Here is the news: and its going to get better
Alan Patrick has a rather dismal take on mainstream news media’s loss of audience to bloggers. I am considerably more optimistic: I think Alan both over-estimates the quality of newspapers and TV news, and under-estimates the quality available from blogs.
Newspapers deserve to die
We all know newspapers are slowly dying. Competition from the internet may be one cause, but newspapers hardly help themselves by simply being so bad. The Guardian has a great example in Zoe William’s whine about how her baby is more affectionate towards his father than to her. (more…)
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The Wall Street Journal gets spun
The Wall Street Journal seems to have been completely fooled by telecoms spin-doctors into claiming that Google, and other prominent advocates of net neutrality, have changed their views.
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Glib beats insightful
Paul Graham’s essay, Hackers and Painters, is very popular with some programmers. I just found a hilarious refutation of it, called Dabblers and Blowhards.
The interesting thing for me is that Paul Graham’s audience are just as enthusiastic (if not more so) when he writes rubbish about things he knows nothing about, as when he writes insightfully about things he is an expert on. (more…)
Wired’s open source myth
Wired has an interesting twist on the tired old myth that “open source is developed by volunteers”, that has been. The new twist is that it reverses the usual myth that it is not possible to make money from open source: instead the wrong people will make the money and it will all fall apart. Unsurprisingly this flies in the face of the facts.
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Incompetence from The Economist
The Economist’s coverage of Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo has apparently been written by someone who thinks that Yahoo is primarily a search engine. It has been written in complete ignorance of both the competition concerns and the major difficulties of integrating the businesses. (more…)
The myth of environmental myths
Time for another sample of incompetent journalism, this time from The Times. The headline claims that walking to the shops damages the planet more than going by car. Of course this is not even remotely true, and a few seconds thought is enough to tear the argument apart. (more…)
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The end of academic publishing
It has been clear to many analysts (including myself) for years that publishers of academic journals were facing the slow death of their business. Despite the view of publishers and the more optimistic analysts that peer reviews journals were irreplaceable, the evidence continues to emerge for a slow, but certain, decline. (more…)
My favourite terrorists
The terrorists responsible for the London and Glasgow airport “car bombs” are my favourite kind: bumbling idiots who could not explode a jar of nitroglycerine. I feel a lot safer,knowing how incompetent they are. My main worry is that some of the suspects are doctors: if they planned this, how did they get through medical school? (more…)
Nortel demonstrates how not to do PR
Nortel has prevented a former subsidiary, Blade, from buying from a rival. The resulting publicity is far more damaging to Nortel than the original, far less widely read coverage, of Blade’s choice of a PBX from Fonality (based on the open source Asterisk) over Nortels own products. (more…)
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