Wild Angels with Charlie

This is fake, an absolutely typical method of plagiarism and copy-cat behaviour. One of Europe’s largest tv companies RTL Television plagiarises the well known and absolutely respected tv series and blockbuster movie „Charlies Angels“ into their own germanized format. The show „Wilde Engel“ features a female trio of special-agents: The glamour girl Rebecca, the technic freak Ida and the martial fighter Aiko. Not that the concept is stolen from the legendary tv series, even the modifications done for the Charlies Angels movie have been copied as much as possible. To top this most visible stupidity created by RTL Television, they published a small paragraph on their website:

„The new trio combines a fresh and young mix of action, crime and entertainment on the screen which is only usually known from cinematic movies. With quotes of Hollywood-Blockbusters like e.g. „Matrix“, „Kill Bill“ or „Charlies Angels“.

RTL becomes rather famous for their simple copies of successful tv and movie formats. Already „Monk“ (germanized copy named „Die unlösbaren Fälle des Herrn Sand“) and „Lost“ (germanized into „Verschollen„) have been copied… now „Charlies Angels“ has been media-raped. And why would anyone notice this? Because Katharina and I were loosely zapping the tv channels last evening. I believe the german tv media becomes a fraud itself without the former creativity and ideology…

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American Idiotism: Blogs for the Media

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The well-known media mogul Rupert Murdoch expressed his new opinion concerning the supposed-to-be rivalry between usually independent blog authors and journalist faction formed by the Mainstream-Media. According to him, the whole battle cannot be fought forever. In order to seek for the end of this struggle, he expects blog authors to contribute and support the journalists to complete the whole coverage of each valuable and expensive day:

At the same time, we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy — chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve, so long as our readers understand the clear distinction between bloggers and our journalists. (via Blogbar and Newscorp)

But why are these days valuable and expensive? The answer is rather simple. I believe Murdoch realized the uselessness of the whole concept of pay-per-view content (especially for tv and internet) and probably expects more incoming „monkey-money“ from the younger generation if he changes Multi-National Corporation by adapting a „nicer“ public corporate-culture. To adapt this kind of new strategy seems to be one of the first steps… but even if he’s trying to include independent authors within his corporate dependency… what’s going to happen next?

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Rechteloser Blog-Journalismus

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Was wir alle hier treiben beinhaltet einen positiven oder negativen Effekt. Je nachdem wie man sich in der Öffentlichkeit des Internets äußert, kann der Flügelschlag eines wunderschönen heimischen Schmetterlings den tosenden Orkan in den USA auslösen. Nein, nicht Asien, weil dies hier nichts mit den Tsunamis oder üblichen Stürmen der Region zu tun hat, sondern anders, denn bald könnte es nach dem Willen von vielen Unternehmen und dabei auch die Multi-Nationals wie folgt aussehen:
Man steht förmlich im Walde und kann keine Bäume sehen, den Wald aber schon. So wird sich ein Blogautor fühlen müssen, während das eigene Werk mit vielen anderen Blogs im Internet zu finden ist (= der Wald), aber einzelne herausstechende journalistische Arbeiten dieser Blogs (= die Bäume) nicht finden kann.
Warum sollte man die Arbeit anderer nicht finden? Online-Journalismus in der modernsten Form in Konkurrenz oder Kooperation mit den traditionellen Journalisten sieht man doch täglich im RSS-Dschungel vorbeirauschen.

Drei Blog-Sites, die Informationen über Produkte verbreiteten, die bei der Computerfirma Apple noch in der Entwicklung sind, sollen einem kalifornischen Richter zufolge kein Recht auf Quellenschutz geltend machen dürfen, wie es Journalisten verbrieft ist, um Informanten Anonymität garantieren zu können. Sie sollen ihre Quellen offenlegen.

Apple hat also vorerst einen Sieg für die Multi-Nationals errungen, indem diese drei Blogautoren (vertreten durch die Electronic Frontier Foundation – EFF) in Kalifornien dazu verurteilt wurden, ihre Quellen offen zu legen, werden klare Grenzen innerhalb des Journalismus gezogen. Mehr zur Klage gibt es auch im fscklog. Komme wie es komme, damit ist für mich schon klar, dass ich mir wirklich keinen IPod zulegen werde.

via: FAZ

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Print DVD Advertisements

I honestly detest the new variant of advertising a product in a well-established market. Once the marketshare of certain newspapers and weekly magazines decreases, the editors prefer to introduce new methods of attracting their clients: Buy a magazine and earn a rich-media content CD or DVD. Usually, information technology magazines grant their readers the chance to conduct further research into the digitial sphere of their materials, but recently, great newspaper families open themselves to the media. By publishing the usual magazine with a DVD, certain german magazines like Der Spiegel and TV Movie try to compete against the new SFT and AudioVideoBILD who already include a full DVD in their monthly edition for 3.99€. Will this mark the end of the classic print media and enable us and the editors to create a convergence situation? But by which of the four known steps will the convergence end?

1. Technological Convergence, a vast array of different types of technology to achieve nearly similar tasks,
2. Industrial Congervence, a merging of traditionally seperated branches,
3. Market Convergence, an increasing substitution of products,
4. or the Regulational Convergence, a part of the government relationship with markets.

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Categorical Death

Whenever people start to suffer, the media is there and awaits them. These prancing ponies don’t care for their victims but rather for the collected money from their commercials. Let dying people die and don’t cannibalize their corpses for your purposes. Honestly, I did not care about Terri Schaivo since the whole scenario of her death was abused by the media and the US‘ government – it did not affect me in my small life as I have to suffer from several things on my own, but who cares about this? Nobody. And why should I bother to watch that many news concerning her – she was meant to die once the nutrition was turned off because nobody can survive such drastic measures.

Now the media turned away from Schaivo and concentrates on Count Rainer from Monacco and the Pope Johannes Paul II who both are old men suffering from diseases and the most dangerous truth from which everybody on this planet will suffer… the age. Mario Sixtus made quite a simple comment on the media show: „Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope, Sports“ (translated) is flashing everywhere and everytime on TV. But why focussing again on dying people, and especially as the (proudly claimed) „whole world cares“ for the pope. The term of „whole world“ is quite an obstacle since the majority of the world is not christian, and especially not catholic or hierachically oriented towards the Pope: It is a religion practised by nearly 2,000 million people worldwide compared to the other religions Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Sikhism which roughly make the other 4,000 million people.

But however, most of all old people do wish to die since their life was long and fruitful, but others do not wish to die as they might have some things left out in their life. Why won’t the Pope die? Because he is kept alive with artifical technology… isn’t this a great concern to his prime objectives of preferring truthful catholicism instead of modern advancements? Amusing…

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6th Mixed Tape

Mercedes Benz released a new version of their Mixed Tape – download it now. Its as nifty as the old one. Nevertheless there’s been some controversy in the Blogosphere concerning the company and their attempts to put some entertainment to the online community – sadly I don’t find the feed which had some input on this issue. Anyone else?

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MGM vs. EFF&Grokster

MGM battles at the US Supreme Court against the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Grokster for a decision about the applicability of the Betamax concept in the 21st century. About 20 years ago, Sony won the case for the distribution of their VCRs as the question rose whether it was legal to record copyrighted material for your private use at home with a VCR or if it was a violation against common law.

Now the internet millionaire Mark Cuban announced he would give full financial support to the EFF and Grokster to avoid that smaller companies might have to battle for the rights to introduce new technological innovations to the market. Nice move!

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AQS Syndrome

Nearly all movies or tv series are synchronised for the German audience into their mother language. But this strikes me with a serious blow: The anglicism for URL as „Uniform Resource Locator“ was translated directly into German. My girlfriend Katharina and I were zapping through the programs, and we had no idea what they’ve been worrying about in the tv series – about a typo in the AQS? What’s the AQS, we asked ourselves… until we figured the URL had been renamed into AQS – „Allgemeiner Quellen Sucher“. Strange synchronisation directors! The anglicism is a normal method to implement modern english words like „Internet“, „Blog“, etc. into the German language, but the standardised revamping of tv series lacks conformity and the simple knowledge of anglicisms. I wish they’d show only original and unsynchronised movies and tv series… :(

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No Prime Minister

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This is an unbelievable punishment for the governmental party SPD (Social Democratic Party) in Germany: The elections to the Prime Minister for the state of Schleswig-Holstein were held four times without finding a winner. It depends only on one vote as 35 of 69 total votes are necessary to win this race but the SPD got only 34 votes of their 35 possible votes of the current coalitions of the Grüne (Green) and SSW (South Schleswig Group). The tv news magazines report there won’t be a new election but a special case election to find a government for the state. The latest Prime Minister, Heide Simonis, won’t take another fifth election routine since she’s going to step back from her duties. This day is one of the most discomforting moments for the SPD party as the coalition of CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and FDP (Free Democratic Party) is celebrating the events – it will lead to a loss of SPD votes in the Bundesrat, the second instance for legislative issues in Germany after the Bundestag. Critics doubt the government will have an easy time in the current legislature period…

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Blo.gs for sale

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The pinged-by-blogs monitor platform Blo.gs is for sale. Basically, the package contains the domain name blo.gs and weblo.gs, the database full of blog adresses and feed urls, and „all rights to the software“ as long as the new owner keeps in mind that the whole platform is based on open source technology. I don’t wonder what made Jim Winstead jr. change his mind of being a blog provider:

i don’t have a price in mind, so don’t ask. cash-flow wise, the site has cost approximately $3500 to date (mostly for hosting), and has earned less than $750 (mostly from google adsense ads).

Will $4000 suffice the whole effort and price? In the end, he will earn $500 plus all his previous expenses.

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