August 22, 2003
Arianna begins a blog
Arianna Huffington has a new campaign weblog, and today discusses the departure of her campaign manager.
We'll see if Arianna can start gaining traction over the next 30 days. As much as I like Arianna (I even donated to her campaign), it appears that the only one with a chance of toppling Arnold is Cruz Bustamante. He's picking up endorsements from labor unions and education associations left and right.
Top news sites and directories
Rich Gordon pulled together data from Nielsen/NetRatings to create this chart of the top news sites and directories/local guides. He explains what he did in today's E-Media Tidbits.
Nine indicted for copyright infringement
Pacific Business News: A federal grand jury indicted nine Hawaii residents in what is considered the largest nationwide infringement of Hollywood movie and video game copyrights.
Write a story, go to jail
Wired News: A student who wrote a violent short story on a school computer may face 10 years in prison. Prosecutors say they are trying to prevent more school massacres; the student's defenders say they're fighting attempts to criminalize thought.
This is unbelievable:
Brian Robertson was just months away from graduation at Moore High School in Moore, Oklahoma, last year when he found the beginnings of what he thought was a short story on a school computer. He copied the file to another computer, added some paragraphs to the initial text and then promptly got arrested.Robertson, who was 18 when he wrote the story, was charged with a felony count of planning to cause serious bodily harm or death. The story he wrote, titled "Evacuation Orders," (PDF) described preparations for an armed invasion of his school that included directions to unnamed fellow commandos to kill the senior class principal and then plant plastic explosives around the campus.
After searching Robertson's car and his parents' home, authorities found no weapons, traces of explosive material or any other evidence that the teen was planning to attack his school.
But authorities said the story Robertson wrote was sufficient to charge him under an Oklahoma state statute, which was passed in the wake of school shootings across the country in the last few years.
The statute, passed in July 2001, makes it illegal for anyone to "plan, attempt, conspire or endeavor to perform an act of violence involving or intended to involve serious bodily harm or death of another person." Robertson, if convicted, faces up to 10 years in prison. ...
Uncle Bob said:
I'm sure John Ashcroft will be noting this with interest and try to make it happen in the rest of the states.
So apparently the Constitution does not apply in Oklahoma. Free speech is so inconvenient anyway, especially when practiced by teenagers.
Blog indexes help journalists track stories
Mark Glaser in OJR: Weblog Indexes Help Journalists Track Stories -- and Boost Their Egos. Daypop's Top 40, Popdex and the other services allow writers to see almost instantly how many sites are linking to their stories. Is such information useful, or simply a popularity linking contest?
New from CaliforniaAuthors.com
New from CaliforniaAuthors.com:
Cody's, the venerable Berkeley bookstore that I used to call a second home, has entered the blogging world and discusses the upcoming book Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi.
Novelist Mark Lee kicks off a new series from California authors on tour.
And FBI agent William Rehder spent three decades chasing L.A. bank robbers of every description, and it was his job to give them the catchy nicknames that play so well on the evening news. "Every bank robber has a tale to tell," says Rehder, who teamed up with journalist Gordon Dillow to write "Where the Money Is: True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World." Read an excerpt here.
