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By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Feb 3: I'm on vacation this week. Check out the good blogs on
the blogroll below, and I'll be back next week.
Jan 31, 2003 - (Last
week's weblog)
Poets run amok: Sam
Hamill got an invitation from the White House:
Laura Bush requests the pleasure of your company
at a reception and White House Symposium
on "Poetry and the American Voice"
on Wednesday, February 12, 2003 at one o'clock
So he emailed his friends and asked for antiwar poems. Many responded.
He plans to publish, on Tuesday, a directory of more than 2,000 poets
who have joined Poets
Against the War.
Next thing you know, White
House Cancels Poetry Symposium.
Chagrined
Laura Bush finds poets oppose war
Poets
behaving badly.
The
first casualty of war: poetry
Link
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Phantom
Flight From Florida: From the Tampa Tribune,
TAMPA - The twin-engine Lear jet streaked into the afternoon sky, leaving
Tampa behind but revealing a glimpse of international intrigue in the
aftermath of terrorist attacks on America.
The federal government says the flight never took place.
But the two armed bodyguards hired to chaperon their clients out of
the state recall the 100-minute trip Sept. 13 quite vividly.
In the end, the son of a Saudi Arabian prince who is the nation's defense
minister and the son of a Saudi army commander made it to Kentucky for
a waiting 747 and a trip to their homeland.
The hastily arranged flight out of Raytheon Airport Services, a private
hangar on the outskirts of Tampa International Airport, was anything
but ordinary. It lifted off the tarmac at a time when every private
plane in the nation was grounded due to safety concerns after the Sept.
11 attacks.
Link
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Ice
sculptors from Kenya in for a shock: From the Toronto Globe &
Mail,
Only one member of Kenya's first-ever team of snow sculptors has ever
seen snow, and even he isn't quite sure how one goes about carving it.
They have chisels, mallets and a saw; they are packing gloves and extra
sweaters. But the Kenyan team entered in the international competition
at the carnival in Quebec City next week -- the Olympics of snow-sculpting
-- faces a particular disadvantage.
Link
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Purdue
researchers discover basis for biological clock: From Purdue News,
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The biological clock – timekeeper
for virtually every activity within living things, from sleep patterns
to respiration – is a single protein, Purdue University researchers
report.
Download Photo Here
Photo caption below
The husband and wife team of D. James and Dorothy Morré has
discovered this protein, which is responsible for setting the length
of periods of activity and inactivity within cells. If the protein is
altered, an organism's body will experience "days" of different
length – ranging from 22 to 42 hours in length in some cases.
The discovery could have far-reaching implications for medicine.
Link
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Slamdunk: Journal business/tech reporter
Tim Barmann sends along an email
he got from Microsoft about the Slammer worm, noting,
See the last paragraph of the text of this unsigned letter, where
MS says it is committed to fixing the Slammer problem. Then, in the
legalese at the end, it says not to consider this a commitment on the
part of Microsoft!
Link
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October
18, 1969 Rolling Stone interview with George Harrison about the
upcoming Abbey Road album:
"Something" is a song of mine. I wrote it just as we were
finishing the last album, the white one. But it was never finished.
I could never think of the right words for it. Joe Cocker has done version
too, and there's talk of it being the next Beatles' single. When I recorded
it, I imagined somebody like Ray Charles doing it, that was the feel
I thought it should have. But because I'm not Ray Charles -- I'm much
more limited in what I can do -- we just did what we could. It's nice
though, probably the nicest melody I've even written.
Link
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Is this all there is? Mark Pilgrim of
diveintomark has had it. "Take
this job and shove it"-had-it:
I used to punch a clock. I didn’t make anything, I didn’t
produce anything, I didn’t write anything, I just punched a clock
and when I was done I was done and I went home or out or somewhere else,
anywhere else, because it was after work and that’s what you did
after work. Now there is no after work, there is no before work, there
is no work day, no office, no clock. There is only one long continuous
24-hour day that is always work, always office, and I never punch in
and I never punch out. I know the economy sucks and the market sucks
and the computer field sucks and lots of people have no jobs, and you
know what? You can have mine. I can’t do this anymore.
Sequel:
Just spoke with my boss, who reads my weblog regularly.
... he recommends that I take a few days off and unplug completely.
I have no idea what I’m going to do with myself.
For Mark, there's Gary
Turner's Switch page:
More people are interested in switching off their PCs & Macs than
ever before. See why they made the change and how easy it was. Discover
how compatible you are with other people. Learn about all the great
ways getting out more will give you a better life. And understand how
a simple outdoor activity can make your life easier and your possibilities
endless.
Link
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Jan 30, 2003
News pirates? Thanks to Tom Matrullo for sending me a Wall Street
Journal story by email. I could read it, although I'm not a subscriber,
and I could post to a discussion of its topic. But any attempt to click
its sidebars, or any other links on the navigation bar led to a login
page I could only banish with a credit card.
Tom sent the page via the "email this story" link you'll find
on many news sites.
I wonder if there'll be "news piracy" some day, with one paid
subscriber furtively slipping hot stories from Salon or WSJ onto Kazaa
or other P2P file-sharing networks.
RIAA and $alon
would make strange bedfellows.
Link
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Michael
Powell's four big decisions may make or break America's communications
industries: From The Economist,
Next month, the FCC's five commissioners will vote on a crucial bit
of policymaking that gets to the heart of what the Telecommunications
Act of 1996 was trying to achieve. In the spring will come a broad overhaul
of America's ancient media-ownership rules, which limit what media firms
can own. Mr Powell will then decide the regulatory future of broadband—fast,
always-on internet connections whose rapid spread is widely touted as
the best way to lift America out of its investment slump. Ending Mr
Powell's busy year will be a spot of creative thinking about how the
government rations and manages the national airwaves. Together, say
Mr Powell's staff, this amounts to the most important year for FCC policymaking
that anyone can remember.
Michael Powell is the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Link
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ZD
Tech Update gang eBay update: The Globe today explains
why the laid-off staff's attempt to auction themselves was yanked from
eBay, and the changes they made that brought them back. (See
my screenshot of the original posting from yesterday) This time, they
made it to $610 before vanishing: They're
gone again.
Link
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New(est) journalism: At
D.C. protests, a few hundred thousand go missing. I like this
story. It's by Matt Taibbi, a young reporter for The Beast in Buffalo,
N.Y., covering the Jan. 17 Washington antiwar demonstrations. The writing
swoops from his brain to my screen without processing, no distance. Taibbi's
experience is raw, fresh, and eye-opening. Excerpts:
We had come out early that morning for the first—and most twisted
by far—of the weekend's Iraq-related protests. The main event,
the anti-war protest at the mall sponsored by International A.N.S.W.E.R.
(Act Now To Stop War and End Racism), was due to start at 11 a.m. This
pre-event, scheduled for 9 a.m., was the day's journalistic appetizer,
a freak show too tantalizing for any responsible press organ to ignore.
It was the pro-war demonstration, run by one of the most amazingly-named
organizations in the history of American activism.
MOVE-OUT stood for Marines and Other Veterans Engaging Outrageous Un-American
Traitors.
---
Our parents are ashamed that they left behind all those movies of them
burning their bras, eating acid at Monterey, and giving the finger to
returning Vietnam vets. They're ashamed because they ultimately became
everything they were against back then: cynical, greedy careerists.
That's why they created this atmosphere that celebrates the uncompromising
protest of Mohandas Gandhi on the faraway Asian continent as brave and
principled, but teaches us that protest in our own country is just something
that's nice to try when you're young, before you get a real job.
---
"You realize," I said, "that once you start giving 'no
comments' to other journalists, it's all over. Your career is over.
I know you haven't been in this business long, but once you take that
step, you're f***ed. You understand that, don't you?"
You go, Matt.
Link
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Country
Joe's Fixin'
to Die Rag (real audio) : The man -- Joe McDonald -- became famous
at Woodstock '69 for
his four-letter-word cheer, and for the chilling sight of hundreds of
thousands cheerfully singing his Rag, "Be the first one on your block
to have your boy come home in a box / And it's 1-2-3 what are we fighting
for..." Folks have written new
words to fit all sorts of situations. Metafilter has more
links and comments.
Link
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Sneaky
Toolbar Hijacks Browsers: Only Internet Explorer, again. (Why
are you still using it?) Wired reports,
Xupiter is an Internet Explorer toolbar program. Once active in a system,
it periodically changes users' designated homepages to xupiter.com,
redirects all searches to Xupiter's site, and blocks any attempts to
restore the original browser settings.
The program attempts to download updates each time an affected computer
boots up, and has been blamed for causing system crashes. Several versions
of Xupiter also appear to download other programs, such as gambling
games, which later appear in pop-up windows.
Some said that Xupiter has taken over their browsers.
How do you acquire it?
Mike Healan, of SpywareInfo,
said some installations probably occurred when people clicked "OK"
in a pop-up box without really knowing what they had agreed to, or when
they meant to close the pop-up window.
Xupiter is also being bundled along with at least one peer-to-peer
file-sharing program. And the toolbar will install itself automatically
when Internet Explorer's security settings aren't set to the highest
level.
How do you get rid of it? Healan recommended Spybot
Search & Destroy to eradicate the program. The utility is free.
The author, Patrick M. Kolla, has one request, though:
But if you like it, I ask two things of you: say a prayer for me (and
the most wonderful girl while you're at it ;) ) to your god - or whatever
you believe - and wish us some luck.
Link
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The
Buena Vista Social Club, those terrific Cuban musicians made prominent
by Ry Cooder,
comes to Providence next week, a benefit for WaterFire.
here's how the announcement at Rhode
Island Latino.com starts:
WaterFire Providence invites you to join us at the Providence Performing
Arts Center, Thursday, February 6th, to enjoy the music of the Orquestra
Ibrahim Ferrer presented by the Buena Vista Social Club. Ibrahim Ferrer
will be performing the music we so love at WaterFire with his twenty-two
person Orquestra.
Basic tickets are $30 and $40 (there are a couple of reception options,
too) from WaterFire (credit cards only) at 401.273.1155 or 401.273.9727.
Click
this link for more info.
Link
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Laid-off
Workers, Rich Execs: J.D.
Lasica comments, "Knight Ridder meets its financial goals on
"the backs of laid-off employees" and staffers who must cope
with lower budgets, he writes. Absolutely true. The Enron mindset is alive
and well in corporate America."
Link
to this item | Comment
Ongoing RSS: Tom
Matrullo has been blogging hard about the limitations inherent in
depending on just those sites that generate RSS feeds. I agree. (He quotes
me to that effect.)
(RSS feeds deliver headline links to the reader; you read them in a "news
aggregator." Learn about them from J.D. Lasica's recent OJR
and blog
stories.)
Tom is replying to a note to him from Dave
Winer yesterday:
To Tom
Matrullo who wonders what good RSS
is if it just shovels the same old crap he reads in newspapers. Tom,
it's better than that. Much. RSS creates a level playing field that's
open to all. Amateurs and pros, young and old, rich and poor, the
homeless, the uninsured and people with AIDS, you name it -- they
all can slug it out for readers in the same venue. If you subscribe
to Scripting News, today you've already heard about a new peer-to-peer
network, you've learned a little math, and read an amusing Glenn Fleishman
piece about skiing in Montana (if you clicked) and heard that Dubya
is borrowing a few lies (oops lines) from Teddy Roosevelt. And it's
not even 7AM. Sure the NY Times, BBC, News.Com, etc are all worth
reading. But now you're getting more variety, and they're getting
competition, which are good things, imho.
Tom writes, in part,
As a rationale for RSS, it's unclear whether this democratic agility
is different from what the Net was supposed to be in the first place.
Or how a subgroup of RSS feeds is somehow preferable to the serendiptious
and proactive searching described by folks like Sheila Lennon...
What Dave describes is the Web! Without RSS, I read everything yesterday
on his Scripting News
blog.
Most sites don't use RSS to deliver links, and we bookmark them.
But the part that's troubling to me is that news aggregators get an insular
group of sites, since feeds are generally created by bloggers using blogging
software that autogenerates them -- not just plain web pages like this
one -- or by news organizations that distribute their headline links.
Bloggers who read only other sites with RSS feeds blog only the links
they find in them -- they're all pulling from the same small pool.
Look at these posts:
From rc3.org
daily: John Gruber is going through the RSS
conversion. First, you start using a news aggregator that you like,
then you feel dumb for not providing an RSS feed for your Web site,
and then you kind of stop reading all those sites that don't have RSS
feeds. There are some sites that don't support RSS that I still follow,
but the truth is that I read them sporadically at best, regardless of
how good they are. That's still a better situation than when I didn't
use a news aggregator at all and I simply stopped reading all personal
sites for weeks at a time because I didn't make time to stroll through
my bookmark list to see who was writing what.
And, from Daring
Fireball,
Feed Me
When your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
When your favorite web client is NetNewsWire Lite, every web site starts
to look like it ought to provide an RSS feed.
...The most surprising thing about NetNewsWire isn’t that it
has changed how I read web sites, but that it has changed which web
sites I read. Sites without feeds (Zeldman,
I’m looking in your direction) are falling off my daily read list
because I don’t remember to check them for new content.
Sites which offer feeds are replacing sites that don’t on my
reading list.
I want to read -- and blog -- all sorts of spontaneous publishings, offbeat
news sites, pages created by folks outside the technoblogging loop. Every
day, people with liberal-arts educations find a way to make web pages
and fill them with original ideas, found objects and links only they know
about.
The breadcrumb trail can lead anywhere. I've promised to go wandering...
Enough with this. Wielding Google
and Daypop and my gazillion bookmarks,
I'll keep beating the bushes.
I may make an RSS feed for those who want it, or not.
Link
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Merit
Badges by Mary Yaeger: Blogger Judy
Watt, who's devoting her 2003 blog only to art, writes,
(Her) female merit badges illustrate female "rites of passage"
as well as the myriad physical manipulations women undergo to achieve
cultural ideals of beauty, such as weight watching, whether or not to
shave or wear makeup, etc. << These are fantastic - what a great
idea!
Link
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Juggling: Much of today has been spent working
on features for projo.com. Here's a page
of links and tools (reg. probably req.) for the
new horoscopes site. Tomorrow, maybe the life cycle of the anopheles
mosquito. (When I lived in Africa, I could always tell when the anopheles
was biting me -- those high, tall back legs were unmistakable.)
Link
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Jan 29, 2003
Kurt
Vonnegut at 80: Joel Bleifuss interviews the
novelist, for In
These Times. Here's how it starts.
You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan
wars, Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq.
What has changed, and what has remained the same?
One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what
continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place,
and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here.
There were already all these games going on when I got here. …
An apt motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its state seal or currency
or whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball manager
Casey Stengel, who was addressing a team of losing professional athletes:
“Can’t anybody here play this game?” ...
Link
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The
Experimental Party
bills itself as "the artist-based political party." via
Noosphere
Blues.
Link
to this item | Comment
Tech news staff for sale: The entire staff
of ZDNet
Tech Update is for
sale on eBay (their page is gone now -- what's below is a screen shot
I made earlier). Laid off on both coasts, and unable to find new jobs,
they're putting themselves on the block as a group. Sadly, the bidding
was only up to $8.50 when I captured this. Here's the text that went with
it:
Complete staff of ZDNet Tech Update, formerly a vital division of one
of the top ten highest-trafficked sites on the Web, currently available
to instantly implement professional Web site or print magazine. Bi-coastal
staff has familiarity with information technology issues, HTML, Vignette,
and AP style. Personnel include:
San Francisco:
(1) Executive editor
(2) Senior editor/producers
Boston:
(1) Executive editor / columnist
(1) Managing editor / copy editor
(2) Senior producers
(2) Senior editor / producers
(1) Senior content management developer / Vignette programmer
Resumes available to highest bidder. Bidders should be prepared to
make a total annual commitment for salary and benefits in the high six
figures. Sellers will also consider contract work. Please e-mail any
questions before bidding.
Internetnews.com has
more details.
Link
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Kazaa
goes on legal offense: Defendant in music file-swapping suit files
counterclaim. AP reports,
The owners of the Kazaa file-sharing network are trying to defend a
copyright-infringement lawsuit by alleging that the entertainment industry
promotes piracy by failing to work with them to create a legal alternative.In
court papers filed in Los Angeles, Sharman Networks Ltd. accused several
movie studios and recording labels of antitrust violations.
Link
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Desert
Caution: Once 'Stormin' Norman,' Gen. Schwarzkopf Is Skeptical About
U.S. Action in Iraq. The Washington Post revisits an icon of the Gulf
War.
Link
to this item | Comment
Inaccuracy noted: Yesterday
I blogged, "But online, there's no passing it around unless you're
ready to swap seats. It's a harsh model."
From my boss: "Not entirely true. The 'E-mail a friend' link at the
bottom of our stories allows users to pass them around. No registration
required to view the story passed to you via e-mail." I didn't know
that.
I asked him if this was also true at pay sites such as Salon
and the Wall Street Journal. He didn't
know. Do you?If you're a subscriber to either, please email
me a story and I'll see if I can read it.
Link
to this item | Comment
Jan 28, 2003
Big, rambling blog today. Some days are like that...
News for the credit-card class? Steve Outing
writes a column in Editor & Publisher headlined, Paid
Content Trend Is Dangerous But Not for the Reason You Think.
I agree with him, but not for the reasons Outing gave (that Google doesn't
search and list it).
I think the far greater danger is that the big, in-depth stories won't
be part of our common body of public knowledge. We will live in a culture
in which readers of innumerable paid sites will know the whole picture,
while the rest of us will only get sketchy, breaking news from free sources.
In a small way, we may have had a glimpse of this already.
In December, CBS's 60 Minutes interviewed former Providence Mayor
Buddy Cianci just before he went to federal prison on a racketeering charge.
He brushed off the questions, rewrote the record -- saying he had not
burned his ex-wife's alleged lover with a cigarette -- he told Safer it
wasn't lit -- or assaulted him with a fireplace log and Morley couldn't/didn't
challenge him. He probably didn't know the whole story, because Cianci's
history had all moved to a paid archive.
I
blogged a rebuttal, digging deep in the Journal archives to publish
an account of Cianci's appearance in Superior Court in 1984 in which he
admitted under oath to the details of that crime -- the very details he
told Safer didn't happen.
But what's the reach of my little blog correction, as compared to 60
Minutes?
I think that if the entire Buddy Cianci saga had been on the open Web
-- archives too, although digging it out and coding it makes this a pipe
dream -- it would have been blogged and linked and eagerly tracked online,
just as we in Rhode Island know every public detail of the technicolor
life of our former mayor. Many people -- even Safer's researchers -- would
have known what was real and what was not.
Now that Salon is all-premium, its writers, like Salon itself, may find
themselves caught in the old, "If a tree falls in the forest and
nobody hears..." On the web, if you're not linkable, you don't exist.
And few bloggers and reporters want to lead readers to the door of a paid
news site.
News publications pride themselves on their reach -- that for every issue
sold, several other people actually read it for free. They brag to advertisers
about this, as it doubles or triples the number of eyeballs looking at
the ads. Papers and magazines in libraries, coffee shops, buses swell
the readership further.
But online, there's no passing it around unless you're ready to swap
seats. It's a harsh model.
Faced with an excruciating choice of shutting down or shutting out, news
sites without local classified ad revenue to help pay the bills are unlikely
to worry much about this issue now. Perhaps the think tanks can take it
on.
Alternative scenarios: P2P sharing will broaden to encompass "pirated"
news stories. Or, new free news sites will spring up that have figured
out a moneymaking angle based not on old-fashioned advertising but on
new revenue sources -- shopping carts behind those banner ads? printable
coupons that pay the originating site when they're redeemed, a way for
readers to support good sites with their printers?
Before the commercial sites discovered the Web, it was a feast of interesting
little sites full of information you couldn't find elsewhere. If the commercial
news sites retreat behind doors unlocked only by credit cards, the Web
may again look like that.
We'll look back on the information bulge that passed through in the late
90s and ask, "What was that?"
And as a society, we'll be stupider.
Link
to this item | Comment
Trucking: Tom
Matrullo is concerned that the buzz over RSS is overshadowing the
content issues -- that there's a lot of hoopla over the invention of the
equivalent of a paper route for delivering the news, while it's the same
old news.
Yes, RSS is about the pipe: how news, opinion and information get to
the reader.
Tom, writes, "all the code in the world might not make too much
of a difference in what we call news, so long as what we're doing is accessing
the same tired media by whatever novelty of means." (Tom is another
[former] ink-stained wretch, a refugee from newspapers.)
For bloggers, it's a way to be discovered by a larger readership, especially
if you get on the default list of one of the RSS feed readers, aka "news
aggregators." Their enthusiasm for RSS feeds is understandable.
But there are other issues here:
-- Matt Croydon
wonders about the effect of RSS on design: "If a redesign happens
and everyone is reading via RSS, did a redesign happen?"
-- John
Rhodes: "Most people tend to think of RSS feeds as being for
normal text content, such as blog postings. However, RSS feeds can be
used in other ways. For example, why not use RSS feeds to keep customers
aware of new products and services? We are doing something like this with
Trodo's RSS feeds.
You can subscribe to see when new items are added to Trodo." (Trodo
is like eBay for traders.)
RSS is a "push technology" -- sign up and the headline links
will come to you. Will people who religiously uncheck the boxes saying,
"YES! Send me announcements of new products and services" say
yes to a company's RSS feed because RSS is cool?
Because I use the "tabbed browsing" feature of Mozilla, I have
a bookmark that opens my favorite blogs simultaneously in one window,
with tabs stringing along the top that let me click among them easily.
Perhaps this is why I seldom opened the feed reader I've had since July
of 2001.
But I may try a new one for sites that I *don't* want to see all the
time, sites I might otherwise bookmark and lose in the long list.
And, when I get a chance, I'm going to play with a page that promises
to "Syndicate
Your Page." If it works, I'll have an simple RSS feed, and we'll
see what happens.
Btw, Tom refers to me as "one of a small band of professional journalists
whose primary journalistic mode is the blog she writes for the Providence
Journal."
Before you send drooling emails "You're paid to blog!" I'd
better set the record straight: I'm paid to produce the features and interactive
portions of the projo.com site.
For instance, three years ago, we set up an mp3 site for local bands.
We take the shovelware gig
listings (reg. req.) from the paper, and link the bands' names
to their
mp3 pages. (reg. req.) Bands can also enter their upcoming
gigs on their mp3 pages, and on Monday a randomly chosen "Band of
the Day" moves out from the music
section front (reg. req.) to the front page, along with links
to bands who've indicated they're playing this week.
That's the sort of stuff I'm paid to think up, then work with a programmer
and designer to make happen.
I'd been doing it for three years before "Would you like to write
a blog?" came up. So now I do both, with the help of a indispensible
man named Frank Carnevale.
Link
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At
74, Internet cowboy spreads wireless: AP serves up a fascinating
story about Dave Hughes, a retired Army colonel who "has made a second
career out of extending Internet-era benefits to overlooked people and
places."
"All I want to do is connect up all 6 billion brains on the planet,"
Hughes explains in the compact office in his modest home here, as classical
music plays in the next room.
The story ends with,
...When he dies, Hughes wants his coffin equipped with a laptop computer,
wireless Internet access and a solar panel that would grab light from
above ground.
Special software in the laptop would study his past writings and incorporate
new information into what the living Hughes knew and thought -- and
then take over the task of being him.
Even after he's gone, computer screens in far-off places would blink
a message from his silicon continuation: "Hi, this is Dave Hughes.
Wanna chat?"
All he asks is that someone clear fallen leaves off the coffin's solar
panel from time to time.
"You'll be dealing with me 'til the end of time," he says,
"or until the sun blinks out."
Link
to this item | Comment
"Slammer" comes home to roost:
Microsoft
Slammed by Its Own Vulnerability
Microsoft fell victim to a software vulnerability in one of its own
products on Saturday, when the W32.Slammer worm infested host machines
on the Redmond, Washington, company's network, flooding that network
with traffic.
The company's travails with Slammer late Friday night and Saturday
morning were first revealed through internal e-mail messages obtained
by news agencies and reported on Monday.
Related: Slammer
Source Code Provides Clues:
Signatures within the worm's source code indicate that a group known
as the Honker Union of China—also known as the Hacker Union of
China—may be responsible for writing the code, according to security
experts who have analyzed the code. However, experts caution that although
they are certain of the code's origins, someone else may have actually
loosed the worm on the Internet.
Link
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Don't
let 'em put words in your mouth: At
least 74 papers, including The Providence Journal, unwittingly printed
a form letter generated by a Republican
Party website site that promises points toward premiums for successful
placement in the media. (Here's a screenshot
of the registration-only "team leader" page) The letter
began, "When it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating
genuine leadership. " (These links are from M. E. Cowan's Failure
is Impossible blog, one of many sites documenting the extent of the spam
scam, dubbed "Astroturf.")
The headline link above is a column by Stephen Phelps, the Opinion-page
editor of a paper that didn't fall for it, the Bristol,
(Va.) Herald Courier:
As you may know, the Herald Courier can get pretty desperate for letters
to the editor at certain times of the year. But I hope we never get
this desperate.
Shortly after Jan. 7, the day President Bush announced his latest
tax-cut proposal, we received a letter from an Illinois resident voicing
support for the plan and hailing it as evidence of Bush's leadership.
Just a few hours later, we received another from someone in the Richmond
vicinity voicing support for the plan and hailing it as evidence of
Bush's leadership. If this last sentence prompted you to ask, "Haven't
I just read this?" then you know just how the second letter struck
me. In fact, I compared the two, word for word; except for the names
and hometowns at the bottom, they were identical.
IN ALL, I GOT the same letter from eight people over a week and a
half; a couple of the letters did come with an extra sentence. ...
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ACLU
Blasts New Bush Policy Allowing Construction Of Religious Buildings With
Taxpayer Dollars:
WASHINGTON - The American Civil Liberties Union today criticized a
federal policy change proposed by the Department of Housing and Urban
Development that will allow religious groups to use taxpayer dollars
-- previously set aside to house single parents, the homeless and people
with AIDS -- to finance the construction and renovation of their houses
of worship.
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US
buys up Iraqi oil to stave off crisis: The Observer (U.K.) reports,
Facing its most chronic shortage in oil stocks for 27 years, the US
has this month turned to an unlikely source of help - Iraq.
Weeks before a prospective invasion of Iraq, the oil-rich state has
doubled its exports of oil to America, helping US refineries cope with
a debilitating strike in Venezuela.
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Anarchists
and the fine art of torture: Spanish art historian says they put enemies
in disorienting cells:
A Spanish art historian has uncovered what was alleged to be the first
use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture, with the discovery
that mind-bending prison cells were built by anarchist artists 65 years
ago during the country's bloody civil war.
Bauhaus artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, as well as the surrealist
film-maker Luis Bunuel and his friend Salvador Dali, were said to be
the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centres
built in Barcelona and elsewhere, yesterday's El Pais newspaper reported.
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Armchair travelers' fantasy: Flying
the Caribbean describes a trip you probably won't take unless you're
a pilot. Philip Greenspun makes it a fun read.
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Ode
To Billie Joe: So what did Billie Joe MacAllister throw off the Tallahatchie
Bridge?
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Bloggies:
What Went Wrong? Now disgraced as rigged, fixed by a group of
Dallas/Fort Worth bloggers, the Bloggie Awards gave winning a bad name.
East West magazine -- a Bloggie nominee -- dissects the downfall:
...one man conspired with a small group of Dallas / Ft. Worth, Texas
bloggers and others outside their local area into stacking the votes
for the awards. That man was Ed K. More than 100 of his votes, including
all five in three different categories, made it to become finalists.
Ed K. (not his real name) had an obsession, an interest in blogs and
bloggers and particularly those with notoriety and any degree of fame.
He regularly attended Dallas / Fort Worth blog meet gatherings. One
big thing he didn't have in common with the group was obvious, he didn't
have a blog. Nevertheless, his life was about blogging. He spent hours
online sending instant messages and leaving in-depth comments on innumerable
urls until finally, in just August of this year, and at the encouragement
of everyone he knew and was contacting, myself included, he finally
got a website of his own.
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Palladium
changes name, but not stripes: I'm late with this, but Palladium,
the code name of a future Microsoft operating system, has had a name change.
Its new name is now also a warning: “next-generation secure computing
base.” As Dan Gillmor puts it,
They can call it whatever they want. But it's still, in the end, a
tool that has some potentially good uses but which inevitably will be
used for controlling what do with our own computers.
Microsoft's increasingly obvious tilt toward the entertainment-cartel
side of the copyright issue makes Palladium a danger as much as a potential
benefit. Changing the name doesn't change the mission.
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Coding
from Scratch: A Conversation with Virtual Reality Pioneer Jaron Lanier,
Part One High-end thinking you can't read quickly.
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Bare
Facts On Tv's Sneaker Streaker: Yes, he got very cold.
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com
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