The Bang-on Blogosphere

Further proof that things are shifting in media-land:

as Iain Dale, the Tory blogger who ran Davis's ill-fated leadership campaign, points out, while newspapers scorned the resignation the blogosphere largely embraced it: political chatrooms are overflowing with right-wingers offering to start a fighting fund, and left-wingers agonising over whether to support him. Even the Daily Telegraph's Saturday letters page was two to one in favour of the former MP for Haltemprice and Howden.

Could David Davis somehow have stumbled across something the establishment has missed, an untapped anger with what the public sees as a snooping, heavy-handed state that spies on it through speed cameras and CCTV and microchips on its rubbish bins, that tramples its freedoms and makes sloppy mistakes with its private data?

Update: Related thoughts here.

ACTA's Unspeakable Acts

It seems that the Mighty behind the imminent ACTA are aware that what they are up to is literally unspeakable:

I’ve recently heard through a grapevine that ACTA negotiants have reportedly signed non-disclosure agreements as a condition of their participation in this week’s secret closed-door meeting in Geneva.

This is an amazing and frightening step backwards in the history of global governance. It also epitomizes the ACTA negotiants’ dismissive attitude towards the importance of credible, transparent trade policy-making in the current global environment.

Anyone who would seek to radically transform the world’s trade in intangible assets without the participation of most of the world’s governments has learned little from the Asian Financial Crisis, the Iraq War, or the ongoing real estate and credit catastrophe.

Why isn't the mainstream media up in arms about this? Or are they too busy contemplating their own growing impotence and irrelevance? Some of us have been warning about this for six months....

Another Reason Why China is the Future...

...or rather *a* future:

Chinese trust the Internet over mainstream media and all sources of information according to a study done by Harris Interactive for Edelman.

(Via RConversation.)

Digital Fish Wrap

There is a wonderful evolutionary winnowing process underway within the mainstream media: those that get the Internet are thriving, while those that don't, come up with ideas like this:

Here's my proposal: Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period -- say, 24 hours -- after it is made available to paying customers. The point is not to remove content from the Internet, but to delay its free release in that venue.

A temporary embargo, by depriving the Internet of free, trustworthy news in real-time, would, I believe, quickly establish the true value of that information. Imagine the major Web portals -- Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN -- with nothing to offer in the category of news except out of date articles from "mainstream" media and blogosphere musings on yesterday's news. Digital fish wrap.

See Darwin run. (Via Techdirt.)