Bill Amendments go Mainstream?
For those of us who are interested in the legislative process bill amendments are part of the lifeblood of democracy a who did what, proposed what, and what happened process. The process is not always visible outside the legislature, so I was interested to see today that Slate Magazine is now tracking every amendment to the US Senate’s health care reform bill.
According to Slate “they are presented (here) with sponsors’ names, plain-English descriptions, links to texts and summaries, and roll call votes, with the most recent at the top.”
Its nice to see the process out in the open and the information getting disseminated. Shame its all PDF, some amendment RSS would be nice but its a step in the right direction
Jisc Ebook Observatory Report Summary
JISC have released the findings of their study on ebooks in Libraries. Its pretty detailed based on 52,000 responses but a quick summary would be:
Read the full report here
Undiscoverable = undiscovered?
If you are not engaged in your business you will not be in business and all business is about conversations. You might cynically think that Rupert Murdoch sledging Google is simply good business, look at the profile of the last couple of days – easy to get if you own a lot of media.
The thing I dont get is if your business is news you need to be in the news, retreating behind a pay wall and making your content “undiscoverable” cannot make much sense.
I am no CEO expert but I believe it is possible to not allow Google index your content, but why would you want to?. What the industry has failed to do is to find any additional value propositions to develop new income streams while clicks grow yet subscriptions and purchases fall.
It’s a bit like the reaction in the UK to the BBC expanding its reach to cover local news and provide video last year, they wanted to do it because no one else had and someone could or should. So the BBC got blocked and no one did anything, why all it would have done was created a bigger market for local news.
If the spat is really about advertising revenue, and it probably is, round one to Mr. Murdoch, I bet he gets a sweeter deal!
Video Continues to Grow
PR 2.0 have a good update on the state of video on the web. I have to admit I missed the point where you tube overtook yahoo as the seconds most popular search engine after parent company Google. Thats significant.
There is going to be impact here for all aspects of media and communications. Infrastructure, is going to have to deal with the surge and I cannot see a long lifespan for text only e-book readers, the iphone and related clones may be the future after all. Infrastructure permitting!
Liam