ARTS & FARCES internet

Al Franken is virtually single-handedly trying to bring a sense of humor to the progressive side of the political map. First it was his book’s subtitle: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right which drew the wrath of Fox News and its lead entertainer, Bill O’Reilly. A judge subsequently threw out Fox’s infringement complaint. Now Franken’s at it again, this time with the name of his radio show. The O’Franken Factor, scheduled to premiere at the end of the month is a not-so-subtle swipe at O’Reilly’s daily show on the Fox television network.

And Franken’s itching for a fight. “Bill, I want you to sue us,” Franken reportedly said, according to an AP account. Fox, for its part, appears to want no part of another round with Franken. When asked to respond to Franken’s remarks, the AP reports Fox News spokesman Robert Zimmerman as saying, “All forms of free speech are welcomed in this country. We wish them well.”

Instead of taking himself and his politics so seriously, Franken clearly intends to have some fun. “Our long national nightmare is over. I’ve signed,” said Franken in the media release announcing his show. “My first priority is to get sued by a right wing jerk in order to generate interest in my new show, The O’Franken Factor. Our hope is to do drug-free talk radio, although I understand it’s never been done.”

Without really wanting to open this whole can of worms with regard to whether small publishers should syndicate summary content of their articles or the full content of the articles, it looks like it’s unavoidable.

Currently, I syndicate only a summary of any given article. There are a variety of reasons for doing this, but the two main ones are attention and eventual business model.

Attention in that I’d really like to drive you to my website where I have a shot at either selling you something or getting you to hire me to do something.

Eventual business model in that I firmly believe that eventually someone will come up with a sustainable business model for micropublishing and I’m pretty sure it will involve RSS or some variant.

If I configure my feeds to syndicate the full content of the articles, then I don’t get either of the things that, right now at least, matter the most to me.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Public Knowledge, and five library associations filed a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seeking to block the government agency’s overly broad regulation of digital television. The suit, filed last week in the Washington, DC Court of Appeals, charges, among other things, that the FCC failed to point to substantial evidence in adopting its “broadcast flag” ruling.

Last November the FCC issued the broadcast flag ruling, which mandated that consumer digital televisions incorporate digital rights management and content control technologies demanded by the entertainment industry. These rights management technologies restrict consumer use of digital television in order to preemptively prevent any whiff of piracy. The ruling, if not successfully challenged, will go into effect by July 2005.

Saying that it had overstepped its bounds when it issued its broadcast flag ruling, EFF intellectual property attorney Fred von Lohmann said today, “The FCC’s digital broadcast television mandate is a step in the wrong direction because it would make digital television cost more and do less, undermining innovation, fair use, and competition.”

The broadcast flag is a binary signal embedded within the digital television signal. When set to “on,” the receiving device is required to restrict the distribution of the signal.

In June 2002, the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG), a trade association representing the entertainment industry and consumer electronics manufacturers, issued a report that took a decidedly draconian position with regard to consumer use of digital television. The trade association’s report recommended that all devices capable of interacting with digital television—including computers—be required to implement methods designed to “frustrate end-user modification.” Furthermore, according to the report, any digital television recording device would have to come from a list of approved technologies, putting control over what devices could or could not be built solely in the hands of the entertainment industry.

This is the tenth major revision of this website since February 1993. There’s bound to be some breakage, so kindly use that Feedback link in the upper right corner if you find anything that doesn’t seem to be working properly.

Sometime this weekend—could be in a few hours; could be tomorrow—I plan on migrating to a new content management system called Expression Engine. Being a completely new system, all inbound links will break (as well as the internal links and images, at least initially) and there will surely be some rough spots.

Several temporary shortcomings will be immediately apparent:

• The URLs for all of the RSS feeds will change (but there will be a new Atom feed)
• The search engine isn’t yet implemented; this will be remedied as soon as possible
• There’ll be no calendar interface, at least not initially, although it may be added in the future