onfocus

Did you know that Journalists have a Code of Ethics? And did you know that the first code is:

Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error...

Neither did I. The list is fantastic, and reads like an indictment of current news practices. I especially like this one—

Give voice to the voiceless; official and unofficial sources of information can be equally valid.

Most of these could apply to weblog authors as well.

Have you heard Maciej Ceglowski's Audioblogging Manifesto? I wish I had the skills to put together a Flash animation using this audio.

Matt got a great shot above San Francisco.

If you haven't deleted your Friendster profile yet (is anyone still using that?) here's another reason you may want to get rid of it: an employee was fired for blogging. [via matt]

I had a great conversation with Dr. Lisa Ede from OSU yesterday. Her area of expertise is rhetoric, and she gave me a quick lesson so I could understand her terms. We spent a good amount of time talking about the ways web authors present their identities online, and (in retrospect) how they establish ethos, pathos, and logos in this new medium. Though I "study" the web and weblogs every day in a haphazard way, I left our conversation wondering what it would be like to study the web full-time in a structured academic setting.

I should really set up one of those link-sidebar thingies again. Until then, an unordered list it is—

• George Lakoff on framing (update!)
• Last link via the new devoter.com, PolitiFilter
• JD Lasica's review of We the Media was rejected by Amazon for being too opinionated? [via wendy seltzer]
• AWS 4.0 beta (note to self: code now!)
• The Flickr API is already giving birth to new applications. Check out the Flickr API Group. (note to self: finish code now!)

Spotting similarities—

• Portland Tribune Photo -> Remixed Propaganda Poster
• Pat Buchanan -> Rep. Doug Bereuter
• SocialText -> Technorati [via Waxy]
• Blast Destroys Camera -> I found a digital camera in the woods... (heh)
• Goozilla -> Joogle

sk let me know that today is the one year anniversary of Amazon Hacks being released. ("Great," you're thinking, "but what have you done for me lately?") There's another birthday just around the corner. Not to mention (well, ok, to mention) my birthday in a mere ten days. *wink*

This is a very interesting read from the EFF: Best Practices for Online Service Providers (OSPs). (It's actually a PDF linked from this page.) But they're just talking to traditional Internet Service Providers like the cable and telephone companies, right? Nope, just about anyone can be an OSP:

"...virtually any website or access intermediary, not just established subscriber-based businesses, can be considered an OSP under the law. Indeed, even individuals may be 'accidental OSPs' if they set up WiFi access points to share Internet connectivity with friends and neighbors."

Because the government can subpoena any information they want from any service provider, the EFF recommends obfuscating or deleting all server logs. After all, "OSPs cannot be forced to provide data that does not exist." They even note that just "deleting" logs won't completely remove them from the disk, so they recommend complete server-log abstinence:

"The best way to protect against the risk of log artifacts on disk is to never create any user logs in the first place. This is the ideal and safest solution even though it is often impractical."

If you run a web service where people contribute data (my non-lawyer guess is that even weblogs with comments enabled count) these are definitely issues worth thinking about.

Everyone's talking about it, and they should: Organizr is a next step for web applications. (It's designed to manage/publish photos online.) Check it out!

Obviously I haven't been finding the connections recently, since it's been over a week since my last post. Here are a few quick links:

• Torrez -> Kottke -> DropCash
• Dinah -> Peter Pezaris -> Multiply
• Blogger -> Doug Bowman -> Blogger Navbar
• Jim Woodring -> Taruto Fuyama -> Animated Frank
• Philip K. Dick -> Flow My Tears -> Acts

I'm in the middle of reading Foucault's Pendulum and I came across this quote that could be a mantra for the web—

"No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them."

Eco's character was talking about detectives or intelligence agencies, but I think the same approach to data is true for Google, Amazon, and lots of successful web services.