Mosaic features selections from daily TV news programs produced by national broadcasters throughout the Middle East. The news reports are presented unedited and translated, when necessary, into English.

Some of the broadcasters are state controlled and others are private networks, often affiliated with political factions. These news reports are regularly watched by 280 million people in 22 countries all over the Middle East.

Link TV - Mosaic

Every few days, I get an RSS feed that lists the new books added to the University of Pennsylvania Library's catalog of online books, and I go foraging. To me this is a long-distance version of the kind of trolling I have done most of my life, wandering through the library stacks, making accidental discoveries in the shelves along the way.

I do that kind of thing, too.

Facebook, the Web site where students around the world socialize and swap information, has put itself on the block. The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale.

Really?

Sites like MySpace and Facebook, and social-networking rivals such as the video-oriented YouTube are promising new channels for communication, entertainment, and marketing. Social-networking sites are a primary form of communication for millions of younger people in the U.S, and increasingly, around the world. It's not unusual for young people to spend an hour or more a day at such sites, posting photos, messages, and blog entries, and building up huge lists of online "friends."

I like how "friends" is in quotes.

That $2B figure has me feeling a little verklempt. Please, talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic:

Social networking is the 21st century equivalent of collecting baseball cards.

Discuss.

Facebook's on the Block

There's no question the industry has been subjected to a great deal of competitive pressure over the past decade or so, with promises of more to come as the Internet and wireless technology transform the way Americans receive news and information. And newspaper companies have struggled with how to handle these changes to their readers' habits and their revenue models. Those of us who preach the benefits of creative destruction for everyone else are now getting to live the experience, and it isn't always fun.

A report just out from Columbia University's Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Charitable Trust finds that there are more media outlets than ever, but they are increasingly echoing each other. In this environment, the echoers will likely find it ever harder to pay their way when others are willing to offer the echo free.

Good and factual reporting and independent commentary of the kind you can't get elsewhere is where the successful journalistic outlets will create value in the future, as they have in the past. The trick will be adapting old journalism standards to the new opportunities that technology offers.

Newspapers discover creative destruction

A new feature allows people to explore the music, movie, and book collections on the Internet Archive using other patron's bookmarks. http://www.archive.org/bookmarks-explore.php

A personal bookmark can be set on any details page and then seen on your own bookmarks page: http://www.archive.org/bookmarks.php

You can see other people's bookmarks... for instance here is mine: http://www.archive.org/bookmarks/brewster

Enjoy.

-brewster

Social Bookmarking at the Internet Archive

Blogging -- if you will forgive the cartoon philosophising -- brought the European Enlightenment to the US. Each blogger was his, or her, own printing press, spontaneously exercising their freedom to criticise.

Which is great.

But along the way, opinion became the new pornography on the internet.

...

If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.

"Oh, the boredom of argument without action, politics without power."

...

Blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts -- a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.

I wonder if anyone ever wrote an ode to the telegram or the personal letter, lamenting the evanescent qualities of the telephone. (Can you imagine a book being published 40 years from now, based on Sergey Brin's instant messages?)

A historical tidbit for you:

Needless bureaucracy led to the founding of William Dockwra's Penny Post in 1680. A merchant of London, Dockwra realized the potential for a business designed to quickly and cheaply deliver mail from one place in London to another, all for the cost of a penny. Along with his business partner, Robert Murray, he quickly founded his business and based their head office in Line Street, along with seven additional sorting offices. The Penny Post met with tremendous success, and grew to five hundred receiving houses in just two years. Messengers would deliver to each area between 5 and 15 times daily. It was a well-run system that received much acclaim.

Time for the last post

The Internet has a rising star whose name isn't Google. Just over 2 years old, MySpace now has 2 1/2 times the traffic of Google

The development comes as the leading portal, Yahoo, becomes more like MySpace, starting a social-networking service called 360 and buying content-sharing sites such as Flickr and Del.icio.us.

MySpace rises as new online star

According to a new FCC report, consumers could be better off under "a la carte" options for delivery of video services.

A report by Booz Allen Hamilton, published in 2004, contained numerous errors in reaching the (incorrect) conclusion that the a la carte model was not economical.

FCC: Flawed BAH Study on Cable TV

Outrage over the appearance of the cartoons in Danish and Norwegian newspapers -- one of which depicted Muhammad as an apparent terrorist with a bomb in his turban -- has ignited demonstrations from Turkey to the Gaza Strip, prompted a boycott of Danish products throughout the Middle East, and spurred calls for a religious decree to attack Danish troops serving in Iraq.

Offending Cartoons Reprinted

As they say in the Pentagon, I nonconcur.

Arrant Nonsense