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

NY Times: Photographing the Famous, Even Those of an X-Rated World. The Times' Arts section takes an intriguing look at an upcoming book -- "XXX: 30 Portraits of Porn Stars" -- that will include arty nude shots of adult film stars, including reigning queen Jenna Jameson. Photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders discusses his art: "They're energized, and they feel more in control. I was very inhibited myself. After shooting a few of them, I don't feel uncomfortable, because they're not uncomfortable. They talk about sex so openly. At first I was shocked, but you go with the flow."

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 Wednesday's New York Times, the national media are beginning to pay attention to the candidacy of Howard Dean and his emergence from the pack: Defying Labels Left or Right, Dean's '04 Run Makes Gains. Excerpt:

... 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.