NEW YORK – Groups of Michael Moore fans, stay-at-home moms, Dungeons &Dragons players and pug owners face a choice this month: Should their organizers pay a monthly fee to stay with Meetup.com?
The Web site, best known for bringing together supporters of Howard Dean during last year’s presidential election, is instituting a $19 monthly fee for new groups. Current groups can pay a $9 monthly rate at least through the end of the year.
Meetup quoted Bob Dylan to explain the fees: “You gotta serve somebody.” Its site also said, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
The formerly free service brings like-minded people together by letting visitors pick an interest, such as speaking Japanese, then enter a ZIP code to see if there’s an event at a coffee shop, bar or other nearby venue.
Democracy for America, a group that grew out of Dean’s campaign, will pay at least the first monthly fee for its more than 400 Meetup chapters, said Noreen Nielsen, a spokeswoman. Meetup, she said, “is, in many ways, the heart and soul of our organization.”
Try your hand at editing: It happens all the time: You read an entry in an encyclopedia or other reputable source and think, “That’s not right” or “They forgot this!”
Microsoft Corp.’s Encarta encyclopedia is testing a system that lets everyone be an editor – in theory at least. Readers can suggest edits or additions to entries, although the changes are vetted by editors before they reach the page.
Encarta is not requiring such novice editors to identify themselves, said Gary Alt, Encarta’s editorial director. But it is asking them to reveal the source of their information if possible, and the editorial staff will check for factual errors and evidence of bias.
This is in contrast to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which lets anyone instantaneously make changes, even delete entries, regardless of whether that person has any expertise in the subject.
Encarta has added research editors and fact checkers to handle the volume of edits it expects to receive when the system goes live Thursday.
Trade secret laws, First Amendment rights clash: Online journalists and bloggers filed a brief this week supporting three Web site reporters who wrote about a top-secret product Apple Computer Inc. claims was protected by trade secret laws.
In December, Apple sued 25 unnamed individuals – possibly Apple employees – whom it claims leaked confidential product information to three Web publishers.
In Apple’s attempts to identify the source of the leaks, the company subpoenaed an Internet provider and demanded it turn over some of the reporters’ e-mail records. After a judge in San Jose, Calif., upheld the subpoena last month, the reporters appealed.
The Center for Individual Freedom, First Amendment Project, Media Bloggers Association, Reporters Without Borders and several individual online journalists, bloggers and other groups submitted a brief this week asking that the online publishers be allowed to keep sources confidential.
The groups said the judge’s ruling, if upheld, would discriminate against journalists who don’t work for mainstream newspapers or other large publications. The reporters in the Apple case write for the Web sites Apple Insider and PowerPage.
Let’s race: Europe’s fastest supercomputer, which can make 40 trillion calculations per second, booted up for the first time at a research center in Barcelona.
The “MareNostrum,” built by IBM Corp., boasts 40 teraflops of speed. It can make more calculations in one second than a human pecking at a calculator could make in 10 million years.
Its memory is equal to the combined memories of nearly 20,000 personal computers, and its storage system has a capacity of 233 terabytes, the equivalent of the information in 29 million books.
From Herald news services
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