Red Herring closing up shop

AP story: The Red Herring tech mag is folding. March will be its last issue. The Herring follows on the heels of Upside and the Industry Standard. Thanks to BoingBoing for the pointer.

Familiar faces at DRM conference

Just got back from a daylong conference at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business on the subject of DRM, or digital rights management. In many ways it was the West Coast version of the I-Law conference at Harvard's Berkman School last July. Some 300 folks jammed into the hall for most of the day (the conference runs three days, but today was the big enchilada).

Lot of familiar faces here, many of whom I've interviewed for the book I'm writing on digital rights: Cary Sherman, Larry Lessig, Edward Felten, Sarah Deutsch, Dave Farber, Donald Whiteside, Chris Murray, and others. Media folks in attendance included Dan Gillmor, Drew Clark of the National Journal, Katie Dean of Wired News and I think Amy Harmon of the NY Times. The blogger crowd was also out in force, include EFF's Seth Schoen, Lisa Rein, Aaron Schwarz and others.

Bloggers who did a terrific job of blogging the conference live -- yes, they had a wifi connection -- included Dan, Bryan Alexander, Lawrence Solum and 16-year-old Aaron, who's wise beyond his years. So I wound up taking more photos than notes (though I tape-recorded the proceedings). So I'll share some here.

Cary Sherman, president of RIAA (click to enlarge):

Dave Farber, whose mailing list at the Univ. of Penn. is over 30,000 strong:

Sarah Deutsch, VP and associate general counsel of Verizon:

Prof. Edward Felten, left, and Prof. Larry Lessig:

Google's free newsletter

The Google Friends mailing list offers a free email newsletter that goes out every two months or so. Thanks to Sree for the pointer.

Followup on Projo's fire blog

Steve Outing at the Poynter has a followup to the items I posted Monday here and in OJR Editors Log on Projo taking down its registration fence for its new nightclub fire blog. He comes to the same conclusion: In news of this magnitude that attracts lots of new visitors, it makes sense to lift the Iron Curtain.

ActiveWords in two flavors

Looks like Buzz has been busy revamping the ActiveWords lineup. You can now get ActiveWords (which I highly recommend -- it supercharges your PC) in two flavors: the SE version at a new low price of $9.95, or ActiveWords Plus, for $49.95. Check it out. I've been using it for almost a year now and it's been a life-saver in helping me manage the thousands of files on my PC.

More on blogrolling.com

Jason DeFillippo answes my query about blogrolling.com's background with a pointer to his resume. He's a programmer who lives in Chicago and works as chief technologiest for Faction Creative in Beverly Hills. Here's more about blogrolling (the outfit, not the term, which I believe was coined by Doc Searls).

Year of the Matrix

Marc invites us to post something to The Matrix, one experimental outgrowth of the Internet Topic Exchange. Check out, among other things, the Matrix Phone and Joi and Marc's colloquy about micro-content, the blogosphere and getting beyond links to achieve total meshdom.

Have online media bottomed out?

Jimmy Guterman in Biz2: Has Online Media Bottomed Out? Maybe, but it's going to take more than a jump in advertising to build a strong recovery.

Squaring off over media consolidation

AdAge.com:

Consumer groups are girding for a major fight today as the Federal Communications Commission holds its first and only formal hearing before drafting new rules that could have a far-reaching effect on media consolidation and ownership. ...

The Center for Digital Democracy yesterday accused the FCC and the largest media conglomerates of trying to overturn the "checks and balances" that have long governed American media.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Be your own wireless network

NY Times: Be Your Own Wireless Network ... with a Net-enabled cell phone.

Bold design chosen for Ground Zero

Breaking news: New WTC plan is taller than twin towers. A complex of angular buildings and a 1,776-foot spire designed by architect Daniel Libeskind was chosen as the plan for the World Trade Center site on Wednesday, The Associated Press has learned.

This is magnificent news. I've admired the Libeskind entry from the beginning.

Engineers feared shuttle wing burn

Breaking news from CNN.com: One day before the Columbia disaster, senior engineers raised concerns the shuttle could be lost during re-entry.

A virtual march on DC

NY Times: The switchboard on Capitol Hill was swamped today as antiwar protesters conducted what they called the first "virtual march" on Washington. Some 32 groups were involved, including the National Council of Churches, the N.A.A.C.P., the Sierra Club, the National Organization for Women and MoveOn.

Great news. I mentioned Moveon's plans for the political action against invading Iraq last Friday.

MSNBC tries to out-Fox Fox

What the hell is up at MSNBC? Are they trying to out-Fox Fox?

First they go out and hire the hate-mongering Michael Savage, who loathes Latinos, women and gays. (PBS' NOW recently carried a segment on Savage.) Now comes word that MSNBC is hiring Dick Armey, the neo-fascist former House Majority Leader whose politics are somewhere to the right of Dick Cheney or Attila the Hun (take your pick).

I don't blame them for dumping Phil Donahue (I blame them for hiring him in the first place), whose brand of washed-out, predictable, politically correct namby-pamby liberalism is a sad spectacle to watch (not that anyone watched his show).

But is this the answer? Puh-leeze. Here's another network I won't bother tuning in to.

The emergence of breaking-news multimedia

Steve Outing's latest in E&P: Breaking-news multimedia: not an oxymoron. Writes Steve in his email newsletter:

Breaking-news multimedia isn't an oxymoron. It's the direction that the online-news industry is taking, particularly as broadband access becomes more common. I liken today's environment for multimedia news to the days of the first Macintosh, PageMaker software, and laser printers. That new technology got a lot of people designing self-published printed newsletters, but much of their work was not great -- until they gained experience. It's the same with multimedia today.

Detroit public radio station abandons streaming music

From Detroit's WDET web site:

DETROIT - February 24, 2003 - WDET 101.9FM Detroit Public Radio has temporarily suspended streaming its music programming on its website (wdetfm.org) today because of rules created by the recording industry limiting what music can be streamed. These rules designed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and approved by Congress dictate how stations must stream music by a particular artist within a certain amount of time. For example, a station is not allowed to play more than two songs in a row by the same artist, and not allowed to play more than four songs by the same artist within a three-hour period.

Sad. It's likely that other rules implemented last year also come into play, such as forcing stations to keep records of every song streamed during a Webcast.

Congress targets campus P2P

Declan in News.com: Congress targets P2P piracy on campus. Excerpt:

Members of the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees copyright law said at a hearing that peer-to-peer piracy was a crime under a 1997 federal law, but universities continued to treat file-swapping as a minor infraction of campus disciplinary codes.

"If on your campus you had an assault and battery or a murder, you'd
go down to the district attorney's office and deal with it that way,"
said Rep. William Jenkins, R-Tenn.

Uh, huh. Great analogy, from the great minds at work on this subject on Capitol Hill.

RSS for liberal art majors

Dave has a modest proposal: RSS for liberal art majors.

He's right that news aggregators haven't hit the mainstream yet. (Here's my recent story on the subject.) And it's cool that he's got a prototype up at Harvard to get it kick-started.

Blogrolling updates

In the past week I noticed a couple of blogs with a really cool feature: a real-time ability to tell you which weblog links have been updated in the past hour, two hours, six hours, etc.

Greg explained that it's a function of blogrolling.com, a little operation that stores your links to other blogs on its site and gives you a code you can place in your blog. You can snag one blogroll for free, or 10 for a minimum donation of $15 (which is what I did).

So, after about three hours of coding, cutting and pasting, I managed to add this functionality to virutally all the weblogs over there in the right nav. (Still working out the color kinks on some of these.)

I've asked the site operator, Jason, to send me a little bit of background on blogrolling.com, so I can share it with others, and I'll post that in the next day or so.

A quick word about the updating system: Jason's code wizardry (javascript is the route I chose here) basically snags the pings received by Weblogs.com whenever a weblog is updated. It then parses the data to whatever parameter you set (I chose every 6 hours rather than the too-frenetic every 20 minutes).

As Jason explains on his site:

Blog software packages like Movable Type, Blogger Pro, Radio and pMachine have built-in options for pinging weblogs.com to tell the site your blog has updated. LiveJournal and the free Blogger packages do not. If you would like to build your own software or do it manually please see the Weblogs.com Specs on how to do this.

A few other blogs, like the hand-built html of Projo's Subterranean Homepage News by Sheila Lennon, also lack this pinging capability. But most of the ones I check regularly seem to have it.

Personally, I think this is extremely cool, and hope it will be widely adopted by other bloggers in the coming months. See what one guy and some nifty code can do?

Blogging and big-j Journalism

Dave Winer talks with News.com today about early blogs, his move to Harvard for a fellowship there (only 10 blogs at Harvard? that can't include the student body, can it?), and how blogging is supplanting some of the roles traditionally performed by mainstream journalists.

It's a worthwhile read, of course, since Dave is one of the few bloggers who's a big thinker, a doer instead of just a pontificator, and a dang good writer.

Dave and I have had runarounds on the subject of journalism's role in the new media ecosystem, and it's clear that he's felt burned by a lot of press coverage in the past and that colors his perspective. (Just as the fact that I've worked in newsrooms for 20 years colors mine.)

So when Dave says ...

People now get the information from each other and for each other using Web logs. There are still professional journalists writing, but a lot less. Web logs are journalism. Have they had a big impact? Absolutely. When a big story hits, I don't necessarily trust the professional journalists to tell me what's going on. If I can get the Web logs from the people who were actually involved, I'll take that.

... I'll have to disagree ... and agree.

I agree that weblogs have changed the dynamic and balance of power in the media ecosystem. We're no longer passive recipients of fact and entertainment dished out by the establishment media. We're creators, producers, designers, publishers. Most bloggers have something worthwhile to say, and they find a ready audience for their niche or wide-ranging subject matter.

Too many newsrooms still share the caveman mindset that blogging is at best a lower form of journalism or that it's not journalism at all. It's a convenient stance, given the dire state of the news industry, but it's flat-out wrong.

At the same time, I think bloggers can be a little too self-satisfied and dismissive of the mainstream news media. In truth, it's a symbiotic relationship. As I've written about before, weblogs will supplement and complement, but not replace or displace, traditional media. When big news hits -- when war breaks out, a terrorism attack occurs, or even a neighborhood shooting -- you can bet the overwhelming majority of online readers will first turn to news media like CNN.com, MSNBC, nytimes.com, a local news site and other traditional sources -- and then turn to weblogs for discussion, dissection, interpretation, counter-arguments.

Weblogs need the traditional media, if only to play off against. In the years ahead, I think we'll see a richer interaction between the best parts of weblogging and the best parts of traditional news operations. It's been slow in coming, but the evidence is growing by the day that their futures are intertwined.

Despite their warts and all-too-evident shortcomings, newspaper and broadcast journalists still play an essential role in this democracy trying to keep us informed. That's what real journalism aims to do, regardless of the medium or the messenger.

Wired News' registration push

Wired News sent out an email this morning notifying the tens or hundreds of thousands of us who subscribe that our subscriptions would soon no longer be valid and that we needed to resubscribe. OK, the sign-up was harmless enough, but I'm sure they'll lose thousands of readers in the process.

What did they gain? After I registered I got a notice saying:

With your Member Name & Password, you can access the following Lycos Network sites:

Lycos Gamesville - Play games to win cash!
http://www.gamesville.lycos.com

Lycos Shop - Shop online, bid on auctions, and more!
http://shop.lycos.com

Lycos Communities - Chat, clubs and message Boards
http://clubs.lycos.com/

More fun, free sites & services ...
http://www.lycos.com/

Activist journalist sneaks into nuke lab

Talk about activist journalism: Wired News has a first-person report from someone who snuck into the Los Alamos nuclear facility in New Mexico:

There are no armed guards to knock out. No sensors to deactivate. No surveillance cameras to cripple. To sneak into Los Alamos National Laboratory, the world's most important nuclear research facility, all you do is step over a few strands of rusted, calf-high barbed wire.

I should know. On Saturday morning, I slipped into and out of a top-secret area of the lab while guards sat, unaware, less than a hundred yards away.

The author, Noah Shachtman, wrote to Declan's Politech list: "I think the article raises serious questions about the safety of our country's nuclear secrets."

You won't find a story like this in the mainstream press anymore.

Valenti's moral crusade

Here's the text of Jack Valenti's speech yesterday at Duke University about the immorality of Internet piracy.

As Declan McCullagh noted, "The buzz when I was at the law school there last week is that he got a nice, circa $20K speaking fee. Not bad for an hour's worth of
public relations on behalf of his employer. Wonder if anyone asked him
about the morality of forcibly implanting copy protection technology in all
electronic devices at the behest of one industry group?"

Later: Valenti's office sent a correction to Declan, noting that Valenti received a $5,000 honorarium for his speech, and that "whenever an honorarium is presented, he contributes that sum to a Washington-based charity called Woodley House."

Room for movie bloggers in the blogosphere?

Alisa Weinstein has a new piece in Salon: Hollyblog -- Are movie bloggers part of weblogging's natural evolution, or just a sign that another cool Net thing has been co-opted?

I was one of four bloggers Alisa interviewed for her Salon piece. My comments didn't make it into the final cut -- Meg Hourihan's views and mine were pretty similar -- so I'll post them here.

Alisa initially wrote:

I'm writing a story for Salon.com about a blogger who was hired by a film production company to be the official blogger on the set of their latest project, a movie called I Like Your Work, directed by Adam Goldberg (Saving Private Ryan) and starring Christina Ricci, Jason Lee, Joshua Jackson, Elvis Costello and Franke Potenta, among others. The blogger, Helen Jane, keeps her own web log, called helenjane.com. One of the film's young executive producers (also a blogger) knew of her site, liked her writing style, and offered her the job via an email message. The only ground rules were, no talking to the actors between takes and stay out of the way.

I am curious to know what you, as a part of the Blogging community, think of all of this. Will it be successful? Is it a good thing?

Sure, it's a terrific thing. Most bloggers aren't just sending bits off into the void -- they want some reaction, they want to set off a spark. And if someone will pay us for our random thoughts and random observations, so much the better. Say, do you have that producer's business card handy?

Is the commercialization of blogs inevitable?

No, the end of unpaid, doing-it-for-the-love-of-it bogging is not at hand. Unfortunatley. For Helen Jane, this seems like a great confluence of talent and luck. But it goes to show that if you're a decent writer, you should put your stuff out there on the Web. You never know how someone's going to trip across your work.

Is Helen Jane compromising her integrity by doing a Hollywood web log
that is being edited?
Not at all. Plenty of bloggers, such as newspaper bloggers, have editors and layers of approval. What's important is full disclosure: Let the Web community know up front what the deal is and who has final say. That's important information.

Is this going to be well-received by other bloggers?

It depends. The trick is simple: Keep it honest. The more free form, unscripted and unsanitized it reads, the more likely we'll accept it as a blogger's glimpse of movie set doings, rather than as an official version stamped with the seal of corporate approval, which would be far less interesting.

Will bloggers be hired out like this in the future? In other words, will they be able to market themselves as expert bloggers for hire to corporations and Hollywood?

Don't look for a tidal wave of bloggers as film consultants or official chroniclers of life on a Hollywood set. But if lightning strikes, make the most of it.

They're not sure if they're going to reveal that the blog is not in real time. What do you think about that?

That would be a major mistake. You can't withhold information like that. When I was an editor at BabyCenter, we didn't mention the fact that a mother's journal of her pregnancy was not taking place in real time, and got crucified for it.

Also, they're not going to allow people to post comments right away, only send emails. They want to see what kinds of emails come in first and make sure they're not getting emails from angry crew members or various other scandalous messages.

That's another mistake. If you don't trust your readers, what does that say? All they need to do is set up terms and conditions for posting right at the outset, and they can remove any comments that violate those precepts.

JD Lasica is senior editor of the Online Journalism Review and a daily blogger.

Outlook's demand for a password

Mark K. spotted an old query I made on my Manila blog on the Enter Network Password problem in Outlook.

I've been plagued by this since the first day I "upgraded" from Windows 98 to Windows XP 13 months ago, but despite dozens of stabs in the dark by bloggers and hundreds of queries on the subject by folks like Mark, I don't have an answer. So, since I've moved from Manila to a new hosting service and Movable Type, and have a somewhat different group of readers today, I'll toss this out to the group. Here's what I wrote last June, and still haven't found a solution:

I continue to receive emails from other bloggers asking if I've found an answer yet to the pesky problem of Microsoft asking me to Enter Network Password every half hour or so -- even though the dialogue box is totally useless (whether I enter OK or hit Cancel or enter a faulty password makes no difference) because I'm already connected through an always-on cable modem. I'm working on a Dell Dimension PC running Windows XP and Outlook 2002. I'm not on a network -- I work alone in my house, and thus there's no need for this absurd password.

If anyone has a solution to getting rid of the pesky password prompt, the blog community will be forever grateful. Sadly, the Microsoft Help boards haven't provided an answer.

Since that time, I reinstalled Windows XP, gotten an entirely new hard drive -- and still the network password prompt comes up. (Here's a screen shot of what it looks like.) The tech expert who helped with the reinstall of Outlook says all the settings are correct and I shouldn't be getting this message -- but I am, as are untold thousands of others.

I finally went in to Outlook's settings and changed Tools | Options | Mail Setup | Send-Receive and unchecked the box that says "Schedule an automatic send/receive every xx minutes." I thus no longer receive the network password prompt, but it's not a satisfactory solution: I now have to manually click Send/Receive every time I want to download emails to my in-box.

Burrowing further into the dialogue box by clicking on Edit (account) | Account Properties | Connection, and switching from "Connect using my LAN" to "Connect using IE or a third party dialer" doesn't help.

I still receive more queries on this from strangers than on any other topic.

Anybody? Lemme know. Or post a possible solution below.

Making the email rounds

I usually hit the delete key when I get these emails, but I found this one entertaining.

Did you know Ö?

Q. There are more collect calls on this day than any other day of the year?
A. Father's Day

The average number of people airborne over the US any given hour: 61,000

Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.

The world's youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.

Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better.

Coca-Cola was originally green.

It is impossible to lick your elbow.

The State with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska.

The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time TV were Fred and Wilma Flintstone.

The cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven: $6,400

The youngest pope was 11 years old.

The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.

Those San Francisco cable cars are the only mobile national monuments.

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from
history:

Spades - King David,
Hearts - Charlemagne,
Clubs -Alexander, the Great
Diamonds - Julius Caesar

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th,
John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 years later.

"I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes
them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.

Q. What occurs more often in December than any other month?
A. Conception.

Q. Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of what?
A. Their birthplace

Q. Most boat owners name their boats. What is the most popular boat name requested?
A. Obsession

Q. What do bulletproof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers, and laser printers all have in common?
A. All invented by women.

Q. What is the only food that doesn't spoil?
A. Honey

Q. What trivia fact about Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs Bunny) is the most ironic?
A. He was allergic to carrots.

Q. What is an activity performed by 40% of all people at a party?
A. Snoop in your medicine cabinet.

In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase "goodnight, sleep tight."

It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month we know today as the honeymoon.

In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them to mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It's where we get the phrase "mind your P's and Q's"

Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim or handle of their ceramic cups. When they needed a refill, they used the whistle to get some service. "Wet your whistle" is the phrase inspired by this practice.

In Scotland, a new game was invented. It was entitled Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden ... and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language.

AND FINALLY
At least 75% of people who read this will try to lick their elbow.

The rebirth of Napster

BBC News: Napster will be relaunched later this year by its new owner -- as a legal subscription service -- but is it too late?

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Balanced Subjective Journalism

Don Park on Balanced Subjective Journalism and his proposal to jump-start the dying SF Examiner with peer-to-peer journalism.

Thanks to Dave for the pointer.

Calling all warbloggers

Ryan Pitts, an online producer for spokesmanreview.com in Spokane, Wash., is putting together a page on online war coverage. Admirably, he wants to include weblogs in the conversation. Writes Ryan:

I naturally want to include a well-rounded blogroll, spanning the left, the right and everything in between. I consume plenty of blogs, so I'm pretty comfortable compiling this list. However, I'd *also* like to include headline feeds from five or so of these warbloggers. ... Do you have any ideas on who I might choose in order to provide a decent cross-section of ideology?

I've never been a part of the "warblogger" community, though I've read about them on OJR and elsewhere. Anyone out there visit a warblog on a regular basis? If so, send me a note, or post your comment below, and I'll pass it along to Ryan.

RI nightclub fire blog

Sheila informs that Projo.com's Rhode Island nightclub fire blog is now outside the company's registration requirements and out on the open Web here. The blog includes a list of victims, coverage of the national news media's reporting on the tragedy, the status of Ty Longley, rhythm guitarist of Great White, who's still listed as "missing," and much more.

Who's fleecing whom?

The usually reliable Declan McCullagh had an incredibly wrong-headed new column up today at News.com: Get ready to be fleeced.

I admire Declan for not following the herd and staking out independent positions (and his political slant is popular with the anti-government libertarian crowd). But even if Congress follows his advice and repeals the most egregious parts of the DMCA and other federal copyright laws -- which it won't -- that still leaves private industry free to bamboozle and hoodwink millions of unsuspecting customers with crappy products, laden with DRM, that won't play on their computers, on their portable music devices, or in other ways. The great Invisible Hand of the Marketplace won't solve that. Information will. If there's no market incentive for the record lables to mark their DRM CDs as defective -- and there isn't -- why would they?

"Get ready to be fleeced"? How? By providing customers with the information they need to make informed decisions?

Studios, firms in piracy talks

LA Times: "Trying to plug another potential hole in the anti-piracy dike, Hollywood studios have started a new round of private meetings with high-tech companies and consumer-electronics manufacturers to explore ways to stop unauthorized recordings. This time, the issue is how to preserve anti-copying signals on a digital television show, online video or DVD when converted from digital to analog."

The Microsoft-Apple tango

Glenn F. has a new column up in the Seattle Times that looks at the uneasy dance between Microsoft and Apple. Nice job.

Salon death watch

The LA Times has the latest on the Salon death watch.

Meantime, just got an emailing from Salon editor David Talbot, who's trolling for more subscriptions, but this can't be good news. Writes David:

"If every one of our 53,000 subscribers brings in just ONE additional subscription, Salon will finally break even this year."

Grammys: The Norah Express

I discovered her last summer and immediately fell in love with her incredible, silky-voiced stylings. Thought she only appealed to the over-30 set, though, so I was surprised to see the Norah Jones tsumani sweep through this evening's Grammys. (Though, by the look of the crowd, was there anybody there under 30?) Now, if they'd only cut out the flabby, just-lying-there 90-minute mid-section, they might have had a decent show. But it was worth staying up to see Bruce, Elvis, Little Stevie and Dave Grohl let it rip on the Clash's London Calling. Damn, that was something. As was the Simon-Garfunkel reunion. Maybe I'll post the segments online some day, cease-and-desist letters notwithstanding.

As for Eminem, I still don't get it.

Getting the wrinkles out

I spent the rest of the past three days fixing the thousands of broken links on jdlasica.com. Apologies for not getting to this sooner. Moved to Dreamhost a couple of weeks ago and decided to organize things a bit better (like, moving images to an images folder).

Three apps that saved my sanity in all this:

• Cute HTML, which let me do a search and replace within hundreds of documents at a time;

• Activewords, which let me create a few dozen specialized macro keys that made the mindless chore of search and replace so much easier;

• Master.com, which still offers a free search program that lets you spot any broken links or duplicate pages on your site (with over 2,000 html pages and many hundreds of images, that's essential).

In a few weeks, I'll take my WELL home page down. Meantime, if you spot any links that don't work or pages that look amiss on your browser, please drop me a note.

Rheingold in the Times

Piece in the NY Times' Week in Review today -- How Protesters Mobilized So Many and So Nimbly -- that quotes Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs.

I conducted an interview with Howard a few months back here.

Culture Clash: subversively brilliant

As I mentioned yesterday, my wife and I, and a friend, Colleen, trekked to San Jose Saturday to catch the comedy troupe Culture Clash. I hadn't caught them in about eight years -- when I interviewed them for the cover of the Sacramento Bee's Ticket section -- and so I was heartened to see how their routine has matured over that time. (They actually had a show on Fox for a year that nobody knew about; as Herbert Siguenza, one of the members, said: "We're Latino, and we were doing satire, so that's two strikes right there.")

While their work in the early to mid-'90s was all about the Chicano identity, their new staged pieces have opened up and grown in a different direction, tackling issues of citizenship, belonging, cultural assimilation, the immigrant experience, and the topic that's hanging over all of us: war and terrorism. Their routine's anti-war message gave the performance a more somber but deeper and more resonant tone.

Two of the members took the stage after the show to answer questions from the hundred or so folks who remained, many of them students from UC Santa Cruz. Richard Rodriguez explained the troupe's work by invoking the word "journalism" as part of their mission. Before a show's run, the three members actually go out and interview 50 or 60 locals to get a feel for what the community is experiencing on a social and cultural level. The resulting show, they said, is about reporting back to the audience on their findings.

An official with San Jose rep mentioned that the theater company had gotten some hate emails about the troupe's act (and they were actually run out of town in Mesa, Ariz.). Not surprising, given the power and uncompromising vision of the performance.

Cul-cha Day

It's Cul-cha Day here at the Lasica household. (Hey, I'm from Joisey.) First we hit Culture Clash, the Latino comedy troupe, at the San Jose Repertory Theater. Then it's on to a wine-tasting shop/bistro we've been wanting to check out in the tiny town of Sunol, called Little Valley.

Why did Google want Blogger?

Why did Google want Blogger? According to someone who worked on Blogger's search capabilities, because it's a step closer to the semantic Web.

ESPN.com pushes the multimedia envelope

Has anyone noticed what ESPN.com has done sometime in the past couple of days? When you hit their front page, instead of the usual static main image of the day's top story you get a prompt to activate Motion, a free feature that integrates ESPN video into the ESPN.com front page with no bufering, "transforming ESPN into the world's first integrated news and video site." All you need is a high-speed connection.

Because I visit ESPN fairly often and have a cable modem, I spent a minute registering (I'm one of those oddballs who actually gives truthful information in these fields). Then I had to download a 507K applet, or app, to install Motion on my machine.

The result? Who knows? Returned to ESPN's home page to see Michael Jordan in all his static-photo glory.

'Blogging is not journalism.' Period.

Technology consultant Bill Thompson -- whoever he is -- has an absurd little temper tantrum today on BBCNews.com in a column about Google's purchase of Pyra and the excitement it stirred in the blog community.

Fumes old-schooler Thompson:

Ridiculous comments, such as Dan Gillmor's claim that "with the advent of weblogging, the readers know more than the journalists" only stoke the fires of hyperbole and do not help us understand this new tool.

Blogging is not journalism.

Often it is as far from journalism as it is possible to get, with unsubstantiated rumour, prejudice and gossip masquerading as informed opinion.

Without editors to correct syntax, tidy up the story structure or check facts, it is generally impossible to rely on anything one finds in a blog without verifying it somewhere else - often the much-maligned mainstream media.

The much-praised reputation mechanism that is supposed to ensure that bloggers remain true, honest and factually-correct is, in fact, just the rule of the mob, where those who shout loudest and get the most links are taken more seriously.

Thompson's cave-dweller rhetoric notwithstanding. a vibrant community of hundreds of thousands of grassroots voices -- a brilliant and invaluble contribution to the media ecosystem -- is proving him wrong every day.

A thanks for the pointer goes out to an incredulous Matt Haughey. who notes, "The link near the end to tell Bill what he should write about in the future -- that's the extent that the audience should participate?" I'll be on a panel with Matt next month at South by Southwest.

Too bad we won't have Thompson at SXSW, so that his wildly wrong, cocksure assumptions could be punctured in person.

IRE's Extra! Extra! weblog

Derek Willis, of The Scoop blog fame, has helped put together a new weblog for IRE, the Investigative Reporters & Editors organization, called Extra! Extra! Derek says itís still a work in progress, but theyíve already got some interesting entries up about investigative stories in Raleigh, Denver, Portland, Detroit and elsewhere. Good stuff.

Bloggers' albums of the year

Blogcritics.org -- "a sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, and technology" (gotta like that description; you can see the contributors in the left hand nav) -- has named its Albums of the Year in advance of the Grammys' dreary affair Sunday night. Blogcritics' top 10 albums picks:

1) Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco
2) Come Away With Me by Norah Jones
3) Sea Change by Beck
4) Turn on the Bright Lights by Interpol
5) The Rising by Bruce Springsteen (more here, here)
6) A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay
7) When I Was Cruel by Elvis Costello
8) () by Sigur Ros
9) Once More, with Feeling - Buffy the Vampire Slayer
10) Murray Street by Sonic Youth

Not a bad list. Actually, damn good. More of their music award choices, as well as some interviews, here.

Putting events in context

Just put your birthdate in the window when you click on this link and see what happens.

Taking up the cause of Charles Babbage

It's not every day I get an email missive from the Communications Manager
at Southwark Town Hall in London, but Lise Colyer writes to say:

I'm writing to ask if you would mind asking your readers to vote for Charles Babbage, the father of computing. Here in the London Borough of Southwark we're setting up a sort of People's Plaques historic plaque scheme, in which people vote for the famous places, events or people they believe should have a historic plaque. These include Shakespeare's Globe, The Mayflower, Brunel's Thames Tunnel and so on. Is there any chance at all you might be interested in urging your readers to take up the cause of Charles Babbage? It's just that he doesn't have many votes yet, of 2,000 or so we've had already. We'd really appreciate interest from cyber buffs all over the world. These two links should explain what's going on in full.

Posted by jdlasica at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Conversation (0) | TrackBack (0)

Where's the security?

Daniel Schorr -- whom I had the pleasure of spending the day with at a journalism conference at Rutgers I organized 20 years back -- has a dead-on commentary on NPR. Excerpt:

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge may provide low-cost diversion with color-coded alerts and advice to stock up on duct tape. But talk is cheap and real security is expensive. One would have thought that, with memories of Sept. 11, the president's first priority would be the first responders to a terrorist attack - police, firemen, public-health workers.

Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley wrote in The Washington Post this week that the federal government provided only $1 million of the $11 million his city has spent on homeland defense. And, Mr. O'Malley asks why it is necessary to wait for another devastating attack before taking action to protect America's ports, railways, and borders.

Quick hits

Sheila has an item looking at the The Station, scene of the fire that killed at least 86 people and and injured 150 others in West Warwick, RI.

XML -- The only way to fly: Another reason to like Movable Type: an RSS feed that kicks ass.

Moveon is planning a virtual march on Washington next Wednesday, Feb. 26 -- a daylong effort to inundate every member of Congress with phone calls, emails and faxes.

The Boston Phoenix calls Slate "the best online journalism out there."

PressWise has assembled codes of journalistic ethics from around the world.

Wired News: The Center for Democracy and Technology said it will try to compel Pennsylvania's attorney general to disclose new details about unusual efforts in that state forcing Internet providers to block visits to websites containing child pornography. Lawyers for the group compared the technique to disrupting mail delivery to an entire apartment complex over one tenant's illegal actions.

Dan gives his take on yesterday's FCC rulings.

Here's another snide, Big Media sneer about the pending death of Salon, courtesy of the WSJ's OpinionJournal.

NY Times op-ed piece: The Trouble With Corporate Radio: The Day the Protest Music Died.

Thrillers online

Oliver Willis, erstwhile weblog celebrity, humorist and pundit, has posted the first two chapters of his novel online. Valley Girl is a thriller about what happens when an
adult film star becomes the object of affection for a diabolical senator.

I'm there, guy.

Meantime, not long ago I posted all the chapters of my own thriller online. Return of the Legends is the story of a businessman who launches a DNA grave operation to retrieve the genetic profiles of history's most famous legends.

Quick hits

Wired News: DMCA blocks tech progress. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is threatening innovation in Silicon Valley, and it's time for businesses and consumers to mobilize to change the law. That was the message at the Digital Rights Summit in Santa Clara on Wednesday.

Jack Slater on bias in the media, here and here.

Wired News: Peter Rojas on the moblogging phenom.

Mark Glaser in OJR: The LA Times lets its critics loose, letting readers engage in an online Q&A.

Oh, brother: A group of music publishers is suing Bertelsmann for its investment in Napster, and they're asking for damages of at least $17 billion.

LA Times: Thanks to new digital technologies, more solo journalists can go solo into danger zones, reporting a story, writing it, videotaping, editing and transmiting it at the scene.

MediaPost: CNET is re-launching its ZDNet Web site with a new focus as a relationship portal for buyers and sellers of IT products. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Gallery: a cool photo utility

Jamie Hutt, a design editor at startribune.com, emailed the online news list about a program he's crazy about called Gallery. Says Jamie:

It's the best of many "donation-ware" photo tools available now. Aside from providing a lovely slideshow utility, it allows you to catalog and organize all of your site's images. Oh, and it makes your pics searchable. If you have zero to little photo automation on your site, but would love to easily improve efficiency and access, I'd really recommend you look at this software.

You can see it in a form that was easily customized for my personal pics at:

http://www.huttstuff.com/gallery(Username: guest Password: guest)

Or sample one gallery here.

These are lovely slide shows.

Sweeping changes in phone and broadband rules

Breaking news: The regional Bell operating companies won one and lost one Thursday afternoon as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made sweeping, dramatic changes in its local phone and broadband competition rules. A sharply divided FCC ruled the Bells will no longer have to share their high-speed fiber lines with broadband competitors but also decided the Bells would have to continue to share their local voice copper lines.

Coverage in Internet.com and the NY Times. The FCC will probably come in for criticism for easing up on on the broadband competitor rules, but from what I've read, the Bell competitors were getting subsidized by the Bells and then sticking it to their own customers. So both rulings seem fair-minded. And it showed some guts on the commissioners' part to break with their chairman, Michael Powell.

One hopes that the customer isn't an afterthought in this clash of the telecom titans, as has been the case all too often.

Guterman on Bloggle

In his latest Media Notes column for Biz2, Jimmy Guterman takes a look at Google's purchase of Pyra Labs. Excerpt:

Both Google and Pyra officials have been relatively quiet so far regarding what they plan to do together, but several elements of the deal are clear. The Blogger hosting service will become faster and more reliable when it's moved to Google servers, and millions of people who have never given a thought to blogs will be exposed to them when they visit Google. The intense bloggers, that small group of correspondents who seem to sit in front of their computers posting all day and all night, have begun the expected insular conversation about what this means for them. I expect that what it means for them, more than anything else, is that they are about to get a lot more company. Some bloggers have carved pleasant, comfortable niches for themselves that are about to get challenged. That might not be great news for the individual bloggers affected, but it's great news for the many thousands of blogs that will be born as a result of this development.

Signs of the Times

9-11-01: 15 Saudis, 0 Iraqis

Drunken frat boy drives country into ditch

War begins with 'Dubya'

Bush is proof that empty warheads can be dangerous

Let's bomb Texas, they have oil too

How did our oil get under their sand?

Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld: the asses of evil

Let Exxon send their own troops

Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity

Bush is to Christianity as Osama is to Islam

A picture of Bush saying "Why should I care what the
American people think? They didn't vote for me."

Meantime, check this out: These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed.

Oh, and have you received your Evite to the War on Iraq party?