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All the random images to the right are courtesy of my amazing wife.
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I love when I hear about podcasters that are releasing books. Today, Grammar Girl’s book Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing is released. Go get it, because if it’s anything like the podcast, it’s entertaining and educational.
On top of all that, she’s also released this fun little widget that quizzes you on grammar. I got all but one right, leave a comment tell me how you did!
Brad from Brad Sucks needs your help!
His second album is coming out in September and he is putting a music video together for the song “Fake It”. He wants the video to be as cliche as possible, and he’s listed a whole bunch that he likes on the page.
Anytime Brad Sucks releases anything, it get attention across the web. If you are one of those attention whore types, someone who wants to contribute to the greater good or you’ve always wanted to be in a music video, here’s your opportunity.
Here’s some disclosure: I work at a newspaper in New York City. I work as the podcast producer. By nature of the first statement, my company has been written about in Gawker many times. I have no ill will towards Gawker and most of the people in the office read it to keep up on the revolving door that is the hires and fires in newspapers.
Gawker spends a fair amount of time ripping on newspapers.
But an article over on Radar made me smile this morning: Gawker Cuts Staff Pay Rate for Second Consecutive Quarter. I feel bad for the people who are receiving the checks over there and have no ill will for the staff of Gawker personally, but perhaps it’s time to rethink the “blogging for dollars” model. This could be signaling that Gawker is in a bit of trouble. First, lots of people leave, and Emily Gould does it in a way that paints Gawker as the worst thing that’s ever happened to her a the New York Times Magazine cover story, titled “Exposed - Blog-Post Confidential“. Then in April, Gawker sells three of the money losing properties. This is all following the first time that Gawker (publicly) altered its pay structure towards being paid for the number of people that visit each story. In my opinion, it’s ruined the content of the site.
I think that Gawker, a media company, is having the same issues that other media companies are having.
Judge Protects YouTube’s Source Code, Throws Users To The Wolves over at TechCrunch is the story I’m going to be talking about.
You know those Terms of service that you agree to when signing up for a service that says they keep your history and consider it an asset to the company? Well, a judge is making Google hand over your individual histories to Viacom. If you remember, Google and Viacom are in the middle of a billion dollar lawsuit over the uploading of copyrighted materials.
Here’s a quote:
That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube
When a judge makes an order like this it sets a precedent. I am now expecting to see more cases of a company turning over all user records to big media in copyright cases, so whatever privacy you thought you had online on these services, you can forget it.
As soon as the first lawsuit comes out over Facebook and Facebook is ordered to turn over all user histories, this will become a giant privacy issue. For some reason, people don’t think knowing that you watched both the Charlie unicorn and baby finger biting videos is a big deal.
