I’ve been told that in the broadcast media, there are contract clauses that stipulate what ads can run side by side. For instance, if you are Honda, you probably don’t want the TV network running a Toyota Prius ad right next to your Civic Hybrid spot.

I’m guessing the same rules do not apply to web advertising. I don’t think it was coincidence that sitting right next to the article about IBM/Lotus Sametime telephony integration was a video ad spot for Microsoft VoIP. Something tells me the marketing guys are both sides will get an earful - The blue team may want to call in sick while the red team is probably getting high-fives.

What brought this to the forefront for me was my post about the Lunar Moth. The event was real. The moth was spread out flat on the grass. I did various cleanup procedures on the image and changed the lighting to better present the moth. Here is the before and after. You get to decide if it was to maintain the photograph’s presentation of fact.

The image was straitened, color corrected, sharpened (perhaps a bit too much), and a faint darkening of the grass under the moth to make it stand out. The most dramatic “touch up” was to repair to all the damage of the wings. It is this last element - in my opinion - that makes this less factual and more “art”. If it were scratches in an old photo, that would be artificial damage and the repairs would be more warranted. In this case, it represents a natural occurrence which the camera captured.

I discovered that the video podcast is also available as a simple video download. The big difference is that the podcast assigns a unique file name to each day’s news whereas the video download has the same name all of the time. This gave me an idea. The ReadyNAS does not have a podcast client but it does have a lightweight version of Linux. I did some digging and found that it runs cron, as task scheduler. So, I setup to define a “task” that would download the evening news every night. It turned out to be simple one-line command …

wget -t 5 -nc -o /media/Daily/nbc-nightly-news.log
        -O /media/Daily/nbc-nightly-news.m4v 
        http://msnbcpod.rd.llnwd.net/e1/video/podcast/pdv_nn_netcast_m4v.m4v
Note: “/media/Daily” is the directory accessable to my video player.

Now, at one minute past one in the morning (”1 1 * * *” in crontab syntax) the ReadyNAS fetches the evening news. I get up every morning, and watch the evening news while enjoying my morning espresso. It’s not a bad way to start the day !

What is interesting is the poll was of readers from the United States.

(I preface the next paragraph by saying I wrote it before I took the time to read Facebook’s terms of use.)

News outlets have used these public Internet sites to harvest background content, quotes, and story lines. To a greater or lesser extent, this is reasonable or reasonably expected. The content in the public domain.

More interesting (and unfortunate) is that media personnel have used the information from Facebook and MySpace to identify potential interviewees for the purpose of securing quotes from students involved as well as friends and family of students effected. In some cases, the media were insistent in their pursuits - to the point of harassment.

I was not familiar with the policies at Facebook so I took a closer look. It turns out, the media’s behavior could be found in violation of the terms of the service.

You further agree not to harvest or collect email addresses or other contact information of Users from the Service or the Site by electronic or other means for the purposes of sending unsolicited emails or other unsolicited communications.

Source Facebook Terms of Use

To be honest, I was not expecting the above section of the terms of use. I had assumed the user content would be deemed “in the public domain”. It’s refreshing - but the pessimist in me suspects it goes mostly ignored.

What all of this means is that “if it’s in the Internet, it’s considered fair game”. It means those who choose to publish in the Internet, should evaluate all the good and bad ways that information may be used. It is our responsibility to protect ourselves, our family, and our friends.

This is an unfortunate state of affairs. However, it is reality. If someone wants to misuse or subvert a situation, there are too many possible ways for us to prevent them all. Information and privacy are the latest victims.