Month: November 2002

I’ve had bookmarked/hot-listed for some time the Who Owns What page which details what other companies certain large megalomaniac companies own. Whilst it is mainly US Media orientated companies (and therefore doesn’t list the companies owned by Microsoft) – it does reveal some interesting things.

Did you know that AOL TimeWarner (the owners of Warner Brothers, New Line Cinema, Netscape, Mozilla and the Open Directory Project) also partially own Amazon (who, in turn, own Alexa Research who also own The Internet Archive). Or that News Corporation (aka “Fox”) owns such wide ranging companies as the book publishing company Harper Collins, the cosmetic “*ding dong* It’s Avon calling” company, The Sun and The Times UK newspapers, partially own the Electronic Arts games software company and, of course, Sky satellite broadcasters?

One entry I was quite surprised at was Viacom – I didn’t know they owned Paramount Studios, MTV, Nickelodeon (mainly with Fox/News Corp/BSkyB), VH1, BlockBuster video and the Star Trek franchise.

Wow! Combine that with the fact that the Daily Mail And General Trust (that own the Daily Mail newspaper and used to own UKPlus) also owns my local newspaper (via Northcliffe Newspapers) and, via their 29.97% controlled GWR subsidery, my local radio station – it’s quite scary how much of my ‘media input’ is controlled by just a few companies… [add: the DMGT also owns part of the Teletext company via Harmsworth Media and a 20% share in the ITN News corporation which provides news services to ITV and Five]

What about news organisations in your area? Are they owned by just the one company? Or can you list all the companies Microsoft own?

Ok, I know today (well, November 28th) is the American Thanksgiving Day Holiday, but that is no reason for Slashdot to have so many duplicate stories. They’ve had “When Personalization Runs Amuck” (posted at 7:25pm) which was a repeat of “When Profiling Goes Wrong” from 4:36pm on November 26 (both about the same article on the Wall Street Journal about how the personalisation profiling services as used by TiVo‘s and Amazon can sometimes suggest things that make you have a ‘double-take’). Before that, at 4.55pm they ran “Face Transplants On The Way” which was a repeat from November 27th’s 05:07pm story “Getting More Face Time” (both about the same BBC news article that facial transplants could take place in the next six to nine months).

The Slashdot editors then round it off by posting “Hark! I Hear a Dropped Packet” at 3:15am, which – you’ve guessed it – is a repeat again. But this time from the same day, okay at 1:47pm when “Using Sound To Test Internet Connections” was still on the front page (so even the Slashdot editors looking at their own site would have seen it). Ok, it didn’t have so much “lead information” about the article on New Scientist but still…

You’d think if Slashdot really wanted to get people subscribing to them (instead of relying on advertisement revenue), they’ll make at least a little effort to run things professionally wouldn’t you? [end rant]

At least a few readers managed to make a couple of comments which made me laugh….