Wort|ge|fecht, das

Earlier this week Oxford University Press declared "unfriend" its word of the year. This got me thinking... now that we are entering an era of media reforestation what common phrases could soon be history? Here's 10 that I came up with. You may disagree but I believe all of these have faded or will be gone soon. (All images are from Flickr via Creative Commons and are credited.) Permalink | Leave a comment  »

In the recent debate in the UK about copyright extension for performances, one of the key points raised by many who were against the proposal was that economic studies suggested that it would really only help a few big superstars (who probably were well enough off already) while harming up-and-coming artists greatly. Christian Zimmerman points us to a recent economics paper by Francisco Alcala and Miguel Gonzalez-Maestre that models why this happens, and points out that copyright extension actually serves to decrease incentives for the creation of new content. The full paper (pdf) basically points out that extending copyright really only helps the superstar performers, since, for everyone else, the economic value of the content is exhausted by the time the extension would matter. That's pretty obvious. But the more troubling part is that this also then negatively impacts the market for new artists, because money and attention that might have gone towards new works end up going instead...

[Reposted from acid]

McKinsey hat auf “What matters” die Ergebnisse einer Studie veröffentlicht, auf denen sie die Arten der Zusammenarbeit (Types of Collaboration) in Augenschein genommen haben und anhand dessen untersuchen, wie diese Zusammenarbeit durch Tools unterstützt werden können. Interessant: Die “Meckies” gehen davon aus, dass 30-50% der Arbeitszeit in wissensintensiven Bereichen vertrödelt wird durch überflüssige E-mails, überflüssige Meetings, [...]

As Rupert Murdoch talks about how he wants to cut off Google, while claiming that aggregator sites are "parasites" and "stealing" from him -- and that fair use would likely be barred by the courts, it seemed like a good time to examine at least some of the sites that are owned by Rupert Murdoch that appear to aggregate content from other sites and which rely on the very same fair use argument. We've mentioned a few in the past, but figured it wouldn't hurt to explore them more thoroughly. Well, let's start with the flagship Wall Street Journal itself. It integrates its own "aggregator" with headlines and links to other stories. For example, on the WSJ's tech news page if you scroll down, you'll find a bunch of headlines and links to other sources -- without permission: Oops. Looks like the WSJ is "parasiting" and "stealing" according to Murdoch. Perhaps he should cut them of too. Okay, how about Fox News itself? Yup. It's got an aggregator as well. Here's its Politics Buzztracker that...