j’s scratchpad

When some people travel, they eat more junk food than they normally would, using vacation as an excuse to indulge in treats they wouldn’t normally consume at home. I often use USA Today as my travel treat. I don’t normally read the newspaper, but when I travel, I can often pick up a copy fairly easily in the airport or at the hotel. Today’s issue has four articles worth noting here.

1. The Money cover story is about social networks going mobile. As the prevalence of mobile devices and number of people who want to be continually connected grow, we are, of course, going to see more and more applications specialized for those devices. The article focuses on how social network members use the various servics on their devices and what those applications offer mobile users. The article names quite a few mobile services and discusses trends in the industry.

2. Paul Davidson discusses the latest proposal to ease Federcal Communications Commission media ownership rules in an effort to help struggling newspapers. FCC chairman Kevin Martin suggests changing the rule preventing one company from owning a newspaper and a TV or radio station in the same market, particularly in larger markets.
3. Remember a few years ago when Yahoo! gave up incriminating information about users to the Chinese government, who then imprisoned the people? Yahoo and the family members of two incarcerated people settled the lawsuit with undisclosed details. A bill that could ban companies from disclosing information about individual Internet users, the Global Online Freedom Act, is now circulating in the US government.
4. Music sites are shifting from computers to mobile devices (see number one above about how we’re going to see more applications for mobile devices) and the controversy over royalties from Internet radio stations, which might have caused several to shut down, might be ending soon as parties might be close to an agreement.

An aside: when I was drafting this post, I thought about how a few years ago, I would have blogged each of these article summaries separately. When thinking about how to handle these four bits from one source and the brevity of some of them, I thought creating four blog posts I wanted to knock live today (I’m not sure how long USAToday articles are available on the Web) was a bit excessive. One post based on the common thread of the source would work, especially since I’m not blogging on a platform where I can assign one post multiple categories. In Manila, I probably would have done four separate posts because it would be foolish to have the summaries about the FCC and Yahoo! be filed as Tools.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 7:41 pm and is filed under Journalism, Search Engines, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.