I’m sure by now you’ve heard the chorus of voices commenting on IDG’s policies regarding press access to Macworld Expo next month. There have been a number of theories as to why IDG is limiting press access this year. The official IDG stance is that demand for press passes is high this year, so stronger limitations have been put in place. Others theorize that Apple’s culture is changing and that they are less community-oriented than they have been. Some see it as Apple and IDG getting back at the Mac Web for live text feeds of previous events. Still others see it as a way to keep your average Joe from starting a blog, posting about Apple, and getting press passes (i.e. to restrict it to professional journalists). However, this does seem to be the latest episode in a series of issues that have brought up the question, what counts as “media” anymore?

Before I get started here, I want to make a couple of notes. First of all, I am not bitter about Deep Thought not getting press access to MWSF, mainly because, well, I never fully expected to get press access anyway! We do not meet all of…
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The last week has been wild. Try being sick, working on final papers, finishing up reading, and trying to do a little work on DT sound to you?

The next few days is going to be more fun. I have one more paper to churn out and two exams later this week, so don’t expect too much from me this week.

It should be fun--yeah, right.

Just a brief rant on how much I hate power outages.  They completely destroy your productivity and interrupt your workflow, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent them.  The only measure of prevention against them is a UPS (which honestly, I can’t really justify buying right now).

It’s especially insulting when the power’s only off for a few seconds or a couple minutes.  That way, everything I’m doing is interrupted, but there’s not a big wander-around-in-the-dark-for-4-hours situation.  Gyaaaahhh.

After controversy surrounding the online biography of John Seigenthaler Sr., Wikipedia has altered its rules for creating new articles.

Seigenthaler discovered, while reading his own biography on Wikipedia, that it contained several factual errors about him, including an implication in both of the Kennedy assassinations.  Naturally he did what anyone would do and complained:

Upon discovery of the falsehoods, Mr. Seigenthaler contacted Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in October 2005, who undertook the unusual step of requesting that the false information be deleted from the article’s version logs—as a result, the unredacted versions of the article can only be viewed by Wikipedia administrators. The false statements had been present in Wikipedia since May 2005—a period of over 4 months. Several Wikipedia “mirror” sites (which are outside the editorial control of Wikipedia itself) continued to reflect the incorrect versions of the article in question for several weeks after. —Wk

Jimmy Wales, the site’s founder, enacted a publishing permissions change whereby users must register and login to create new articles.  However, users may still edit existing articles anonymously, including any acts of vandalism from inserting inane gibberish to blanking entire articles.  The hope is to cut down on the number of new articles…
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As with news and blog entries, comments are now available for reviews, interviews, tutorials (once we get some...), and the geek ___ of the week entries.  Unlike news and blogs, they will be available for 60 days after being posted instead of 30.