The weblog of Christiaan Briggs
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber explains why he thinks the management of some of the closed aspects of Apple’s iPhone App Store are flawed.
And if that interests you, you might also be interested in this interview with Jonathan Zittrain and a review of his new book, The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It.
Jane Clifton muses on the emergence of blogging and it’s relationship with old fashioned journalism, complaining that “it’s hard to tell whether the information providers are accurate, biased or simply malicious.”
“The Blogerati” responds in good fashion, but what I like that blogging brings to the table is exactly what Clifton fears: uncertainty about who is telling the truth. One of conventional journalism’s biggest traps is that it purports to be the conduit of truth, when in fact—and certainly from my experiences of being reported on as part of a story—this claim couldn’t be further from the truth.
Journalism, especially in the form of for-profit media, should have never staked this claim, and it now has much to answer for.
Blogging and the internet encourages us all to treat everything we read with a critical eye; not simply to accept something because it’s written down. And that’s a good thing Jane.
This weekend I finally moved my website to a new web host: Ecohost, possibly the ultimate web host.
It’s been a long time coming because my criteria for a new host included that it be low carbon, not store any data in the U.S. and do business in English. That’s a surprisingly difficult combination being that most English-speaking low carbon web hosts are in the U.S., using Californian solar energy to power their data centres.
I would have liked bragging rights that my web host produced its own energy but these guys do the next best thing, according to their website, and offer webspace in a data centre called Smartbunker, powered by 100% renewable energy sourced from Ecotricity.
Furthermore this data centre is apparently located in a high-security former nuclear bunker, offering a money back guarantee of 100% uptime. Not that my web host offers this but I’ll be curious to see how reliable it is compared to my last host.
And to top it all off, not only is Ecobee low carbon but it’s also a not-for-profit co-operative. Being a pareconist it really doesn’t get much better than this!
So it’s all roses—and fast to boot—but I’ll be sure to keep you posted.
Update 16-05-2008: Name changed from Ecobee to Ecohost
The work allegedly plagiarised? An article I published in 2006, titled, Plagiarism and intellectual loot. It’s a piece that rejects the idea of “intellectual property,” arguing instead that in a society organised with human happiness as an objective, copyright infringement laws and similar restrictions would not hinder the distribution and recombination of ideas.
It’s interesting—and amusing in some respects—to get fired for plagiarising a piece championing plagiarism, but it gets better. I plagiarised the whole piece myself, nearly word for word. McDonald didn’t plagiarise me. He plagiarised from the same book I did: Days of War, Nights of Love, published in 2000 by CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective, a book that actually encourages others to plagiarise from it.1
So, based on allegations by a faculty member at Texas Tech University, who had obviously come across my website, the editorial board of The Daily Toreador promptly fired McDonald, publicly accusing him of plagiarising me and of “compromising the integrity of the paper and the academic institution it serves.”
A reporter is said to undermine a newspaper’s credibility in failing to honestly acknowledge sources, but, however predictable, publicly chastising and firing a volunteer writer from a student newspaper for plagiarising an opinion piece championing plagiarism seems a little tactless to me. Clearly there’s a little more to the story.
Not only was McDonald’s public firing tactless but it was also based on incorrect information. Neither The Daily Toreador’s Editor, Michelle Casady, nor anybody else, ever got in touch with me before making the decision to fire McDonald and publicly humiliate him by failing to explain the full story. The public statement that McDonald plagiarised me is simply incorrect. Furthermore, not only has the editorial board mislead their readers to the full extent of this story but they’ve subsequently denied McDonald the chance to explain his side of the story to their readers.
By incorrectly accusing McDonald of plagiarising me and by accusing McDonald of compromising the integrity of the paper without rejoinder, I think the editorial board does a disservice to both McDonald and their readers. At the very least they should retract the accusation that McDonald plagiarised me and offer McDonald the chance to give their readers a more nuanced side to the story.
They even went to the length of arguing that plagiarism is a “serious offense in any forum” and “a very serious problem within our society” and “in no way, shape or form should … ever be tolerated.” Not even, it seems, when you’re making a point about plagiarism itself.
Copyright and plagiarism are ideas that deserve full and frank discussion in our societies and a view as blinkered as the one above does nothing to further an adult discussion on the topic.
External links:
I just finished talking to the boss at work with the use of Skype too, a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) app; the internet’s answer to the telephone, clearer than my mobile phone and free to boot. Great stuff.
Anyway, it feels good to be on the move again, even if it is in a gas guzzling 747.
Looking forward to seeing everyone in NZ.
Recent Comments