Interactive shoot-em-up news broadcasts?

Today at the Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons conference in Brisbane I had the pleasure of meeting Henry Jenkins. Professor Kerry Raymond of QUT was talking about how the Wii had improved her global news: when the Wii is connected to the Internet with the Wii Channel active and Wii News selected, a world appears and you get news from whichever part of the world you click on.

I wanted to know if I could still keep hitting my virtual punching bag while the news came in. Kerry said no. I was disappointed. That’s when Henry Jenkins said “I want news you can shoot!”

Such fine convergent thinking. And I have to say it would be good.

Big Brother is watching me read an OECD pdf

The pdf is about the economics of user-generated content. Nothing top-secret. Disruptive yes, but not subversive. I downloaded it in the usual way. I use a Mac, so the default pdf viewer is Preview. I couldn’t look at it with Preview because Preview wouldn’t link to a privacy notice that I had to agree to. I couldn’t just agree without reading what I was agreeing to (well I didn’t really read it, who does, but I opened the page and skimmed it).

So I opened the pdf with Adobe Acrobat Professional, and could now access the web page with the privacy policy. It wasn’t made clear why I needed to agree to the policy, and looked like a pretty usual privacy policy, so I clicked “agree”. Pretty soon I had to agree again, so I checked a box that said “remember this action on this site”. Which turned out to be useful, because the pdf calls back to the mothership once a minute.

That is really annoying. A dialog box flashes in front of what I read, every minute. Interrupts my concentration, pisses me off. And for what?

Is this the future of “protected” pdfs? Will we need to hire a lawyer every time we want to view them?

Well, I’m about to get back into writing my term paper on Open Access journals. May they take over the world.