The Mind Trap

Fighting Sites That Hijack Rights

BBC: You know all that content you put up on your blog/Flickr account/whatever? Some of those sites claim a hell of a lot of rights over that content...be careful...

Understanding Digg and Its Utopian Idealism

PC Mag: I've disagreed with John Dvorak before, but this time I think he's on the mark with the issues surrounding Digg's user-rating system. "Has anyone even thought about the possibility of news manipulators using this "democratic" mechanism? What proof is there that any of these "diggs" are accurate? I have no doubt that they are accurate today because the crew at Digg consists of honest folks, but what happens when Rupert Murdoch or Sumner Redstone runs it? Or when the government of China has its version? ... Can Digg be rigged? And what happens if it ever gets rigged? Would people notice? Or would they just be happy that The New York Times editors are not "telling them what's important?"
And so on. It would be pretty easy to rig Digg at the moment when it only takes a few hundred hits to get to the top...if there were tens of thousands of "diggs" it would be more difficult, but still relatively easy (and cheap, compared to a standard advertising campaign). And I liked this comment: "What would happen to the Digg site if say, Jerry Falwell and his legions, along with the Bush-supporting minions in the red states, flocked to Digg and actively promoted stories, slammed things they didn't like, and in the process drove away the current libertarian users? Digg as a mechanism would still work, right? It would still be democratic, right? Or would it? Is it ever democratic really?"
As Digg gets bigger it will run into the same problems Wikipedia did...

The Rise Of Crowdsourcing

Wired: This is a great article on the rise of "crowdsourcing", using the general population to generate intellectual property for your business. It ranges from getting cheap stock photos to posting prizes for solving a difficult engineering puzzle. It's good that the general public can get a bit of extra money from their hobbies -- not least because it increases their respect for intellectual property. Of course, it can be bad for the working professional, who might have to change the way they do business to accomadate the new competition. In other cases it means that workers have to be productive enough to justify their salary, although luckily there is a cost involved in searching for cheap content.
Taking journalism as an example (since I'm familiar with it) with the rise of amatuer writers and people trying to break into the industry publications can now get articles incredibly cheap, as in thousand word articles for $10 or less. Of course, the vast majority aren't any good, and finding any quality ones takes a lot of time and effort. So working journalists can compete on quality as editors familiar with their work give their articles more attention, and it also helps if they compete output. If they can write several articles a day their per word rate drops dramatically, and the extra cost is worth it for the guaranteed level of quality.

Code of Conduct For Citizen Journalism: A Load Of Tosh?

The National Union of Journalists in the UK has released the Witness Contributors' Code of Practice, ostensibly to regulate citizen journalism but there's a fair bit of protectionist policies in there as well. There's a post at Complete Tosh which dissects the issue nicely.