Catch a culture wave

Hey, it's summertime here in California. Forget the recall election, the bleak news from abroad, the cruddy economy. Let's catch some waves. James Sullivan in the SF Chron has a laid-back feature about surfin' safaris.

You don't have to own a long board to celebrate the carefree lifestyle of California's surfing culture. It's been inseparable from the state's image since the romance of shooting the curl went mainstream in the 1960s. These days, though, surfing is enjoying a pronounced renaissance in the collective imagination.

A photo blog of the blackout

Before you can blink, a moblogger at Textamerica has put up a photo blog of today's great blackout.

Talk about participatory journalism!

Thanks to Ryan for the pointer.

NJ firm can't make movie trailers

Jed Horowitz, whom I interviewed for my book a couple of months back, made the documentary Willful Infringement about his litigation with Disney.

This week a federal judge ruled that his New Jersey company may not make its own online trailers for Disney and Miramax movies because trailers, like movies themselves, are protected by copyright laws.

Here's an article on it in Variety.com (registration required).

The upside to downloading

Chicago Tribune via Newsday: With battle lines drawn and lawsuits pending, music conglomerates and Internet distributors have a solution they, artists and consumers can live with.

Battle of the blog

News.com: A power struggle erupts over a technology widely used to distribute Web logs, pitting blog pioneer Dave Winer against opponents at IBM, Google and others clamoring for a different format.

A new media blog out of Spain

Jose Luis Orihuela, a professor at the School of Communication at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain (here's his home page and personal weblog) has launched a new media blog in English.

A new blog devoted to the recall

A new blog, The Condor, may be the only weblog devoted solely to the recall (or at least one of a handful), says its creator, David Jensen.

Writes David: "Several things of interest there re online journalism: [The California political blog] Rough & Tumble had its biggest day ever following arnie's announcement -- more than 34,000 page views. You can read about the failure of online sites last Sunday when Arnold's vote on Prop. 187 was announced. Spanish language online sites are carrying news stories on the recall that reflect poorly on Arnold."

Says a notice on the site:

This is a foray into the wilds of California's first-ever gubernatorial recall election. It will leave the usual, mundane coverage of the campaign to the media's finest and, instead, pick over the carcass. Your comments or questions are invited and will be posted in edited form if they are sufficiently interesting, regardless of whether they agree with the Condor.

Fair and Balanced Day

Friday is Fair and Balanced Day.

A Yale law prof tells the LA Times, meantime, that Al Franken's use of "fair and balanced" in his book title is obvious satire, so Fox News Channel's suit should not succeed.

And the NY Times is hosting a readers forum (though it's a badly organized grab bag) on: Fox v. Franken ó whose side are you on and why?

Citizen publishing: A reality tour

This lifted verbatim from a Tuesday posting on Sheila's blog (the perma-link wasn't working, but it is now):

Citizen publishing: A reality tour. jobforjohn.com, created by John Andrew of Northfield, Minn., takes job-hunting to new heights. Here's how it starts,

Hello, thanks for visiting my site, JobforJohn.com. Last Thursday, July 24th I was "downsized" from my job of 3 years at a software company.

Later the same day I heard that President Bush's economic team would be doing a bus tour through Wisconsin and Minnesota this week touting Bush's tax cut and its prosperous economic effects.

"What a bunch of BS. I'd like to give their PR tour a dose of reality," is what I thought. So I packed up the minivan and decided to follow their bus around the countryside and talk to whoever would listen about the real facts -- that this economy stinks, and Bush's tax cuts are making it worse.

And off he goes. At one point, he finds himself in the drive-through at a fast-food restaurant Wausau, Wis., as Treasury Secretary John Snow walks by, and he gets his attention:

"What's your story?" Snow says.

I tell him I was laid off last week & saw that he was coming & I thought it was important to come here and let him see the reality of what's going on in today's economy.

"What industry were you in?"

"Most recently the software industry."

"That's a particularly vulnerable part of the economy."

"Yes, well, I need a new job & it doesn't look good."

"Just wait," he said. "The first tax cuts haven't really taken effect. So just wait... the second tax cut... well, it' won't hit the economy for several months, but I'm sure you'll get a job." ...

John then writes, "Snow later recounted his version of our conversation to reporters," linking to an AP story about the tour:

One resourceful demonstrator decided to get into his car and use the restaurant's drive-through window, which remained open, to order a frozen custard while also making his views known.

Snow, who happened to be walking by, responded to the man's comments about the inadequacies of the Bush economic program.

"He said, `Your tax cut hasn't done anything for me,'" Snow told reporters later. Snow said the man told him he was upset because he had been laid off about a month ago from a computer job.

"I know what it is like to not have a job and to want one," said Snow, recounting his early years before he became a wealthy railroad executive.

John blogs the trip, adds photos from the road, photos of his kids. It's a personal, irresistible report from the heartland. His site is a fine example of the citizen journalism.

Roundup of politico blogs

From Sheila, a roundup of politico blogs, including the John Kerry blog I couldn't find earlier this week. A researcher at the Miami Herald came up with this list:

ï Bob Graham
ï John Kerry blog
ï Howard Dean (mostly written by campaign staff but apparently the candidate posts sometimes)
ï Joe Biden (possible presidential candidate)
ï Dennis Kucinich
ï Gary Hart written by the former candidate
ï Tom Daschle - blogging a health-care tour

Al Gore, where are you?

Waypath, a new blog search engine

Gary also sends along a pointer to Waypath, a new "blog only" search engine that looks interesting. It says it offers "contextual navigation of 6,102,945 posts from 714,338 weblogs," although I notice that a good many of its page results are websites and not blogs.

A new blog from MSNBC

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a former reporter for the NY Times, has launched a new weblog for MSNBC.com: TestPattern, covering the latest pop culture, television and Web news. Thanks to Gary Price for the heads up.

Draft Wesley Clark airs TV ads

DraftWesleyClark.com has launched a television ad in several states in an attempt to initiate a grassroots movement to draft Gen. Wesley Clark for the Democratic nomination.

I like the 60-second commercial (you can see the mpeg on this page -- it took 12 seconds to load over my cable modem). And I like the idea of Clark as the No. 2 guy on the ticket, no matter who wins the nomination.

Passage seen for privacy bill

Here's an apparent rare victory for grassroots democracy: The SF Chronicle reports today that "Banks and insurance companies have decided to drop their long-standing opposition to a bill to restrict the exchange of consumers' financial information rather than take their chances trying to defeat a more restrictive ballot initiative next year."

News sites and online communities

New in OJR: News Sites Still Figuring Out What to Do With Online Communities.

Schools keep vigil for Internet2

The NY Times takes a look at Internet2 and schools.

Just how fast is Internet2? Recently, scientists transferred 6.7 gigabytes of data, the equivalent of two feature-length DVD movies, across 6,800 miles in less than one minute. That is more than 3,500 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. ...

Only about 7,100 of the nation's public elementary and secondary schools, about 8 percent, are now connected to Internet2. (The Education Department says that 99 percent of the nation's schools now have Internet connections.) As more schools are linked to Abilene through statewide education networks, however, the challenge for teachers will be to learn how to take advantage of the technological advances that are useful to them ...

Taming the copyright jungle

Jon Healey in the LA Times:

Executives at the nonprofit National Geographic Society see gold in the videos they've amassed of exotic locales and roving wildlife.

But each of the hundreds of thousands of clips in the society's vault comes with a tangle of strings attached, thick as a jungle.

A producer may hold distribution rights outside the United States. A song in the soundtrack may be cleared to play in Asia but not in Africa. And a billboard in the background may show the logo for a brand-name sneaker, requiring the shoe's manufacturer to weigh in.

All that can be intimidating to filmmakers, ad agencies and others that might want to use the footage. So the society is trying to make its collection more accessible, with a Web site where customers can review its vast trove and apply for myriad licenses.

The site is powered by software developed by RightsLine Inc. of Beverly Hills, which sees a gold mine of its own in helping companies sort through the maze of overlapping copyrights affecting their video, music, images and trademarks. ...

Power outage hits Northeast

Breaking news from CNN: A major power outage simultaneously struck dozens of cities in the United States and Canada late Thursday afternoon.

Cities affected include New York; Boston, Massachusetts; Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Toronto, Ontario; and Ottawa, Ontario. The power outage occurred shortly after 4 p.m.

A New York state official said the outage came when the Niagara-Mohawk power grid failed. Officials don't believe the outage is related to terrorism.

Top SF restaurants

OpenTable, the terrific instant-reservation online service that lets you book restaurant reservations, lists its member restaurants from the SF Bay Area that were featured in San Francisco Magazine's 2003 Food Issue. I've hit about half of them.

On campus, 'blitzing' replaces phoning

Katie Hafner in Thursday's NY Times:

SOON after Bill Brawley arrived at Dartmouth College eight years ago to work for the campus computing services, something about his new office struck him as odd. At first he had trouble putting his finger on it. All seemed normal enough. He had been supplied with the usual accouterments - a desk, a computer and, of course, a phone.

Then he figured it out: the phone never rang. In fact, nobody's phone rang much at all.

That's because everyone on campus was busy blitzing.

For nearly 20 years, the 13,000-odd students, faculty and staff members of Dartmouth have communicated by using Blitzmail. Strictly speaking, Blitzmail is a campuswide e-mail system, but it is so fast that it qualifies as instant messaging. And as instant messaging becomes a fixture on college campuses, Blitzmail serves as a signpost for what others might come to expect when most communication on campus is accomplished by way of keyboards. ...

A Young Writers' Round Table

NY Times: A Young Writers' Round Table, via the Web. Here's the nut: "in patches around the country, teachers say that online technology is now becoming a powerful tool for improving, rather than undermining, students' writing skills."