My friend Dylan also contributed to the discussion and I left a largish comment on his post during lunch, which was consequently munged into an unreadable wall of text So I decided to post my reply here…

Firstly, in my defense, I left Stuff because of it’s content. Now the stories I want to read are aggregated with Google News. I still visit Stuffs site regularly to read the stories I want.

I would also argue that Jobs.org.nz (and by extention Google News, digg, techmeme and any other aggregator) are not stealing content. They’re using a headline and a small excerpt of the post (permitted under copyright “fair dealing”), and giving a perma-link to the content hosted on his blog. If they were using his entire post as content, referenced or not, I’d understand his anger and would agree that was “stealing content” because that would be copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Jobs.org.nz is obviously a questionable looking site, and I’m not saying that Lance is beyond his rights to ask his feed to be removed. I probably would as well – I wouldn’t want to be associated with that site as it has potential to damage your brand.

Dylan said:

Google News takes traffic away from publishers by “stealing” and republishing content within a news aggregation site where the original publisher has no opportunity to make revenue from ad sales.

I don’t understand how he came to this conclusion. Google uses a headline and sometimes a 20 character excerpt. If you want to read the story you have to link out to the publishers site (except for AP content which Google pays for syndication).

Dylan Said:

In conclusion I’d argue that Google News takes traffic and eye balls away from the publisher…thus reducing their revenues. If I were a publisher I’d be nervous.

I would agree that Google News takes eyeballs away from publishers front pages, but that’s simply because Google do a better job at providing a portal for content the user wants to see.

And of course publishers are nervous. So were the other industries when they realised that they had to change.

We’re entering a stage in our society where consumers want to pick and choose what they consume. The music industry is realising that some people don’t want to pay for an album for a few good songs (iTunes, other digital services). The television industry is realising some don’t want want to watch the endless river of shitty reality TV shows to get to the good stuff (TVNZ on demand, Hulu). The print industry must realise that some won’t want to wade through their quagmire of crap to get to the stories which are important to them.

• The Living End
• The Dandy Warhols
• The Potbelleez
• Gyroscope
• Tiki
• Testament
• The Jordan Luck Band
• Autozamm
• Goodwill
• Concord Dawn
• Little Bushman
• Dimmer
• Die! Die! Die!
• Fur Patrol
• Goodnight Nurse
• State of Mind
• The Valves
• Pitch Black
• The Exiles

NICE! It’s due to kick off November 9th. Looks like some party! If the second announcement is anything like this one, I might have to be there!

photo credit: yngrich

There’s a lot of buzz about Freeview at the moment. They’re almost through their DVB-T rollout. DVB-T means Digital Video Broadcast and differs from Sky and the current Freeview implementation in that it doesn’t require a satellite to recieve broadcasts, it uses the bog-standard UHF arial almost ubiquitously installed across New Zealand. Difference is, the broadcast is digital and will enable broadcasters to, finally, broadcast shows in full 1080p HD.

I know a few people that have gotten their grubby little mitts on Freeview set top boxes (Interested? Head down to Eastern Hi-Fi with a few hundred bucks and see what happens!) that realise this new standard and the feedback that I’ve heard from them is absolutely stellar.

All well and good, but for the love of God I don’t want another set-top box. What I want is a PlayTV. It’s a dual-tuner, well integrated little box for your Playstation 3 thats incredibly easy to use and integrates with the rest of my devices (UPnp NAS, PSP, HDTV). For those who are interested – here’s a little video showing off some of what it can do.

I don’t want Sky anymore. I don’t want their re-hashed movie channels, their proprietary access methods and all the buggy firmware to go with them, I don’t want to pay them for MySky for their half-baked PVR and I don’t want to pay them again to upgrade to HD.

If Sony gets their act together and releases this product here as soon as possible, they can quite easily position the PS3 as the gadget to have for all AV setups. They’ve also recently announced that they’ll be hosting a “Video On Demand” service – basically streaming High Definition movie downloads from the Playstation Store over your broadband connection. So between gaming, Bluray, HDTV PVR and video on demand it will become an impressive centerpiece for any living room.