Snopes founders doing journalists' job

Mark Glaser in OJR has a Q&A with the founders of leading Internet hoax busters Snopes.com. David and Barbara Mikkelson's site got a big boost after 9/11, and their success at unmasking the lie about hunters shooting naked women in the Las Vegas desert (Hunting for Bambi) has now made them even more well known. Excerpt:

MG: So what made you think "Hunting for Bambi" was a hoax?

DM: Part of it is that we start off with the thought that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Our approach is going to be that something outrageous is going to be a hoax. But that's unfortunately not what a lot of people in the media do. They say, "This is real, and we'll see if there's proof it isn't."

MG: So you start off with the assumption that everything's a hoax until proven real?

DM: In a general sense. I can't say that applies to everything. We start out by saying, is there anything that proves this to be true. Absolutely the worst approach you can take -- and unfortunately the approach that most people in the media take -- is simply to contact the hoaxer and ask, "Are you on the level?" No one will put the time and effort into perpetrating a hoax simply to say, "Oh, you got me." Simply by approaching him, you've both alerted him that you're on his trail, and you quite possibly have given him clues as to what people might be looking for to verify that it's phony and will give him ideas on how to improve the hoax. ...

Reporters should take a page from their playbook. I wish the Chicago Tribune had interviewed them for its story on Bambi and Internet hoaxes, which I wrote about on Monday.

Could a hacker steal the '04 election?

Paul Boutin in Slate asks: Could a hacker steal next year's election?

CopyPaste: another helpful app

The other day Dan G. wrote about CopyPaste from Script Software, an application that's apparently been kicking around since the mid'-90s but one that I'd never heard of. (Howard R. pointed him to the software.)

Twenty-two years ago, when I moved to California for a newspaper editing position, we had macro memory keys on our low-tech VDT keyboards that let you copy characters, sentences or commands to about three dozen different keys.

So it has always amazed me at how incredibly limited the Windows operating system is in this regard -- keystrokes that lets you select, copy and paste, but only one item at a time.

CopyPaste frees you from those limitations. I've just been using it for the past 24 hours, but already I can see how handy it will come in. You can copy and paste on up to 99 different sets of keys -- plus other goodies under the hood that I haven't inspected yet.

It's cross-platform, so I'll be downloading it for my Mac as well as my PC. Cost: $20.

Free phone calls

John C. Dvorak in PC magazine tackles free phone calls, aka voice over IP. Buzz tells me I ought to look into it, given all the time I spend on the phone. Excerpt:

Anyone who would use Vonage in a hotel has long since stopped using the hotel phone anyway. Most people use mobile phones when they travel. Even with the priciest roaming charges, mobile calling is cheaper than the horrid hotel phone rates. Only dummies use hotel phones.

I wonder what the Park South folks would think if they knew people could completely bypass the hotel's phone for all calls. I'm certain that both telco executives and hoteliers are going to be passing this column around with notes of concern scribbled in the margin. But smart hotel operators will see this as an opportunity. I'm a regular at the Park South because of the T1 connection. What's more important than a regular customer? ...

Keyword searches of PBS video

Lots of good stuff, per usual, on Gary Price's Resource Shelf, including this:

More and more spoken word material is becoming searchable. The Public Broadcasting Service not only offers television programming throughout the U.S. but also has a website that provides additional resources for each program. Included on the PBS site are several databases of archived video. Every word spoken in these video segments can be searched by keyword. Simply enter your terms, use some of the limiting options, and click search. Once you the material that interests you, click and watch the section of the program where your search terms are spoken or the entire segment. You'll need a RealAudio/Video player. That's it! There is no charge to access and use these tools. These databases were created using voice recognition technology, no human intervention. Next to every entry on a results page you can also read a text transcript of the video segment. ...

• PBS NewsHour Video Search
Search segments of the program beginning in February, 2002.

• Washington Week Video Archive
This archive dates back to July 21, 2000.

Scoop your own newscasts on the Web

Lots of good stuff in Lost Remote:

• A Cory Bergman essay:

Start scooping your own newscasts on the web. The Internet won't make more money than TV anytime soon, but the extra cash will mean more TV reporters and photographers will get to keep their jobs.

• Get your ESPN cell phone

Walt Disney Co. is in early talks with several wireless telephone companies over plans to offer cell phones under the entertainment companyís various brand names, including ESPN, The Wall Street Journal reports.

• Slate gets into radio

• Merrill Brown, former editor of MSNBC.com, will leave Real Networks.

Blogs have a place on news sites

Steve Outing's latest in E&P: Blogs Have a Place on News Web Sites.

It's hard to believe this fundamental point still needs to be hammered home, but such is the way of the newspaper publishing world.

Steve tackles both blogs and moblogs in his column. Excerpt:

Last year, I wrote a column for Editor & Publisher Online suggesting that many reporters, correspondents, editors, and columnists at newspapers should produce Weblogs. I stand by that advice, but these days I place equal importance on non-staff members producing the content for blogs at news companies.

Weblogs present a wonderful opportunity to get the voices of the public onto your site. An area that's ripe to capitalize on is digital photographs taken by members of the public -- AKA witnesses to news. This, I am convinced, is going to be a huge trend in the next couple of years.

A handful of media companies have already experimented with the concept. BBC News Online solicited digital photos from people attending anti-war rallies prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Dallas Morning News Web site collected images of space shuttle Columbia debris that had fallen to earth.

My advice is for news companies to set up a standard repository of public images and publicize how to submit photos (e-mail a specific address either from a photo phone or conventional e-mail). Then, the next time a tornado or hurricane rolls through, or a plane crashes in a populated area, a stream of witness images will pour in, ready to be filtered for publication. This concept can be deployed on any manner of public event or happening: a participatory event (say, a local marathon); an appearance by a presidential candidate; a Hollywood filming taking place in your town; etc.

Having a digital-camera-toting public at your disposal is, of course, the result of the popularity not only of digital cameras, but also picture cell-phones. It's the latter that's really exciting, and that will change the face of photojournalism. ...

Tom Daschle to begin a blog

Sioux Falls Argus Leader:

Tom Daschle is coming soon to a blog near you.

The Senate minority leader and South Dakota Democrat will post a daily diary on his official Web site as he drives around the state next month during Congress' annual August recess, he said Wednesday. The diary is modeled on the growing phenomenon of the online journals known as Weblogs, or blogs for short.

"At the end of the day, wherever I am, I can just type up some thoughts and tell stories about things that happened," Daschle said. "I'm always up for trying something new." ...

The first posting in Daschle's blog - which will be called "Travels with Tom" and will be linked to the front of his official Senate Web site - should go up Thursday [presumably today], spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said.

Um, no mention in the newspaper about what the blog address is.

Thanks to kpaul for the pointer.

Consumer groups ready financial privacy initiative

Here's a California voter initiative done right: Backers of a financial privacy initiative say they've collected enough signatures to qualify it for the ballot. But in a surprise move, they promised to hold the signatures for three weeks to give state lawmakers a final chance to hammer out a bill instead.

Newpaper sites struggle to reach the young

In OJR: Newspaper Web Sites Struggle to Attract Younger Readers. Surveys show that about half of 20 to 29 year olds read the newspaper every day in 1972; by 1998, just 20 percent of twenty somethings read the paper every day.

Travel photo finds a print home

An editor at National Geographic Adventure Magazine spotted this photo of Chacala, Mexico, on the Web. Tonight I signed a contract for the magazine to use it in its October issue. Cool.

Fan Fiction: Fan's Right or Copyright Nightmare?

I had missed this on Kuro5hin until today: Fan Fiction: Fan's Right or Copyright Nightmare? (Not sure what's up with Kuro5hin taking a long time to render tonight.)

The Five Days of TypePad

We're on day 3 of the Five Days of TypePad.

More on Cat's adventure

Susan Mernit, ever the enterprising sort, tracked down the topless pix of the alluring Cat Schwartz, who had a Photoshop cropping problem the other day but isn't mortified by it all.

10 best no-cost PC tools

PC World names this year's collection of the ten best no-cost tools delivers PC speed and safety. One of them is ActiveWords. Congrats, Buzz.

RedPaper: Another experiment in participatory journalism

Wired News:

A host of court documents in the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case are available online from a collaborative publication created by ordinary citizens.

For $2 a pop, all the public documents filed in the case against the Los Angeles Lakers basketball star can be downloaded from the RedPaper, a 3-week-old collaborative website written by "citizen reporters." ...

The RedPaper is testing the market for specialist information, ordered and paid for over the Web using a micropayment system, which long has been touted as an essential component of online publishing.

"(The RedPaper) is a combination of eBay and The New York Times," said founder and editor Mike Gaynor. "You don't have to have something valuable in your garage. You just have to have something valuable in your head."

Backed by software giant Adobe Systems, the RedPaper is an experimental market for information, allowing anyone to publish and sell their writing, be it recipes for muffins or hard-to-get court documents.

The site has about 600 registered users, who have published several hundred articles on the site, including favorite drink recipes, car maintenance instructions, poetry and short fiction. ...

Flash winning out over substance

Mark Glaser in OJR: A report finds that many award-winning Web sites are impressing judges with flashy layout rather than with the quality of their reporting and editing.

Bad radio news for Merle

Los Angeles Times: Merle Haggard, whose new song, "That's the News," criticizes big media, is unlikely to get his music played on commercial radio, says a Los Angeles Times editorial.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

A closer look at Yahoo! News

Chris Sherman of SearchEngineWatch.com takes a closer look at Yahoo! News.

File sharing wars, cont.

The latest on the file sharing wars:

CNN: Secret Networks Protect Music Swappers, featuring Justin Frankel's Waste, a popular private file sharing network.

USA Today: Music Swap Threats Not a Deterrent, Say Users.

Guardian UK: Legal downloads won't make up for drop in CD sales, record labels told.

TheInquirer.net: RIAA Will Take 2191.78 Years to Sue Everyone

Photographing the famous, unclothed

NYT to name an ombudsman

The New York Times said today it will name a "public editor" to be a readers' representative.

Good news -- something they should have done 20 years ago.

Bush wants to prevent gay marriage

NY Times: President Bush said today that federal government lawyers are working on legislation that would define marriage as a union between a man and woman.

Yee-haw! We got ourselves a wedge issue!

Once again our nation owes a debt of gratitude to a president who's a uniter, not a divider.

Industry needs to grow online music

The San Jose Merc's Dawn C. Chmielewski reports from the Plug.IN digital music conference in New York: Industry key to growth of online music, exec says.

The other dimensions of Howard Dean

... In Vermont, whose political center of gravity lands left of the nation's, one of the secrets to Dr. Dean's success was keeping the most liberal politicians in check.

Over 11 years, he restrained spending growth to turn a large budget deficit into a surplus, cut taxes, forced many on welfare to go to work, abandoned a sweeping approach to health-care reform in favor of more incremental measures, antagonized environmentalists, won the top rating from the National Rifle Association and consistently embraced business interests.

Overall, the article concludes, "Dr. Dean's presidential pitch is more pragmatic than ideological. He is less George McGovern than John McCain, less Eugene McCarthy than Jimmy Carter."

In other words, he's a more complex man than the one-dimensional populist being portrayed in the media today.

A more photogenic blog

I've added a photo of me to the top of the blog there (the backdrop is our backyard grape vine). Why the pic? To combat a problem us initial people frequently face: Are we of the male or female persuasion?

For some odd psycho-linguistic reason, I've received about 20 emails from people over the past year who think my name is Jessica. Something about "JD" and "Lasica" morphing into a Jessica.

For the record, it's the New & Old Testament-friendly Joseph Daniel.

Pirates of the Internet

Steven Levy in this week's Newsweek: Pirates of the Internet. A proposed bill says if you share a single tune with your pals online -- as millions do every day -- you are a felon. Penalty: up to five years in jail. Excerpt:

My guess is that the vast majority of those 60 million file sharers would never steal a physical object from the store. In a mixture of self-interest and rebellion theyíve taken the measure of the record industryís karma (overpriced CDs, a history of ripping off artists), noted that stealing files isnít like stealing stuff (maybe theyíll buy a disc later) and concluded that file-sharing isnít that bad.

Start-up launches `digital newsstand'

From today's Mercury News:

Louis Borders is best known for starting two companies: the hugely successful bookstore chain that bears his name, and Webvan, the dot-com grocer that went belly-up in spectacular fashion.

Now, Borders is getting back into the game. On Monday, he launched KeepMedia, a Redwood Shores start-up that serves as a ``digital newsstand,'' offering subscribers access to archives of more than 140 magazines and several newspapers for a flat monthly rate of $4.95.

Unless they come up with more than this -- say, content tied to tablet PCs -- I don't see the compelling business proposition that will prompt people to pony up $5 a month, given the notoriously tough sell of online subscriptions for magazine and news content.

Universal Music defends DRM, P2P litigation

Internet.com:

NEW YORK -- Larry Kenswil, the president of Universal Music Group's (UMG) eLabs unit, is defending the recording industry's decision to use Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology alongside a litigation strategy to stamp out music piracy, arguing that the survival of the industry was dependent on copyright protection initiatives.

In a lively keynote presentation at the Jupiter Plug.IN Conference & Expo here Tuesday, Kenswil slammed pundits who have been "trying to dictate how to reinvent the music business" by encouraging the theft of copyrighted works.

"We are battling a nasty infection of image-itis. The tobacco company can kill us. The package food companies can clog our arteries. The oil companies can provoke wars. But, apparently, there's no industry more despicable than the music industry. We are hated just because we refuse to acknowledge the public's God-given rights to steal music," said Kenswil, referring to the piracy epidemic that online file-sharing represents to the music industry. ...

Arianna gets ready to run

Editor David Talbot has a report in today's Salon: At a meeting of Hollywood and progressive supporters in her West L.A. home, Arianna Huffington gets ready to run for governor. Her goal: Take Sacramento and shake Washington.

It's not official yet, but she's off and running. That was the message at Arianna Huffington's home in posh Brentwood, Calif., on Sunday afternoon, where several dozen political activists and advisors gathered to hear the author and Salon columnist make her case for jumping into the race to recall California Gov. Gray Davis. The only thing that would keep Huffington out of what is shaping up as an electoral free-for-all would be the sudden entry of a major Democratic rival to Davis -- and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the only likely such 800-pound gorilla, is still rejecting entreaties to rescue the party from the rapidly melting Davis.

Great news.

More on the file-sharing wars

SF Gate: Advice to Avoid Copyright Litigation

... "We won't win any popularity contests. We don't really care what people think, except we want them to know that it (file-sharing) is illegal," [RIAA spokeswoman Amy] Weiss said. "It's unpopular, it's not pretty, but it's the right thing to do for all the people involved in the music industry."

BBC News: File-Sharers Fight Legal Moves

RIAA picks a political veteran as new CEO

Katie Dean of Wired News has the story on the music recording industry's selection of a new CEO: Mitch Bainwol, former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, will take the reins in September.

The voting rights struggle of the digital age

My friend Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation has a new commentary up called The Voting Rights Struggle of Our Time. She participated in a study of electronic voting security.

The biggest problem with computerized voting systems is that they are not transparent. Some who think we don't need a paper trail tend to portray those of us who insist we do as paranoid conspiracy theorists. But any reasonable person who takes a moment to think about it quickly understands why it's not a good idea to trust 100 percent computerized, paperless voting systems run on secret software.

On a similar note, John Schwartz in the NY Times had this the other day: Computer voting is open to easy fraud, experts say.

And Don Hazen, editor of AlterNet, has this: A voting and democracy primer.

'Day to Day' debuts this week

Slate founding editor Michael Kinsley is among the first guests on the new public radio show Day to Day, co-produced by Slate and NPR News, debuting this week.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

One last byline for Vincent Canby

Now that's one prolific writer: The New York Times's front-page obituary of Bob Hope carries the byline of Vincent Canby, a Times writer who has been dead himself since 2000.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Music customers: Out of U.S., out of luck

The NY Times picked up on the problems with portability of iTunes Music Store tunes outside of the U.S.: Out of the U.S. and Out of Luck to Download Music Legally. Here's the likely culprit:

... Before a song can be distributed online, the labels must first clear two sets of copyrights ó those for the sound recordings and those for the songwriter's publishing rights. American music labels have in many cases licensed those rights overseas to different companies ó agreements that sometimes must be negotiated one artist at a time to regain international digital rights. And since copyright laws in other nations can vary from those in the United States, those discussions also must often take place country by country. ...

Forget Arnold, Meet Georgy

So Arnold isn't running in the California governor recall election, but Georgy is. Dang, she's even got a blog! And an out-of-the-ordinary online guestbook. And the Washington Post's Howie Kurtz is a fan.

Debunking Internet hoaxes and scams

I'm quoted in today's Chicago Tribune in Maureen Ryan's article, Did you hear the one about men hunting women with paintballs? Lead:

The story had sex, violence and, well, more sex. In other words, the "Hunting for Bambi" controversy was a dream come true for the news media and outraged commentators. Too bad it was a scam.

Because this is as much a story about the recurring phenomenon of Internet hoaxes as it is about the Bambi incident, here are some observations I sent along to the Tribune's reporter:

A week doesn't go by that a relative or friend doesn't send me an e-mail saying they had 'heard this on the Internet' and wondered if it was true. I finally put up a Web page to steer people to hoax-debunking sites that size up rumors that spread on the Net like an unchecked virus. For better or worse (and it's clearly both), the Internet has become another news medium. And we're still flummoxed about what and who we should trust online.

I'm always amazed at the credulity of people who tend to believe something just because they read it on the Internet. We need to fine-tune our BS meters by expressing skepticism each time we come across a far-out story from an unverified source. Over time, the Internet helps us develop reputation filters and circles of trust to help us filter out the nonsense.

Newspapers and television newscasts seem to be abdicating their traditional role of verifying the accuracy and truthfulness of certain stories, and that role has been taken over by a new breed of Web sites that specialize in debunking Internet hoaxes.

For a story like Hunting for Bambi, a story editor at a newspaper or TV station tends to see it as a soft-news feature, a story about what a wacky world we live. They won't commit the resources to tracking down its truthfulness because it's too good to pass up and they don't believe the subject matter warrants serious treatment.

But for Snopes, Urban Legends and other hoax-buster sites, they're in the business of tracking down the credibility of this story. In the years to come, they'll play an increasingly important role in the media landscape.

Some last thoughts:

Two weeks after 9/11, my niece received an email from a friend's aunt's boyfriend, calling for a nationwide boycott of Dunkin Donuts. The basis? The supposed existence of a video showing the Arab owners of a Dunkin Donuts franchise in Lyndhurst, N.J., cheering the attack on the World Trade Center, a supposed sighting of the owner of a Dunkin Donuts store in Cedar Grove, N.J., burning the American flag, and a customer who allegedly saw a U.S. flag on the floor covered with Arabic writing in a Dunkin Donuts store in Little Falls, N.J. I told my niece the stories were obvious fabrications at a time when terrorist jitters and a hint of xenophobia were in the air.

In this age of lightning-speed hoaxes, I'd like to see newspapers and magazines publish a recurring 'reality check' column. Report on the rumors floating around cyberspace, their genesis, and their level of truthfulness or fabrication.

Later: Ken reminds us to Check Your Hoax-o-Meter.

First chapters of new books

The New York Times: First Chapters page delivers opening pages of hundreds of fiction and non-fiction books. I've been advocating this for a long time.

This is a good start, though I can't understand why publishers are squeamish about delivering what they promise. This excerpt from Wired: A Romance, for example, offers only the first four grafs.

Thanks to Susan H. for the pointer.

The Press: Time for a New Era?

I'm not quite sure what the Jayson Blair scandal has to do with "objectivity" -- does subjectivity somehow equal fabrication? -- but former Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley has an opinion piece that I generally agree with: Major media should stop wearing "objectivity" on their sleeves. Still, I wish Bartley's essay outlined a philosophy to replace the flamed-out wreckage of objectivity. Certainly fairness and balance -- rather than subjectivity and shallow partisanship -- should be among the principles undergirding the traditional news media's core precepts.

AOL 9.0: A year too late?

Susan Mernit asks: Did AOL 9.0 come out a year too late?

Interactive innovations in journalism

Just got word of this:

Batten Award Finalists Pioneer Novel Interactions

COLLEGE PARK, MD ñ Five newsroom initiatives that used technology in innovative ways to involve people in the news have been selected as the first finalists in the new Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.

The $10,000 winner and two $2,500 runners-up will be announced Sept. 15 at the Batten Awards Symposium in Washington, D.C., according to Jan Schaffer, director of J-LAB: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, the University of Maryland center that sponsors the awards. The symposium will showcase the winnersí efforts and other journalism innovations around the country.

ìThese newsrooms have really risen to the challenge of doing good, fundamental storytelling in fresh, exciting ways,î said Bryan Monroe, chairman of the Batten Awards Advisory Board and Knight Ridder assistant vice president/ news. ìThey should serve as models for other newsrooms, big and small, showing that all it takes to create innovative journalism is a great idea, a bit of time, and, most of all, the will and the leadership to make great things happen.î

Visit www.j-lab.org to view these finalists and other notable entries: :

ï Minnesota Public Radioís ìBudget Balancer,î a 19-page Web game that challenged users to fix the stateís $4.2 billion deficit by cutting programs and raising taxes without spending too much political capital; 7,000 visitors submitted 11,000 budgets.

ï The Chicago Tribuneís ìWhen Evil Struck America,î a CD-ROM time capsule distributed to more than 1 million subscribers on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks. Interactive and easy to navigate, it boosted single-day street sales of the newspaper by 100,000.

ï The San Francisco Chronicleís ìTwo Centsî project, a ìvirtual man-on-the-streetî effort involving a database of more than 1,450 ìfield correspondents,î residents who contribute and react to articles, opinion pieces and a standing op-ed column.

ï MSNBC.comís ìThe Big Picture,î a sophisticated series of in-depth guided tours on three subjects ñ Iraq, the 2002 elections, and the Oscars ñ that integrated video, audio, text, interactive polls and games into playful, yet informative, multimedia packages intended to give the big-picture overview on the topics.

ï VillageSoup.com for its community media Web sites that are delivering homespun news and information to three Maine towns, along with interactive virtual tours and e-mails of scenic postcards.

NYT front pages on file

Ryan posts the secret to digging up digital images of the New York Times's print front pages going back 18 months.

The Road to Babylon

From the August issue of Harper's magazine: The Road to Babylon: Searching for targets in Iraq, by Lewis H. Lapham.

War inspires dueling decks

This was a fun piece from yesterday's Merc on dueling playing card decks with polar political views of the war in Iraq. A Catholic school teacher in San Jose has sold 10,000 decks of her "Operation Hidden Agenda'' playing cards.

A Texas recall?

Hmm. Is there any way for Texans to recall Gov. Rick Perry and the other jokers who are trying to gerrymander Texas' Congressional districts?

Back to business

Both the Monterey Aquarium and Capitola were great fun. Finally getting my summer tan. (Here's a beach scene from last summer.) Thanks for the birthday wishes. Now back to journalism business.

File-sharers show anger, remorse

Amy Harmon in today's Times: Subpoenas Sent to File-Sharers Prompt Anger and Remorse.

Birthday dinner in Monterey

My wife, 4-year-old and I are heading out the door now to Monterey. Bobby has never seen such an amazing aquarium before.

It's my birthday today, so we'll be dining in Pacific Grove and spending Monday in Capitola. Not bad.

California smackdown: Arnold vs. Arianna?

Sheila asked for my 2 cents about the weirdness gripping the California political scene these days. Here's what I emailed her:

This is not politics as usual. If Arnold Schwarzenegger ran in a GOP primary, he would be facing the usual scrutiny by the Republican right wing over his straying from the party line on social issues like abortion and gun control. But Republicans here are absolutely apoplectic about Gray Davis. (Itís strange: Democrats have no love for him because heís an empty suit with no core values ñ a pro-death penalty opportunist who has never granted a pardon, who supports three strikes, who builds more prisons, and who canít be counted on to support progressive causes.)

In such an environment, the GOP will turn to anyone they think has the best shot at toppling Davis. They know Issa has no chance of winning, so they may turn to the best alternative. Given the collapsed time frame, Arnold has the name recognition and may have a legitimate chance. Although a majority of Californians polled say heís not qualified to be governor, the likely winner (if the recall is successful) may come away with only 25% or 30% of the vote, in an election when only 25% or 30% of eligible voters may turn out.

The most formidable candidate entering the race would be former LA mayor Richard Riordan ñ who should have been Davisí opponent last November, had Davis not meddled in the GOP primary. Riordanís perceived as a moderate, and heíd be the favorite to succeed to Davis if Davis is booted out.

Itís hard to say if an Arianna Huffington candidacy would grain traction. Sheís on the right side of most issues Californians care about. If Democrats, Greens and independents coalesce around her as the progressive candidate, she could have a shot.

By the way, we could care less if the national media are enthralled with an Arnold vs. Arianna street fight or not. (The NY Times' Maureen Dowd weighs in today from 3,000 miles away.) Weíll have to live with this governor for the next three years, long after the recall election fades from the national spotlight.

'Wired': The Coolest Magazine on the Planet

The Sunday NY Times books section reviews ''Wired: A Romance,'' a book by one of the magazine's contributing editors, Gary Wolf. Excerpt:

''Wired: A Romance'' is less a love story than a theological autopsy of a religion that flourished and went away in less than a decade. Things happened quickly for Wired -- remember ''Internet time''? At its height in the mid-90's, Wired could be found in the lobbies of venture capitalists, on the light tables of designers, underneath the coffee cups of computer geeks and in the middle of the only conversation that seemed to matter. It was, briefly, the coolest magazine on the planet.

Draft Arianna for guv

Here's an excerpt from an email I just sent to MoveOn.org:

I would like to request that the leadership of MoveOn poll its members who live in California to vote on whether to urge Arianna Huffington to enter the race in the recall election for California governor.

Such a poll would be straightforward:

Regardless of whether you favor or oppose the recall of California Gov. Gray Davis, voters on Oct. 7 will be asked to vote on a slate of replacement candidates. Would you favor voting for:

- No replacement candidate, banking on Gov. Davis' victory in the recall.

- Arianna Huffington to run on a progressive platform.

- Green Party candidate Peter Camejo.

- Another candidate. (Who?)

It's a longshot, but if Arianna enters the race and no big-name Democrats do, California could wind up with a better governor.

Later: Just read a story that informs us that Bay Area activists have formed a group called Runariannarun.com.

Lance nearing tour win

After today, it looks as though Lance Armstrong will win the Tour de France.

Meanwhile, the Times looks at the Wired Tour de France.

Open Source Gets Down To Business

Technology Review: Open Source Gets Down To Business. Robert Lefkowitz has an MIT degree in engineering and a track record as a Wall Street IT director. Now he's trying to push open source software from the dominion of alpha geeks into the corporate mainstream.

How to Tell if the RIAA Wants You

I interviewed Fred von Lohmann again last night at the Illegal Art event at Oakland's Black Box, and he mentioned the new database-driven site created by the Electronic Freedom Foundation to help file traders find out whether they've been issued a subpoena from the Recording Industry Association of America. Wired News has the story.

Bush by the numbers

A friend just sent this fact sheet:

$5,600,000,000,000
Budget surplus when President Bush took office
(Office of Management and Budget, 2001)

$1,900,000,000,000
Bush deficiet over the next five years
(Office of Management and Budget, 2003)

3,100,000
Jobs lost since Bush took office
(Bureau of Labor Statistics)

83,000
Monthly job loss since Bush took office
(Department of Labor)

3 out of 5
Number of unemployed Americans who live in Senate seats up in 2004
(Bureau of Labor Statistics/DSCC release)

$1,000,000,000
Weekly cost of Iraq campaign to U.S. taxpayers
(Department of Defense, 2003)

1,000,000
Number OF US Military personnel not receiving child tax relief checks
(Children's Defense Fund)

250,000
Number of children who have a parent on active duty
(Children's Defense Fund)

10
Number of nuclear devices North Korea is expected to have by year's end
(William Perry, former Secretary of Defense)

8%
Percent of non-US troops serving in Iraq
(Department of Defense, 2003)

War, peace and Nieman Reports

Jeff Jarvis has a followup to his one-sided war of words with the editor of Nieman Reports. Based on that red flag, I was wary about turning in my article last night. But it turned out that today I had a very amicable and cordial editing experience with her. Was she scared straight by Jeff, or did Jeff just have a bad experience? I suspect the latter, but perhaps we'll never know.

I'll post my article when it's closer to the magazine's publication date.

No lock on the door at digital home

Internet.com: No Lock on the Door at Digital Home. According to a Jupiter Research Home Networking Report, one-third of broadband users are interested in installing a home network to listen to music files on a home stereo.

Digital Mix/Illegal Art gathering tonight

I'll be heading to Oakland tonight to attend this:

Digital Mix: A special night celebrating 'illegal art'

On July 25, the Electronic Frontier Foundation will host a night of music, art, and conversation to celebrate digital culture. Hosted at the Black Box in downtown Oakland, this special BayFF will bring up-and-coming artists of electronica, digital film, and illegal art together with leaders from the cyber-rights movement. Lawsuits and legislation have become the weapons of choice for dealing with file-sharing and cultural recycling ("sampling"); come out and discover what all the hype is about. Between laptop music, hip hop, and industrial performances, you will hear from people who are fighting to protect new forms of expression and cultural distribution from the attacks of the entertainment industry. This is an all-ages event.

Performers:
~ Kat5
~ Meanest Man Contest
~ Uprock
~ Mochipet
~ Freshblend

Speakers:
~ Fred von Lohmann (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
~ Glenn Otis Brown (Creative Commons)
~ Ray Beldner (Illegal Art)

Where: Black Box at 1928 Telegraph Ave., Oakland
When: Friday, July 25th, 8 p.m. - 2 a.m.
Cost: $5 suggested donation.
Easy BART access @ 19th St. Station in Oakland.
For more information please contact: katina@eff.org

iTunes Music: do not cross the border

From Shawn Yeager (via both the Politech and Interesting People lists) comes this bit of news:

I just received a harsh lesson in DRM and record label-driven policy that may be of interest to those on your lists who are Apple customers and may be leaving the United States in the future. Having purchased a number of songs from the Apple Music Store while in the US and using a US funds credit card, I regrettably didn't read the fine print. I've now discovered that if you leave the country, your songs may just disappear, as mine have.

I've recently moved to Canada and just this week had a problem with my PowerBook that called for me undertaking a reinstall. After firing up iTunes and attempting to play purchased songs, I was asked to reauthorize those songs, using the Apple ID associated with the purchase. No problem, I thought. This is the Apple Music Store, not PressPlay or MusicNet. I paid for these songs and they're mine. Silly me. Apparently, if you change your contact address and/or have your US credit card address changed, as I did, you are no longer able to play the songs you paid for while on US soil.

After going back and forth with AMS customer support, they pointed me to the terms of sale policy, and there it is in the very first paragraph.

So, shame on me for not reading the fine print. But if you're spending money with Apple and plan a departure from the States any time soon, your
money would be better spent on little round platters.

David Brooks gets plum NYT column

David Brooks, a contributor to the New York Times and a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, has been named an Op-Ed page columnist for the paper. Brooks, also a regular on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, is usually wrong on the issues, but at least he's intellectually honest, unlike the George Will/Bill O'Reilly/Robert Novak/Rush Limbaugh/Cal Thomas wing of right-wing commentators.

Jayson Blair's next bold move

NY Post: Jayson Blair, the fiction-writing former New York Times reporter, has landed writing assignments from Esquire and Jane magazines. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Gwyneth, the Grateful Dead and Google

News.com: Gwyneth, the Grateful Dead and Google.

Everything is watching you

New in Salon: We're well on our way to a world where every product has a tiny radio transmitter embedded in it. Privacy activists are not happy, but big corporations are licking their lips.

RIAA, Colleges Seek Piracy Fix

Katie Dean in Wired News: Universities are collaborating with the music and movie industries to bring entertainment to college dorms legally.

The latest on enhanced TV

Click on Jennifer Aniston's dress to buy it, or watch a Friends episode with seven different endings. Wired News looks at the latest on interactive television, or enhanced TV.

TechTV producer accidentally goes topless

Allyourtv.com has the story of TechTV producer Cat Schwartz, a blogger who gained Internet fame this week in an unintended way:

... Several days ago, Schwartz posted some comments on her weblog, along with a couple of artfully cropped photos of herself. They're a little flirty, and very appealing.

Now here comes the embarrassing part. Photoshop generates small preview images for the pictures it produces and hides them in the original image. If you change the image drastically, the preview thumbnail is changed too. But if you don't make a major change, and just crop the photo without changing the file name, the preview thumbnail stays the same. Which means someone can open up the cropped photo in Photoshop, and see a thumbnail version of the original picture.

So if you (or in this case, Catherine) used a couple of topless photos as the basis for pictures you cropped with Photoshop and posted on your weblog....well, let's just say that the online world seems to be filled with lonely techno geeks with too much time on their hands. And it took a couple of them about ten seconds to discover her mistake, and begin posting copies of the original topless photos. ...

Bustamante takes a pass on governor grab

Saw my bud and poker partner, veteran Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Walters, on PBS' NewsHour last night being interviewed on the Gray Davis recall election. His latest: Bustamante embraces -- then shuns -- a bold grab for power.

Baby Louise turns 25

Louise Joy Brown as a teen with her parents, John and Lesley Brown in Britain.

Baby Louise, the world's first test tube baby (who points out she was actually conceived in a petri dish), turns 25 today. Here's an account in the San Jose Merc about the legacy of Louise Brown, born in Oldham, England, on July 25, 1978.

As the author correctly notes in "There's a line to be drawn -- before we get to 'enhanced' people," the public is quite capable of holding a fairly sophisticated set of opinions on the subject of genetic engineering of humans. Excerpt:

We've had five years to get used to the idea of human cloning -- and a Gallup poll in May shows 90 percent opposition.

Most people have no trouble drawing firm distinctions between technologies that help families and those that work against our common humanity. Overcoming infertility is a good thing; fiddling with our genetic heritage is not. The fact that a slope may be slippery does not mean we need to go careening down it.

Absolutely dead on.

Should we know the name of Bryant's accuser?

New in OJR: Mark Glaser says the mainstream media have a longstanding tradition of not publishing the names of alleged rape victims, but no such code of behavior governs the Internet.

Meantime, in case you missed this AP story: Officials: Bryant Accuser Was Hospitalized.

A dangerous mind

NY Times: House majority leader Tom DeLay will travel to the Middle East and take with him a message of grave doubt that the region is ready for a Palestinian state.

DeLay, a former pest exterminator from Sugar Land, Texas, is bringing his right-wing zealotry to "the world's most complex and troubled region," as the Times put it. The fact is, the Middle East has been ready for a Palestinian state for about five decades; it has just never had the full backing of a U.S. administration.

Welcome to the Big Darkness

Sheila also points us to Hunter S. Thompson, who's back with a vengeance: Welcome to the Big Darkness, the gonzo journalist's first ESPN column since June 10. In it he touches briefly on Kobe Bryant ...

You thought O.J. was bad? Wait until we get a taste of the K.B. scandal. It will be like a feeding frenzy and a long parade of cannibals.

... before moving on to other matters:

The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.

New journalism collides with old

Following up on last night's news that Jeff Jarvis killed the piece he was writing for Nieman Reports and instead published it on his blog, Sheila chimes in: Sparks fly as new journalism collides with old.

RIAA leaning on kids' parents

AP story in Wired News: RIAA Leaning on Kids' Parents

Parents, roommates -- even grandparents -- are being targeted in the music industry's new campaign to track computer users who share songs over the Internet, bringing the threat of expensive lawsuits to more than college kids.

Within five minutes, if I can get hold of her, this will come to an end," said Gordon Pate of Dana Point, California, when told by The Associated Press that a federal subpeona had been issued over his daughter's music downloads. The subpoena required the family's Internet provider to hand over Pate's name and address to lawyers for the recording industry.

Seeing double

Looks like the Washington Post has found a new way to beef up its content: Run a story on Hollywood's anti-piracy efforts on Tuesday, and run the same story with a different headline on Wednesday.

Researchers uncover 'huge flaws' in e-voting system

From the EFF:

In response to today's release of research about critical security flaws in e-voting systems, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged immediate passage of e-voting legislation to prevent election fraud.

Security researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University announced today that they have discovered numerous serious security flaws in what they believe is one of the leading e-voting systems in the country -- the Diebold Electron Systems' e-voting terminal.

Among the security flaws discovered were several ways in which individual voters could vote multiple times in a given election. The researchers also uncovered methods permitting voters to "trick" the e-voting machines into allowing them system administrator privileges or even terminating an election before tallying all legitimate votes. ...

A first for moblogging news in Japan

OJR: A clip of breaking news video sent in from a camera phone airs on Japan's NHK network. A trucker videotaped a huge pileup on a busy expressway with his cell phone, and he called the clip in to NHK. A few minutes later, he's live on the phone while his grainy video of the deadly accident plays on the air. "Moblogging" is poised to change the dynamics of news coverage forever. OJR reports from the First International Moblogging Conference, held in Tokyo earlier this month.

'The Restaurant' outsmarts TiVo

Lost Remote: NBC's innovative new reality show, "The Restaurant," takes product placement to a new level, helping "TiVo proof" the broadcast. The show is also testing a new funding model: American Express, Coors and Mitsubishi are financing the show in exchange for extraordinary on-air presence. "I think the audience will decide if it's a good model," said Ben Silverman, who helped conceive the show. As for the restaurant, its eight phones are ringing off the hook and reservations re booked well into the immediate future.

Recall election set for Oct. 7

(Democratic) California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante has set Oct. 7 as the date for the election to recall (Democratic) Gov. Gray Davis, a day after (Democratic) Secretary of State Kevin Shelley certified that enough signatures had been gathered.

Already notice the difference here between the Dems are doing in California and what the Republicans did in Florida?

I'm no Davis fan, but the recall vote -- financed by a right-wing congressman with a criminal history -- makes a mockery of the political process. (Davis was re-elected just 9 months ago.) Even folks like conservative commentator David Brooks say it's an abuse of the democratic process. And it'll cost us $30 million while wreaking havoc on election officials.

If the Republicans think they're immune from exteme partisan politics, they're dreaming. This, I fear, is the opening salvo in a protracted, bloody political war in the Golden State.

As for the media? You can bet they'll have a field day with Ahnold throwing his size 18 hat into the ring.

'A Blogger is His Own Editor'

Oh, oh. Not sure what I started. In early June I was approached by the editor of Nieman Reports, who told me she wanted to publish an issue on weblogs, and could I suggest some of the leading lights in the field. Jeff Jarvis, Doc, Dan, Sheila and Tom Regan were some of the names at the top of the list. Most of them have been approached.

But Jeff has some issues with how his manuscript has been edited. (I'm finishing mine up now.) Sorry about that, Jeff. The flap is fairly interesting, judging by the two dozen postings on his "world without editors" item. Excerpt from his rant:

Journalism still needs to escape its closed, think-tank think and get out there and use the tools the audience is using. They need to read what the audience is writing. They need to listen. That's what is so damned exciting about weblogs. Weblogs give you the chance to hear your audience and what they really care about -- if only you are ready to listen.

And now Ed Cone and Dan weigh in.

I disagree with Jeff, who thinks the only good editor is no editor. I've had some great editors over the years. But some pretty overbearing ones, too, who want you to write the story in their head. That's called a taskmaster, not an editor.

Google Images question

For the heck of it, I plunked in a couple of search terms in Google images.

I didn't find what I expected.

And I found what I didn't expect.

The first was RIAA president Cary Sherman. I've seen some really second-rate photos of Cary, who's really a dashing fellow, in the media. So I figured some media outlet might be interested in purchasing this photo (the original is larger).

Anyone know why this photo wouldn't turn up on a search of "Cary Sherman" in Google Images? I don't know how Google does its algorithm, but the other images on this page don't all contain the word Cary.

Google says this about its image indexing, but I don't know if I quite believe it:

You can search more than 425 million images on the Web with Google's Image Search. However, there are many more images on the Internet that Google has not yet added to its index. Google is working to crawl more images to increase the quality and quantity of images returned when you search, so it's likely we will add the image you're looking for in the near future.

Images that I had on my WELL site are still up there, even though I pulled the plug on my WELL site in March. And none of the hundreds of images on jdlasica.com seem to be up there, even though they went up at the same time. Also, none of the dozens of photos on my weblog seem to be up there, though I don't know if Google indexes blog photos.

Meantime, Alta Vista Images seems to do a much better job, turning up shots of mine like this, while Lycos Multimedia does a poor job.

Next I plunked in the term "Chacala," because a national magazine just emailed me asking for photos of this coastal Mexican village. My own images of Chacala didn't turn up -- but some folks I know who run the non-profit Mar de Jade resort and Spanish language immersion school there borrowed my photos. (I would have said yes if they asked.) Five of the six photos on this page are mine.

Saving the Net

Doc Searls in the Linux Journal: Saving the Net. Excerpt:

... The Internet has been blessedly free of regulation for most of its short life. But the companies that provide most Internet service--telcos and cable companies--are highly regulated. They are creatures that live in a regulatory environment that bears little resemblance to a real marketplace. As natives of regulatory habitats, they see nothing but Good Sense in regulating the Net. After all, any regulation will help assert their ownership over the sections of the Net they control and legitimize the limitations they place on what their customers can do with, and on, the Net.

These companies have deep alliances with the big "content": industries (in the case of cable, they are one and the same) that want to see control extended beyond the Net, into the devices that connect to the Net, including PCs, which have also been blessedly free from regulation. Intellectual property protections have been built into consumer electronics devices for a long time. These guys see no reason why PCs, as a breed of consumer electronic device, shouldn't be subject to the same restrictions, in the form of digital rights management (DRM), run by content providers and burned into hardware at the factory. In fact, they're counting on the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to prevent any hacks around those DRM systems. Once those cripples (for which there is zero demand on the customers' side) are in place, you can count on Dell, HP and Gateway PCs and laptops that are much less ready to run Linux. ...

Downloaders face the music

SF Chron: Firm sleuths out illegal file sharers. BayTSP tracks down IP addresses, IDs of music downloads. And a chart of illegal downloads.

Witch hunt against the BBC

From mi compadre Robert Scheer: The witch hunt against the BBC. Excerpt:

As Paul Reynolds, a veteran BBC military affairs analyst, said of the British intelligence dossier cited as the source for Bush's now-repudiated claim about Iraq's nuclear program: "Of the nine main conclusions in the British government document 'Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction,' not one has been shown to be conclusively true."

Blogs in the workplace

Chicago Tribune (registration required): Firms Find Way To Avoid Getting Blogged Down. Originally used by individuals for online diaries, the Weblog format is being adopted by more employers as a way to replace the e-mails, faxes and phone calls that slow office life.

Blogger journalism

Just tripped across this example of first-person blog journalism from last week. Blogger Andy Baio reported on the elderly driver who careened through a farmerís market just outside Baioís office window in Santa Monica, Calif., on July 16. He had been walking down that street 20 minutes before.

Baio described ìthe dead and dying" lying in the street and relayed first-hand reports from office co-workers who saw the driver. He also posted a map of the accident scene, laid out a detailed chronology of events, and pointed to media coverage and photographs of the bloody scene.

A new look for Pho

The Pho list, which discusses the intersection of art and commerce, has redesigned its home page and begun to list weblogs kept by its members.

New Music Download Service Launches

AP story:

PC owners got a new Internet music download site Tuesday, one boasting the cheapest per-song rates but carrying many of the restrictions that have stymied rival music services. ...

Different songs on BuyMusic have different restrictions for how often they may be burned onto CDs or copied to other PCs or portable music devices. They can all be burned onto CDs at least once. ...

Music companies play Whack-a-Mole

Toronto Globe & Mail:

It hardly matters that Shawn Fanning is has a new music-downloading program. His legal, fee-based file-sharing network is going to be mauled by the very same monster he unleashed when he gave the world Napster.

Consider the case of a company called NYCWireless, a loose collection of people offering "hotspot" connections to the Internet. Its co-founder Anthony Townsend received a warning in the spring from the recording industry saying someone on his network was downloading music illegally, and unless that person was stopped, the industry would prosecute.

But NYCWireless operates a series of hotspots in New York's Bryant Park, meaning passersby with nothing more than a laptop computer and a Wi-Fi card can log in while sitting on a park bench, without having to register first. There is no way Mr. Townsend could warn the user or even identify who it was....

Why the creative shall inherit the economy

Virginia Postrel in Wired mag: The Aesthetic Imperative. Why the creative shall inherit the economy. (By the way, that's an illustration of Virginia, not of Scott Menchin, who drew it.) Plus, views from Bruce Sterling, Rob Glaser, and J. Bradford DeLong.

The FCC's media ownership snafu

My bud Jane Black has a new piece in Business Week Online about FCC chairman Michael Powell's failture to make a case for relaxing rules on media mergers, leading to a populist revolt.

And Salon has a new article, Congress to Big Media: Not So Fast, suggesting that the growing public backlash against the FCC's media merger rules could create problems for the Bush administration.

M-I-C-K-E-Y: He's the Leader of the Brand

LA Times: Disney is honoring the 75th birthday of Mickey Mouse and boosting its merchandising by planting the character in "hip new places," such as ESPN and "Sex and the City." Thanks to the keen-eyed IWantMedia for yet another pointer.

Hollywood intensifies anti-piracy efforts

Hollywood Reporter:

In Hollywood's most aggressive attempt to dissuade people from pirating movies on the Internet, the studios, networks and motion picture theaters will roll out a series of trailers and TV commercials with anti-theft messages.

Stressing the importance of copyright protection, the campaign begins Thursday evening with an unprecedented television "roadblock" on more than 35 network and cable outlets, with each network donating 30 seconds in the first primetime break.

On Friday, every major exhibitor will donate time to play daily trailers on all screens in more than 5,000 U.S. theaters. The campaign strategy was created and executed under the auspices of the MPAA Public Relations Council, which is made up of the MPAA's Public Affairs team and the senior public relations executives from the seven member studios: 20th Century Fox, MGM Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios, Warner Bros. Studios and Buena Vista Pictures, an affiliate of the Walt Disney Co.

"We're talking directly to the public about the dangers of piracy," MPAA president and CEO Jack Valenti. ...

Dan G. isn't impressed.

Read a mag via wi-fi

Wireless Week: Zinio Systems has signed a deal to deliver more than 70 digital magazines, such as Business Week and Motor Trend, to users of wireless Internet network Wayport. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Key 'Influentials' Are Web Junkies

Advertising Age: "Influentials" prefer the Internet to any other media for acquiring daily information, says a new study from WashingtonPost/Newsweek Interactive. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Art and commerce collide in book world

Business Week: Three novels set in the book publishing world -- "The Last Days of Publishing," "Foul Matter" and "The Storyteller" -- dissect the sorry state of the industry. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

House Votes to Roll Back Key Patriot Act Provision

Reuters: Last night the House passed an amendment to the Commerce, Justice, State Appropriations bill denying funds to enforce the "sneak and peek" provision of the Patriot Act. The act was cosponsored by Dennis Kunich, a liberal's liberal, and Butch Otter, a true blue conservative. Thanks to Politech for the pointer.

Hunting for Bambi

Here's the Hunting for Bambi website that everybody's talking about (the official site is down due to overwhelming demand). Bambi has the news media flummoxed. (Is it real? Snopes says no: Has a Las Vegas business been conducting hunts of naked women for customers armed with paintball guns?)

Pvt. Jessica Lynch comes home

Australian media blogger Greg Tingle asked my opinion about the media attention lavished on Pvt. Jessica Lynch's return home today. Here's my response:

I was astonished to see that for some time today, Washingtonpost.com had the Jessica Lynch homecoming as its main story, complete with a large color photo. It's true, Jessica's story does garner eyeballs, as America searches for an affirmation to emerge from the Iraq rubble.

Where have you gone, Jessica Lynch, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you ...

My take on this affair is that the media have been playing up the story with a journalistic hook of 'is this really a story or a media creation by the military?,' but nonetheless the end result is more flag-waving coverage that satisfies our post-9/11 hunger for patriots and heroes, real or imagined.

Death too good for Uday and Qusay

Salam Pax on the news that Uday and Qusay were killed Tuesday:

just to tell you that i would be really dissapointed if Uday and Qusay were really killed in Mosul. this is just the easy way out for them. they should have been humiliated in public, images of them handcuffed and being pushed around.

Of blogs and SWAT teams

LLRX.com (for which I've written a couple of articles) features an Internet Roundtable on weblogs: Just why are they so darn exciting? Among those taking part: Jerry Lawson, Brenda Howard, Dennis Kennedy, Ernest Svenson (aka Ernie the Attorney) and Tom Mighell.

Good quote from Ernie: "I have no idea where my blog is heading. I just hope that it doesnít wind up in a place where the SWAT teams have to storm in."

Reviews of wack job Ann Coulter's new book

The trouble with getting three Sunday newspapers -- we get the NY Times, SF Chron and San Jose Merc -- is that it takes a few days to read them all. So, belatedly, don't miss:

- Dan Gillmor's important and plaintive plea to elected officials to leave a paper trail, even when going electronic, to ensure the integrity of our elections.

- Two looks at right-wing wack job Ann Coulter's new book, Treason, in the NY Times (Blond Lightning on the Far Right) and the SF Chron (Dangerous Minds). It's scary that this book -- which, among other things, defends Joe McCarthy as a true patriot -- is No. 2 on the non-fiction list.

The Times' review is more thorough, but the Chron's piece is more fun. Outtakes from the latter:

What do you say to the physically mature, opinionated female pundit (suspected of leveraging her sex) who begins Chapter 6 of her new book with the very same sentence? You say, "Ms. Coulter, in light of the insipid invective, appalling ignorance, slipshod scholarship and egregious dishonesty oozing from your new book, 'Treason,' I'm not surprised. You richly deserve the title of pseudo-intellectual and give real meaning to Jacques Barzun's complaint about 'the menace of the untaught -- the menace to themselves and to us.' But I'm not sure what to conclude about your publisher." ...

although Ann Coulter's "Treason" may be proof positive of Samuel Johnson's observation that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," what really matters is how many of her die-hard fans (a.k.a. stupid white males) seize upon it as the gospel truth, and vote accordingly.

The book is a mess! Coulter's first paragraph contains the vile suggestion that liberals constitute an inferior race. The evidence? "Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence." Essence? According to George Fredrickson's history of racism, "It is when differences that might otherwise be considered ethnocultural are regarded as innate, indelible, and unchangeable that a racist attitude or ideology can be said to exist."

Coulter may substitute a "political" difference for the "ethnocultural" out of ignorance, but her objective seems clear -- to supplant "nigger" and "communist" with "liberal," as the new conservative epithet describing inferiors beyond redemption and thus unfit for consideration. ...

Coulter's pseudo-racist view of liberals enables her to adopt the notorious demagogue, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, as her intellectual pimp. Her book attempts to rehabilitate McCarthy by proving he was "indispensable." ...

Entertainment industry sets up RespectCopyrights.org

Dan Gillmor in today's eJournal: Respect Copyright, Says a Pious Hollywood. Sony, Disney, AOL and the other big movie studios have set up a cleverly named site, Respect Copyrights.org, as part of a campaign (also including TV commercials and in-theater pitches) aimed at persuading us all of a single point -- that it's wrong to infringe on copyrights.

A fresh look at ActiveWords

Seattle Times: New utility program makes it easier to open Windows. A look at the fabulous, time-saving PC app ActiveWords. Thanks to Doc for the pointer. (And I just used ActiveWords to supply Doc's link.)

Schools stay mum on file traders' names

News.com: Schools stay mum on file traders' names.

Some universities are balking at stepped up demands from the recording industry to unmask alleged student file swappers, citing procedural uncertainties over an avalanche of subpoenas filed with the courts in recent weeks.

Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Tuesday said they are barred from immediately handing over the names of students to the recording industry by the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, which requires institutions to notify students before releasing any personal data.

Both schools said they were opposing the subpoenas on procedural grounds, rather than contesting the RIAA's right to the information. As a result, the refusals could further delay--but are unlikely to derail--the recording industry's efforts to unmask the identities of file swappers and ultimately file suit against them.

"MIT of course has a policy of complying with lawfully issued subpoenas," said professor James Bruce, vice president for information systems at MIT, in a statement. "In this case we have been advised by counsel that the subpoena was not in compliance with the court rules that apply to these subpoenas, and did not allow MIT time to send any notice as the law requires." ...

Political Advertising -- From the IRS

More from Mitch Ratcliffe at Correspondences.org:

We received a letter today from the Internal Revenue Service, informing us that thanks to Congress and President George W. Bush, "We are pleased to inform you.... This new law provides broad-based tax relief, including a $400 increase in the child tax credit for 2003...."

This is another example of malfeasance by the Bush Administration, not because the Federal government is borrowing from future generations (more about that in a moment), but because the letter is a political advertisement for the Bush campaign. It doesn't simply inform taxpayers about a change in rates, it spins the very debatable point that this is a "broad-based" form of tax relief.

The letter should not have been sent with the adjectival "broad-based" appended to the phrase tax relief, since the child tax credit is only one aspect of a much larger tax cut that, cumulatively, results in far greater benefits for the richest one percent of the U.S. population than for the typical American. The Secretary of Treasury, John Snow, should resign for having abused the neutral bureaucratic function of the Internal Revenue Service mailing priveleges for political purposes.

But, I also want to send some feedback from one of the Americans the Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 ostensibly benefits, my seven-year-old daughter, Geneva. When I opened the letter and read it, then handed it to my mother-in-law, who said "What are they sending $800 [for my two kids] when the government doesn't have the money?" my daugher said: "They're sending us $800, why are they doing that when they don't have the money -- where does it come from?"

I explained that even though the Federal government doesn't have the extra money to write these checks, it is borrowing the money and will pay it back later, with interest. My daughter, who is already certain she will own a business someday (a pet shop currently, but she's got entrepreneur written all over her, as she's always making and selling things), asked who would be paying it back.

"Americans will pay it back, in the future. You and the other kids who will have jobs someday will pay it back."

"I don't want my store to pay back $800 we got this year," Geneva said. "That's not fair." I didn't go into how some very wealthy families are getting a lot more than $800. But I did ask her a question to make sure she understood that we pay taxes every year, anyway: "Would you be willing to pay some money to the government every year for schools and other things it provides?"

Here, Genny was precise and the President should listen to my little girl: "Daddy, of course I'd pay taxes to let us live, but President Bush shouldn't be taking $800 out of my pocket when I am a grown up." ...

Snow won't resign, of course -- he's doing exactly what the White House wants -- but perhaps the campaign of a Democratic candidate for president can use Mitch's daughter in a campaign commercial. Maybe Geneva at a chalk board, doing the math of what this will cost her in the future. And it'll add up to way more than $800. And maybe she's got a friend whose daddy got way more than $800 back, and who won't have to pay back a cent when she grows up. Just riffing here.

News media vastly underreport U.S. death toll in Iraq

From the July 17 E&P: Media Underplays U.S. Death Toll in Iraq. Soldiers Dead Since May Is 3 Times Official Count.

Any way you look at it, the news is bad enough. According to Thursday's press and television reports, 33 U.S. soldiers have now died in combat since President Bush declared an end to the major fighting in the war on May 2. This, of course, is a tragedy for the men killed and their families, and a problem for the White House.

But actually the numbers are much worse -- and rarely reported by the media.

According to official military records, the number of U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq since May 2 is actually 85. This includes a staggering number of non-combat deaths. Even if killed in a non-hostile action, these soldiers are no less dead, their families no less aggrieved. And it's safe to say that nearly all of these people would still be alive if they were still back in the States.

Nevertheless, the media continues to report the much lower figure of 33 as if those are the only deaths that count.

A Web site called Iraq Coalition Casualty Count is tracking the deaths, by whatever cause, of U.S. military personnel in Iraq, based on official Pentagon and CENTCOM press releases and Army Times and CNN casualty trackers. Their current count is 85 since May 2. ...

The followup is that the article set records for reader e-mail, with readers saying they want the press to cover all U.S. casualties.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

LA Times cartoon prompts Secret Service inquiry

The Los Angeles Times' publishing of this cartoon of someone pointing a gun at President Bush's head prompted a visit by a Secret Service agent.

Even though the cartoon was pro-Bush.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Digging for Googleholes

I had missed this Steven Johnson piece in Slate last week: Digging for Googleholes. Google may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent.

Participatory journalism at Correspondences.org

Correspondences.org has this Mission Statement:

Think of this as a "newspaper out of the box" where everyone can contribute. We're building a portal for reporting of events by participants and commentators covering all aspects of events around the world, locally and internationally: politics, business, economics, technology, medicine, media and culture.

Somehow I hadn't seen this site before. Good stuff here, like Today's Political Rewards, a regular feature. Yesterday Mitch Ratcliffe posted an entry on the day's Department of Defense contracts and the political contributions made by the companies that received them.

It's the sort of thing newspapers used to do.

Later: Mitch emails: "I'm hoping that if enough people pick up their own little hobby reporting efforts, so that we dissect the system that exists today, we can create something greater than the newspaper and CNN rolled into one genetically mutated civic journalism."

Google feature outclasses news sites' own search

San Jose Merc:

Google has added another drawing card to its popular Web site by introducing a tool designed to make it easier to find specific news stories.

The new feature, available by clicking on an advanced search link in Google's news section, enables users to limit news searches to particular publications and dates. The tool also narrows searches to stories containing an exact phrase.

Mountain View-based Google's online newsstand covers 4,500 English language sources, up from about 4,000 sources 10 months ago.

Now here's the cool thing: Even though many news sites close off their content behind a pay firewall after 7 or 14 days, at least some of that content can be accessed through Google's advanced search function. For example, you can retrieve free news going back one month or so on the New York Times by using Google's search rather than the Times' own search.

Now, maybe Google will enhance its clunky alert service so that search results will be relevant, timely, and site-specific. Tonight, I got a Google alert notice for my search term "copyright." The result?:

Copyright Notice Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company.

Convergence news

San Jose Merc: EchoStar deal gives SBC bundling edge

In its strongest push yet to be all things to all people, SBC Communications announced a deal with EchoStar Communications on Monday that will allow consumers to bundle satellite television with their phone and Internet services.

The agreement marks the first time a company has said it will offer customers all five of the key telecommunications services: local, long-distance and wireless phone, and broadband Internet and television.

The Greek islands revisited

I still get emails every month from strangers who plan to visit the Greek islands, thanks to the travel article I wrote about the honeymoon my wife and I spent there seven years ago this month. (Apparently it turns up fairly high in Google.) Here's the article I wrote, and the photo gallery of Crete, Santorini and Naxos. (Newspaper travel editors are underpaid and underappreciated, but I still think they're some of the luckiest souls around.)

And now comes a NY Times travel piece about Santorini that brings back memories: A Shining Arc in the Aegean.

Who's unpatriotic now?

Another dead-on Paul Krugman column in Tuesday's NY Times: "By cooking intelligence to promote a war that wasn't urgent, the administration has squandered our military strength. This provides a lot of aid and comfort to Osama bin Laden ó who really did attack America ó and Kim Jong Il ó who really is building nukes."

Quote of the Week

"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq." --Paul Wolfowitz

Thanks to Reason Online for the pointer.

John Gilmore: Patriot or wacko?

Reason Online has a much too kind portrait of EFF co-founder John Gilmore: Multimillionaire John Gilmore is suing the government to remain anonymous. Is this the last stand for privacy?

After you check out the Reason article, go to Jeff Jarvis for a reality check.

Gilmore's a strange bird. He agreed to be interviewed on the subject of digital rights management for the book I'm writing about the entertainment industry's clash with tech renegades. Then he never answered several followup emails to confirm a time and place for the interview.

Blogger-journalist story

Several months ago I read an item about a journalist who raised a few thousand dollars through reader contributions on his weblog to finance his trip to some locatoin. I thought I blogged it, but now I can't find it, and I need it for inclusion in a report I'm editing on participatory journalism. (And no, it's not Andrew Sullivan.)

Can anyone remember the episode and send me a pointer?

Later: Well, I just stumbled upon it myself: Freelance journalist-blogger David Appel appealed to his readers readers to let him to pursue an investigative story.

Still later: Patrick Phillips of IWantMedia and Joseph L. Hall both emailed to jog my memory about Back to Iraq. Christopher Allbritton reported breaking war news from Iraq on his Web site, funded by 320 people who donated $14,334. Business Week Online asks: Are pay-to-read sites the future of journalism? (Steve Levy mentioned it here.)

Coupons for Microsoft customers

Internetnews.com:

The State of California won its antitrust suit against Microsoft. Now, the payoff: coupons good for cash off on still more hardware and software.

California consumers' four-year-old class action suit against Microsoft came to a close on Friday, when the San Francisco Superior Court granted preliminary approval of the settlement.

Starting today, Californians can call a toll-free number to file their claims and request vouchers worth from $5 to $29. Consumers and businesses that bought Microsoft software for use in California between February 1995 and December 2001 can apply for refund vouchers. The catch is, the vouchers can only be used to buy hardware or software -- from Microsoft or from competing vendors. ...

Gates taking Corbis public?

Puget Sound Business Journal (alas, registration required): Recent moves at Bill Gates-owned Corbis may signal preparation for a stock sale.

Gallup expands into consulting

NY Times: The Gallup Organization, best known for its polls, is now looking to turn into its very own media outlet with its publishing, management consulting and market research businesses.

"We want to turn into our very own media outlet," said James K. Clifton, 51, Gallup's chairman and chief executive.

ReplayTV's New Owners Drop Features That Riled Hollywood

NY Times: ReplayTV's New Owners Drop Features That Riled Hollywood.

ReplayTV's new 5500 model, which will go on sale next month, will no longer be able to skip entire commercials automatically without recording them or to send recorded programming over the Internet to other ReplayTV users outside a home network. The recorders will, however, still be able to store large libraries of programming indefinitely and allow users to skip manually through recorded commercials in 30-second increments.

DVDs to buy but not keep

NY Times: DVD's Meant for Buying but Not for Keeping.

To help consumers avoid [rental late]fees, while trying to develop new revenue, the Walt Disney Company's home video division plans to test market a new type of DVD that will be priced about the same as a rental but never needs to be returned -- because it stops working after a fixed period of time.

Amazon Plan Would Allow Searching Texts of Books

NY Times: Amazon Plan Would Allow Searching Texts of Many Books.

Armstrong increases Tour lead

Breaking news: Amazingly, Lance Armstrong survives a crash and increases his Tour de France lead from 15 seconds to 1 minute 7 seconds.

DallasNews launches an editorial blog

Terrific use of weblogs by a surprising source: the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News. From their new DMN daily EdBlog page:

Welcome to the EdBlog, an electronic journal by the editorial board of The Dallas Morning News. The opinions you read below are those of the individual writers, not necessarily the collaborative opinion of the board as a whole, whose opinions you read on the Editorial page each day in the newspaper.

This blog is designed to allow board members to share their evolving thoughts on a variety of issues, and to allow readers a window into our opinion-development process.

A reader in Houston writes:

The new DMN blog is amazing. I can't even express how thrilled I am that a major metro paper is DIRECTLY RESPONSIVE TO ITS READERS!! (Sorry for the all-caps, I guess I got a bit carried away. :-)

I hope the experiment works, and I hope it shows a good example for other papers to follow.

Here's the message I just posted to the online-news list:

I can't tell you how impressed I am with this major step by the Dallas Morning News. Editorial pages have pretty much become an anachronism in the interactive age. By opening up the process to the readers, DallasNews accomplishes several things:

- It puts a face, or at least a name, to the editorial opinions of an otherwise faceless institution, bringing an unprecedented amount of transparency to the process.

- It frees its editorial writers to write in a language that isn't dry-as-dirt opinion-by-committee.

- It lets the public see that the DMN edit board isn't monolithic and that individuals hold differing opinions. Over time, readers will get a sense for these writers' political viewpoints and temperament.

It's still early in the process, and likely DMN will need time to iron out some wrinkles. For example, organizationally, I wish we could see topic threads developed instead of jumping from one subject to another (especially when one writer is responding to another, and the previous post is 6 or 7 posts below). Also, I had hoped to see some interactive element -- a place for readers to post comments. (Dan Gillmor's eJournal launched such a feature a week or two ago.) Having editorial board members mix it up and match wits with readers in a contest of ideas -- now that would be something.

Those reservations aside, I hope many newspapers follow the Dallas Morning News' lead here. Congratulations.

Later: Dan Gillmor weighs in. Dan's right, but at least DMN is heading in the right direction.

Dean turns Web into gold

In today's San Jose Merc: Howard Dean turns Web into gold.

Truth or cover-up?

Moveon is raising funds to place this MisLeader ad in major newspapers around the country.

Play Your Tunes Away From Home

Katie Dean in Wired News looks at Muse.Net, which lets you access your digital music collection from any computer.

Spy Kids' Director Goes Digital

Wired News: Spy Kids' Director Goes Digital.

Topic forums on KenRadio

Ken Rutkowski announces a makeover of his KenRadio website. He writes: "Currently the daily show is receiving over 130,000 daily listeners and I hope to get many of those listeners to subscribe to the new site. The new site is all built around forums and topics, something like blogs where wireless, digital filmmaking, IT Law and all kinds of other important current issues are discussed." He is asking select individuals to run their own forum. He hopes to launch the new site this week. Here is a sneak peek.

The missing Al Qaeda link

NY Times op-ed: In all the debate over the disputed claims in President Bush's State of the Union address, we must not forget to scrutinize an equally important, and equally suspect, reason given by the administration for toppling Saddam Hussein: Iraq's supposed links to terrorists.

Can albums survive the Net?

Jon Pareles in the Sunday NY Times: Can music albums survive the Internet?

Tri-Valley magazine launches

I'm a contributing writer for Tri-Valley Magazine, a regional magazine here in the SF East Bay, which just launched its first issue. The website just went live. I've got two articles in Issue #2, including a profile of customized motorcycle legend Arlen Ness. Another Sacramento Bee alum, Ed Murrieta, is the restaurant critic.

Doc contacts George W.

Doc Searls contacts the White House.

How to appeal to the young

Steve Outing in E&P on how news sites can appeal to younger readers.

Making accessible minds

Mark, who has spinal muscular atrophy, is writing a blog. Excerpt:

I didn't start writing this blog as a way to scream "Hey, look! I'm a cripple and I blog!" I just wanted something that would get me to write more. And because of my disability, stuff happens in daily life. It can be something funny or silly or just frustrating, but it's usually interesting enough for me to want to write about it. And that's probably where the novelty comes in. Many of the Anonymous You have probably never met someone with a disability, at least not a visible disability. By reading my stuff, you get a little peek into a life that's at once very similar and very different from your own life. You may read this site and feel amusement, puzzlement, voyeuristic fascination, or even pity. I have no idea.

Thanks to the Reverse Cowgirl for the pointer.

'Piracy = terrorism'

News24.com reports the latest outrage: Piracy linked to terrorism.

Paris -- The head of Interpol called on Wednesday for a global crackdown on software and music piracy, saying the illicit proceeds help finance al-Qaida, Hezbollah and other terrorist networks.

Business Week on our connected digital homes

Special report from Business Week on digital homes: Net hookups are spreading from the study to the living room, bedroom, and kitchen.

Music Prohibition jihad?

Somewhat overheated piece ("escalation in violence" to refer to legal actions?) from The Register UK: RIAA nails 1,000 music-lovers in 'new Prohibition' jihad.

RIAA issues hundreds of subpoenas

AP story on Salon:

The music industry has issued at least 871 federal subpoenas against computer users this month suspected of illegally sharing music files on the Internet, with roughly 75 new subpoenas being approved each day, U.S. court officials said Friday.

The effort represents early steps in the music industry's contentious plan to file civil lawsuits aimed at crippling online piracy.

Subpoenas reviewed by The Associated Press show the industry compelling some of the largest Internet providers, such as Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Cable Communications Inc., and some universities to provide names and mailing addresses for users on their networks known online by nicknames such as "fox3j," "soccerdog33," "clover77" or "indepunk74."

The Recording Industry Association of America has said it expects to file at least several hundred lawsuits seeking financial damages within the next eight weeks. U.S. copyright laws allow for damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song offered illegally on a person's computer, but the RIAA has said it would be open to settlement proposals from defendants.

News from the future

OK, this is weird. By typing certain search terms into the NY Times' search engine -- in this case, Britain Tried First -- the first seven results come back dated from the years 2083, 2084, 2088 and 2089.

Lawmaker seeks greater FBI role in online piracy war

Internetnews.com: Lawmaker Seeks Greater FBI Role in Online Piracy War.

Remaking Iraq

John Kifner in today's NY Times: Britain Tried First. Iraq Was No Picnic Then. Lead:

The public, the distinguished military analyst wrote from Baghdad, had been led "into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor."

"They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information," he said. "The Baghdad communiquÈs are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows."

He added: "We are today not far from a disaster."

Sound familiar?

That was T. E. Lawrence ó Lawrence of Arabia ó writing in The Sunday Times of London on Aug. 22, 1920, about the British occupation of what was then called Mesopotamia. And he knew. For it was Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence and the intrepid British adventuress Gertrude Bell who, more than anyone else, were responsible for the creation of what was to become Iraq. A fine mess they made of it, too.

OK, this is strange. I went back to snag the url -- and the article has disappeared. Poof!

Sunday: OK, it's up now.

Dem activists push surprise as potential Terminator stopper

San Jose Merc: If the recall to Gov. Davis makes the ballot in California, as now seems likely, Bay Area activists are stirring things up even more by trying to recruit reformed conservative Arianna Huffington to enter the race as the progressive alternative. Excerpt:

In any other election, the notion of progressive Californians rallying behind Huffington might seem strange. She's a onetime anti-feminist Republican, New-Age devotee who divorced her husband after the former California congressman outed himself as gay in Esquire magazine.

Yet Arianna advocates say the movement to draft the syndicated columnist seems to be gathering steam.

Leading the charge is Bay Area activist Van Jones, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in San Francisco. Jones and the fledgling campaign are preparing to unveil their Web site -- www.RunAriannaRun.com -- to generate enthusiasm.

``She's anti-drug war, tough on corporate crime, anti-war, anti-Bush, pro-environment, pro-electoral reform -- and smart as hell,'' Jones wrote in an e-mail sent out last week to dozens of activists. ``If anybody could pull this off, it would be Arianna.''

So far, Huffington has done nothing to knock down the idea. ...

The movement ... is already drawing surprise support from Green Party candidate Peter Camejo, who said he might bow out of the race and support Huffington if she embraces a progressive agenda.

``I'd be perfectly willing to withdraw and consider supporting someone else,'' Camejo said Friday. ``I think it could be rather interesting if she got into the race.'' ...

Bryant's secretive life pierced

Tim Kawakami in today's San Jose Merc: Kobe Bryant's secretive life shaken.

A blog headache

Hey Sacramento Bee blogger/California Insider Daniel Weintraub: In this country we like to read newspapers, books, magazines and websites with flush-left columns.

Newspapers should let reporters blog away

Journalismjobs.com: My colleague, Online Journalism Review editor Michelle Nicolosi, is on the same track in thinking that newspapers would be well-served by letting their reporters take up weblogs. She says in a Q&A: "More papers should think about setting up reporters with blogs. Working on them should be optional -- not mandated -- and reporters should be given the freedom to have a little personality in their blog, to link offsite, to post pretty much as they see fit. If they do a bad job, cancel it."

Pentagon retaliates against GIs who complained

From today's San Francisco Chron: Pentagon retaliates against GIs who spoke out on TV. Sad, but typical.

Bush approval ratings come down to earth

Interesting snapshot of public opinion: President's approval rating sags over Iraq, economy. Key graf:

Half in the poll, 50 percent, said it was likely they would support Bush's re-election, while almost that many, 46 percent, said it was unlikely.

Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage?

Somehow I missed this Jon Pareles piece in last Saturday's NY Times. It's going to disappear behind a pay firewall tomorrow, so I'm reproducing it below. Excerpt:

[Dylan] was simply doing what he has always done: writing songs that are information collages. Allusions and memories, fragments of dialogue and nuggets of tradition have always been part of Mr. Dylan's songs, all stitched together like crazy quilts. ...

The hoopla over " `Love and Theft' " and "Confessions of a Yakuza" is a symptom of a growing misunderstanding about culture's ownership and evolution, a misunderstanding that has accelerated as humanity's oral tradition migrates to the Internet. Ideas aren't meant to be carved in stone and left inviolate; they're meant to stimulate the next idea and the next.

Because information is now copied and transferred more quickly than ever, a panicky reaction has set in among corporations and some artists who fear a time when they won't be able to make a profit selling their information (in the form of music, images, movies, computer software). As the Internet puts a huge shared cultural heritage within reach, they want to collect fees or block access. Amazingly enough, some musicians want to prevent people from casually listening to their music, much less building new tunes on it.

Companies with large copyright holdings are also hoping to whittle away the safe harbor in copyright law called fair use, which allows limited and ambiguously defined amounts of imitation for education, criticism, parody and other purposes. The companies also want to prevent copyrighted works from entering the public domain, where they can be freely copied and distributed. The Supreme Court recently ruled, in Eldred v. Ashcroft, that individual copyrights could extend for 70 years after the life of the creator, or in the case of a corporation, for 95 years. As a result, Mickey Mouse will be kept out of the public domain ó that shared cultural heritage ó until 2024.

The absolutely original artist is an extremely rare and possibly imaginary creature, living in some isolated habitat where no previous works or traditions have left any impression. ...

Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage?
By JON PARELES

n alert Bob Dylan fan was reading Dr. Junichi Saga's "Confessions of a Yakuza" (Kodansha America, 1991) when some familiar phrases jumped out at him. There were a dozen sentences similar to lines from songs on Mr. Dylan's 2001 album, " 'Love and Theft,' " particularly one called "Floater (Too Much to Ask)."

In the book a father is described as being "like a feudal lord," a phrase Mr. Dylan uses. A character in the book says, "I'm not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded"; Mr. Dylan sings, "I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound." Mr. Dylan has neither confirmed nor denied reading the book or drawing on it; he could not be reached for comment, a Columbia Records spokeswoman said.

The Wall Street Journal reported the probable borrowings on Tuesday as front-page news. After recent uproars over historians and journalists who used other researchers' material without attribution, could it be that the great songwriter was now exposed as one more plagiarist?

Not exactly. Mr. Dylan was not purporting to present original research on the culture of yakuza, the Japanese gangsters. Nor was he setting unbroken stretches of the book to music. The 16 verses of "Floater" include plenty of material that is not in "Confessions of a Yakuza," although the song's subtitle and its last line ó "Tears or not, it's too much to ask" ó do directly echo the book. Unlike Led Zeppelin, which thinly disguised Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor" as "The Lemon Song" and took credit for writing it, Mr. Dylan wasn't singing anyone else's song as his own.

He was simply doing what he has always done: writing songs that are information collages. Allusions and memories, fragments of dialogue and nuggets of tradition have always been part of Mr. Dylan's songs, all stitched together like crazy quilts.

Sometimes Mr. Dylan cites his sources, as he did in "High Water (for Charley Patton)" from the " `Love and Theft' " album. But more often he does not. While die-hard fans happily footnote the songs, more casual listeners pick up the atmosphere, sensing that an archaic turn of phrase or a vaguely familiar line may well come from somewhere else. His lyrics are like magpies' nests, full of shiny fragments from parts unknown.

Mr. Dylan's music does the same thing, drawing on the blues, Appalachian songs, Tin Pan Alley, rockabilly, gospel, ragtime and more. "Blowin' in the Wind," his breakthrough song, took its melody from an antislavery spiritual, "No More Auction Block," just as Woody Guthrie had drawn on tunes recorded by the Carter Family. They thought of themselves as part of a folk process, dipping into a shared cultural heritage in ways that speak to the moment.

The hoopla over " `Love and Theft' " and "Confessions of a Yakuza" is a symptom of a growing misunderstanding about culture's ownership and evolution, a misunderstanding that has accelerated as humanity's oral tradition migrates to the Internet. Ideas aren't meant to be carved in stone and left inviolate; they're meant to stimulate the next idea and the next.

Because information is now copied and transferred more quickly than ever, a panicky reaction has set in among corporations and some artists who fear a time when they won't be able to make a profit selling their information (in the form of music, images, movies, computer software). As the Internet puts a huge shared cultural heritage within reach, they want to collect fees or block access. Amazingly enough, some musicians want to prevent people from casually listening to their music, much less building new tunes on it.

Companies with large copyright holdings are also hoping to whittle away the safe harbor in copyright law called fair use, which allows limited and ambiguously defined amounts of imitation for education, criticism, parody and other purposes. The companies also want to prevent copyrighted works from entering the public domain, where they can be freely copied and distributed. The Supreme Court recently ruled, in Eldred v. Ashcroft, that individual copyrights could extend for 70 years after the life of the creator, or in the case of a corporation, for 95 years. As a result, Mickey Mouse will be kept out of the public domain ó that shared cultural heritage ó until 2024.

The absolutely original artist is an extremely rare and possibly imaginary creature, living in some isolated habitat where no previous works or traditions have left any impression. Like virtually every artist, Mr. Dylan carries on a continuing conversation with the past. He's reacting to all that culture and history offer, not pretending they don't exist. Admiration and iconoclasm, argument and extension, emulation and mockery ó that's how individual artists and the arts themselves evolve. It's a process that is neatly summed up in Mr. Dylan's album title " `Love and Theft,' " which itself is a quotation from a book on minstrelsy by Eric Lott.

Hip-hop, ever in the vanguard, ran into problems in the mid-1980's when the technique of sampling ó copying and adapting a riff, a beat and sometimes a hook or a whole chorus to build a new track ó was challenged by copyright holders demanding payment even for snippets. Although sampling was just a technological extension of the age-old process of learning through imitation, producers who use samples now pay up instead of trying to set precedents for fair use.

That might be a good idea; a song that recycles a whole melody (like Puff Daddy's productions) calls for different treatment than a song that borrows a few notes from a horn section, and courts are not the best place for aesthetic distinctions. But in practice, it means fewer samples per track, and it can make complex assemblages prohibitively expensive. Mixes heard only in clubs and bootleg recordings are now the outlets for untrammeled sampling experiments. Yet, samples have extended and revived careers for many musicians when listeners went looking for the sources.

Mr. Dylan has apparently sampled "Confessions of a Yakuza," remixing lines from the book into his own fractured tales of romance and mortality on " `Love and Theft.' " The result, as in many collages and sampled tracks, is a new work that in no way affects the integrity of the existing one and that only draws attention to it.

Dr. Saga has no need to keep his book isolated. He told The Associated Press that he was ecstatic to have inspired such a well-known songwriter. And as news of the Dylan connection surfaced, sales of "Confessions of a Yakuza" jumped. Yesterday it was No. 117 among the best-selling books at Amazon.com, and No. 8 among biographies and memoirs.

Of course, Dr. Saga can't be too possessive about the writing. The book is an oral history, told to him by the yakuza gangster of the title. It's another story that has drifted into humanity's oral tradition. Mr. Dylan's complete lyrics are freely available at www.bobdylan.com. As for the song, if someone asks Mr. Dylan for sampling rights, it would be only fair to grant them.

Bryant charged with sexual assault

Breaking news from AP: Kobe Bryant charged with sexual assault. In this ESPN followup, Bryant says, "I made the mistake of adultery."

Kazaa offspring block RIAA

Yahoo News: Two derivatives of the popular Kazaa peer-to-peer filesharing service now actively attempt to block scans by the RIAA and other agencies, escalating the P2P war to a new level.

Thanks to Sheila for the pointer.

OT rules would exempt journalists

Overtime could be a thing of the past for many journalists under the Labor Department's regressive new rules.

Localism's last stand

More on Congressional efforts to overturn the FCC's new media ownership rules, from William Safire in yesterday's Times:

... I scorn all polls except those that support my views. According to this week's Pew Research poll about the F.C.C. plan (to break the ownership barrier and permit media crossover), "By roughly 10 to one (70%-6%), those who have heard a lot about the rules change say its impact will be negative." Nearly half of those polled had heard about this issue, despite conflicted media coverage.

This growing grass-roots grumbling against giantism is getting through to legislators ordinarily cowed by network-owned station managers or wowed by big-media campaign contributions. Unfortunately, the any-merger-goes F.C.C. chairman, Michael Powell, has derided objections to his diktat as "garbage," and the White House strategist Karl Rove dismisses the depth of voter resentment that Democrats will be able to exploit next year. ...

Public opinion is on the march. Some in-house pollster should awaken President Bush to a bipartisan sleeper issue that could blindside him next year.

Washington Post's future is online

CBS MarketWatch: A new content deal with Yahoo News is one of the ways in which the Internet is playing a big part in helping the Washington Post boost its presence outside the Beltway. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Gov. Dean finishes up his guest-blogging

I'm still following presidential candidate Howard Dean's guest-blogging on Larry Lessig's blog. (And so are the folks on Slashdot, where his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, waded into the capital of nerddom and gave assurances that it is, indeed, Dean, and not one of his assistants, who's at the keyboard and blogging.) His last entry should go up tonight.

Rolling Stone ad defends file sharing

From the EFF:

An ad from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) intended for the more than 60 million U.S. residents sharing music files online appeared in Rolling Stone's August 9 issue, hitting the stands today.

The EFF ad -- part of an ongoing campaign to protect the rights of people sharing music online while compensating artists -- shows several music fans in a police-style lineup accused of sharing files online using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology like Kazaa and Morpheus. The ad copy reads, "Tired of being treated like a criminal for sharing music online?" and "File-Sharing: It's Music to Our Ears." ...

Blogging for bucks

Not many bloggers make money for providing links, but independent journalist Rafat Ali does. Ali publishes PaidContent, a blog-cum-newsletter, and is doing pretty well, thank you. Wired News asked him how he does it.

Rafat Ali: I have only been in this full time for about five or six months, so it's early days, but I am slated to get about $60,000-$80,000 in advertising/sponsorship alone this year. ...

Ali: I am lucky in that I have done freelance Web design, so I'm pretty comfortable with design and technical issues. I use Movable Type, which is very good. I still think pMachine is the best nano-publishing tool but I am too lazy to move from MT to PM. ...

AOL flack a leading contender for RIAA chief

From the NY Post:

John Buckley, the head spokesman for AOL Time Warner's America Online division, is a leading contender to become head of the Recording Industry Association of America, according to sources close to the RIAA. Buckley, according to sources, is a finalist to get the key lobbying job, and the RIAA could make an announcement within the next couple of weeks.

Buckley was seen schmoozing last month at the going-away party for Hilary Rosen, who announced in January that she would step down as the RIAA's chief.

Buckley has strong ties to the Republican Party, a credential that the RIAA has been seeking in candidates. He was the longtime head of public relations for Fannie Mae, and served as communications director on Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign.

He has also held flacking jobs for the National Republican Congressional Committee and Ronald Reagan's 1984 campaign.

Prior to entering politics, Buckley was a rock critic for both the Village Voice and Rolling Stone.

Pods unite

Buy a new Volkswagen Beetle and you get an iPod. Here's the new commercial.

Trade a song, go to jail

The latest outrage from the House Dems, reported by Jon Healey in the LA Times:

To some music lovers, paying $18 for a CD with only one good song is a crime.

To some members of Congress, letting someone copy a song online without paying for it should be a felony.

A bill introduced by senior Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee would make it easier for federal prosecutors to bring felony charges against people who offer at least one song, movie or other digital file on Kazaa or other public computer networks.

The proposal by Reps. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Howard L. Berman (D-North Hollywood), which is co-sponsored by four other Democrats, also would make it a crime to record movies as they're being displayed in a theater or to register a Web site under a false name. ...

As Mike wryly (but accurately) notes on Dave Farber's list: "Given that anything you write is copyright without a filing, that means that sending anything will be a violation."

British arms expert dies suddenly

From today's NY Times:

LONDON, July 18 ó The body of a man believed to be the arms expert at the center of a high-profile dispute over the validity of government weapons intelligence was found today near the expert's home in Oxfordshire.

The arms expert's wife told the police shortly before midnight that her husband, Dr. David Kelly, had been missing since he left his home Thursday afternoon saying he was going for a walk. The body was discovered this morning on a hillside bridle path five miles from the Kelly residence in the town of Abingdon.

The acting superintendent of the Thames Valley police, Dave Purnell, said a formal identification would be made on Saturday, but he added that the description of the body matched that of Dr. Kelly. Calling the case an "unexplained death," Superintendent Purnell declined to discuss possible causes or answer questions about whether there were any suspicious circumstances. ...

A new scapegoat in Nigergate?

From Writerrific:

President George Bush blamed CIA Director George Tenet for allowing Bush to falsely claim in his state of the union address that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa for a nuclear weapons program. Now, a senior CIA official has fingered presidential assistant Robert Joseph as having pushed to keep the known lie about Niger uranium in the speech, according to the Washington Post.

White House e-mail system becomes less user-friendly

John Markoff in the NY Times: Do you want to send an e-mail message to the White House? Good luck. Those who want to send a message to the president must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a form that asks if they support White House policy.

Tracking down the intruders

I've been keeping track of hacker attacks on my computer over the past two weeks. (I'm a tempting target with an always-on cable modem connection.)

I don't know if this is foolhardy or not, or if other people have done this on their blogs, but I'm going to publish the IP addresses of the intruders. I had thought that I was getting repeat company, but each of these intruders tried to hack my machine only once. (Or were caught, at any rate, by my firewall.)

Geobytes offers this very cool page for tracking the location of IP addresses. Here's the rundown:

Backdoor/SubSeven Trojan horse attacks:

213.152.81.27:2312 (Alexandria, Egypt)
62.0.27.102 (Nazareth Illit, Israel)
24.197.20.140:2658 (Radford, Virginia)
4.41.216.79:3768 (Covina, Calif.)
24.141.58.173:1985 (Burlington, Ontario, Canada)
12.248.230.220:3777 (Rolling Meadows, Illinois)
68.82.85.25:1929 (Newark, Delaware)
67.9.80.55:4175 (Australia)
80.179.65.168:4361 (Tel Aviv, Israel)

Attempt to connect to local computer using the NetBus Trojan horse:

67.81.69.114:4008 (Paramus, New Jersey)

House panel votes to overturn FCC rules

Breaking news from the Washington Post: House Panel Votes to Block Media Ownership Rules

In a bipartisan vote, the House Appropriations Committee today moved to block the Federal Communications Commission from easing rules that have limited concentration in the nation's commercial television markets.

The panel's action applied to a key part of a landmark June 2 FCC decision that would enable networks to acquire stations reaching up to 45 percent of the national audience. By preventing the FCC from spending funds to carry out its new ruling, the committee effectively restored the old limit of 35 percent.

The White House opposed the committee's action, and White House budget officials said they would recommend that the president veto the 2004 Commerce, Justice and State Department spending bill, to which the provision was attached, unless it was deleted. ...

Local Web-only news sites storm the suburbs

Mark Glaser in OJR: Does the future of small-town community journalism reside with the Internet? Meet three entreprenuers who are showing the way with low overhead, interactivity and local roots.

RIAA subpoenas 4 Bentley students

Gnutella News reports that four students at Massachusetts' Bentley College have apparently been subpoenad by the RIAA in what's likely to be one of, if not the first, shot of the promised RIAA bout of lawsuits against file sharers. The item is short, but the reactions are interesting.

404 page for the New York Times

Sheila also points to The New York Times story cannot be displayed, brought to us by Anthony Cox, and fills us in on how the "weapons of mass destruction" page came to be.

Taxes, Indians and violence in R.I.

This dispute in Rhode Island didn't make the news here in northern California (then again, I don't watch the local TV news). But Sheila's all over it:

Spread the "sin taxes" around -- tax fast food, SUVs, guns, not just cigarettes -- including a photo of the R.I. State Police's raid on the Narragansett Indians' new tax-free tobacco shop.

Q&A with the chief of Google News

Here's a new Q&A with the principal scientist behind Google News.

Listening in on the Supreme Court

Katie Dean in Wired News: File sharing is usually considered the province of music, but more substantive files are available to be shared. Thanks to the Oyez project, you can download MP3s of Supreme Court arguments.

Roll-your-own Net TV takes off

Wired News: Roll-Your-Own Net TV Takes Off.

The strange changing of the guard at the NYT

The LA Times' Tim Rutten dissects the odd circumstances surrounding Bill Keller's appointment as the New York Times' new executive editor.

Limbaugh as football analyst

Talk about brain-dead decisions: Right-wing talk radio's Rush Limbaugh has been hired to make weekly appearances on ESPN's Sunday NFL Countdown "to provide the voice of the fan and to spark debate on the show."

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Studios fight Internet bill in California

Jon Healey in today's LA Times: Studios Stage Fight Against Internet Bill.

These weapons of mass destruction cannot be displayed

Check it out: Go to Google, type in "weapons of mass destruction," and select the top link.

Twisting our intelligence

Nicholas Kristof in the NY Times:

After I wrote a month ago about the Niger uranium hoax in the State of the Union address, a senior White House official chided me gently and explained that there was more to the story that I didn't know.

Yup. And now it's coming out.

Based on conversations with people in the intelligence community, this picture is emerging: the White House, eager to spice up the State of the Union address, recklessly resurrected the discredited Niger tidbit. The Central Intelligence Agency objected, and then it and the National Security Council negotiated a new wording, attributing it all to the Brits. It felt less dishonest pinning the falsehood on the cousins.

What troubles me is not that single episode, but the broader pattern of dishonesty and delusion that helped get us into the Iraq mess ó and that created the false expectations undermining our occupation today. Some in the administration are trying to make George Tenet the scapegoat for the affair. But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney's resignation. ...

While the scandal has so far focused on Iraq, the manipulations appear to be global. For example, one person from the intelligence community recalls an administration hard-liner's urging the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research to state that Cuba has a biological weapons program. The spooks refused, and Colin Powell backed them. ...

Paul Krugman in the Times adds:

More than half of the U.S. Army's combat strength is now bogged down in Iraq, which didn't have significant weapons of mass destruction and wasn't supporting Al Qaeda. We have lost all credibility with allies who might have provided meaningful support; Tony Blair is still with us, but has lost the trust of his public. All this puts us in a very weak position for dealing with real threats. Did I mention that North Korea has been extracting fissionable material from its fuel rods?

How did we get into this mess? The case of the bogus uranium purchases wasn't an isolated instance. It was part of a broad pattern of politicized, corrupted intelligence.

Literally before the dust had settled, Bush administration officials began trying to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq. Gen. Wesley Clark says that he received calls on Sept. 11 from "people around the White House" urging him to link that assault to Saddam Hussein. His account seems to back up a CBS.com report last September, headlined "Plans for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11," which quoted notes taken by aides to Donald Rumsfeld on the day of the attack: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." ...

Also check out this RealAudio snippet featuring Ray McGovern, a member of the CIA for 27 years who served as the ìAll Intelligence Agentî during the Reagan administration. Heís now part of a group of former intelligence agents who are so dismayed with the intelligence used to support going to war against Iraq that they formed a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Ray McGovern says the Bush administration slanted intelligence information prior to the Iraq war. He points to an unsual pattern on the part of Vice President Dick Cheney, who visited CIA headquarters 27 times prior to the invasion.

Howard Dean guest-blogging

Here's the first in a series of weeklong postings on Larry Lessig's blog by presidential candidate Howard Dean. He talks a bit about the Internet as an open platform. Some 135 comments posted there in response so far.

Blogs for the arts

ArtsJournal has launched a new feature: ArtsJournal blogs. Here's what they say:

We've assembled some of the best writers on the arts and asked them to start blogging on their favorite subjects. Our bloggers are all heavily involved in the arts, and most of them write in other publications as well.

Good to hear of another mainstream use for blogs.

Cyberjournalism news and tips

The Media Center at the American Press Institute has just launched a new weekly e-mail digest including news, tips and commentary from CyberJournalist.net and the NewsFuture series of columns. Here's a sample. It comes out Fridays. Interested? Sign up here.

Blogs breaking logjam of journalism

Kathleen Parker in the Orlando Sentinel: Blogs breaking logjam of journalism. Excerpt:

I'm not an expert on blogging, but I am a fan. As a regular visitor to a dozen or so news and opinion blogs, I'm riveted by the implications for my profession. Bloggers are making life interesting for reluctant mainstreamers like myself and for the public, whose access to information until now has been relatively controlled by traditional media.

I say "reluctant mainstreamer" because what I once loved about journalism went missing some time ago and seems to have resurfaced as the driving force of the blogosphere: a high-spirited, irreverent, swashbuckling, lances-to-the-ready assault on the status quo. [emphasis added] While mainstream journalists are tucked inside their newsroom cubicles deciphering management's latest "tidy desk" memo, bloggers are building bonfires and handing out virtual leaflets along America's Information Highway.

Only nitpick with the article: Matt Drudge is not a blogger. Isn't now, never has been.

Thanks to Ryan of Dead Parrot fame for the pointer.

Biz2 predicted Yahoo takeover of Overture

In this Savvy Predictions Dept. comes word that two Business 2.0 staffers, Erick Schonfeld and Om Malik, predicted Yahooís purchase of Overture in the August issue of the magazine, including forecasting next steps for Yahoo after the acquisition. Yahoo's purchase of Overture was announced today.

The Biz2 issue wonít hit newsstands until next week, but it's online (available to subscribers). Here's the text of the section on Yahoo:

YAHOO BUYS OVERTURE, THEN MERGES WITH DILLERíS INTERACTIVECORP

The Price Tag: $1.4 billion for Overture; $25 billion for merger

Hereís a two-course meal that starts with a light appetizer and finishes with the M&A equivalent of a thick slab of prime Texas steak. First, Yahoo munches paid-search provider Overture. That would go down smoothly: Yahoo has almost $900 million in cash, and would likely pay with some combination of cash and its stockówhich still carries one of the richest valuations in the market. (Yahooís current price/earnings ratio is 137, higher than eBayís 101.) Through paid listings that appear as the top results whenever somebody conducts a search on Yahoo, Overture already provides about a fifth of the Web portalís ad revenueóa contribution expected to top $200 million this year. But why split that money 60-40 with Overture, as the two companiesí current deal requires? Why not take it all?

The real gut-buster is the main course: a merger with Barry Dillerís InterActiveCorp, parent of Citysearch, Expedia, the Home Shopping Network, Hotels.com, Match.com, and Ticketmaster. InterActiveCorp has a market cap of roughly $22 billion, 10 percent more than Yahooís, so the odds would be on Diller winning control. Dillerís goal is to build the largest e-commerce company in the world. Yahoo and InterActiveCorp, says one M&A banker, are a ìnatural fit.î Yahoo under CEO Terry Semel (an old Hollywood pal of Dillerís from their days as studio moguls), the banker says, is becoming ìa mini-InterActiveCorpî by also selling services over the Webótravel, dating, loans, tickets. The companies would benefit from the network effects of combining similar services like Match.com and Yahoo Personals, and Diller would be able to start feeding traffic from Yahoo to his individual properties.

WHY IT WILL HAPPEN: Overture could be a money machine for Yahoo, and the subsequent buyout by Diller would crown his campaign to become the king of e-commerce. Plusóand this is not insignificantóhe could drop that goofy InterActiveCorp name and adopt Yahoo, one of the most recognized brands in business.

WHY IT WONíT HAPPEN: Diller usually isnít wild about diluting his personal ownership stake by buying up huge things. Another possibility: Microsoft swoops in to acquire Overture before Yahoo makes its play.

THE ODDS: Yahoo-Overture, 3-to-2; InterActive-Yahoo, 10-to-1

Germans just wild about Harry Potter

Wired News: Germans just wild about Harry.

A whopper of a correction

Looks like Keller has some work to do. Consider this 2,132-word correction in today's Times. Thanks to Hylton for the pointer.

Keller named editor of NYT

Bill Keller, a columnist who has served as managing editor and foreign editor, will take over as executive editor of the NY Times on July 30. Here's coverage from E&P, AP and the NY Daily News.

File swappers look for a cloaking device

Two great reads this morning from the San Jose Merc's Dawn Chmielewski: Music file-swappers sprint to cloak identities. And Spanish Shawn Fanning is hot.

Both stories appeared next to each other on the Merc's Business page. Inexplicably, mercurynews.com continues with its policy of failing to give readers any hint that the stories are related.

Intel bets on wi-fi

NY Times: Intel bets on wi-fi.

Harry Potter and the Internet pirates

From Monday's NY Times: Harry Potter and the Internet pirates.

Playing fair a losing proposition

Sunday's Doonesbury was a keeper.

The Net, the law and free speech

Interested in the Internet, law and free speech? You'll want to read this story in Sunday's Times about Intel vs. Hamidi. You have 7 days till the toll gates go up.

Dems = pot party?

Click on this NY Times story about the Democratic candidates for president, and you get a somewhat jarring image of a marijuana plant (at least I did) in an advertisement on the page. Coincidence or product placement?

Later: A reader writes to say he's getting Nokia banner ads. Ah, well, it was too serendipitous to be intentional.

New on the ResourceShelf

I've been remiss in not pointing enough to Gary Price's invaluable ResourceShelf. New on ResourceShelf this week.

• Part 2 of an interview with Daypop's founder. Scroll down to July 9. (Here's part 1.)

• Link to video interview with the CEO of FAST Search

• A homemade transcript of a conference interview of a Walt Mossberg intervew with the founders of Google.

• Search engine personalization: An exploratory study.

Also, recently:

• Consumer Reaction to Learning the Truth About How Search Engines Work. Excerpt:

Here are the major findings of this study:

1. Most participants had little understanding of how search engines retrieve information from the Web or how they rank or prioritize links on a results page.

2. The majority of participants never clicked beyond the first page of search results as they had blind trust in search engines to present only the best or most accurate unbiased results on the first page. As a result, two-in-five links (or 41%) selected by our participants during the assigned search sessions were paid results.

3. Once enlightened about pay-for-placement, each participant expressed surprise about this search engine marketing practice. Some had negative, emotional reactions. ...

Happy birthday, Hollywood sign

Happy birthday to the Hollywood sign, which turned 80 today. As it happens, my father-in-law turns 80 tomorrow. Thanks to Adam Curry for the pointer.

The year's best gear

From the August issue of Wired, a look at some fun and cool tech toys.

Privacy rights under threat

Here's a reminder for all those members of the East Coast punditocracy who think California is wack because of its initiative process, which sometimes is the only way to bypass a compromised or out-of-touch legislature.

Privacy rights under threat by lawmakers

By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist

In the constant battle to preserve what's left of our privacy and roll back some of the invasions we've already suffered, one reality is all too clear: Elected officials are not on our side.

Last week brought the latest perversion of the public will, the cowardly refusal of the California Legislature to enact even modest improvements in financial privacy. The voters will do it instead, in a ballot measure next year.

A royalties plan for file sharing

Harvard's William Fisher in News.com: A royalties plan for file sharing.

Clampdown on students' Net access

The University of Florida has begun cutting students' Net access en masse -- not just to file-sharing networks but even Internet Relay Chat.

Matters of public record

Salon's Scott Rosenberg has something worth considering: Matters of public record, initially centering on a blogger who records Dave Winer's early postings and posts them, pre-editing, but it's really about much more than that.

Mercury News' awful op-ed pages

I've been biting my tongue, not wanting to ding my local paper since it went to a new look on its op-ed pages a month or so ago, but I've just got to say it: The San Jose Mercury News' new look for its op-ed pages is the worst redesign I've ever seen.

As a former design director, I know that readers don't like change, and more than a few of them complain every time a paper does a makeover. I'm not one of these readers. I enjoy change and welcome improvements to a publication's typography and design.

The Mercury News, under Rob Elder, who left a year or so ago to join the Santa Clara University ethics center, had what I considered the most approachable, well-designed op-ed pages in the nation. So I was horrified a few weeks back to see them trot out a new look: typography (lots of italics) that harks back to the 1970s, a mishmosh of vertical letters and columns on the opinion page, and the abandonment of photographs for awful oversized 1960s-style illustrations. But the worst thing may be the introduction of Wall Street Journal-type 1950s-era line art for its columnists. (Sorry, none of this is available online.) The content hasn't suffered, but its presentation is so uninviting that I spend much less time on these pages.

What a sad, sad descent into op-ed mediocrity.

You've got blogs! AOL readies Weblogs

From Cyberjournalist.net: You've got blogs! AOL readies Weblogs.

SF Chron critic on best beach reads

From today's Californiaauthors.com:

This morning, on a madeñforñTV beach in New York City -- shoeless and sporting a surfñmotif shirt -- San Francisco Chronicle Book Critic David Kipin did an animated ìbeach readsî segment with the Today showís Katie Couric. California authors Ellen Ullman (The Bug) and Paul Collins (Sixpence House) make his summer reading picks list, but our favorite exchange was about California readers:

Kipen: ìIt often happens that a book will make the best seller list in the San Francisco Chronicle and in a few weeks it will catch on in the rest of the country.î

Couric: ìAre you saying that you set the agenda for books in America?î

Kipen: ìNot me! the readers of San Francisco!î

You can see a streaming video of the interview on MSNBC here.

Illegal music downloads boost album sales?

Scotsman.com: Illegal music downloads boosting album sales.

Digital citizens

The Guardian UK has a piece on the difficulties and challenges involved in transitioning to digital records.

Bloggers opening Western eyes

Katie Dean in Wired News: Humanitarian workers abroad use blogs to chronicle the lives of people in strife-torn societies in the hope that the West will finally comprehend, and respond.

Publisher cancels book over DMCA fears

NY Times: Behind a Hacker's Book, a Primer on Copyright Law. Excerpt:

Andrew Huang, an engineer and programmer in San Diego, has written a book called "Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering." It has also been an introduction to copyright law in the digital age.

Wiley Technology Publishing, a unit of John Wiley & Sons, agreed last year to publish the book. But after Mr. Huang delivered the manuscript five months ago, the publisher backed out over concerns that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 made it illegal to disseminate information about how to circumvent copyright protection. ...

Rejected by Wiley, Mr. Huang had the book printed himself and began selling it by mail order, shipping copies from his garage.

With help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties group based in San Francisco, Mr. Huang recently found a new publisher, No Starch Press in San Francisco. Bill Pollock, No Starch's president and publisher, said his company expected to publish the book this month. ...

Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in a telephone interview that he anticipated similar issues in the future. "It's a problem that more people in the computer science and security field are going to run into," he said. "Even if what they are finding is probably perfectly legal, publishers don't want to risk expensive litigation to find out."

2004 American Presidential Candidate Selector

The 2004 American Presidential Candidate Selector: Want a president who represents your views of how the country should be run? At SelectSmart.com, you answer 17 questions about your positions and the site tells you which candidate most closely matches your political views. Looks like I'm most in sync with Howard Dean, John Kerry and John Edwards, while George W. and I agree all of 19% of the time.

Thanks to Sheila for the pointer.

Meantime, of course, there's another option: Republicans for Sharpton.

How to rig an election

Food for thought from Truthout.org: How to Rig an Election in the United States.

Webcasters threaten to sue RIAA

From Wednesday's CNET News.com: Webcasters threaten to sue RIAA.

Google cache: legal or not?

From Wednesday's CNET News.com: Google cache raises copyright concerns.

iPod on Oprah

From the pho mailing list:

So Oprah's going through her "favorite summer things"on the show today (July 10)--t-shirts, flipflops, etc. The last item is her iPod--she raves and raves as generally puzzled audience casts curious glances. Oprah finishes with flourish by having her staff give a brand new one to everyone in the audience. Could it do for iPod adoption rate what her bookclub does for authors?

Moblogs foreshadow online journalism's future

Howard Rheingold writes in OJR: Moblogs Offer Crystal Ball for Future of Online Journalism.

OJR asked Rheingold to pull together his thoughts on moblogging and how it will change journalism: Does the nascent moblogging movement mean journalism will eventually become more democratized, or is moblogging a fad destined to only ever be chic among a geeky minority?

Libel ruling doesn't shield bloggers

Mark Glaser points out in OJR that a recent libel ruling, hailed by free speech advocates, does not does not protect bloggers' original content -- and it sets a bad example for online journalists.

Britain no longer expects to find Iraqi weapons

NY Times: Blair Aides Don't Expect to Find Iraqi Weapons.

Senior officials in Prime Minister Tony Blair's government say they no longer believe weapons of mass destruction will be uncovered in Iraq, British news organizations reported today. ...

The failure to discover weapons of mass destruction has undermined Mr. Blair's credibility, dented his public support and turned a majority of Britons against a war they once supported.

Election 2004: Here comes Ralph

From the Alice in Wonderland pages comes word that Ralph Nader is thinking of running for president in 2004.

Is there any progressive in his right mind who would vote for this man next year, given the political realities, economic realities and environmental realities surrounding us?

Idiot comment of the week

From Dave Farber's Interesting People list:

Idiot comment of the week

ìNo serious person thinks that we are in the middle of a civil-liberties crisisî

-- Ann Coulter, Time Magazine, July 14, 2003

Some Xbox Fans Microsoft Didn't Aim For

From Thursday's NY Times: Some Xbox Fans Microsoft Didn't Aim For. Excerpt:

... After a few months on the Xbox Live network, in May, [a 31-year-old Manhattan financial executive] got a bit bored again. This time, however, he opened his Xbox and soldered in a chip that allowed him to change the console's basic computer code and bypass its internal security technology. After installing a new hard drive, he transferred about 3,000 MP3 music files to the system and downloaded illegal copies of 3,500 old-time arcade games. Then he installed the Linux operating system, which allowed him to use the box essentially as a personal computer. ...

It is a battle that involves many of the ethical and legal issues facing the technology and media industries at this digital moment. What rights do consumers have to tinker with products they own? How far should companies go to protect their intellectual property? What happens when the desires of consumers conflict with the business models of companies they patronize? Who gets to decide just what a particular product may be used for? ...

Smart Mobs Meetup Day

This is pretty amazing:

International Smart Mobs Meetup Day

When: Wednesday, July 16 at 8 pm

Where: In up to 561 towns (anywhere that at least 5 people sign up). The exact local venue is up for a vote.

Who: Fans of Howard Rheingold and friends.

You can sign up and keep posted here.

A nation of scared sheep

Salon: Why don't Americans care that Bush may have lied to them about Iraq? The answer lies deep in our reptilian brains.

Since 9/11, Americans have been living in a state of fear and anxiety comparable to the Cold War in the '50s and early '60s, or to the World War II era. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took more than 3,000 lives, making it the deadliest foreign attack on the U.S. since Pearl Harbor. Experts who study deceit in all of its forms and degrees contend that it therefore makes perfect sense that Americans are willing to accept and forgive, though not necessarily believe, Bush's statements, even if those were intentionally or otherwise misleading. Humans are more or less genetically programmed to accept falsehoods that comfort them during periods of extreme stress. Call it the fear factor: Being able to rally around a strong leader -- and the flag -- is reassuring to many Americans.

Hi-tech babble baffles many

BBC News: Hi-tech babble baffles many. Most people are confused and flummoxed by the jargon used to describe new technology, says a survey.

Court win for search engine

From SATN via Slashdot:

The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion about fair use Monday. The issue was whether a search engine that indexed images from the web and presented them as thumbnails was fair use under copyright law. They decided that it was fair use and allowed under law.

The court's opinion (a PDF) is here. Excerpt:

This case involves the application of copyright law to the vast world of the internet and internet search engines. The plaintiff, Leslie Kelly, is a professional photographer who has copyrighted many of his images of the American West. Some of these images are located on Kellyís web site or other web sites with which Kelly has a license agreement. The defendant, Arriba Soft Corp. [now Ditto.com] operates an internet search engine that displays its results in the form of small pictures rather than the more usual form of text. Arriba obtained its database of pictures by copying images from other web sites. By clicking on one of these small pictures, called ìthumbnails,î the user can then view a large version of that same picture within the context of the Arriba web page.

When Kelly discovered that his photographs were part of
Arribaís search engine database, he brought a claim against
Arriba for copyright infringement. The district court found
that Kelly had established a prima facie case of copyright
infringement based on Arribaís unauthorized reproduction
and display of Kellyís works, but that this reproduction and
display constituted a non-infringing ìfair useî under Section
107 of the Copyright Act. Kelly appeals that decision, and we
affirm in part and reverse in part. The creation and use of the
thumbnails in the search engine is a fair use. However, the
district court should not have decided whether the display of
the larger image is a violation of Kellyís exclusive right to
publicly display his works. Thus, we remand for further proceedings
consistent with this opinion.

CNET had a story on this earlier this week.

Speaking of SATN, blogger and Internet pioneer David Reed -- former chief scientist at Lotus Development Corp., a member of the original committees that created the TCP/IP protocol, and an adjunct professor at MIT's Media Lab -- was just hired by H-P.

Nightclub research tonight

I'm heading to an Oakland nightclub tonight to check out some "appropriation-based" electronic music for research for my book. Any bloggers interested in grabbing a drink there? Here are the details:

Music Performance: The Sound of Illegal Art I
What: Live ìappropriation-basedî electronic music and multimedia, featuring RAJAV and two additional performers to be announced
When: Wednesday, July 9, 8 p.m.
Where: 21 Grand, 449B 23rd Street (between Broadway and Telegraph), Oakland
Admission: Sliding scale donation of $5ñ$10 at the door

Windows XP mystery solved

The generosity of bloggers never fails to astound me, and God knows, I often need your help.

Such was the case again this week. On Saturday I posted an entry noting that I was unable to do a slide show of almost any of my hundreds of digital photos in various folders sprinkled throughout my PC. When I clicked through to the folder, the Picture Tasks pane disappeared, and with it, the option to "View as a slide show."

Ryan Westendorf in Ames, Iowa, took pity on me and asked to be invited into my office virtually. After ten minutes of noodling around through XP's Remote Assistance, he hit on the solution:

For each folder (alas, this can't be done on the top-level Pictures folder), if you right-click the folder, go to Properties, and select the Customize tab, you need to change the folder type from the default (Documents) to Pictures. You'll probably want to check the box to apply that choice to all subfolders as well.

Thanks, Ryan. Enjoyed the company. I'll have to check my sked to see the next time I plan to be in Iowa ...

Now, if I can just figure out why my popup dialogue box (with an option to launch Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard) has gone away whenever I connect a compact flash card, I'll make my peace with Windows XP. (Still can't network it with my wireless Macs, but I've given up that battle for now.)

Blogging in the news

Anand writes and points to a couple of weblogs-in-the-news items:

• A couple of months back, Dan G. wrote about one of his students, Simon Song, a thirty-eight-year-old native of the Peopleís Republic of China who is enrolled at the University of Hong Kong and who is interning at the New York Daily News and keeping a weblog of the sights and images of New York. Well, now New Yorker magazine takes a look.

• If you're a fan of Randy Cohen's The Ethicist column in the Sunday NY Times (I read it every week, though I find his humor, and some of his advice, off-putting), check out the recent NPR segment (Real Audio) with guest host Joe Palca, as he and Cohen discuss the dilemma of a man who has stumbled across his lady friend's very personal and anonymous weblog.

Stories of participatory journalism

I'm working on an article for the Online Journalism Review about participatory journalism. I'm looking for examples of it. If you, or someone you know, has committed an act of participatory journalsm, drop me a line.

I'm not so much interested in the restaurant review you posted on your weblog. I'm thinking more about things like:

- covering a news event and posting video footage on your weblog or website

- examples of moblogging, perhaps with a camera phone, and publishing updates or coverage of an event, rally or speech on a group site

- community news sites where moms, dads or kids publish coverage of their local soccer team because it doesn't get coverage in the newspaper.

- examples of sending in "amateur" photos to a news site (as dallasnews.com and the BBC have done) or citizen reporting (a la Korea's ohmynews.com).

Would you like WiFi with that?

San Jose Merc: McDonald's to offer wireless Internet access in Bay Area.
The fast-food chain will launch wireless access in 55 Bay Area restaurants, with about 20 more to follow. Stores in San Jose, Half Moon Bay and Pleasanton are on the list.

Yes!

Unemployed writers tell their stories

The San Jose Merc's Mike Cassidy tells the story of 8goodpeople.com. Excerpt:

8goodpeople.com was launched to attract the attention of potential employers, but it's creating a group narrative that will speak to many in Silicon Valley and beyond. Read together, the essays cover a range of issues that accompany the loss of a job.

The stories are little stories -- about coaching Little League, lusting for a fancy Aeron chair, the loss of courtesy in the job-hunting processes, job postings, the battle to think positively and more.

Little stories with big and universal themes for the unemployed. There is the initial feeling of liberation, of finding time for children and life's joys. There is the disappointment and frustration of sending rÈsumÈ after rÈsumÈ and hearing nothing in response. There is the cold fear of worrying about survival and one's sanity. There is even some humor, because after all sometimes all you can do is laugh.

Dear Abby gives advice to a blogger

Dear Abby gives advice to a 14-year-old girl in New Jersey who blogs.

Thanks to kpaul for the pointer.

Making a Sonic PurÈe From Pop Snippets

NY Times: How to Make a Sonic PurÈe From Pop Snippets. Matthew Mirapaul, an online friend and freelancer, looks at a new interactive program that retrieves Internet song files, slices off audio snippets and blends them into sonic collages.

Court OKs Web linking

From the EFF this evening:

Web Linking Need Not Cause Copyright Liability

San Francisco - A federal appeals court today changed course
in a closely watched case on the legality of linking on the World Wide Web, issuing a revised ruling siding with search engine Ditto.com against photographer Leslie Kelly. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) had filed a brief urging the court to permit Web linking to copyrighted images.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' original ruling, issued
in February 2002, caused a stir by saying that linking to a copyrighted photo on a website without permission violates the copyright owner's "public display" rights.

The EFF urged the court to reconsider this portion of its ruling, arguing that the ruling against "in-line linking" threatened to transform everyday website activities into copyright infringements. Today the court withdrew the controversial portion of its opinion, leaving it to the lower court to take a fresh look at the issue.

"Website owners can rest a bit easier about linking to copyrighted materials online," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "By revising its ruling, the court removed a copyright iceberg from the main shipping lanes of the World Wide Web." ...

More information here.

P2P Summit moves to DC

I was planning to attend the P2P Summit in Los Angeles on Aug. 8 (so was Doc, among others), but now it appears I won't. Just received this notice:

Due to the rapidly shifting dynamics of this space and the recent developments stemming from Washington, we are moving the P2P Summit to Washington, DC to accommodate the demands of the marketplace. This will allow the event to be more grand in scale enabling several more hundred people to attend and, more importantly, it facilitates the requests of lawmakers to more readily participate with the event.

We will be announcing dates and a venue within the next few weeks.

Blogs in the workplace

New York Times: Blogs in the Workplace. Corporate Web logs are catching on. Are they performing a useful business communications function, or simply giving bores and blowhards one more opportunity to blather? Excerpt:

At Community Connect, Mr. Tang's engineers use a service called LiveJournal to post updates about tasks like fixing server computers or configuring software. Hitting the upload button sends the text to a private site, viewable by the authors and their managers, including the date and time of the postings and, often, links to relevant Web pages.

"When I want to know something I check the Web log," Mr. Tang said. "It saves me the trouble of e-mailing people or yelling across the room to get a status update."

Mr. Tang has also used blogs to coordinate group projects, like the recent process of interviewing job candidates for a programming position. The various people at the company who spoke to each candidate posted their comments on a password-protected Web log. ...

Google, the provider of Internet search services, has become a big user of blogs for communication among its employees and managers ó a result of the company's acquisition of Pyra Labs, the creator of the Blogger Web log service, earlier this year. On one internal blog, called Google Love Notes, the customer service staff posts thank-you notes from users. One is from a woman who nursed her sick dog back to health after researching the illness on Google; the posting includes a photograph of the healed dog frolicking in a stream. Another came from a woman who was able to find a long-lost love through Google ó and who happily reports that she wound up agreeing to marry the man's brother.

File Swappers to RIAA: Download This!

Leslie Walker in the Washington Post: File Swappers to RIAA: Download This!

Ian Clarke and the RIAA on P2P and piracy

Declan's latest in News.com: Piracy and peer-to-peer, in which he asked Ian Clarke, Freenet's inventor, and Matt Oppenheim, RIAA's senior vice president of business and legal affairs, to engage in an e-mail debate on Freenet and the race between law and technology.

Artists just wanna be free

Wired News takes a look at the Illegal Art exhbiti at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, which challenges copyright and trademark legalities and asks the question: So what's stealing and what's fair use?

Tailoring radio to individuals' tastes

Wired News: An Internet radio station out of London is experimenting with a technique that automatically tailors the music it plays to individual listeners' tastes. Some say the approach, which uses collaborative filtering, could prove revolutionary.

Kobe Bryant arrested for sexual assault

Breaking news: The Associated Press reports Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers has posted a $25,000 bond on a felony count of sexual assault and has been released from an Eagle County jail in Colorado.

Addicted to multitasking

The New York Times has an interesting article today on some of the challenges of multitasking. It cites a study claiming that in some cases folks who multitask may have only half the productivity of those who do work one task at a time. And it says that the ubiquity of technology in the lives of businesspeople and consumers has created a brewing tension between productivity and freneticism.

The Tiger Trap

OK, so it's a Web publicity stunt, but it's still better than most: 29 unsuspecting golfers. 4 Buick Rainier SUVs. And Tiger Woods on the prowl. A five-minute mini-movie.

There's a Dallas Morning News story on it all, written by Tom Maurstad, but the site doesn't remember my log-on and won't let me in.

Any Windows XP experts?

Any Windows XP aficionados out there? (My Mac friends continue to send notes of sympathy for all the PC travails I encounter.) I've owned a Windows XP machine for 18 months now, and a few things still baffle me.

I'll throw two particularly vexing issues out for anyone who might know of a possible solution.

(1) Whenever I insert a compact flash card into a card reader, normally a dialogue box pops up asking What would you like to do? View a Folder, launch Media Player, View the contents using the Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard, etc.

About a month ago, the dialogue box went away. When I insert a compact flash card, it merely opens the drive and shows me the folder. What I really want is the Scanner and Camera Wizard so I can view the contents of the folder and decide which photos to transfer to my hard drive. When I try to manually launch the Wizard, it refuses, saying I don't have a peripheral attached. (I'm using a Dazzle reader.) Any idea how I can get the Scanner and Camera Wizard back when I pop a compact flash card into a reader?

(2) When I open Windows Explorer in XP (not IE) and navigate through the arcane tree structure to a particular folder -- say, C:\Documents and Settings\JD\My Documents\My Pictures -- sometimes the folders will appear as a regular set of folders and subfolders, and sometimes the directory folder tree structure will be gone and in its place are little submenus that say:

Picture Tasks
View as a slide show
Order prints online
Print pictures
Copy all items to CD
etc.

Well, that's baffling enough. When I click through to a folder that actually contains some jpegs, the Picture Tasks submenu disappears and I'm left with only:

File and Folder Tasks
Make a new folder
Publish this folder to the Web
Share this folder

So: How in heck can I see a slide show if the option for a slide show disappears when I drill down to a folder containing actual photos?

E-Mail mobs materialize all over

Wired News: Flash