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Early in the week, discussions began online about the way much of the TV coverage of Katrina's impact was ignoring obvious questions of race and class. On Wednesday, Slate media critic Jack Shafer accused TV news of skirting one of the most visually clear aspects of the story – that blacks in New Orleans were more directly hurt than whites. Mark Jurkowitz, media analyst for the Boston Phoenix speaks to Bob about the questions left largely unasked and unanswered.
What's in a name? For the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), domain names are the way to organize a chaotic global internet. But when ICANN proposed a .XXX domain for adult-content, it sparked a political fight. Those debating the new .XXX suffix are an uneasy alliance of pornographers, the Christian right, conservative countries and the U.S. government. Brooke speaks to Bret Fausett, a lawyer and advisor to ICANN, about how names can hurt you.
Earlier this year, Business 2.0 writer Om Malik noticed that Google was buying up surplus fiber optic cable all over the country. It got him to wondering what Google was up to, and whether the company may be quietly building a parallel Internet of its very own. Malik tells Bob about the vast competitive advantages that the creation of a "GoogleNet" would make possible for Google.
PayPal, the online financier, did what few of its contemporaries were able to do. It weathered the dot-com boom and bust, and become the most popular choice for websites looking to do business with the public. But its success and sale to eBay gave it a newfound muscle that PayPal has increasingly used to police the content of sites it's affiliated with. Bob speaks with Eric Jackson, author of The PayPal Wars.
Local governments are obligated to inform the citizenry about new speed bumps, traffic lights, and the recycling schedule via public notices published in the local paper. In a few states, legislators have suggested that the Internet might be the logical place for public notices in the 21st century. But local papers are fighting that threat to what has been a guaranteed gravy train for them. Brooke talks with Sasha Issenberg, author of a brief history of the public notice in Legal Affairs Magazine.
Internet users searching for news on the London bombings had plenty of mainstream media sites to turn to. And they had Wikipedia. Within hours of the attacks, the ever-dynamic website had developed one of the most comprehensive sources of information on the bombings, which, like everything else on Wiki, was written and edited entirely by volunteers. New media maven Clay Shirky joins Bob discuss what Wiki has to offer the news-scape.
For every move that media industries have taken to protect their copyrights, there has been an equal and opposite countermove by consumers. In Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, J.D. Lasica explores the realm in which so-called pirates operate - slicing, dicing, and sharing media to their hearts' content. Lasica talks to Bob about how Hollywood is driving consumers further into the shadows and under the radar.
For several years, marketers have been rediscovering the power of the world’s oldest advertising technique: word-of-mouth. And a company called BuzzMetrics thinks it s found an effective way to track it. Researchers there sniff out cyberspace's most influential visitors and monitor everything they say. They then sell that information to clients with a stake in the chatter’s outcome. Bob talks to BuzzMetrics president & CEO Jonathan Carson.
