[LINK] 41 hits.....

[Craig Sanders]

On Tue, Mar 06, 2012 at 09:47:41AM +1100, Jan Whitaker wrote:
> This is just weird. The Finklestein report says what?????
> 
> http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/print-media-slammed-as-precious-20120305-1uefg.html
> Mr Finkelstein's report, handed down on Friday, recommended a 
> government-funded News Media Council be established, which would have 
> statutory powers over the media and the power to compel retractions, 
> corrections and apologies - or have recourse to courts.

that's not neccessarily bad in itself. it depends on the details.

correcting errors of fact (whether deliberate lies or honest mistakes)
is acceptable. restricting what kind of opinions may be published is
not, although there's a fine line when facts are distorted or skewed and
deliberately misinterpreted to support a particular opinion.

> It would apply to radio, print and broadcast media, including blogs 
> with ***more than 41 hits a day****.

what's a "hit"?  

if they mean an individual http request, that would include almost 100%
of web sites. it's not uncommon for a single web page to contain 20 or
30 (or even more) images, scripts, css stylesheets, applets etc.

it's easy for a site to get slashdotted due to just one interesting
article, or to be DoS-ed because they offended some spotty teenager with
a l33t hax0r script. a few million hits over a few hours averages out to
a lot more than 41/day for the remainder fo the year.

> -----
> 
> Is 41 just almost the answer to the universe? Where did that come 
> from? People get hits on blogs at the top page, individual articles, 
> old posts, mistakes, all sorts of things. This is just plain weird.

i can easily imagine a committee being side-tracked by this irrelevant
and nonsensical criterion and, after much wrangling and negotiating,
settling on a "reasonable compromise" of 41.

41 is absurd, of course, as is any number - but it's easy for committees
to get caught up in agenda-item group-think and lose sight of reality.


> Any linkers have any insight?

here's a better idea: it applies only to publications that have paid
staff or paid freelance writers.  and possibly also to publications
with a large subscriber (or regular reader) base.

trying to define non-commercial, or even "amateur", is too prone to
error....even non-commercial / non-profit blogs often have advertising
to cover costs.

but if you're big enough to pay people, then you're big enough to be
held accountable for the accuracy of what you publish.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>