Fear & Loathing

We've Moved

I've converted Fear & Loathing to the WordPress platform and moved it back to manishin.com.  You can find the blog here.  This archive will stay up until the transfer process is complete for old posts, photos, etc.

Golden Rule Doesn't Apply in Politics

Liar, liar pants on fire. Rove Calls Biden 'Liar' After VP Boasts of Scolding Bush [FOXNews.com]. Looks like the whole things was manufactured anyway.

Posted via web from glenn's posterous

A Post-Newspaper Era

Michael Kinsley says if the New York Times disappears, there will still be news. Life After Newspapers. I'm not so sure. Since most Web news is repurposed content from newspapers, especially financial and investigative reporting, and because few if any sites can monetize or profit from online news distribution, when newspapers die I fear there will be little to replace them. Certainly NOT television.

Posted via email from glenn's posterous

A Throwback F1 Debut

With a 1-2 finish last week in Melbourne and another pole and win in today's Malaysian Grand Prix, upstart Brawn GP -- rising from the ashes of Honda's recent Formula One failure -- has ushered in a throwback era of Formula One competition. Historic Upset At the Australian Grand Prix. As Bob Varsha commented on Speed TV in the US, Ross Brawn has managed to garner more poles and victories in two races than Honda and its predecessor team, BAR Honda, did in 170+ grands prix. 

New, revolutionary rule changes have shaken up more than a decade of parade-line finishes in F1. In fact, it has been 30 years since a Formula One team (March, with 3-time World Champion Sir Jackie Stewart) took pole and a win in their maiden race. What a wonderfully refreshing change. Yes, the cars look different, with tiny rear wings and sleek bodies shorn of barge boards and aerodynamic winglets. But overtaking is a reality, in-season testing restrictions permit smaller teams once again to be competitive, and behemoths Ferrari, McLaren and Renault are struggling just to get into the points, let alone on the podium.

This is shaping up to be a tremendously exciting season!!

Posted via email from glenn's posterous

Astonishingly Out of Touch

Frank Rich asks "Why has there been so little transparency and so much evasiveness so far? The answer, I fear, is that too many of the administration’s officials are too marinated in the insiders’ culture to police it, reform it or own up to their own past complicity with it." Obama's "Katrina Moment"? [NYTimes.com]. Newt Gingrich calls this "astonishing." Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal dubs it the "incredible lightness" of the Obama policy team.

Wow. Who woulda thunk that only eight weeks into the new Administration Americans -- and especially liberal columnists from the New York Times -- would be pondering, let alone writing publicly, whether Barack Obama's crew is "out of touch" with mainstream anger?

Posted via email from glenn's posterous

How Time Flies

It's been six years since the "shock and awe" of the war in Iraq.  And it's been just about that same period since I launched this blog in late March 2003.  At the time, I wrote that I was not sure what it would become.  I'm still not sure, but have been having fun -- with a few off and on breaks -- just expressing my views.  For those who honor me by reading, thank you.  For those who could care less, thank you, too, for again teaching me humility.

Suicide Still Isn't Right

Maybe populism has gone too far. The Weekly Standard noted this morning that U.S. Senator Charles Grassley in a radio interview remarked that the AIG executives who ran the insurance company into the ground, and then accepted taxpayer-funded bonuses, should resign and kill themselves, Japanese-style. Grassley to AIG: It's Seppuku time.

Now you know I have absolutely no sympathy for these AIG morons and think the bailout is absolutely stupid. We should have let the company fail and the chips fall where they may. But this is way over the top. What sets America apart from Japan is that we do not embrace their culture of "face" and respect, which is what drives executives to resign in shame and then, not infrequently, commit suicide. In the U.S., you are what you do and what you represent, not to whom you report. Organizations are important but have no real meaning aside from the individuals who make them up.

So as far as I am concerned, AIG should "claw back" those bonuses and fire these idiots.  (It's not like that so-called talent helped the company do anything other than rack up the largest quarterly loss in the history of capitalism anyway!)  But suggesting Seppuku is just out of line and un-American.

Posted via email from glenn's posterous

What's In a Name?

SciFi Channel is all set to become Syfy. But no, despite what CNet News implies, it is not the lawyers' fault.  The point here is a rather arcane one about trademark law, which prohibits use of a generic term as a protected description of goods or services.  The CNet article seems to suggest that "SciFi Channel" could not be trademarked because "Sci-Fi" is generic.  But if the mark is unique and the entire phrase has not been allowed into the public domain, as in Science Channel, there should be no problem.  So on this one, don't blame me!!

Posted via email from glenn's posterous

Generating Product Buzz with PPT - Pay-Per-Tweet

So Intuit is paying social media users to post reviews and plugs of TurboTax in Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere by paying for a mention of its flagship tax preparation software. This may be a good example of a corporation embracing Web 2.0 media savvy, but I think it is just as bad -- perhaps worse, if the relationship is undisclosed -- as pay-per-post used to create blogosphere traction by compensating those who post favorable comments. At the very least there has got to be transparency when a product placement is made for compensation. At the worst, it still stinks IMHO.

Posted via email from glenn's posterous

Who Owns Social Media UGC?

Two weeks ago there was a major outcry within the Facebook community over revised Terms of Service (ToS) for the hugely popular social networking site. The gist of the protest was an implication in the new ToS that Facebook claimed "ownership" of user-generated content (UGC) and reserved the right to market it for for commercial purposes.

That conclusion would be rather stupid from a business perspective and was quickly disowned by Facebook management.  Facebook CEO Zuckerberg: “We Do Not Own User Data” [Mashable].  But because this was a Website policy, changeable unilaterally without user consent, it leaves unanswered the larger question of whether UGC is owned by the person posting the content, the person on who's page/site the content appears or the owner of the service/server.  The issue is WAY broader than Facebook.  It applies, for instance, to comments posted on newspaper sites, blogs, photos shared on Flickr and the like, and many more applications.

Today I am not trying to answer the question, rather raising some.  In the law of traditional commercial relationships -- say banking or telephony -- the "content" one shares with a company is owned by the corporation.  Your banking records can be obtained by the government without your consent because they are "owned" by the bank.  Only sector-specific privacy laws like Gramm-Leach-Bliley, which are altogether too rare in the United States, limit what the company can go with data arising from its relationship with customers.  Hence, Facebook was possibly wrong (although correct from a customer relationship standpoint) to argue that it needed a license from one user to display his/her content on the "Wall" of another user, even when the first person had affirmatively decided to share that UGC by posting it within Facebook.

But what of corporations as employers?  Since the law is settled, right or wrong, that a company owns emails generated on its systems, regardless of whether work-related, will that same conclusion hold for social communications sent and received via an enterprise Internet connection?  And what of copyright; if a user posts photos to a sharing site, does that act imply either abandonment of their ownership interest or the grant of a "fair use" right to republication in full to the world?

These are interesting, and perhaps important, questions in the developing law of social media.  Stay tuned here for more analysis and discussion as we make some tentative predictions of how the law will evolve and whether, in the ultimate analysis, it matters.