Links for 10-29-2009

• Strobist: Brain Food: Three New Offerings - Lighting is something I've never really gotten into. Maybe I should one of these days.
• Technology Review: A Note on the Type - The geeky but important matter of web fonts.
• magCulture.com / editorial design - Obviously has an agenda behind it but interesting stuff here. Things like Conde Naste's troubles notwithstanding, magazines are generally in a much healthier place than newspapers.
• A New Financial Model For News, Straight From The Cable Industry | paidContent - This is really just a different billing mechanism for a paywall and has the same problems. And if you do something like essentially add a tax to ISPs that gets divvied up among content providers you're effectively mandating a subsidy.
• DRM by any other name: The latest from Hollywood | Freedom to Tinker - " If it's going to work on my iPhone while I'm sitting in an airplane, the entire video needs to be stored there in advance. Furthermore, if the video is supposed to be "high definition," that's a bare minimum of 5 megabits. (Broadcast HD is 20 megabits and Blu-ray is 48 megabits.) Most home DSL or cable modem connections either will never go that fast, or certainly cannot maintain those speeds without hiccups, particularly when sharing the line with other users. To do high quality video, you either have to have a real broadcast medium (cable, over-the-air, or satellite) or you have to download in advance and store on a hard drive. And, of course, once you've stored the video, it's just not that hard to extract it. And it always will be. The challenge for Hollywood is to change the incentives of the game."
• Charting US newspapers' decline | Media | guardian.co.uk - A striking chart of circulation changes.
• The Media Death Spiral - Megan McArdle - Depressing opine. But I think that Megan is probably right on multiple counts. "Maybe there will be jobs, online. But if so, more web outfits are going to have to get into the habit of paying salaries that will support an adult middle-class life. Right now, a lot of web outfits tend to churn through twenty-somethings who are also building their resumes . . . but I'm not sure how well this works in a world where a job churning out blog copy for pennies a word is the last stop in a journalistic career, rather than the first."
• William Vambenepe — Exploring “IT management in a changing IT world” - Interesting framework for looking at IT. Ops/apps is a useful division.
• The need for clear data licenses :: High Earth Orbit - I have more issues with Creative Commons than Andrew does but a good look at the issues around licenses for data.
• Speed versus accuracy in journalism: towards a new debate | Regret the Error - Thoughtful piece. The opinions pretty much mirror mine.
• ASCII by Jason Scott / GeoStupid - The erosion of the Web's memory.
• Can We Secure Cloud Computing? Can We Afford Not To? | Rational Survivability - Good high-level take on security and cloud computing.
• Lighter Than Arrogance - TIME - "Modern media did not invent greed, eccentricity or lust for attention. What they did was monetize them. There have long been odd families and obscure men pursuing bizarre theories and cobbling together flying machines in their backyards. But only in the reality-TV era has unstable behavior become a valid career choice."