I Knew There Was Something About That Zuckerberg Guy!

We worry about government snooping on us, but what about private enterprise? And do we realize that we are invading our own privacy when we put our personal settings online? And do privacy settings give us a false sense of security?

The Onion's Factzone has a lot of fun with this topic, but also gives us something to think about.

How To Be a Rock Star in 2011

The big recording companies are reeling. Record stores are pretty much dead. But musicians, if they are good and lucky and pick a good nice, can do surprisingly well by selling their tunes over the Internet. Jonathan Coulton is one of those Internet-made success stories. NPR reports.

Hearing the America of a Century Ago

We experience history through words, pictures and drawings in books. That works pretty well for transmission of facts, but how about more nuanced things like emphasis and attitude? Wouldn't it be great to have a rich historical archive of speeches and music and sounds.

And now we have that. The Library of Congress recently opened the National Jukebox, an online database of recorded music, speeches, spoken-word performances and other snippets of audio from a century ago. The Los Angeles Times reports.

The Right to Bear ... Phones?

No question that police work is sometimes rough. And it's obvious that pretty much any attention-grabbing incident happening in public is likely to have one or more people taking cellphone video of it. But what are the rights of citizens to shoot cellphone video of arrests and other incidents when police are involved?

NPR reports on this growing issue.

A Tough Job...

More than reporters, photojournalists are on the front lines of natural disasters, riots, wars and other dangerous situations. But why do they do it? And why is what they do important? NPR reports.

The Nature of News

There was only one Medianote this week, and it was a little different than most. Instead of basing it on one article about a development in mass communication, we discussed news coverage of Osama bin Laden's death. We discussed how coverage of the story differs across media.