DYLAN TWENEY
Rough Drafts

Rough Drafts

Essays and blog posts I've written that haven't been published elsewhere yet

813 posts
Rough Drafts

Lessig saddles up

Like many LA Times features, this one is nearly epic in length. But it’s an outstanding profile of Lawrence Lessig, his work on the upcoming Eldred case, and on copyright history. The Cultural Anarchist vs. the Hollywood Police State (registration required — free, but annoying)
Dylan Tweney
Rough Drafts

Intellectual “property”

Gary Shapiro on Intellectual property: “This term is so well established and that there is virtually no chance of rolling it back. But its usage serves to strengthen the position of the content business vis-a-vis information consumers (i.e. society as a whole). It amplifies the similarities and obsc
Dylan Tweney
Rough Drafts

Google news flaws

Nick Denton has a smart critique of Google News: “It discriminates against an exclusive, which is perverse. A story exclusive to one source — the New York Times scoop on US war plans, for instance — will rank low. While a standard calendar-driven wire service story — reported everywhere, without any
Dylan Tweney
Rough Drafts

Axis of X

Golan Levin and the Whitney Museum have produced an entertaining, interactive work of art: Click on any three countries in an on-screen world map, and it will tell you what axis of power they represent. Mexico, Canada, US: Axis of oil-producing, vodka-exporting, nuclear-powered, cannabis-cultivating
Dylan Tweney
Rough Drafts

Weblogging journos

More and more journalists are starting to run their own weblogs on the side. “If I’m a lawyer advising a news organization, the idea of a Web log like this would just make me break out in hives,” says a journalism prof at U. Minn. The NYT reports. (thanks, Romenesko) Thought experiment: What will ha
Dylan Tweney
Rough Drafts

New Google news

New look and features for Google News. Cool! Much slicker looking, much more newspapery. It takes a little getting used to but actually makes scanning the news much easier — it includes short story summaries and some photos, both new, and options to see stories from more sources. The page claims tha
Dylan Tweney
Rough Drafts

Are You Overpaying for Content Management?

The numbers aren’t pretty. Fifty-three percent of companies will have deployed new content-management systems by the end of this year. Given the expense involved — a high-end CMS like Vignette can cost upwards of $100,000 for the software alone, plus another multiple of that in installation costs —
Dylan Tweney
Rough Drafts

Internet archive bookmobile

Annalee Newitz: “Internet Archive volunteers have put about 9,000 public domain books on its site, and now they’re driving around the United States in a high-tech bookmobile where people can link to the archive via satellite, download the book of their choice, print it out, and take it home to read.
Dylan Tweney
Rough Drafts

Weblogs: form or medium?

Xian approvingly quotes this lucid comment by Peterme, regarding this week’s Berkeley J-school panel on weblogs: “In these kinds of discussions, the question, “Are weblogs journalism?” inevitably comes up, demonstrating how people confuse form and content. Weblogs are a form (not a medium… the Web i
Dylan Tweney 1 min read
Rough Drafts

Sorry tech journos

“There was a loop with journalists, businesses, advertisers, readers,” says John Battelle. “Magazines in the late ’90s were not rewarded for doing negative stories. Everybody’s stock portfolios were going up, and what sold magazines were positive stories about the geniuses that were making everybody
Dylan Tweney

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