Author: admin

Censorship of the Internet is commonplace in most regions of the world. It is clear that in most countries over the past two years there has been an acceleration of efforts to either close down or inhibit the Internet. In some countries, for example in China and Burma, the level of control is such that the Internet has relatively little value as a medium for organised free speech, and its used could well create additional dangers at a personal level for activists.

– From Silenced: Censorship and Control of the Internet, a publication of Privacy International

The report also notes that one growing trend is the rise of multinational corporate Internet censors.

This story is some background for the benefit of those in the BloggerCon IRC channel:
Defender of Canada thumbs his nose at British court's libel finding
David Akin
Financial Post
408 words
3 March 1999
National Post
National
C04
English
(c) 1999 National Post . All Rights Reserved.
A British court has ordered a British Columbia man to pay (ps)15,000 ($36,260 Cdn) for libelling an English physicist in an Internet discussion forum. Legal experts believe it to be just the second time a court has awarded damages in an Internet libel case. But experts also say physicist Laurence Godfrey may have trouble enforcing the judgment against Michael Dolenga, who lives in Victoria. In 1995, Mr. Dolenga was a graduate student in biochemistry at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., when the libel occurred. Mr. Godfrey had made some comments that impugned Canada and Canadians, to which Mr. Dolenga responded by calling Mr. Godfrey names. “Read his comments about Canada – a boring place, Canadians have no merit, no talent whatsoever, no Canadians of note, stuff like that,” Mr. Dolenga said in an interview. “In some of my postings I would defend Canada very articulately . . . and some of it was name-calling.
Go read any newsgroup and you'll see the childish insults that are flung back and forth and that's all it was; just some juvenile name-calling.” But Mr. Godfrey, who has filed several libel lawsuits in British courts against defendants such as The Toronto Star and the University of Minnesota, believed Mr. Dolenga's comments caused harm to his reputation. Mr. Dolenga did not defend the lawsuit and, as a result, the British court entered a default judgment against him. On Friday, the court ordered Mr. Dolenga to pay Mr. Godfrey (ps)15,000 in aggravated damages, plus (ps)1,250 in legal costs. “I'm not disappointed by the judgment,” Mr. Godfrey said yesterday. “It's a substantial award. It sets some kind of scale.” Mr. Godfrey has another libel lawsuit pending against Demon Internet, England's largest dial-up Internet service provider. He said he intends to have a Canadian court enforce the judgment, but Canadian legal experts say such a request would not be automatically enforced, particularly in a situation where no defence of the suit was made. Mr. Dolenga could not be reached for comment this week but in an interview last week said: “I don't have an address [in Britain] and I don't any property in Britain. Basically, my stance is I'm not recognizing the British court's jurisdiction and the hell with it.”

The Nieman Foundation at Harvard has just published a comprehensive compendium on blogging and journalism.
Sheila Lennon, a journalist at the Providence (R.I.) Journal and contributor to that compendium, talks about the project, puts it in a bit of context and supplies the URL to download individual essays or a PDF of the whole thing in an entry on her own blog.

I'm a staff journalist and I'm blogging — outside of the official imprimatur of my employers. Apparently more employer types are getting upset about this kind of thing. Dan Gillmor reports:

Tom Mangan reports that the Tampa Tribune has ordered three staffers with unauthorized blogs to stop. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

“Canadian culture is squarely based on a democratic government which in turn needs diversity of voices to live up to its ideals. Diversity of voices can be achieved through diversity of media outlets, diversity of ownership, including ownership forms, and diversity of media products . . . An increase in the number of owners of media outlets can increase consumer choice, especially if the various owners have different objectives. ….
Many of the proposals suggested by other witnesses in these hearings may provide ways to promote diversity including liberalizing foreign ownership restrictions. In my role as an advocate of competition in Canada, I would encourage the Committee to consider these options. ”
Statement by Gaston Jorré,
Acting Commissioner of Competition
Competition Bureau, Industry Canada
Remarks to the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications Hearing on: the current state of the Canadian media industries; emerging trends and developments in those industries; the media's role, rights, and responsibilities in Canadian society; and, appropriate future policies relating thereto.
[Full text of Jorre's comments]

Journalists, academics, media critics and, now, Industry Canada bureaucrats toss around this notion of “diversity of content” but I wonder what that really means. And I don't mean what it means from an academic or theoretical sense but what it might mean from a public policy sense or from a news consumer sense. In other words: What does the diversity debate mean to news gatherers, publishers, broadcasters, and consumers?
Does diversity simply mean more and if so, more of what? More owners? More journalists? More readers? More viewers? More ads?
Would we have a more diverse media environment if we had ten versions of This Magazine? A Toronto Star-style paper in every city? Five clones of Conrad Black all vying to build their own empire here?
Or maybe diversity means more things but more things that are different than what we already have.
If that's what we mean, do we mean we want more diverse political viewpoints? Do we want, as Jorré seems to suggest, more diverse types of owners, that is, some traditional press baron types a la Conrad Black or corporate ownership, a la BCE Inc. where no single shareholder holds a controlling stake? Do we want diversity in the nationality or residency of our owners? (It's always struck me as odd that those in Canada who appeal for more diversity are often dead set against improving the diversity of the nationality of those who would own media assets.)
Do we need more public sector and not-for-profit owners? If federal and provincial governments can run news operations, why not municipal governments or school boards or the local hydro utility for that matter? (I'm not being facetious here: In some smaller Cdn municipalities, local hydro utilities, run by independently elected boards, have plenty of cash and would certainly have some of the basic infrastructure and the cash to be local radio or TV broadcasters.)
Are we for diversity of form? Should we have more pseudo-news formats that are like the U.S. shows that feature Jon Stewart or Bill Maher in the U.S.? Do we need a national tabloid — think of the honour being named a national Sunshine Boy or Girl! – when it comes to print news? What about diversity of presentation? Does the Naked News satisify those who prefer more choice when it comes to presenters of news? (OK, maybe I'm being facetious here, but not by much).
What about diverse of ethical standards? Globe and Mail business reporters are forbidden, for example, to trade on the news they report. Why not a business press that puts its money where its mouth is and lets reporters buy stocks in companies they report on?
Does diversity mean our news collectives such as Canadian Press and Canwest News Service should assign multiple reporters to the same events? Is it still OK in a “diverse” news environment for a single news agency like CP to even exist?
Does diversity mean that newsrooms ought to reflect their readership in terms of socioeconomic, gender, ethnic, and sexual preference characteristics?
Who shall decide on our diversity benchmarks? When will we know we have this much sought-after “diversity of voices”?

Canadians and their weather data

There's nothing that breaks the ice quicker between two Canadians than talking about, well, breaking the ice and other weather facts.
For example, Environment Canada has, after exhaustive study, determined that: “The sunniest city is Medicine Hat and the wettest is Prince Rupert. Whitehorse is the driest, Kamloops has the warmest summers, and the city for all seasons is Montreal.”
These and other fascinating weather facts are culled from an Environment Canada press release.
For journalists, though, what may be more interesting is all the historical weather data Environment Canada is making available via The National Climate Data and Information Archive.
A description:

The National Climate Data and Information Archive, operated and maintained by Environment Canada, contains official climate and weather observations for Canada. Climate elements, such as temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, wind direction, visibility, cloud types, cloud heights and amounts, soil temperature, evaporation, solar radiation and sunshine as well as occurrences of thunderstorms, hail, fog or other weather phenomena are warehoused in a digital database. Access to selected portions of this data, as well as related products such as CD-ROMs and climate normals and averages are available on this web site. Information regarding obtaining extremes, monthly summaries, microfilm, microfiche, paper documents and technical documents, is also available.

The New York Times today has a neat story titled: The Role of the Delete Key in Blog
From that story:

Is a blog still a blog if someone else edits it? A recent policy change at The Sacramento Bee has raised questions about whether taking an editor's pen to a Web log before it is published detracts from very nature of Web logs, or “blogs,'' as the online diaries are called?”

I say yes, it's still a blog, but it just may not be as valuable a blog as it would be if it were unfiltered. Actually, I ought to re-phrase that. It would have a different value. But the form — a diary of shortish entries presented in chronological order — makes it a blog, if you ask me.
This blog, by the way, sees no editors before it hits the Web . . .

From Tara Calishain's ResearchBuzz:

Link List for Internet Demographics
Marcus Zillman has started a link list for Internet demographics. So all those of you e-mailing me asking about Internet demographic angels-and-pinheads, start here. This site features an alphabetical list of Internet demographic resources, unfortunately without any annotation (MAR-cus!). In addition to the demographic portal Marcus has also put together a listing for hoaxes etc. , a listing for Internet experts , and a cool listing for information futures markets.

Dartmouth College in Hanover, Hew Hampshire has invested in a system to let students route phone calls over the Internet.
Interestingly enough, my alma mater, the University of Guelph is just about to do this as well. The Globe will next month publish a ranking of Canadian universities a la the Maclean's ranking. In addition to various overall rankings, the Globe's system also ranked Canada's universities based on technology use and adoption. I'm sworn to secrecy as far as the ranking goes (the Globe will reveal all in October) but I can tell you Guelph did very well.
For that special section, I wrote up an article on universities and technology use in Canada and talked to folks at Guelph and elsewhere about their plans to use and deploy new technology. For this year, Guelph and many other universities are building wi-fi networks all over campus. Next year at Guelph, though, the administration is spending millions to switch the entire campus phone system to a VoIP system. Numbers will be portable. Your phone will find you if you can find a device with an IP number. I'm told by Guelph and by some equipment vendors in this market that Guelph's will be the largest VoIP installation of its kind so far in Canada.

Ross helpfully replies to my earlier observations about Blogware, which, I might add, I'm really warming up to. Mind you, while I hang around with a lot of geeks, I'm not necessarily as fluent in geek-ese as I ought to be so it's going to take me a minute to figure out some of his instructions 🙂 . I did, indeed, figure out how to change the defaults on the “Excerpt” setting (I now have it at 50 words, thank you very much.). And it looks like I'm going to be able to domicile this blog with a pointer off my domain at davidakin.com. After that, it's on to fiddling with some of the look and feel of the place. Thanks, Ross! (I'm also trying this trackback thing for this first time. Some one please tell me if I'm doing that right!)