Saddam's lounge chair

Clever joke on Ken Layne's blog that I just had to pilfer:

Pack of cigarettes: $3.50

Lounge chair: $500

Lighting up in Saddam's living room and dropping your ashes wherever the hell you want: Priceless

Google's faulty porn filters

More on the Google front ...

Declan in News.com:

Children using Google's SafeSearch feature, designed to filter out links to Web sites with adult content, may be shielded from far more than their parents ever intended.

A report released this week by the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society says that SafeSearch excludes many innocuous Web pages from search-result listings, including ones created by the White House, IBM, the American Library Association and clothing company Liz Claiborne.

It's surprising how little has changed since I wrote this column on the same phenomenon in 1997.

Internet via the power grid

John Markoff and Matt Richtel in the NY Times:

As cable, telephone and wireless companies compete to provide high-speed Internet access to homes, a new challenger is emerging based on a decidedly old technology.

The idea is to send Internet data over ordinary electric power lines. Proponents argue that it can be a competitive alternative to digital cable, telephone digital subscriber line and wireless efforts to connect the "last mile" between homes and Internet service providers.

Photojournalism ethics during war

Peter Howe, who covered civil wars in Northern Ireland and El Salvador as a photojournalist and who wrote Shooting Under Fire: The World of the War Photographer, has an op-ed article in USA Today about the editorial choices involved in deciding which photos to publish in a newspaper to tell the story of the war.

The decision to show dead bodies has always been a lightning rod for public opinion, often polarizing it between those who believe we should see war's reality and those who feel such images are inappropriate on the pages of items that enter the home. ...

War photographers face ethical hurdles much greater than their peers working on other subjects. The sights they record are inherently gruesome and disturbing, and they intrude on moments of tragedy and despair more intense than in any other area of photojournalism.

I touched on some of these issues in my most recent column for OJR, Portraying the Graphic Face of War.

Knight Ridder and weblogging

Adam Medros: Knight Ridder and weblogging. In which the Harvard Business School student's class heard from Knight-Ridder Digital CEO Hilary Schneider.

... So I asked Hilary about micropublishing and blogs and she commented that the issue is "huge" and something they're constantly thinking about. They're wondering if there's a business model for weblogs and micropublishing acknowledging that weblogs build news communities.

Which got me thinking that weblogs and RSS might be the impetus for micropayments. I was thinking that I rarely read the print edition of the Wall St. Journal, even though we get free copies at school. I rarely read the online version because it is too cumbersome even though I get free access. Yet I want to read the Wall St. Journal on a daily basis. I would pay for an RSS feed that let me scan and read the content quickly, something that neither print nor HTML lets me do. Now the big question becomes- does advertising have to be part of the news publishing model or can the model be reversed?

Google: Is all the news fit to post?

Perhaps in response to widespread criticism in the blogosphere, Google says it's working to distinguish press releases from real news on the Google News site:

... [A] representative for the popular search engine said that Google would in the future differentiate corporate and government statements from news articles. "It is not our intention to list press releases without clearly marking them as a press release," the representative said. "I will notify the team about the issue...and we will work to fix the problem."