Ray Finkle and a Clean Pair of Shorts is a tumblelog.

It feels to me as if iPad magazines are at risk of being the next CD-ROMs, the “interactive” element providing only a passing nod to the rise of truly engaging media formats. (It’s an analogy already made by the TechDirt blog, among others.) Or perhaps they’re more like early days of Flash websites, wherein website owners leapt upon the opportunity to adorn their pages with slick-looking animations, videos and transitions. Only later did they realize that all-Flash websites are both cumbersome and break the core functionality of the Web — namely, the ability to link to individual pieces of content.

Pete Cashmore (via soupsoup)

I’m thinking the latter, and couldn’t that analogy also be made for any closed app platform? They are clunky, but they’re first attempts. There is real potential for traditional publishers, really for the first time ever, to rethink their process. To shift from print first to digital first.    

You would think, wouldn’t you, that for a company that can design and build a cutting-edge mobile phone, one that Changes everything. Again. that it might be able to figure out how to serve a known number of customers without any one of them having to wait for ten hours.

The decision follows established judicial consensus that online services like YouTube are protected when they work cooperatively with copyright holders to help them manage their rights online.

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

NOAH BRIER’S REACTION may reflect the future of privacy for all of us. As we adjust to the exposure that comes from living online, we need to put information on the Internet with a greater awareness of prying eyes. Noah was unsurprised by the narrative I read off to him because he had so consciously crafted it. Most of the sites that come up in a Google search for his name are of his own creation.