You can't make this stuff up.

Hat tip: Rantburg
4:13:29 PM    

Blog daddy Jeff Jarvis unloads on some arrogant 'pro' journalists who think interactivity is a matter of getting readers to click on buttons so they can led by the nose through the 'news', meanwhile dismissing blogging as "Drivel passed off as journalism. The ramblings of someone somewhere passed off as news." Here's a clue for you folks: We get to decide what's news now, and who's worth reading.

Jeff gets to work with such wingnuts daily, so I can well understand his vehemence. But I'll toss in a hearty cheer of support from this direction. I've been bumping into this kind of arrogance since the early days of CD-ROM multimedia in the '80s, up through the $0 billion interactive TV market of the early 90s, and well into the Internet age when they should have started knowing better. Trying to 'compel' your readers to waste their time dealing with your user interface has never been a value proposition. The information throttling, non-dare-call-it-bias intermediary and aggregation position is a wasting business model, wiggle how you may. As for real, two-way conversational interactivity, you might be able to change a civilization with it, given luck and a tail wind.
4:09:01 PM    

Founder Eugene Kleiner passes away at the age of 80. He was one of the 'Fairchild Eight' founders of the pioneering semiconductor firm, and so was close to the roots of both venture capital and the chip business in the Valley. RIP.
3:06:32 PM    

What will a Moaist-cum-capitalist court system make of property rights in cyberspace? From the unlinkable South China Morning Post, so quoted liberally:

Online game player sues for loss of virtual assets

...23-year-old [Li Hongcheng] is suing internet game provider Arctic Ice Technology in Chaoyang Court, Beijing, claiming the company infringed on his private assets. It is the first lawsuit of its kind to be filed on the mainland.

In February last year, Mr Li discovered that all the weapons he had amassed while playing the game Red Moon had been stolen by another player. He said the loss of favourite weapons, including helmets, a war gown and two boxes of poison left him depressed, since they had incredible value in the game's virtual world.

Mr Li said his weapons had cost him thousands of hours and more than 10,000 yuan (HK$9,400) to acquire over two years. [About US$1,250 - no small sum on the mainland. - ed.]

Arctic Ice said the weapons were nothing more than data. The court case has already gone through two hearings and results should be announced next month.

Zhu Shouquan, attorney and director of the Beijing Lixing law firm, said: "Web-based virtual assets are quite different from what our laws cover - they mainly refer to disputes over money, capital or fixed assets.

"But since gamers invest a lot of time and money in [acquiring virtual property], they should have legal rights over these things on the internet."

Virtual assets fall in a legal grey area. "If game companies wrote guarantees in their service contracts, cases could be tried based on the agreement," said Mr Zhu.

10:02:07 AM