AP Quotes Blogger In Discussing Bloggers Quoting AP; Hilarity Ensues

The ongoing ridiculous situation brewing between bloggers and the Associated Press has now taken a turn towards the enjoyably hilarious. We had already mentioned the fact that, despite the AP’s complaints that bloggers quoting less than 100 words were violating fair use, the AP had a long history of quoting more than 100 words from bloggers - and not even linking back to the original blog.

Now, in a bit of ultimate irony, the AP’s own article about this brouhaha quoted (without linking) twenty-two words from TechCrunch. That’s 18 words more than the supposed four word “limit” the AP has suggested. With an ironic chance that wide, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington couldn’t resist, and asked his lawyer to send a DMCA takedown notice to the Associated Press, along with a bill for $12.50 (directly off the AP’s own pricing schedule). He admits that it’s ridiculous, but that’s what his actions are designed to present. By law, the AP should be required to takedown the content before filing a response — though, since it’s filing the response to itself, then perhaps it won’t need to takedown the content. Either way, this helps illustrate the insanity of the entire situation.

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A digital filmmaker named Dennis Liu has made an amazing video for The Bird And The Bee’s lovely song “Again & Again”. The set? His Mac desktop. You sort of have to see it for yourself to understand; luckily, Dennis has dropped it on YouTube so that the world can see it in low-res glory:

Innovative, and definitely cool. It doesn’t seem to be an “official” video for the song…but if it isn’t, it oughtta be.

[Source: MacRumors forums]

I have been one of the early users of StumbleUpon, and I have seen the ups and downs of it. It is really heartening to read this:

“Sometime today, StumbleUpon will register its five millionth user. (At the time of this writing, it is at 4,994,826 registered users). That number is kind of meaningless because it counts anyone who has ever registered for the Website-rating and discovery service, and who may no longer use it. StumbleUpon, which is part of eBay, does not disclose how many active users it has.”

Full Story on TechCrunch

I installed WP 2.5 only last week, and this has me worried. Concerned. And to be honest, a bit scared too. What if I lose it all some day by accident? Should I revert to an older version? Will there be a patch out? Will it screw up all my plugin settings? Hmm… This will keep me worried for the next few hours, I know…

From Big gotcha in WP 2.5: If you’re a self-hosted Wordpress user and have upgraded to WP2.5, you need to know there is a serious ‘gotcha’ in the revised sidebar widget building section. If you use text widgets to include custom HTML, javascript or other non-PHP code and want to make changes or add new ones then be very careful how you do it.

Demonoid (torrent tracker) was shutdown last fall. For those who don’t already know, Demonoid is back up. Looks like they found a new host for the Web site and the tracker is functioning properly as well. For those with old accounts, all the old data has been saved. It’s almost as if they never left.”