strike

Imagine a return to moviemaking where storytelling as a craft mattered most, and a writer with a dream and some financial backing could do what once required a studio to accomplish.

The Writers Guild of America strike has been an interesting debacle to watch, complete with a host of issues the public might not have thought of before. The inevitable convergence of the Internet and TV is one of them; the continued homogenization of American culture is another.

Film and TV writers are striking for the first time in almost twenty years after the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers were unable to reach an agreement.

I think it’s great that Dell has come out with IdeaStorm, a suggestion site inspired by Digg (and that inspiration is explicily admitted on the site, unlike Yahoo’s recently launched suggestion sites, which caused such a ruckus because they were supposedly a “ripoff” of Digg). And like Rob Hyndman, I think the name is great too.

Finally Microsoft gets to snicker at Google a little. Both companies planned Sydney flyovers for Australia Day to snag aerial snapshots of Australians doing Australian things. But due to a miscommunication between Google and Sydney air traffic controllers, the search company ended up a bit late to the prom.

Sun Microsystems and Avnet Technology Solutions announced a distribution agreement to offer the complete line of Sun StorageTek products to Avnet partners. Such an announcement has been expected since Sun acquired StorageTek last year.

BS is an abbreviation for BellSouth, whose chief technical officer Bill Smith told the media his firm has taken the call for multi-tiered Internet connectivity to the big Internet players; Jeff Pulver suggests the online powers-that-be hit BellSouth first, but it won't happen for one simple reason: money.

South African workers are going on a one-day strike today as called by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) to demand the protection of textile and mining jobs.