NewsScan Daily, 14 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 14 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Web Publishers Migrate to Old Media
        Sony Touts 'The Walkman of the 21st Century'
        Super-Speedy Web Page Rankings
        Alternatives to Microsoft Are Getting Worldwide Attention
        South Korea's 'Citizen Reporters'
        Microsoft Toilet Project Wasn't Hoax

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: The Role of the Contrarian

WEB PUBLISHERS MIGRATE TO OLD MEDIA
Online publishers are venturing into radio and television, a sure sign that 
digital media are going mainstream. This week Slate announced it will be 
working with National Public Radio to produce a daily radio show, and The 
Smoking Gun, a celebrity crime site, has plans to develop two half-hour 
shows for broadcast on Court TV. Meanwhile, Classmates.com is working with 
Twentieth Television to create a reality-TV show based on reuniting 
long-lost school buddies. "This is a sign that these companies have reached 
a certain amount of staying power and are trying to satisfy their audiences 
in new markets," says a Jupiter Research analyst. "Modern media companies 
must be in different mediums." Traditional media ventures have long since 
broadened their outreach, cranking out magazines and TV shows as well as 
Web sites, but the migration of Web enterprises toward TV and radio is a 
fairly new phenomenon. Several efforts by companies such as Pseudo.com and 
Digital Entertainment Network were cut short a couple of years ago by the 
technology bust, but Web entrepreneurs have high hopes for the latest 
efforts. "NPR's loyal audience and nationwide reach coupled with Slate's 
innovative delivery of news and information is the perfect marriage of 
radio and the Internet," says Slate publisher Cyrus Krohn. (CNet News.com 
13 May 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1001398.html?tag=fd_top

SONY TOUTS 'THE WALKMAN OF THE 21ST CENTURY'
Sony announced its latest salvo in the videogame wars: a small, lightweight 
videogame device called PlayStation Portable (PSP for short), which will 
hit the shelves toward the end of 2004 and will feature a 4.5-inch screen 
and a high-end processor for running games. The PSP will be capable of 
linking by wire to other PSPs, cell phones, PCs and Sony's PlayStation 2. 
Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi says the PSP will be 
"the Walkman of the 21st century." (Wall Street Journal 14 May 2003)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105286804328403600.djm,00.html (sub req'd)

SUPER-SPEEDY WEB PAGE RANKINGS
Researchers at Stanford University have developed several techniques 
designed to make calculating Web page rankings, such as those used by the 
Google search engine, up to five times faster. Currently, the ranking 
algorithm used by Google can take several days to search and rank 3 billion 
Web pages. To speed up Google's Computing PageRank algorithm the Stanford 
team used three strategies. First, they employed "extrapolation" methods, 
which make some broad assumptions about the Web's link structure that 
aren't necessarily true, but do speed up the PageRank process. The results 
can then be refined using the original PageRank software. A second strategy 
involved an enhancement called "BlockRank," which eliminated the redundancy 
of ranking pages that all belong to the same Web site. Finally, the team 
used "Adaptive PageRank" to eliminate more redundancy caused by 
reprocessing Web pages that have been ranked early in the ranking 
procedure. "Further speed-ups are possible when we use all these methods," 
says Stanford graduate student Sepandar Kamvar. "Our preliminary 
experiments show that combining the methods will make the computation of 
PageRank up to a factor of five faster." The hope is that eventually 
Google's ranking mechanism could calculate personalized page rankings 
dictated by an individual's interests, or customized to a particular 
topic." (Science Daily 14 May 2003)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/05/030514080352.htm

ALTERNATIVES TO MICROSOFT ARE GETTING WORLDWIDE ATTENTION
In a new report called "A Look at Alternatives to Microsoft," the Gartner 
research firm says that governments throughout the world are encouraging 
departments and businesses to consider alternatives to support Linux, an 
increasingly popular alternative to Microsoft's Windows operating system. 
This development is taking place in China, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, 
Australia, and several European and South American countries. Gartner says 
the attractiveness of Linux seems to be attributable to widespread 
perceptions that Microsoft insists on unattractive licensing arrangements 
and offers inadequate software protections against security breaches. 
(Information Week 13 May 2003)
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=9901246

SOUTH KOREA'S 'CITIZEN REPORTERS'
The increasingly popular South Korean online news site ohmynews.com has 
more than 26,300 of its readers registered as "citizen reporters" who 
account for about 80% of the site news coverage (the rest of which is 
written by ohmynews's 38 professional writers and editors). The mainstream 
press is critical of ohmynews's journalistic methods, but senior editor and 
founder Oh Yeon-ho says that his intention is to "say goodbye to 20th 
century journalism," by showing that every citizen can be a reporter. "We 
put everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves." 
(AP/San Jose Mercury News 14 May 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5858507.htm

MICROSOFT TOILET PROJECT WASN'T HOAX
Microsoft and its public relations firm are now saying that what they 
themselves thought was a hoax (the development of the iLoo, a portable 
toilet complete with wireless keyboard and Internet access) actually was a 
real project of the company's MSN group in the UK. The original press 
release indicated that the iLoo would offer its users "a unique 
experience." An MSN product manager now says: " "We jumped the gun 
basically yesterday in confirming that it was a hoax and in fact it was 
not," said Lisa Gurry, MSN group product manager. "Definitely we're going 
to be taking a good look at our communication processes internally. It's 
definitely not how we like to do PR at Microsoft." In any event, whether 
really a hoax or really real, the project is now dead -- flushed, as it 
were. (AP/USA Today 14 May 2003)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-05-14-iloo-hoax-retract_x.htm

*****

FLASH CARD
      "There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them. The 
education system in this country is just terrible, and we're not doing 
anything about it." (Ray Bradbury)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE ROLE OF THE CONTRARIAN
      In his book "Letters to a Young Contrarian," Christopher Hitchens 
says it's important that a social critic attack not just the elite but the 
masses as well:
      "There is a saying from Roman antiquity: Fiat justitia -- ruat 
caelum. 'Do justice, and let the skies fall.' In every epoch, there have 
been those to argue that 'greater' goods, such as tribal solidarity or 
social cohesion, take precedence over the demands of justice. It is 
supposed to be an axiom of 'Western' civilisation that the individual, or 
the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as 'order.' 
But in point of fact, such immolations have been very common. To the extent 
that the ideal is at least paid lip service, this result is the outcome of 
individual struggles against the collective instinct for a quiet life. 
Emile Zola could be the pattern for any serious and humanistic radical, 
because he not only asserted the inalienable rights of the individual, but 
generalised his assault to encompass the vile role played by clericalism, 
by racial hatred, by militarism and by the fetishisation of 'the nation' 
and the state. His caustic and brilliant epistolary campaign of 1897 and 
1898 may be read as a curtain-raiser for most of the great contests that 
roiled the coming twentieth century.
      "People forget that, before he addressed his most celebrated letter, 
'J'Accuse,' to the president of the Republic, Zola had also issued open 
letters to the youth of France, and to France itself. He did not confine 
himself to excoriating the corrupted elite, but held up a mirror in which 
public opinion could see its own ugliness reflected."
                                 ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465030327/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for "Letters To A Young Contrarian" by Christopher Hitchens -- or look for 
it in your favorite library. [We donate all revenues from our book 
recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

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