Busy, busy

My day job is going to be taking up serious amounts of time for a while, so posts will be less frequent and you may notice a drop-off in attention to detail and depth of analysis. Or, worryingly, you may notice no difference at all.

Be that as it may, some items have caught my attention recently. I hope to explore the first two in greater depth, time permitting:

1. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal, News of the World, The Times (of London), BSkyB, Fox, Hulu, MySpace and a zillion other properties, has come down firmly on the side of not-free content. This should hardly come as a surprise, particularly since the Journal, at least, has been charging for its online content forever and Murdoch is nothing if not a capitalist. However, it will be interesting to see just how this plays out. I would expect a series of experiments and adjustments, but beyond that rather obvious prediction, who knows?
2. The associated press has caused a ruckus with its announcement that it will charge up $2.50 per word for excerpts posted online (the per-word rate drops off rapidly from that $2.50 worst case). There is some uncertainty as to whom this applies to. Large commercial sites can and probably should pay for such excerpts, just as major print magazines do. Smaller non-commercial sites (read, blogs) shouldn't. AP assures the public the policy is not aimed at small fish, but without a clear, binding statement to that effect, I would expect most bloggers to stay well clear of quoting AP on anything. Which, of course, is the exact opposite of what AP might want. Yet another example (see the previous post for another) of old media needing to be careful in the process of adapting their existing practice to the web.
3. A middle-schooler has recently informed me that Yahoo! mail is cool and gmail is uncool, duh. So I guess I won't be sitting with the cool kids at lunch anytime soon.