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Regarding the AP/Drudge Retort contretemps:

• The Media Bloggers Association is “a nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting, protecting and educating its members; supporting the development of “blogging” or “citizen journalism” as a distinct form of media; and helping to extend the power of the press, with all the rights and responsibilities that entails, to every citizen.” Basically an advocacy group available to bloggers and non-bloggers alike. They also offer legal advice and help to individual bloggers like Rogers Cadenhead of Retort when they are faced with legal action.
• Here’s the actual backstory of the issue from Robert Cox of the MBA, who has been involved in this affair from the beginning. Apparently prior to the 7 takedown notices filed last week (whose validity is indeed still up for debate), the website had gotten several perfectly valid takedown notices for clear violations of the DMCA.
• Cox’s reaction to some of the misinformation promulgated by bloggers and press alike.

Have you heard about this? It’s a doozy.

Last week, the Associated Press filed 7 DMCA takedown notices against the Drudge Retort^†, a Digg-style social news website, alleging that its users’ practice of linking AP articles and briefly quoting headlines and leads (never more than 79 words) was not fair use.

Now, apparently the AP’s official policy is that fair use of their content means use of 4 or less words. I am not kidding. Use 5 or more, and you owe them a minimum of $12.50.

The—big surprise—resulting uproar and fledgling PR nightmare has had the AP backpedaling, saying that their initial filings were “heavy-handed,” and planning to meet with representatives from a trade group (the Media Bloggers Association^*) to come up with “a more thoughtful standard.”

Sauce for the goose
Turnabout, however, is evidently fair play:

Now, in a slightly ironic twist, the AP is taking content from a blog site. Namely, mine.

In a news item about the e-mail from Judge Kozinski’s wife that I posted on this site, an AP article lifted numerous passages.

I counted 154 words quoted from my post. That’s almost twice the number of words contained in the most extensive quotation in the Drudge Retort.

Look. A huge portion of the blogosphere is all about news analysis and discussion. Hashing and rehashing, action and reaction. Take that away and all you’ve got is catblogging and what-I-ate-for-dinner-last-night—scintillating stuff indeed. Not to mention that if the purpose of quoting news articles is almost always to react to them, how is this legally any different from quoting a book in a book review, which is fair use under the DMCA?

Well, as embarrassing as this already is for the AP, it’s bound to get worse before it gets better. And they deserve it. (Via InstaPundit)

^† No, that is not a typo. I meant to type “retort” rather than “report.” The Drudge Retort started out as a left-wing parody of the conservative Drudge Report.

^* Who? Are these guys, whoever they are, really representative of the blogging community?

my Indian heritage the credit or weight I should for influencing my outlook; mea culpa. And while this post won’t correct the oversight, it may go some way to addressing the lack.

There has been a recent mini-trend of Bollywood megastars starting their own blogs, complete with thin-skinned cattiness and sycophantic fan commenters:

• Amitabh Bachchan is the godfather of Indian cinema and arguably the biggest star to come out of the formidable Bollywood machine, with a career that will have spanned 40 years in 2009. Even I, a notorious detractor of Bollywood films, am a fan—what can I say? I grew up watching the guy.

  I have to say here that I don’t know who did the design for the site, but the ludicrously large picture of Big B (I presume his son, Abhishek—a star in his own right—is affectionately known as Little B?) used as the banner graphic, as well as the fact that all the posts on the main page are just headlines followed by “more…” links, with no meaningful content on the main page, mean that s/he should be fired forthwith. Poorly done, dude.

• Aamir Khan is film royalty as well, and talent-wise one of my favorite Indian actors. His blog, by contrast, has a much more functional but still attractive design. Kudos to that designer.

Both Bachchan and Khan have recently taken potshots at reigning top dog Shah Rukh Khan—No, seriously. He’s in more commercials than Peyton Manning—on their blogs and subsequently been vilified in the press. In their defense, however, SRK has been known on many an occasion to poke fun at his fellow stars, perhaps not in the best of taste.

That said, both Bachchan and Khan are articulate, if a bit self-absorbed, but when they spend their lives being fawned over and given near-diety status from their fans, can you blame them?

Fun fact: Aamir Khan likes German board games! Especially Settlers of Catan. Who knew?

making changes to the category structure on this blog. I had previously been using the categories somewhat like tags, but it was clunky at best. Now that WordPress 2.3 has introduced the new tagging feature, I’ve removed all subcategories and made the category structure a flat one (though that may change as I rethink my post organization), and used tags to replace those subcategories.

Unfortunately, idiot that I am, I did this all manually, instead of using WP’s handy-dandy categories-to-tags feature. This would have saved me hours. God.

It seems like everything these days—internet presences included—is being chopped up into bite-sized, easily digestible pieces.

A bunch of my friends have started a mass migration toward short-format blogging or messaging services like Twitter and Tumblr, likely because the barrier to entry and activation energy of those services is much lower than those of the now-traditional blog.

Links to those friends’ Twitter & Tumblr accounts:

• vjkaruna’s Twitter
• lilachoot’s Twitter
• georgedexter’s Twitter
• citrusboy’s Tumblr
• lilacmoon’s Tumblr
• mintyfresh’s Tumblr

Enjoy!

As for me, I’m going to stick with the longer-format medium, because I am nothing if not verbose. And besides, you’ve got to get your fiber from somewhere, right?

Phew. I did some domain reshuffling and site reorganization tonight, to hopefully make URLs on my domain a little more sensible. Long story short, the URL for this blog is now http://richa.avasthi.name/blogs/tepumpkin/. The old address (http://blogs.ravasthi.name/tepumpkin/) will still work (it just redirects to the new address) for the next little while. Please update your links accordingly. Thank you, and apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Most of this is under the hood, but I’ve made some changes to this blog to improve your experience:

• I spent some time just now adding new categories, and re-categorizing posts more meaningfully. There should now be no posts marked “Uncategorized”.
• I’ve added a “Most commented posts” section (thanks to this plugin) to the sidebar, so you can see what I’ve written that people seem to get most exercised about.
• Commenting improved! I’ve added plugins to show users a live preview of their comments, and also given them the ability to edit comments they’ve posted for a fixed time after the posting.

of MarsEdit, a blog publishing application, a spin. In brief, it makes writing blog posts like writing emails, it’s supposed to make publishing to multiple blogs easier, and integrates nifty features like editing in your favorite text editor, like TextMate. Which is pretty cool for me, because I am lazy and love keyboard shortcuts, which TM has aplenty (like automatically closing HTML tags).

This post was written in MarsEdit. Let’s see if it works for me. (Via What do I know)

This is probably going to be difficult to implement unless WP declares that “Uncategorized” is a mandatory category, but when writing a post, if you select a category you’ve created, I’d love if WP automatically deselected “Uncategorized”.

Now that I’ve promised you I’ll be blogging more (and we all know I good I am at keeping that promise), here’s a brief enumeration of all the topics I’ve got grandiose plans of writing about:

• Lots and lots of book reviews (this is partially what I’ve been doing in my spare time instead of blogging).
• This won’t be of any interest to those of you who are not web developers or developers (whom, I imagine, comprise approximately 1.2% of my regular readers), but: several discussions on web design, UI design, software tools, and CSS tips and tricks I’ve learned the hard way.
• And your favorite: various rants.