WhoWillBeatBush.com

From Mitch Ratcliffe:

Seth Godin has launched WhoWillBeatBush.com, a way of wagering on the election that lets the person who correctly picks the winning Democratic candidate and the margin of victory (presumably in popular votes -- do they mean electoral votes, which have counted more in previous Bush elections?) Each entrant earns one cent toward a pot that will be awarded to the charity of the winner's choice. I like this idea, because it gives you just one more reason to go and vote -- sometimes just being able to hope you'll win the opportunity to give a large amount of money to a charity is enough for the liberal voter to get off his or her rump and go to the poll.

Jason Calacanis launches Weblogs, Inc.

From BoingBoing:

Jason Calacanis, founder of Silicon Alley Reporter and Venture Reporter magazines, launched his new venture this morning. Weblogs, Inc. is sort of a profit-based micropublishing system for niche, business-to-business blogs. Here's a snip from the company's manifesto.

Weblogs, Inc. is a B2B Web site dedicated to creating niche Weblogs (a.k.a. blogs) across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product. Weblogs, Inc. is creating a new layer on top of the traditional business-to-business media that:

* saves professionals the time associated with reading dozens of B2B publications by providing a non-stop, top-level summary of the news;

* provides analytical tools that allow users the ability to sort and search stories by subtopics inside B2B niches;

* gives users the ability to participate by engaging in discussions, ranking stories and by submitting their own ìblogsî (i.e., pointers and summaries of stories on other sites); and

* promotes fairness and truth in reporting by acting as a public forum where industry professionals can participate.

This from the Weblogs, Inc. site:

Traditional journalism is, in a word, broken. We've spent the last decade working in publishing (online and offline) and we believe that traditional journalism is imploding.

Interesting, and something to watch, perchance to participate in.

Watching the California debate

Watched the California recall debate tonight, which took place five minutes from where I used to live for 17 years in Sacramento. We'll see how the mainstream media plays this tomorrow, but quick first impressions:

Arnold came off as blustery and a little bit scary. He bullied Arianna Huffington and Cruz Bustamante by talking over them, interrupting, insisting on getting the last word. He wasn't out of his depth, but he kept coming back to general platitudes without specific solutions. Oddball comment of the evening: "We should model ourselves after Texas," Arnold said, talking about the state's infrastructure.

Cruz came off as a bit too arrogant, talking down to Arianna and Arnold as if they didn't know the intricacies of state government. He pulled a Gore on a couple of occasions, visibly flustered at the nattering nabobs on the panel.

Tom McClintock seemed assured and didn't back down from his conservative positions even when he was a minority of one on some issues, such as in his criticism of illegal immigrants. I didn't see anything to suggest he's thinking of dropping out.

Arianna was a wildcat, attacking Cruz on occasion but mostly taking aim at Arnold. At one point, when he repeatedly interrupted her, she shot back, ìThis is the way you treat women ..."

Peter Camejo was impressive if a bit too professorial and impractical. He raised issues that nobody else touched, about civil liberties and reformng the tax system.

The moderator must have been on drugs, calling Arianna "Governor Schwarzenegger" at one point.

All in all, nobody made any fatal mistakes. The debate once again reinforced my deepfelt belief that the electoral system is out of whack at both the national and statewide level. I wish someone would finance a proposition that reformed the system of elections so that we could vote for the candidate we really support (Arianna) rather than being forced to vote for one of the front-runners because there's no runoff election. (The Green Party supports this.) Isn't representative government about voting for the candidate you favor the most?

The winning candidate tonight just may have been Gray Davis, with all these suits taking potshots at one another. The latest tracking polls indicate that he's closing the gap. I'm no fan of Davis, but don't be surprised if he narrowly beats the recall in 13 days.

Here's the Sac Bee's Daniel Weintraub's take: No clear winner.

National Free WiFi Day

Thursday is National Free WiFi Day. (Intel, which coaxed T-Mobile, Wayport, Boingo, iPass and others that normally charge $30 a month or more for access into making all their hotspots free for a day, is calling it One Unwired Day.) The San Jose Merc has the story.

The continuing death of radio as usual

Doc Searls today on the Continuing death of radio as usual.

Gannett's missing archives

Remember the U.S. Supreme Court's Tasini v. New York Times ruling, which required newspaper publishers to negotiate archiving rights with free-lancers or purge their databases of unlicensed freelance material? The ruling came down June 25, 2001.

I just learned today that a number of Gannett newspapers have had their archives down for more than two years now. The kicker is they are not being allowed to filter out the infringing material so that the archives could go live again, thanks to orders from Gannett corporate. So at the estimable AZCentral, for example, all stories disappear into the ether after two weeks.

This is what happens when lawyers run your company.

Drudge hijacked?

Wot the heck? I just typed in www.drudgereport.com and was transferred to Web Money Transfer. Was Drudge hijacked? Or is this a new revenue stream for him?

Will California's anti-spam law work?

Will California's new anti-spam law work? I doubt it (of the hundreds of spam messages I get today, none come with the required "ADV" in the Subject line), but perhaps a small step is better than none.

Debate times two

Californians can tune in to local channels today at 6 pm to watch the candidates in the recall election debate. I'll TiVo it just to see how Arnold comes off, since this will be his only debate appearance.

Thursday on MSNBC-TV at 6 pm (I believe it's live on the East Coast and tape-delayed here in the West) is the next Democratic candidates debate, with the new front-runner, Wesley Clark.

RSS entrepreneurs offer online publishing alternatives

Steve Outing's latest in E&P: Startups Offer Online Publishing Alternatives. It's a fascinating look at a half-dozen RSS entrepreneurs, most of whom I'd never heard of. Excerpt:

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada-based Toolbutton Inc. is run by Dale Janssen, who hails from the technical-education industry -- where he published several hundred e-mail newsletters and says his previous company sent out about 20 million opt-in e-mails a month. "About a year ago," he says, "I saw the inevitable decline of e-mail as a content-delivery method on the Internet. So I set out to find a replacement -- and as the story normally goes -- I did not find anything, so I built it."

Janssen liked what he saw with RSS, and he's especially enthusiastic about the RSS 2.0 specification, which adds some capabilities that support more sophisticated publishing. He points out that RSS 2.0 supports adding attachments to feeds. So, future RSS feeds could include audio or video clips and they can deliver actual content to subscribers, rather than simple text links to it, as is now the most common practice.

Geek eye for the Luddite guys

Fortune magazine (and gotta love this headline): Geek eye for the Luddite guys. Can three tech experts deliver digital happiness to a small part of America? Fortune footed the bill to install practical, easy to use products in the home of the most typically tech-less family we could find in an attempt to create digital nirvana.

Outrage of the Day

Reuters: A federal court in Oklahoma City has blocked the national "do not call" list that would have allowed consumers to stop most unwanted telephone sales, one week before the much-anticipated measure was due to take effect. Some 50 million people had already signed up (including me).

Search by location with Google

Gary Price and Sheila both point us to a new Google capability: Search by location. Says Sheila: "You're looking for nearby sashimi in a strange city, or you can't remember the name of the pizza joint a few blocks away. Here, you can restrict your search to a geographic area (a city or a zip code), and Google will deliver a map with your results marked on it."

Gary points out, "Google that gets all of the press for being so innovative. Unfortunately many people have forgotten that other tools are still vital, useful, and also doing innovative things."

'An edited blog is a contradiction in terms'

Tim Rutten of the LA Times jumps into the controversy over the Sacramento Bee putting the editing clamps on Daniel Weintraub's blog. (See the past two days for prior entries on the subject.) I disagree with most of Rutten's conclusions, but he ends the piece nicely with this:

"An edited blog is a contradiction in terms," said Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. "It's a characteristic of the Internet in general that forms like the blog emerge with great exuberance and edgy promise and then the overseers move in. That's a pity. We need frontiers of plain-speaking, even it's politically incorrect. I understand why the Bee did what it did, but it leads to a restraint on free-thinking, which is lamentable."

I suspect Schell wouldn't have a problem with the kind of Editing Lite for blogs that I proposed in February.

Sheila Lennon, one of the best newspaper bloggers in the land, has more on this here and here.

Flashback to the birth of a father

My niece Gina, who just had her first baby, Elisabeth, emails to tell me she is receiving the weekly BabyCenter email newsletter (which I highly recommend to new parents). She added, "Hey, look at the bottom of the newsletter, it's got your series on Bobby."

And indeed it did. Bobby is 4 years old now and, for the moment, no longer a major media star.

Governor Groper?

Katha Pollit in The Nation offers this salient point about revelations concerning Arnold Schwarzenegger's past:

Now just imagine for a moment that a Democratic politician had told a soft-core men's magazine in 1977 about gangbanging a "black girl"--and when asked about it in 2003 said he didn't remember a thing about the interview or the incident itself, but also said he made the whole thing up to get attention. Would that story have been relegated to the bin of youthful escapades by Fox, CNN, the New York Post, Peggy Noonan, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and the rest? Or would we be hearing a lot about "character" and the "I was lying" defense? ...

Absolutely. The point is not that Arnold's indiscretions should disqualify him -- they shouldn't -- but that there's a terrible double standard at work in the land.

Whoopsie! RIAA withdraws suit

Gosh, looks like the recording industry wasn't all that careful when it picked out some of its initial legal targets. Turns out, the Boston Globe reports, that one of its targets wasn't a file-trader at all. And now they've withdrawn their suit.

Mary has more at bIPlog.

Ombudsmen take an undeserved bashing

Matt Welch couldn't be more wrong in his latest in Reason Online: Anything but the Ombudsman! Why newspapers should avoid in-house watchdogs.

It's the paucity of ombudsman at U.S. newspapers (something like 40 out of 1,700 daily papers) that make contrarians like Welch take potshots at one of the few institutions that can help restore reader trust in newspapers. Ombudsmen do what no other editorial position can do: shine a light into the editorial process, expose slip-ups, and bring transparency to the labyrinthine newsrooms of America. Too bad Matt hasn't ever been exposed to one.

Should newspapers edit their blogs?

New in OJR: Should newspapers edit their blogs? Mark Glaser ponders the Sacramento Bee's decision to bring blogger Daniel Weintraub's California Insider into the fold.

Meantime, Mickey Kaus follows up on the muzzling of the Bee's political blogger with an update and this conclusion about "the Bee's best defense--in effect, 'We didn't let the Latino caucus muzzle Weintraub because we muzzled him first!' "

I'd concede that pre-publication editing often improves pieces--depends on the editor--but not enough to justify what is lost on the Web (where you can always do post-publication fiddling if necessary).

Again, I'm with Kaus on this one. And also with him that bloggers shouldn't take it out on the new Bee editorial crew blog. I know some of those folks (three out of six are past colleagues), and they're good people.

Meantime, Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit chimes in on l'affaire Bee, with an interview in OJR and his own posting. Sayeth Glenn:

what I like about a Movable Type-powered blog like this one is that you can produce a post like this, bit by bit, over an hour or so as new stuff happens. I don't think you could do that with an editor involved, and certainly not if you had to email in each incremental addition. Especially after the editor has left for the day.

Agree there. And Jeff Jarvis, natch, has his say. Says Jeff (and, again, I agree):

News organizations have to start looking at information in new ways. I started making this point the other day when I suggested that just for a moment, we should drop the term "news" with all its heavy baggage and instead look on our job in terms of imparting information. (That same day, I had a long lunch on this topic with Jay Rosen, chair of NYU's journalism school and a blogger himself; he gets it.) When you do that, when you see yourself as a leader in the information business, then minders and copy editors become just a little less important. The value of information to the audience becomes more important. ... even more than being in the news business, we are in the information business.

And, finally, Ryan Pitts has a lot more here.