links for 2010-09-27

"Google has been ordered by a French court to pay €5,000 damages to a former convict after the search engine suggested words including “rape”, “rapist” and “prison” when his name was typed."

"Winning games is nice; it’s fun; the kids love it. Being battered at a half-empty Reebok isn’t much of a laugh."

"Value is a concept that keeps coming up in debates about the future of news. In the eyes of many publishers, their industry made a mistake by letting audiences get used to reading news online without paying. But, channelling Marx, they insist that their content 'has value' if only because creating it is not free. They hope that if enough publishers start charging then readers will pay. In this blog I have tried to challenge some of the thinking involved here."

"Journalism, capital J, is supposed to be about ideals such as “democracy” and “the public interest.” It’s probably important to be an informed voter, but this is a very shallow theory of why journalism is desirable. Most of what we see around us isn’t built on votes. It’s built on people imagining that some part of the world should be some other way, and then doing what it takes to accomplish that. Democracy is fine, but a real civic culture is far more participatory and empowering than elections. This requires not just information, but information tools. Newspaper stories online and streaming video on a tablet are not those tools". This is a great essay and I struggle to disagree with anything in it that Jonathan says about product design (and the lack thereof) that is holding our industry back.

Anton Vowl on when it is acceptable to criticise the weight of young women (i.e. when the Mail does it to generate page views it is fine, when anyone else, especially the BBC, does it, it is irresponsible and liable to lead to an increase in eating disorders)

"Apple is not allowing media companies to tie in subscription to their iPad apps; they are adding subscriptions to the app store. Meaning, that Marvel's existing customers still don't have access to the iPad. You have to buy a separate iPad subscription! And people who subscribe to the iPad version of Marvel, can ONLY read comics on the iPad. For companies like Marvel this might not be a deal-breaker, but it is absolutely catastrophic for news companies like the Wall Street Journal."

"Interestingly, despite his disillusionment with blog comments Agnew regularly replies to messages he receives via Twitter."