Recent Linkage 11

So I’ve spent some time unpacking, and then I spent some time catching up with work that piled up while I was unpacking, and eventually I’ll come round to catching up with the blog that was unattended while I was catching up with work, although luckily this does not quite pile up when I don’t write, although ideas do. Anyway, here is some of the stuff I’ve been reading in-between boxes and keyboards.

Japan on the web:

As before, this is in no way an attempt to do the topic justice, just a collection of bits and pieces on how the newest media are watching, processing and trying to help the situation in Japan, in whatever marginal relation that may stand to the enormity of the situation.

• The office of Japan’s Prime Minister has introduced an English twitter stream to post updates. It has been interesting to see how quickly its rhetorics have become twitter-ized, from initial press releases cut down to 140 characters, to today’s ‘the press conference will begin in a  few minutes’.
• Colleagues and I have been wondering whether the animated report on “Nuclear Boy” going around on youtube is (a) real, (b) satire, (c) straight, or even (d) official, and we really can’t tell.
• The Radiation Dose Chart on xkcd — not a joke or a comic, but a real guide to understanding what a sievert is — is brilliantly helpful and somewhat comforting in its clarity, if not its message.

As an antidote, here’s some light-hearted stuff:

• Scott McCloud pointed readers to Laura Hudson’s and David Wolkin’s wonderful, hilarious and completely apt dialogue on Neal Adams’ Batman: Odyssey, which they don’t understand, and neither do I, but they have way more fun with it.
• Sebastian Dosch auf klawtext beobachtet seinerseits die Poesie von Spam, wie ich vor einigen Wochen.

On media control:

• Of course, much news surrounds the failure of the Google Books Settlement. The EFF has some good commentary, and so does the Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law Blog, but the most illuminating and detailed explanation for laymen I could find comes from James Grimmelmann, with more in further posts on his blog.
• Meanwhile, Monique Altheim, attorney in the EU and US, observes the very different political and juridical discourse on internet users’ privacy in both regions.
• David L. Sobel observes on ‘Index on Censorship’ that an overeagerness to classify information as secret leads to a need for leaks.
• Birgitta Jónsdóttir describes consequences from her defeat in her ‘Twitter case’, in which private data on twitter users following wikileaks were compromised. Encouragingly, her reaction is a call to action.

Some other current and miscellaneous  observations  on web media:

• The always fascinating John Battelle’s interview with wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg is worth watching, treating a host of different topics surronding the current state of the web.
• Also from Battelle comes this report card on how the Web 2.0 is measuring up against its original vision, providing a highly concise and interesting argument.
• Pamela Paul earns major credit by spelling out how rude telephone calls can be in the age of email in the NY Times. I’m glad I’m not the only one to see it that way, and practically everyone I’ve spoken to about this has said the exact same thing.
• And yet the same NY Times is about to implement a paywall that seems completely out of sync with newest media, as Cory Doctorow does not grow tired of saying, again.

Und aus deutscher Webmedialität, medialer Kontrolle und Politik:

• Michael Seemannn ist auf Kontrollverlust gewohnt klar und präzise mit einigen Ausschnitten aus der deutschen Post-Privacy-Debatte, hat aber vielleicht nicht recht (dazu später mehr).
• Der Gesetzentwurf der SPD zum Zweitverwertungsrecht (nicht nur) in der Wissenschaft ist zwar erwartungsgemäß zunächst gescheitert, der Gedanke dürfte aber weiterhin aktuell sein. Das Aktionsbündnis “Urheberrecht für Bildung und Wissenschaft” beschreibt Problem und Lösungsvorschlag.
• Thomas Stadler kritisiert den — fehlenden — legislativen Prozeß in aktueller deutscher Politik, am Zugangserschwerungsgesetz und am Atommoratorium, und Recht hat er.