WeatherGirl just handed me a recent copy of The Observer, an excellent British weekly that she subscribes to as part of her campaign (along with listening to BBC radio on-line) to both keep track of what’s happening “back home” and to get her news from organizations that regularly provide intelligent, thoughtful reporting.
An excellent example of this is John Naughton, the author of a regularly technology column in the Observer, and the author of the piece WeatherGirl was handing my way. The column in question is an analysis of the recent (and much discussed) Supreme Court decision regarding Grokster and StreamCast Networks which has been seen by many as a huge defeat for the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, and victory for the big players in corporate media that are trying to desparately to maintain at least the illusion of their control over their content.
Most writing on this and similar issues tends to suffer from serious myopia as the writers typically understand either the technological side of the issue or the socio-political-economic side of the issue. It is sadly all too common that writers understand neither of these sides, and very rarely do they understand both. Naughton is the happy exception, who really understands the world of the nerds that drive the technical changes that constantly ripple through our lives, and can write with wonderful perception about the larger context that these issues live in.
In the column in question, for example, Naughton understands (and clearly explains) important differences between Grokster and StreamCast Networks and the classic Sony decision that is often quoted as precedent. As he nicely points out, a better analogy to the Sony decision is BitTorrent, yet sadly most writers on the issue (not to mention many of the policy makers involved) probably know little about BitTorrent and less about its place in this complex set of issues.
In short, John rocks, and you could do much worse.
Oh, and I should mention that he also helps support the interesting Living without Microsoft site.
