Quick Hits 2 - More on AP, Emergency Mail on Twitter

More on the AP: One observer is less than impressed with AP's proposed technology to keep track of where it stories are being used. Says it's easily crackable. One of the reasons I wish folks would stop referring to it as digital rights management. Far from it.

I'd be a bit more concerned about AP's use of Attributor and its usage-tracing technology. One of Atributor's services is Fair Share, which basically compares text in your stories with others online and alerts you when it finds matches. Interesting thing - I've had some brief access to a newspaper's Fair Share account (with the paper's permission). All it's shown me so far is that too many news outlets are cutting and pasting the same stuff from the same news releases.
Maybe we should worry more about that and about boring our readers to death than about some two-bit spam site hoisting the headlines and summaries.

(This would be an interesting research study if a paper would set up a Fair Share account and give you access to its feed.)

Emergencyemail.org: I have always kept a subscription to this site. Not that it sends out that much or is overly timely, but during hurricane season, health scares, etc., it does do a pretty good job of getting the stuff from the horse's mouth to my e-mail. (You might consider it if you like getting such stuff on your mobile device.) Now, it's also on Twitter, though not with the local selectivity of the e-mail alerts.