September 03, 2003
At my first Dean meetup
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• 106,000 people had signed up for today's Dean meetups nationwide.
• At our meetup, 32 people turned out at a local cafe (I snapped the photo above), double the number expected. We sat with a couple of independents and a fellow who hadn't been involved in politics since the McGovern campaign.
• Some 350,000 volunteers have signed up to help with the Dean campaign, with a goal of 1 million by June 1.
One speaker mentioned that PBS will be televising the Democratic candidates' debates Thursday (Sept. 4) and Sept. 25, at 5 pm on the West Coast.
Some campaign sites of note:
• The Demstore, where Dean T-shirts and other candidates' campaign trinkets are available.
• Cafepress, where political bumper stickers (GOP, too) can be had. (Flynt for Governor, anyone?)
• The Dean blog, of course, and the campaign's main site.
• A recap of the Dean meetups, and a Deanlink page to find fellow Dean supporters in your area. (By the way, when I signed up, I spotted a name I recognized just two names down: Christian Crumlish of Oakland, the blogger behind Radio Free Blogistan, whom I met at UC Berkeley several months back. His Deanlink page is here.)
• Some local Dean sites, including SiliconValleyforDean and EastBay4Dean.
Years ago, when California Sen. Alan Cranston was running against an extremist opponent, I asked the executive editor of the Sacramento Bee if he minded if I did a little weekend campaigning for Cranston, given that my work in the features and entertainment departments had nothing to do with politics. He said, "I can't stop you, but I'd strongly prefer if you didn't." (I didn't.) Many newspapers go further, preventing anyone on their staffs from participating in public affairs.
As a now-independent journalist, it's a breath of fresh air to be able to engage in civic affairs and the political process.
Why Dean and Franken are so hot
Editor David Talbot in Salon today (subscription or one-day pass required): After years of being kicked in the teeth by GOP bullies, Democrats have finally found two brawlers who know how to give it back. Excerpt:
... After watching National Review's preppy editor Rich Lowry denounce the Democrats on C-SPAN for "sissifying" and "feminizing" politics, Franken calls him up and challenges him to a "Fight Club"-like mano a mano in his parking garage. "I'm 50 and have a bad back. But I think I could take you," the humorist tells him. A flabbergasted Lowry asks to sleep on it, but then wimps out the next day when Franken calls him again. ...
andy said:
And why should anyone take Franken seriously? Yes, he's a comedian, but so is Dennis Miller. Does Miller go around physically challenging his ideological opponents? Nope. [Even for kicks and giggles, it's just not funny.]
I'm no Lowry fan, but good for him. He's not obligated one iota to put up with Franken's wackiness. Ask yourself, would you? [I wouldn't.]
A telephone directory aggregator
New on Gary Price's Resource Shelf:
Telephone Directories: Aggregate Results from Multiple U.S. Phone Directories and So Much More With Argali White & Yellow.Argali is a web application (you'll need to download, 5.9MB, Windows only) that allows you to search and aggregate results from several web-based phone directories. I've been using Argali for a couple of weeks and have found it to be a real time saver. That's not all, Argali offers many other directory searches.
Even better is that this application is free to download and use. Its developer, Boris Katz, has assured me that NO spyware is associated with Argali. ...
Locking up content
Doc Searls, who subscribes to Business 2.0 magazine, can't log onto its web site. (Hey Doc, this free pass works: Go to this page, then enter this code in the subscription label field: 079751240X). Also, hasn't Biz2 ever heard of cookies? It bothers me majorly that I have to log on every time I want to access an article. Here's Doc's bottom line:
I'll say once again, to all the publishing folks who refuse to listen (and they are legion), What little you gain in subsriber leverage and sales of old articles by putting your "content" behind a costwall is far more than offset by lost authority. When none of your stuff can be found on the Web ó either by search engine crawlers or by the countless writers who are denied the chance to link to your good stuff, you fail to exist in the largest and most vital business environment civilization has ever known. Links are what make the Web a web. Preventing them is the height of folly.
Internet news likely to grow in influence
Gary Price of The Resource Shelf points us to a new whitepaper on First Monday by An Nguyen, a journalist from Vietnam: "The current status and potential development of online news consumption: A structural approach. Abstract: In reviewing the current pattern of online news consumption across the globe and modelling major structural factors influencing this adoption, the author argues that the Internet, already a very important source of news, will become a major news medium in the years ahead."
Michael Powell on the future of online media
In OJR, Staci Kramer has a Q&A with FCC chairman Michael Powell about the future of online media.
Bush-Cheney bumper stickers
Some Bush-Cheney bumper stickers:
Bush/Cheney '04: Over a billion Whoppers served
Bush/Cheney '04: Compassionate Colonialism
Bush/Cheney '04: Leave no billionaire behind
Bush/Cheney '04: Get used to it!
Bush/Cheney '04: Assimilate. Resistance is Futile.
Bush/Cheney '04: Because the truth just isn't good enough
Bush/Cheney '04: Putting the "con" in conservatism
Bush/Cheney '04: Thanks for not paying attention
Bush/Cheney '04: This time, elect us!
The real master of denial and deception
Robert Scheer (whom I've known for 25 years) in the LA Times:
Oops. There are no weapons of mass destruction after all. That's the emerging consensus of the second team of weapons sleuths commanded by the U.S. in Iraq, as reported last week in the Los Angeles Times. The 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group found what the first wave of U.S. military experts and the United Nations inspectors before them discovered ó nada.Nothing, not a vial of the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin or the 25,000 liters of anthrax or an ounce of the materials for the 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent claimed by George W. Bush in his State of the Union speech as justification for war. Nor any sign of the advanced nuclear weapons program, a claim based on a now-admitted forgery. Nor has anyone produced any evidence of ties between the deposed Hussein regime and the Al Qaeda terrorists responsible for 9/11.
The entire adventure was an immense fraud.
"We were prisoners of our own beliefs," a senior U.S. weapons expert who worked with the Iraq Survey Group told The Times. "We said Saddam Hussein was a master of denial and deception. Then when we couldn't find anything, we said that proved it, instead of questioning our own assumptions." ...
Keyword searches in Wayback Machine
Brewster Kahle announces an add-on to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine: "Anna Patterson built a search engine for the Wayback Machine [by indexing] a portion of the full archive, 11 billion pages."
What that means is that you can now search by keyword. It's available now here, and Patterson explains some of the intricacies of the interface in a PowerPoint slide show.
Heritage Foundation 'reaches out' to bloggers
Derek Willis got an unsolicited email from the Heritage Foundation, which is trying to influence the debate over Medicare reform on Capitol Hill (guess which side they're on?) by sending out missives to bloggers.
Newspapers pulling Sunday's 'Doonesbury' strip
Jim Romenesko via the Hartford Courant: This Sunday's "Doonesbury" will mention masturbation and has one character noting that "self-dating prevents cancer." That's too much for some editors. Of the 34 newspapers that responded to a poll about the strip, 19 said they won't run the masturbation-themed "Doonesbury." An Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editor says of pulling the strip: "It seems kind of obvious to us. It was beyond the reasonable boundaries of good taste to us."
Blog audience still small
Paul Grabowicz over at E-Media Tidbits has a good reality check:
While many people, myself included, think journalists should be experimenting with weblogs, it's important to keep in mind how small the weblog audience is currently. A recent Forrester Research study found that only 2 percent of online households go to a weblog at least once a week, according to a summary of the findings in the San Francisco Chronicle. And 79 percent of people surveyed hadn't even heard of weblogging. This is consistent with a report last April by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that only 4 percent of the U.S. online population used weblogs to get information and opinions during the Iraq war.
Vin Crosbie said:
Yes, Tim. And if yodelers increase at the same rate as newspaper readers are decreasing, then in less than a generation ... well, we'd all be saluting the Swiss flag.
However, just as not a lot of people are going to start yodelling, neither are they en masse going to start booting up RSS newsreaders. Yes, the numbers who do will increase, but not anywhere near what your rhetorical math hopes.
Will Richardson said:
But with a whole rash of educators starting to use Web logs as teaching tools, 5-10 years could quickly change the impact and usage of blogs.
Tim said:
Vin ... Well, you're right. It was hyberbole, but I'm still keeping those lederhosen handy.
Wesley Clark ready for prime time?
From the Sept. 15 Fortune magazine: Mulling a run for president, Gen. Wesley Clark has emerged as a player in national politics. But is he ready for prime time?
Google bows to DMCA pressure
Popular search engine Google has been sucked into the ongoing legal battle between the Recording Industry of America (RIAA) and peer-to-peer sites (P2P). Following a court ruling in favour of the RIAA, Sharman Networks, the developers of the popular Kazaa P2P site, sent a letter to Google requesting that it remove links to certain sites.Fifteen sites are thought to be in breach of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and are said by Sharman Networks to be running unauthorised copies of its Kazaa P2P software.
The letter demanded that Google should "immediately remove or disable all access to the infringing material."
Google has now removed the URLs from its search listings. ...
Kay J. said:
Just another example of the RIAA out of control. They are interested in their own profits, and could care less about the interests of the artists. Bottom line, file sharing is here to stay. We saw this same thing back when VCR's first came out.
mary hodder said:
The problem in this case is not the RIAA, but KaZaa, using the DMCA (as have many others -- see Chilling Effects, who receives all the Google Cease and Desist letters and posts the information here: http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi), to force Google to remove a link to something KaZaa claims violates their copyright. No judicial review. So Google, using the safe harbor provision, then removes the link and instead links to the letters at Chilling Effects, which usually contain the offending links. Go figure. Anyway, the DMCA doesn't say that offering links to copyright infringing material is bad, but the courts have interpreted it that way. And so KaZaa can use the DMCA to get Google to remove the links to KaZaa Lite.
It's an abuse of the DMCA, and there is some move afoot to change the law to say that search engines are not responsible for links as a form of publishing, so therefore linking to something cannot mean that the search engine has to remove the link if the information at the other end of the link is an infringing thing.
Yo-dah-lay-hee-hoo!
Was RIAA's computer search legal?
Wired News: The recording industry violated a New York woman's constitutional rights by searching her computer for illegal music, the woman's lawyers say. The RIAA's lawyers disagree, setting the stage for a lot of lawyers to make a lot of money.
Teen's felony charge tossed
Wired News: After more than a year fighting a felony charge for writing a short story about conducting a violent attack at his school, an Oklahoma teen's case is dismissed. But the felony charge will stay with him for life.
Fallows on Murdoch
In the latest "One Question" feature on IWantMedia comes this: Would America be different if Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch had never entered the U.S. media market?
James Fallows, author of the essay "The Age of Murdoch" in the September issue of The Atlantic Monthly, responds: "Rupert Murdoch's effect on the U.S. media has been like the effect of a testosterone-surge on a teenaged boy. ..."
JD said:
So, which red state are you from, anyway?
andy said:
It's clear that when we snip quotes, whether to make a point or for brevity, both context and meaning evaporate. In this case, Mr. Fallows shows his true colors by labeling "conservative politics" as purely a "money-maker" rather than the popular movement it has become.
Simply because Limbaugh will now also be appearing on ESPN --undoubtedly due to his popularity as a broadcaster-- and others like him are successful as tv/radio/print personalities, we ought to resist from dismissing the movement on the right as nothing more than some money machine.
Making money, being successful and _not_ towing the left shouldn't be branded as a bad thing. The left must find its own niche and compete in the free market of ideas.
JD said:
>Making money, being successful and _not_ towing the left shouldn't be branded as a bad thing. The left must find its own niche and compete in the free market of ideas.
Agree with that. And Fox News should be proud of its right-wing, opinion-laded slant, instead of hiding behind a facade of "fair and balanced."
Where we probably disagree is in the idea that both sides have a level playing field, or that the right is "winning" the war of ideas. I know a lot of people who tune into the shout-them-down, don't-bother-me-with-the-facts offerings from O'Reilly and Limbaugh for their entertainment value, not for any glint of truth that accidentally pokes through.
Neil Armstrong walk tops TV news events
Reuters: Astronaut Neil Armstrong's moonwalk, JFK's 1963 assassination and the 9/11 attacks are the top three most requested clips in Britain's ITN archive. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.
Anna Kournikova quits correspondent gig
TE! Online News: Turns out Anna Kournikova has decided she's not cut out to be a sports journalist, saying she was uncomfortable interviewing other players as a reporter for the USA Network during the U.S. Open. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.
Plagiarism on campus
NY Times: A Rutgers University study finds that Internet plagiarism is on the rise on campus. Lead:
A study conducted on 23 college campuses has found that Internet plagiarism is rising among students.Thirty-eight percent of the undergraduate students surveyed said that in the last year they had engaged in one or more instances of "cut-and-paste" plagiarism involving the Internet, paraphrasing or copying anywhere from a few sentences to a full paragraph from the Web without citing the source. Almost half the students said they considered such behavior trivial or not cheating at all. ...
Somehow, paraphrasing a few sentences in a much longer report doesn't strike me as meeting the threshold of plagiarism. But I do suspect that students take too casual an approach to cutting and pasting without attribution. I can't remember a single teacher or professor even mentioning the word plagiarism in all my years of schooling. Perhaps it's time the subject is addressed in a systematic way on campus, as Princeton is doing.
