Individuals? Media? Or something else? A government agency finally recognises bloggers as media entities - almost.

The Federal Election Commission ruled on Tuesday that political blogs are considered media entities by law and thus cannot be regulated as a political committee, which would make them subject to campaign finance laws. The case centred on the DailyKos - a popular, ad-supported blog that receives over three million page views every weekday - and whether or not their liberal-slanted blogging amounted to “a gift of free advertising and candidate media services” to their favoured candidates. Read the rest of this entry »

Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner may well revolutionise how we Wiki… or at least teach us that media manipulation works better from the privacy of our own homes.

Wikipedia was launched a scant six years ago, and during that time it has spawned more than 8 million encyclopedia articles in over 250 languages (not to mention entering the term “wiki” into our modern lexicon, alongside “Google”). But the openness of Wikipedia - an encyclopedia created, edited, and moderated entirely by the Internet community - also created a grand opportunity for abuse of the system. As the site grew, often landing at the top of search engine rankings even for difficult keywords and company names, it seemed inevitable that companies would turn to creating and editing their own Wikipedia entries as a 21st century PR move.

Enter Virgil Griffith. Noting that Wikipedia’s database contained over 34 million anonymous edits, he set out to create a piece of software that would collate, catalog, and attempt to identify the IP addresses of those anonymous users. Using the ip2location database, Griffith was able to match up the previously anonymous editors against an international database of corporate and government IP addresses, thereby removing the shroud of anonymity from the Wikipedia editing process. Read the rest of this entry »