WELL adopts SpamHaus Block List

More and more spam has been slipping through The WELL's email system, which adopted SpamAssassin a year or so ago. So it's good to learn that tonight The WELL will be adopting the SpamHaus Block List.

Weblogs panel in Berkeley

Mary Hodder of bIPlog fame (Berkeley Intellectual Property Blog) sends along word of a panel discussion on Weblogs, Information & Society, to be held this Thursday, April 10, from 6 to 9 pm at UC Berkeley. Here's more info:

The Weblogs Information and Society panel draws webloggers from academe, business, and journalism to explore how weblogs continue to change the way groups and individuals work, learn, and communicate.

The panel will also explore how weblogs, and social software in particular, facilitate civic and creative engagement by increasing the fluidity of information between individuals and organizations. This developing relationship between weblogs, information, and society is significant and deserves further discussion.

They've got a panel of heavy hitters. Wish I could be there, but can't. It's free, and open to the public, so if you're in the Bay Area, it's well worth catching.

Moderator will be John Battelle, former publisher of The Industry Standard. Panelists include:

Dan Gillmor, technology columnist of the San Jose Mercury News

Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of Salon

Donna Wentworth, who writes Copyfight: The Politics of IP, a Berkman Center/Corante.com weblog column on intellectual property politics and issues. In February of 2003, she became co-editor, with Berkman Fellow Dave Winer , of the Weblogs at Harvard Law weblog.

Ed Felten, an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University, who created the Freedom-to-Tinker blog.

Ernest Miller, a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law
School and the founder and former editor-in-chief of LawMeme, the Law School's collaboratively run weblog.

Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext.

Sounds like a great gathering.

Hey, somebody take a digital photo of Donna Wentworth and send it to me so I can post it over there in the right nav (with her assent).

Globe, Post, LA Times win Pulitzers

AP story:

The Boston Globe won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for ``courageous comprehensive coverage'' in its disclosures of sexual abuse by priests in the Roman Catholic church.

The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post each won three of journalism's most prestigious awards.

My old friend and Sacramento Bee colleague, Diana Sugg, who's now with The Baltimore Sun, won for beat reporting for ``stories that illuminated complex medical issues through the lives of people.''

I was in The Bee newsroom when we won two Pulitzers some years ago, and there's nothing else like it in journalism.

Here' s the complete list of winners:

--Public service: The Boston Globe.
--Breaking news reporting: Staff, The Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, Mass.
--Investigative reporting: Clifford J. Levy of The New York Times.
--Explanatory reporting: Staff, The Wall Street Journal.
--Beat reporting: Diana K. Sugg of The (Baltimore) Sun.
--National reporting: Alan Miller and Kevin Sack of the Los Angeles Times.
--International reporting: Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan of The Washington Post.
--Feature writing: Sonia Nazario of the Los Angeles Times.
--Commentary: Colbert I. King of The Washington Post.
--Criticism: Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post.
--Editorial writing: Cornelia Grumman of the Chicago Tribune.
--Editorial cartooning: David Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
--Breaking news photography: Staff, Rocky Mountain News of Denver.
--Feature photography: Don Bartletti of the Los Angeles Times.

Agonist blogger cops to plagiarism

Wired News: Sean-Paul Kelley, the man behind the immensely popular Iraq war blog The Agonist, admits he posted information from a highly regarded commercial intelligence company on his site without sourcing it -- and in some cases credited it to unnamed sources. Excerpt:

Kelley's insightful window on the details of the war brought him increasing readership (118,000 page views on a recent day) and acclaim, including interviews in the The New York Times and on NBC's Nightly News, Newsweek online and National Public Radio.

The only problem: Much of his material was plagiarized -- lifted word-for-word from a paid news service put out by Austin, Texas, commercial intelligence company Stratfor.

"You got me, I admit it.... I made a mistake," Kelley said. "It was stupid."

In a series of interviews with Wired News, Kelley changed his story several times. At first, he said he used just four or five Stratfor items a day without crediting the company. Later, he owned up to "six or seven days when half was from Stratfor." ...

Kelley's plagiarism was first brought to light by a blogger who goes by the name General Roy. Last week, on his pro-war site, Strategic Armchair Command, Roy charged Kelley with nearly a dozen instances of plagiarizing Stratfor material over the course of a single day.

Stupid indeed, and regrettable, given The Agonist's sudden burst of popularity. Amateur bloggers who want to play by journalism's rules have to live by all the rules -- and plagiarism is a major no-no, no matter the medium.

Copy protected CDs: artists can be the losers

The Age (Australia): This is pretty astounding: Radio stations that are all-digital can't play certain copy-protected CDs because the copy-protection doesn't allow them to rip the tracks on to their station's system. Copy-protection is therfore directly responsible for the lack of airtime in this market by the artists who choose to copy-protect their CD. Thanks to Declan's Politech for the pointer.

New tools for reporters during wartime

Nice story in Sunday's NY Times: New tools for reporters make war images instant but coverage no simpler.

'Please, we are not Al-Jazeera!'

News flash: Arab news publications aren't monolithic.

Every day Arab News receives hundreds of e-mails requesting information about Al-Jazeera, criticizing Al-Jazeera and praising Al-Jazeera. But please, we are not Al-Jazeera!

Meantime, also in Arab News (an English-language Saudi publication): An ìembeddedî Arab journalist who escaped after being captured by Iraqis has questioned the coverage of the war by the Western media, saying it has become an integral part of the war machine.

Moyers, NOW and the withering of democracy

Friday night's NOW With Bill Moyers led with a thoughtful discussion of media coverage of Iraq and related issues in which Moyers interviewed Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. Here's the transcript.

On the same program Frank Blethen of the Seattle Times warned against the trend toward media gigantism, saying if the pace of media consolidation continues, within 20 years "we will not have a democracy."

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointers.

And Salon has an interview with Moyers: The conscience of American journalism speaks his mind about Bush, LBJ, Iraq, Vietnam, the triumph of America's global power and the withering of its democracy.

Poll: Curtailment of liberties goes too far

Cornell Chronicle: Survey: Americans say some new federal powers infringe on civil liberties. Excerpt:

More than 60 percent of Americans oppose tapping phone lines and wireless phone connections as part of the war on terrorism, the survey found. Nearly 60 percent oppose monitoring e-mail, and the same percentage oppose outlawing constitutionally protected actions, even if some consider these actions "un-American."

Why is Google shooting itself in the foot?

In re Saturday's item about Google accepting press releases on its Google News page, readers at the Register UK sound off.

A blog on digital rights

Librarian blogger Gary D. Price pointed me to a friend of his who publishes a blog that focuses on copyright and digital rights issues: Paul Pedley's Information Law Weblog. His day job is working at The Economist in London. I've added it to the blogroll at the right.

A voice from the past

In The Nation, George McGovern -- remember him? -- gives us a reality check on the Bush administration's foreign designs and domestic neglect. Excerpt:

The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, He sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis--all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God's will.

ActiveRefresh: a notification program for blogs and more

Got a press release this morning about a product I hadn't heard about before, though the waters they're plying are fairly familiar. I'll probably check it out. There's a 15-day trial version, and the product costs $24.

ActiveRefresh is a new software application that monitors your web sources and notifies you when they are updated. ActiveRefresh monitors web pages, forums, news sites, LiveJournals, Bloggers, RSS channels, even YahooMail. The main advantage of the program is that it does not just notify you about the changes; this application can extract the new information and deliver it directly to your computer, making it unnecessary for you to visit different websites.

While ActiveRefresh can be considered to be a professional software title for editors, journalists and writers, the purpose of the program is to give the regular folks a simple, straightforward solution that would make it unnecessary to continuously keep visiting websites to see if there is any new information there. Let's say you posted a message. Instead of visiting the website regularly to see if there are any replies, just set up ActiveRefresh and it will show you all replies as soon as they appear.

ActiveRefresh is extremely simple to use. You can just select the news headlines or forum topics you would like to track, and the program will automatically create a template for it. The program features a convenient two-panel interface that displays your sources and the news. This application features multi-user support, so that everybody in your family or office can have their own separate account. The program is fully customizable, has built-in task scheduler and supports drag&drop technology, making it easy to manage your sources.

ActiveRefresh allows you to export RSS channels, has RSS Autodiscovery feature, and processes incoming HTML code in order to delete parts of the code that could be potentially dangerous. ActiveRefresh also supports the standard OPML and OCS formats for loading the channels list from news content providers such as MoreOver, NewsIsFree, and others. You can edit and post extracted contents to weblogs (Blogger, Movable Type, LiveJournal Support)

ActiveRefresh is distributed electronically over the Internet. The price of a single copy is just $23.95 Free trial version is available at http://www.activerefresh.com/ for evaluation. If you have any questions, would like to request editor's copy or have a business proposal, please contact our staff at sisyph@activerefresh.com

System Requirements: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP Internet Explorer 4.0+

The antivirus program that isn't

Just got another reminder of what a shitty program Norton AntiVirus is. After a scan, I was informed:

One infected file found. Rokt.scr contained W32.Klez virus Delete failed. Your email is still infected with viruses.

Does it tell me which of the thousands of email messages in Outlook contains the virus? No. Does it tell me where the infected email is located? No. (I searched all files on my hard drive and came up empty.) In other words, good luck, fella!