Did I say you could print that?

By Injera, on December 11th, 2009%

News Ltd has a complicated relationship with the internet.  On one hand, they seem to view bloggers and tweeters as news parasites, stealing their hard-won, quality content for snarky posts.  And then there’s Google, aggregating news so that we freeloaders can read it without annoying popup ads.  In order to stop this online anarchy, Rupert Murdoch proposes charging for access to News’ online content:

Quality journalism is not cheap. The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites.

Did he say “quality journalism”?  I would pay for quality journalism, however I don’t see much evidence of that in Murdoch’s publications.  In fact, I don’t see much of it in local papers – printed or online – at all.  If Fairfax joins News in charging for online access, I’ll be no less informed than I currently am.  I’ll continue to get my news from the ABC, the BBC, the Guardian and the New York Times.  If the non-government news providers join in and start charging for access, I might consider paying for the Guardian and the NYT.  Would I miss out on local news?  No, the ABC has it covered.

But this is old news, I hear you say.  Why’s she banging on about this now?  Well, there’s the “other hand”, the one that News likes to bite, but still expects to receive food from.  A couple of weeks ago, during the exciting days of the Liberal party leadership meltdown, #spill on Twitter was a vital source of gossip and updates.  What quality content did the Herald-Sun come up with for it’s online coverage?  They pulled a bunch of tweets and published them.  How do I know this, when I scrupulously avoid reading the Hun these days?  I received this from a fellow tweeter:

I see you got quotes on the Herald-Sun website in their Abbott-Twitter story!

Yep.  One line from a long twitter exchange with @teacoffeetea was taken out of context and dumped in a Hun story.  The fact that it didn’t make sense in isolation only further illustrates the Hun’s limited understanding of the medium.  And, as much as I like to think that my observations are all gold, pure gold, I’d be hoping for more if I were to pay for the content.

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Twaters

By injera, on August 6th, 2009%

It’s a happy coincidence that combining the words “Twitter” and “haters” results in a variant of the word “Twat”. That was the word I uttered after reading Rebecca Wilson’s column on Twitter today.

Wilson hates Twitter because, unlike “Facebook and blogs (which) appear to serve some useful purpose, Twitter just does not – it is puerile, inane and a shocking waste of time”. Moreover, Twitter users are “vacuous people with too much time on their hands who like to believe we actually care what they are doing”. Wilson has a column where she is paid to spout her own vapid opinions, but she resents the fact that Twitter allows everybody to do the same. She seems particularly peeved that tweets are limited to a character count (she doesn’t seem to be able to settle on whether that count is 140 or 160), although I doubt she’d prefer more extensive “blow-by-blow descriptions” of the “tedium and uselessness” of the lives of people she obviously despises.  (How somebody can be “turgid” within 140 characters is a mystery.)  Perhaps it’s because she can’t summarise her own vacuousness to the form that Twitter is, to her, “the single most hideous technological breakthrough of the past decade” (she’s never tried Microsoft Songsmith, then, but that’s another story).

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Misanthropy: a side-effect of reading the Herald-Sun

By injera, on February 13th, 2009%

I went through a stage of believing myself to be misanthropic.  I can’t remember why – it just seemed to be that, for a time, I found people to be mostly annoying, at best.  It occurred to me to change my surname to “Anthrope”, but then that would have required abandoning the title “Ms” for “Miss” in order for the name change to achieve any sort of effect.  Also, it would have required then being called “Miss …”, which was unlikely in that phase of my life, and would have been considered eccentric had I insisted upon it.

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