“This internet is different”. This is how it’s going to be!

According to Sascha Lobo, co-initiator of the Internet Manifesto, Journalism has to adapt to today’s as well as the futures emerging technologies. Photo: Reto Klar

Bloggers as of late have been getting a fair deal of flack from more “reputable” news sources with fat checkbooks and more legal resources than most of us would know what to do with. Time and time again we have seen bigger news publications attack smaller blogs for piracy, siphoning content, and all out theft on the digital front. Though, this borrowing and sharing of ideas (*clears throat*…the whole purpose of the internet) and the so called “rules” that apply, only go one way. Whenever big publications are threatened, legal hounds are released. But when bloggers and smaller blogs across the internet are pillaged, well, that’s a different story. This double standard and utter nonsense has infuriated many. Myself included. Thankfully, the little guys aren’t taking it lightly.

15 of Germany’s most popular blogs and bloggers came together to create the “Internet Manifesto”. It is a document informing telling everyone, big publications included, how the internet works no matter the attempts to force it into nice little pay containers and walled gardens. The Internet Manifesto has garnered a great deal of attraction already as the site it is hosted on has been up and down due to traffic. The Manifesto highlights how this growing feeling of entitlement is a disease and that the internet is a new business model — applying old business models and failing to innovate to the changing markets and times will only cast those involved further into irrelevance.

The Internet Manifesto in it’s entirety just inside for those of you wanting some enlightenment, knowledge, and more importantly, a good read.

AP’s DRM News scheme gets a makeover (hillarious)

If you’re into the world of tech, gadgets, electronics, and politics, especially politics pertaining to technological issues, the ongoing battle the Associated Press is waging on pretty much the entire internet just goes to show you how terrible and outdate some businesses really are. Instead of embracing the internet for what it is and what it can help you achieve, companies such as AP are instead trying to make the internet conform to outdated business practices and policies used on older business models. Such mashups simply won’t work. It really is quite stupid and revolves around AP’s claims that everyone else steals their news. (In reality, news is not a single person’s property — heck it isn’t the “property” of anyone. We all know this. Except the AP seems to think they’re in their own little world where they rule all). One with even a sliver of intelligence would think that they would see how beneficial DRM has been to the music industry (extreme sarcasm) and learn from their mistakes. Obviously we assume too much. But I digress.

For the past several weeks, the AP has been hard at work pushing their DRM laced news services in hopes that they can get a cult started in which they’re the ring leader. In order to “help” us thieves, the AP has kindly provided us with the graph shown above (lightly altered by the oh so funny crew at Crunch Gear). The sooner that outdated and bass-akwards companies such as the AP either adapt or die the better off we will all be. Actually, if you look at the AP’s heavy lobbying for DRM, one could see the similarities between them and other crooked organizations such as the RIAA. Let’s hear it for the RIAA/Satan of the news industry: AP! *applause booooooooo* (Real image after the jump — bigger images also for those of you with less than stellar eyes *winky face*)