As pointed out by Soilman in the comment threads, a High Court judgement on Friday rules that web links to online sources are copyright. Which means news aggregation-type web sites need a licence to use them in their content. What are the implications for bloggers? After all, we link to external content all the time. […]
It’s actually obvious from the reporting, but somehow last week’s coverage of “The world’s most boring news day” misses the point. As part of the publicity campaign for search engine True Knowledge, “experts” used a computer search of world events to pinpoint 11 April 1954 as the most boring day of the 20th century. Yet […]
If you came home from work and found that the local council had broken into your house and seized your possessions without warning because it believed you owed money for Council Tax, you’d be incensed. Yet this is pretty much what has just happened in the digital world. Via Mashable, here’s an interesting and disturbing […]
Quote of the day from Future Publishing founder and TED conference curator Chris Anderson speaking at a Creative Bath event last month: We’re obsessed with attention […] but when we measure it we measure it all wrong. We obsess over quantity of attention – circulation, page views, ratings; we obsess over demographics. But the third […]
Things will be quiet on Freelance Unbound for a few more days, as I have a couple of OU science assessments to work on, on top of the usual day job and dog. This is all giving me a fresh perspective on why my journalism students leave everything until the last minute, let me tell […]
Here’s most papers’ front page image of yesterday’s student fee protest riot: And here’s a wider angle view, used by the BBC web site: My – that looks spontaneous. I wonder how long he waited before he thought there were enough photographers around to justify his feat of passionate ad hoc window-kicking…
How I love my comment spam. Thanks to the excellent Akismet plugin, I don’t generally have to moderate it, and it’s very rare that real comments get caught in it. So I can just empty the spam bin (currently 164 comments) whenever I remember, safe in the knowledge that there’s very little risk of losing […]
Following its unofficial, 48-hour wildcat industrial action in support of BBC pension rights strikers, the Freelance Unbound (Non-pension) Collective is resuming work. However, as this is a Sunday, when no update is normally planned, this is an official non-strike, non-update update for informational purposes only. The normal pattern of intermittent blog posting will resume at 9am […]
In solidarity with oppressed comrades at the BBC, Freelance Unbound is going on a 48-hour strike. Obviously if there was a simple “no update” strategy, visitors to the site might make the mistake of assuming I just hadn’t got round to writing a new post. So here is a special “On strike” update, that in […]
I had to read the first paragraph of this Metro splash twice to ensure I didn’t misinterpret what was going on: “Schoolgirls are being told to take off their ‘too sexy’ trousers when they arrive for lessons…” Uh – oh, I see. Then they put on some other trousers that aren’t sexy. Phew – that […]