Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Fun with RSS feeds

So I set up a Google Reader account. This was a fairly easy task as I already have a gmail account. I used to kill alot of time going to news sites like punknews.org. I would read and sometimes comment on stories to pass the hours between classes when I didn't feel like doing anything productive. Well now I can read all my sites at once with googles rss feed reader. Its cool and it lets me kill time more efficiently by allowing me to read the news from countless sites at once. This article from punknews.org caught my eye: F*cked Up, Xiu Xiu suit against Camel, Rolling Stone dismissed I've read different articles about this for awhile now and had wondered how the lawsuit would end up. To summarize a bunch of bands were featured in a Rolling Stone article which was wrapped in about four pages of Camel cigarette ads giving an impression, according to the bands, that Camel was in some way sponsoring or endorsing their music. This is actually a complex legal issue and, if the lawsuit had been successful, would have set a precedent for free speech pertaining to commercial speech placement. In layman's terms magazines would have to be very careful about the placement of their ads and their proximity to other content. I am ambivalent about this. On one hand It was an obvious attempt at Rolling Stone to sell ad space by capitalizing on the credibility of these bands and threatening that very credibility at the same time. On the other hand, where would the line be drawn? Who would be responsible for deciding what commercial content was acceptable for a magazine and where they could put it? Any body have any thoughts on this?

1 comment:

  1. You can check all your sites as long as the uke doesn't fall off the wall again.

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