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By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up'
journalism from the pros I'm off till Oct. 7. Blogging
may happen at my personal site,
where there are no deadlines. September 27, 2002 - Last
week's weblog Cool
tool coming: Journalist-blogger Ed
Cone writes, Public
Knowledge is a year-old group focused on issues that often come down to keeping
the Internet from being totally dominated by corporate power. Start-up funding
came from a foundation created by the founders of Red Hat. In January, Public
Knowledge plans to launch a free, software-based tool that will make it easy to
contact members of Congress, other parts of government, and industry by phone,
fax, email, or telegram.
Communication with our elected
officials is likely to grow exponentially next year. But that wasn't the
point of Cone's story. This is: "As the only opponent of the Berman-Coble
P2P bill to speak at yesterday's hearings, Gigi Sohn got a grilling from Howard
Berman. 'He took every pot shot at me he could,' says Sohn, president of an advocacy
group called Public Knowledge." (The bill would permit denial-of-service
attacks and computer invasions of those merely suspected of copyright violations.) Cone
lives in Howard Coble's
(R-NC) district, where Coble is opposed by Libertarian blogger
Tara Sue Grubb. And Cone has some mildly good news: Public
input has already made an impact on this issue, and there is reason to believe
that more pressure could bring results.
Link
to this item | Comment
Wi-Fi
stretches its boundaries: At News.com, Communications
equipment maker Proxim became the latest company to sell high-powered Wi-Fi networks
that travel long distances, essentially providing buyers with an "ISP in
a box," the company's Chief Executive, Jonathan Zakin, said this week. These
versions of wireless networks using the Wi-Fi, or 802.11b, standard create a wireless
zone of up to 12 miles long, far beyond the usual 300-foot-radius range that Wi-Fi
typically achieves, Zakin said. Overkill for use inside a home, where most
Wi-Fi networks are now found, the long-range Wi-Fi gear from Proxim and others
is meant for small Web service providers. It lets them beam long-range signals
outside, particularly to sell broadband access in rural areas where DSL (digital
subscriber lines) or cable broadband service haven't reached, Zakin said. ...Proxim's
product, priced from about $2,000 to $6,000, will include all the equipment necessary
to become a small-scale network provider. The price differs depending on the quality
of equipment and add-ons that a buyer may want. Each kit can serve about 250 customers.
Couldn't a rural community just buy one? (After vacation,
I'm going to try to sort out all the 802.11 speeds and reaches, and see what shakes
out.)
Link
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Stay
of execution for Internet radio: AP: Sensenbrenner
suggests giving Internet broadcasters an extra six months before new fees.
Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee
introduced the bill yesterday and plans to try to push it through the House next
week. More at Radio And Internet Newsletter
(RAIN).
Link
to this item | Comment
More
than sobering: The
Case for Regime Change by syndicated editorial cartoonist Ted
Rall. I can see this becoming a play -- what if another nation brought the
U.S. before the U.N. for threatening pre-emptive strikes on Iraq, and more? Rall's
op-ed imagines such a speech: Warning: This is not a real
news story; it is a dramatization
NEW YORK-- Making the case for United
Nations ( news - web sites) intervention against the United States, Iranian President
Mohammad Khatami ( news - web sites) told the organization yesterday that military
action will be "unavoidable" unless the U.S. agrees to destroy its weapons
of mass destruction. ... (Iranian President Mohammad) Khatami asked the
U.N. to set a deadline for Bush to step down in favor of president-in-exile Al
Gore, the legitimate winner of the 2000 election, the results of which were subverted
through widespread voting irregularities and intimidation. "We favor not
regime change, but rather restoration and liberation," he said. In addition,
Khatami said, the U.S. must dismantle its weapons of mass destruction, guarantee
basic human rights to all citizens and agree to abide by international law or
"face the consequences."
Link
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Give
that bot a right brain: Over at Google
Labs, there's a glossary in the works. I'd just gotten an email from
journalist and cultural critic Philip Leggiere, whose new blog, Noosphere
Blues, draws its cool name and focus from that Teilhard
de Chardin concept, commonly rendered as "the part of the world of life
that is created by man's thought and culture," and most elegantly as "the
web of consciousness."
So I plugged "noosphere" into
Google's glossary. The dry result: "Human collective thought forms."
Pour concrete in 'em.
Link
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Get it all out there: Dan
Gillmor writes that, in the future, when someone interviews him by email,
he'll blog
a transcript, too. It's movement!
Link
to this item | Comment
Comings and goings: Back:
Daypop Top 40
(felled by a full disk while its creator vacationed in Europe); The
Shifted Librarian (computer problems had Jennie Levine on the ropes); wood
s lot (after deep-thought blogger Mark Wood lost access
to a borrowed computer, Euan Semple at The
Obvious took up a PayPal collection and has so far raised $515 towards a computer
of Wood's own. Meanwhile, Wood has borrowed another computer and is back up). Moved:
Behind
the News, by Elisabeth (Liz) Donovan, news research editor at the Miami Herald,
still works, but Liz has moved on to a blog format with a new name and address,
Infomaniac: Behind
the News. She's off now, but set to return Wednesday. Gone: Me.
To a wedding, a marathon housecleaning, and a week without an alarm clock. Next
posts will be Oct. 7.
Link
to this item | Comment
September 26, 2002 The
modest journalist: Dave
Copeland, a blogger and business reporter at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review,
writes, "Keyboard cowboy: I'm the first subject/victim in the Last
Page's "Why
We Blog" series. Mostly a Q&A with some very flattering commentary
from Page thrown in, so I really can't blame her if I come off as a jackass." But
he doesn't. Check this out: A truly revolutionary blog, in
my mind, would be written by someone who is as wired as any reporter but with
enough balls/lack of restrictions to write what those reporters will not and cannot.
No one is doing that, as far as I can tell, on a local level (in Pittsburgh and
other cities). Some people try on a national level, but no one gets truly wired
into the national scene in a way a person can get wired into their local community.
The problem is, once you give up the paycheck at a newspaper, you give up that
access. (I know people who have stuck with journalism until they were angry heart
attack candidates just because they didn't want to give up the ability to be in
the know. It seems as if knowledge and gossip are as addictive as any drug.)
Great
stuff, and there's lots more of it.
Link
to this item | Comment
Trashlog:
"Collecting a piece of trash for the internet every day." Judy
Watt calls it "a found art kind of blog, from The Netherlands."
Link
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Write
your own Bush speech: A hilarious use of Flash: Drag words (like
Magnetic Poetry)
and sound effects into the hotspot and play them back. Scaryduck
has won the Guardian
contest for Best British Blog. Some things don't translate.
Link
to this item | Comment
The
Blog Twinning Project asks people to tell it which blogs they consider
to be similar, and tallies results. Pairs of blogs with lots of mutual votes are
declared "twinned."
Link
to this item | Comment
Another
piece of "The Great Workaround": Dig
Internet Radio the P2P way, by Howard Wen. via
Doc Searls
Link
to this item | Comment
RIAA
leaks revisited: Responding to skepticism from JD Lasica and Doc, Ben Silverman
says the Hilary Rosen RIAA email is real, but it's old. The editor of DotComScoop.com
sent me the following email in
the wake of yesterday's item: The email is in fact legitimate,
though I can't say how I got it. The funny thing is that it's a year old and has
been on my site since I wrote a story based on the contents of the email and a
RIAA internal legal memo. That was way back on Oct. 3, 2001 (though the story
isn't in my archives, you'll have to use Archive.org to find it). Somehow
the email made its way back into the public blogging sphere again today, but it's
old and basically just a historical document considering [all] that's happened
in the digital music space in the past year. And as far as I know, she never had
the meeting and the email wasn't well received (um,again, I can't say how I got
it).
Archive.org
is The Wayback Machine, which is searchable by URL. Here's the results
page for http://dotcomscoop.com. Sure enough, the
Oct. 9, 2001 headlines point to the item: (Exclusive: RIAA
internal memos detail new war on peer-to-peer networks Wednesday, October
3, 2001 @ 8:33AM EDT by: editor
Story at www.dotcomscoop.com/riaa1003.html.
Links therein (unfortunately, white type on white backgrounds,
so you'll have to select it all to read them) lead to the alleged Rosen
email, and Silverman's story (Internal
Memos Outline RIAA's Strategy To Launch Offensive Against Peer-To-Peer Networks),
which contains the following: Dotcom Scoop contacted the RIAA
and at their request, forwarded the association unedited copies of the memos. "We
are not confirming whether these are real emails. But if anyone thinks that the
music community is sitting idly by while these services threaten our industry
and our technology partners they are wrong," a spokesperson for the RIAA
told Dotcom Scoop.
There is also a link to RIAA's
internal analysis and litigation strategy with regards to FastTrack, MusicCity
and Grokster, which was allegedly distributed internally on September 25,
2001. (This is the same memo Dave Winer blogged yesterday.)
JD Lasica
got a far more
detailed, slightly scolding email from Silverman, and retracts his suspicions.
Doc hasn't reported whether his estimate of Hilary Rosen has been adjusted to
fit the reality that the email probably is legit. (Here's a photo
of both JD and Doc together.)
Link
to this item | Comment
September
25, 2002 Petty bites the hand...: Tom Petty's
new CD, The Last DJ will be in stores Oct. 8, but the title track has been
getting radio play already -- which is ironic, given its opening lyrics: Well
you can't turn him into a company man,
you can't turn him into a whore,
and
the boys upstairs just don't understand any more. Well the top brass
don't like him talking so much
and he won't play what they say to play
and
he don't want to change what don't need to change There goes the
last dj who plays what he wants to play
and says what he wants to say, hey
hey hey
And there goes your freedom of choice,
there goes the last human
voice,
there goes the last dj Well some folks say they gonna hang
him so high
'cause you just can't do what he did,
there's some things you
just can't put in the minds of those kids As we celebrate mediocrity,
all the boys upstairs want to see
how much you'll pay for what you used to
get for free
There goes the last dj...
Listen
to the song, Windows Media Player only; if the link fails, click it at Warner
Brothers Records. According
to Billboard, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers will perform
the entire album Oct. 15 at Los Angeles' Grand Olympic Auditorium, a show that
will be broadcast live via satellite to 38 U.S. movie theaters and simulcast on
North American radio stations. The small arena event will find the group backed
by a full orchestra... The list of cities and radio stations that will carry
the live broadcast are expected this week. Details will be announced via Petty's
official Web site. Tickets will be distributed through local radio outlets.
No word yet whether Lindsey Buckingham, who does background vocals on the CD,
will join the concert. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers comprise Tom Petty (vocals,
guitar, ukelele, piano, bass); Scott Thurston (guitar, lap steel guitar, ukelele);
Mike Campbell (guitar, bass); Benmont Tench (piano, organ, keyboards); Ron Blair
(bass); Steve Ferrone (drums). Also from Billboard: Artists
Turn Out For Label Accounting Hearing
Link
to this item | Comment
RIAA
leaks? Speaking of "how much you'll pay for what you used to get for
free," Dave Winer
blogs leaked RIAA documents: Great
email from the RIAA's Hillary Rosen to execs at Yahoo, Real, AOL and Microsoft,
on how to crack down on the millions of Morpheus and Kazaa users. Is this for
real? Ben Silverman, the publisher of Dotcom
Scoop, says the Rosen email is real, and part of a confidential
internal memo that outlines the RIAA's legal strategy re Kazaa, Music City
and Grokster.
Doc
Searls doesn't think the email is authentic "because I don't believe
Hilary Rosen would do this kind of relationship-building by email, much less in
(an) impersonal one."
Link
to this item | Comment
Blogworthy
public discourses: JD
Lasica is back from Digital
Hollywood (he describes it as "the movie industry's three-day love fest,
which mostly dealt this year with battling piracy and launching new Internet and
video on demand services"), and posts some revealing highlights. A sample: Most
revealing quote of the day went to Brad Hunt, CTO of the MPAA, who at one point
summed up the challenge facing the entertainment and computing industries this
way: "How do you make the PC a trusted entertainment appliance?" That's
the mindset, the shared assumption, underlying the forces on this side of the
copyright battle. Wading through two days of that negative energy was a trying
experience.
Lasica gets around. He's also posted a column (When
Bloggers Commit Journalism) at Online
Journalism Review recounting his experience on a panel of bloggers and journalists
last week at the University of California Graduate School of Journalism. Link
to this item | Comment
Manifesto
for world dictatorship: How we look to the rest of the world, from the
Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald. Now we know. The Americans
have spelt it out in black and white. There will be a world government, but not
one even pretending to be comprised of representatives of its nation states through
the United Nations. The United States will rule, and not according to painstakingly
developed international law and norms, but by what is in its interests. In
declaring itself dictator of the world, The United States will have no accountability
to non-United States citizens. It will bomb who it likes when it likes, and change
regimes when and as it sees fit, it will not be subject to investigations for
war crimes, for torture, or for breaches of fundamental human rights. When
it asks the United Nations to move against Iraq, it is not demanding agreement
to a strong case for action. It now admits it has no evidence that Iraq is preapring
to use weapons of mass destruction against any other country. The Americans have
stopped pretending, and now demand outright capitulation to its hegemony. The
world will be policed in American interests. Full stop.
Link
to this item | Comment
Molly
Ivins (Houston
Chronicle Online Special): No. This is not acceptable.
This is not the country we want to be. This is not the world we want to make. The
United States of America is still run by its citizens. The government works for
us. Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We
do not need to dominate the world. We want and need to work with other nations.
We want to find solutions other than killing people. Not in our name, not with
our money, not with our children's blood.
Link
to this item | Comment
Art
on the run: Heard of D.C.'s "Party Animals"? They're seeking shelter.
What
they are: 200 decorated elephants and donkeys, 4 1/2-by-5-foot symbols of
the Democratic and Republican political parties. One is outfitted like a D.C.
taxi, another is soaked in yellow to represent the yellow-dog Democrat, and then
there's one masquerading as Bottom, the jackass in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
Bottom has lines from Shakespeare on his tail. Why
they're hiding: With the impending arrival of thousands of World Bank-International
Monetary Fund protesters, police warned the D.C. Arts Commission that its prized
herd of sculptures could be targets for urban poachers. So on Friday night,
after American University's leaders agreed to turn their campus into a refuge,
Alexandra MacMaster -- arts patron turned safari hunter -- parked in front of
the National Geographic building with three trucks and nine volunteers to operate
the lift gates, beginning their relocation of the elephants and donkeys.
Here's
a
thumbnail page of photos of all the animals. And a link to IndyMedia.org,
which is all over the protests.
Link
to this item | Comment
It's
cool, but is it true? Is fiction true? Over on MetaFilter, a group blog, there's
an intriguing post -- author/illustrator Edward Gorey had gotten deeply into Macromedia
Flash, and the result was August
Strindberg & Helium, four funny Flash movies. But the comments
deconstructed the post by author "Marquis de Guillermo," who runs
a satire site called Tangmonkey: --
Gorey died
in 2000. Here's his obit/appreciation
in The Guardian (U.K.) -- One poster "made a truetype
font when he died. Sample
image here." -- Another writes, "He's very definitely dead.
His house is now
a wonderful museum,
which I strongly encourage any Gorey fan to visit."
Finally,
Marquis returns: " Everybody's so unimaginative. This is not a hoax: it is
fiction. And (maybe maybe?) an attempt at Art." The attempt succeeds,
I think, and along the way some wonderful links emerged. It's also reassuring
to see so many debunkers at the ready. Lies won't last long out here...
A
piece of the '60s returns: On Sept. 10, I blogged, "Its name is J002E3,
it orbits earth every 50 days, doesn't reflect as much light as might be expected
from a metallic object, and it was discovered just a week ago. How might we have
suddenly acquired a new 'moon'?" Well, we didn't. A piece of Apollo
12, launched in August, 1969, got spat back from space, Wired reports, Since
its first sighting on Sept. 3, scientists had suspected that the 60-foot-long
object, named JOO2E3, was a small asteroid. But further observations have proven
that JOO2E3 was manufactured by humans, and is probably the long-lost third stage
of the Apollo 12 rocket that took astronauts to the moon in 1969.
One
of the puzzles was that JOO2E3 didn't reflect enough light to be metal. There's
an explanation of that, too: Analysis by a high-power telescope
provided the final clues: JOO2E3's surface is covered in white paint. University
of Arizona astronomers measured the spectrum of sunlight reflected from J002E3
and found the colors were consistent with white Titanium oxide (TiO) paint. That's
the same type of paint NASA used on Apollo moon rockets 30 years ago, according
to Carl Hergenrother, who conducted the study with colleague Robert Whiteley.
Link
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September
24, 2002 The
world's largest peace sign collection. (Thumbnails
at a glance via Google images) Transcript
of Al Gore's speech on Iraq. Science's
10 Most Beautiful Experiments. (NYT reg. req.) WiFi
notes: Being
Wireless: Nicholas Negroponte explains why Wi-Fi "lily pads and frogs"
will transform the future of telecom. Depending on the intervening
materials, a vanilla Wi-Fi can radiate more than 1,000 feet. Since I live in a
high-density area, my system reaches perhaps 100 neighbors. I do not know how
many use it (totally free) — frankly, I do not care. I pay a fixed fee and
am happy to share. Because further down the street, beyond the reach of
my system, another neighbor has put in Wi-Fi. And another, and another. Think
of a pond with one water lily, then two, then four, then many overlapping, with
their stems reaching into the Internet. (Credit for the water lily analogy goes
to Alessandro Ovi, technology adviser to European Commission president Romano
Prodi.)... In the future, each Wi-Fi system will also act like a small router,
relaying to its nearest neighbors. Messages can hop peer-to-peer, leaping from
lily to lily like frogs — the stems are not required. You have a broadband
telecommunications system, built by the people, for the people. Carriers are aware
of this, but they discount it because they do not feel there will be sufficient
coverage. They are wrong. ... Viral telecommunications is a truly new, bottom-up
phenomenon, where everyone builds their own and the whole is woven together into
a mesh by loose agreements. In the face of a down telecom market and tight capital
spending, this has further appeal. Second, its performance increases with
the number of nodes. Typically, adding handsets means interference goes up and
quality of service goes down. In this topology, more nodes equals better service.
Slashdot:
Keep your eye on 802.11a: "This article (802.11a:
Wait until next year!) on 80211-planet.com
predicts a real boom in the market for 802.11a in the coming year. An excerpt
from the article: No one doubts that 802.11a, with its top
data throughput rate of 54Mbps--with up to 72Mbps or 108Mbps possible if you use
one of a variety of proprietary and non-standard double-speed modes--beats the
pants off 802.11b, which only has 11Mbps on a good day with the wind blowing the
right way. In tests in my SOHO LAN, I found that in real world conditions,
802.11a averaged four times faster than 802.11b. In addition, with its 5GHz frequency,
802.11a avoids the interference slow-downs that b must suffer with microwave ovens,
high-end wireless phones, and other 802.11b networks. Also makes an interesting
read for knowing about the technologies which maybe driving the wireless bandwagon
in the coming years."
Link
to this item | Comment
Breaking
new ground after the NYT story? Several bloggers have noted that my
posting the transcript of my email
interview with NY Times contributor David Gallagher was unusual. Dan
Gillmor noted it -- he was also quoted in the NYT
story -- and mentioned, "(My interview) was on the phone, so I can't
post it." Ken Layne
blogged that I'd posted the transcript, and accurately guessed the reason: Not
for any "Gotcha!" reasons, just to get the long exchange out there and
add context to her quotes in the paper. As NYT contributor David
Gallagher is himself a blogger, he won't be bothered by this. But I imagine
certain reporters would be really pissed off to find their entire interview on
the source's own site. The point? None, really. It's just cool to have the
whole article-generating process made public.
I added an explanatory
comment to Ken's post: I've been away from print for three
years now, producing part of the projo.com site, so linking to sidebars on other
sites is how I work. With this infinite newshole, the entire web is candidate
for a role in a more complete story. David asked fine questions, and I
didn't wince when I read my answers, so it seemed a shame to waste the time and
ideas in that sidebar. I expect there'll be more of this in the future.
Stories will be written with the Web in mind -- well-told, fact-packed tales supported
by links to primary sources. Print could indeed become a portal to the Web.
Here
in the land of "Digital Extras" -- the Journal's name for links added
at the end of newspaper stories that point to media files or sites on the web
-- it seemed natural to me to publish "the rest of the story" online
for readers who might be interested. But I hoped David Gallagher didn't
think my "sidebar" was a swipe at his story, so I told him by email
what I'd done. From his vacation spot in the U.K., Gallagher wrote, That's
great -- I was even going to suggest something like that. Unfortunately
I have limited Web/e-mail access here so I didn't even get a chance to put up
extra related links on my site as I usually do when I write a story like this.
Your answers were great so I'm glad they're out there.
Another
happy ending...
Link
to this item | Comment
Bloggus
interruptus: I installed a minor update of the Multizilla add-on, and everything
is crashing. This is all I can write. September 23, 2002 Howard
Rheingold on 'Smart Mobs' and more: A man with painted shoes, Howard
Rheingold, is one of the web's cool guys. Rheingold is the author
of Virtual Reality, and The Virtual Community (which
he gives away on the Web), and was the editor of Whole Earth Review and the
Millennium Whole Earth Catalog. He was one of the principle architects and first
executive editor of Hotwired, but quit after launch "because I wanted
something more like a jam session than a magazine." His own virtual community,
Brainstorms,
avoids flamers by a sign-up process: "To get in, either I invite you or you
email me and explain why you would be a valuable addition to the conversation."
His newest book is Smart
Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Smart Mobs is imminent,
and Rheingold will kick off the book tour at Pop
Tech, a conference in Camden, Maine, Oct. 17 that will focus on Artificial
Worlds. JD Lasica, who
writes that he has teamed up with Buzz Bruggeman (of ActiveWords)
to make a blog for
Pop Tech, interviews Rheingold, the first of the Pop Tech speakers the conference's
bloggers hope to evoke. JD publishes this excerpt from
their chat: There's a group in Helsinki, young folks who
have a physical gathering place, a social club, and a virtual community. If you
go to their office, which offers you a coffee machine, a kitchen, a copier, a
telephone and wireless Internet access, your key has a little RF ID electronic
chip in it that will let other people in your social network know that you're
in the building. So if you're sitting at home and you're part of the virtual community,
then that name will pop up on the buddy list on your screen. Or you'll get an
SMS message. So we're now seeing people in virtual communities getting together
face to face and coordinating while they're moving between places. We're seeing
an extension of virtual communities into the mobile space.
Link
to this item | Comment
Forward-thinking
art: George Fifield, founder of the nonprofit Boston
CyberArts Festival, will be at Rhode Island College tomorrow night, showing
work of the last festival in 2001 and presumably drumming up art and enthusiasm
for the next one, in March of 2003. The time is 6 p.m. in Whipple Hall 104. More
info: (401) 456-8054. Fifield is Curator of New Media at the DeCordova Museum
and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Mass.
Link
to this item | Comment
Slashdot
interviews Janis Ian: The '60s singer
(Society's Child) has a huge second act going in her life -- leading the
charge on the record industry. An excerpt: Do you not find
it strange that a 2-hour DVD, with commentary, subtitles, and extra scenes, can
be sold for less than $10, while few audio CDs are that low priced? Janis:
I
don't find it strange, I find it reprehensible.
Link
to this item | Comment
Dan
Gillmor: Jack Valenti presents Hollywood's side of the technology story:
Congress listens attentively to the 81-year-old former
White House aide who, since 1966, has been president and chief executive of the
Motion Picture Association of America.... He
was adamant... that technology gear in the future -- including personal computers
-- will have to be modified to prevent people from making unauthorized copies.
This stance has angered many users of technology and worried some in the industry
as well.
Link
to this item | Comment
Make
your own sand painting: At Sand
Art, there are instructions, and you can save your creation and open it in
a paint program to edit it.
Link
to this item | Comment
Spiritual
web? Spirituality.com interviews David
Weinberger (another of the Cluetrain
quartet) on "The
spirituality of the Web's architecture" In connection,
we are beyond our own interests. So, if spirituality has something to do with
the moments when humans transcend themselves, that self-transcendence is built
into the very architecture of the web and inevitably affects business....... .....Every
link is a small act of generosity, of selflessness. And that's what I understand
human spirituality to be about, at least to a large degree. Thus, the Web's architecture
is spiritual. via The
Obvious
Link
to this item | Comment
Bush's
war plans are a cover-up, Byrd says: The Charleston Gazette reports
that the Senate's revered constitutionalist's belief in the Constitution will
prevent him from voting for Bush’s war resolution. "But I am finding
that the Constitution is irrelevant to people of this administration,” he
says. Byrd says Congress needs solid evidence and answers to
several specific questions, including:
# Does Saddam Hussein pose an imminent
threat to the U.S.?
# Should the United States act alone?
# What would be
the repercussions in the Middle East and around the globe?
# How many civilians
would die in Iraq?
# How many American forces would be involved?
# How do
we afford this war?
# Will the U.S. respond with nuclear weapons if Saddam
Hussein uses chemical or biological weapons against U.S. soldiers?
# Does the
U.S. have enough military and intelligence resources to fight wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq, while mobilizing resources to prevent attacks on our own shores?
The
senator's speech: A
Responsible Approach to Homeland Security
Link
to this item | Comment
Learn
for free online -- from MIT: BBC reports that MIT has finally figured
out how to take advantage of the Internet. It's called OpenCourseWare.
Here's what it means, Over the next 10 years, MIT will move
all its existing coursework on to the internet. There will be no online
degrees for sale, however. Instead, it will offer thousands of pages of information,
available to anyone around the globe at no cost, as well as hours and hours of
streaming video lectures, seminars and experiments. This is just the tip
of the iceberg. MIT wants to start nothing short of a global revolution in education. "Our
hope and aspiration is that by setting an example, other universities will also
put their valued materials on the internet and thereby make a truly profound and
fundamental impact on learning and education worldwide," said MIT's Professor
Dick Yue.
MIT
cautions that this is just the textbooks, not the teachers.: MIT
OCW is not a distance learning initiative. Distance learning involves the active
exchange of information between faculty and students, with the goal of obtaining
some form of a credential. Increasingly, distance learning is also limited to
those willing and able to pay for materials or course delivery. MIT OCW
is not meant to replace degree granting higher education. Rather, the goal is
to provide the content that supports an education.
The first
group of courses are to launch a week from today, September 30.
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Who
writes weblogs? Seb's Open Mind points to lists of Weblogs
by Profession, and notes, ...mainly kinds of people who:
* must interface to ordinary people.
* are pattern explainers.
* have
little to hide and more to share.
* are not afraid of writing.
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The rest of the story: About a month ago, I agreed
to an email interview with David F. Gallagher, a
blogger who freelances for The New York Times. When his story ran today (Reporters
Find New Outlet, and Concerns, in Web Logs) in that newspaper, limitations
of the news hole chopped what's below to one paragraph. But, thanks to
weblogs, I can publish the entire interview myself -- a new wrinkle in the relationship
between reporter and interview subject. Here's the entire exchange: NYT:
Why do you have two weblogs?
My personal blog started as an experiment
during a two-week vacation in July; I announced it, gave the link, and readers
followed me there. I wanted to explore a less formal voice, put up some of my
photos, write about personal friends and family without fully identifying them
-- and not blog at all, if I chose. I also wanted a way to respond to events in
the blogosphere without being tempted to drive downtown to do it. When
the call came that my mother had died
at 3:15 a.m. on July 18, I spent a few minutes pacing, then sat down and fished
out a photo I'd taken of her on Mother's Day, 2000, and put it up. Bloggers reported
my mom's death, and strangers left comments. (The URL was also posted on the in-house
Atex bulletin board at the Journal, and colleagues left messages.) Mom got a virtual
wake and an afterlife on the Web. It was totally new use of the Web, for me, and
I would not have chosen, or been able, to do that on the Journal site.
I have
simulblogged as well, publishing something on my own blog on a weekend, and copying
it to the projo blog on Monday.
They're
both just me writing; they're not competing publications. That's like asking a
reporter what section her piece is going in -- she may not know what pigeonhole
it will end up in.
NYT:
Are there things you would write in one that you wouldn't write in the
other?
My
personal blog has links to the Providence Newspaper
Guild site, which I maintain, and to my brother's
project to bring the USS Saratoga to Quonset as a museum.
Neither is appropriate on the Journal blog.
I've
also talked about geezer sex, hormone
replacement therapy (I didn't choose it, an anonymous friend who did got breast
cancer), and the after-hours bar we
patronized in my early days on the the night news desk. I might experiment with
fiction or song lyrics there, if I ever have the leisure to write some. The personal
blog can be "offbeat," in both senses of that word. But
if I'm going to report on a major issue, such as the current
"First Congressional candidate with a blog," I'll do that formally
on the newspaper site, with lots of quotes and attribution, and background links
to both the candidate and her opponent. Some bloggers linked to that as The Providence
Journal website reporting on it, rather than, "Sheila says... ."
NYT:
Is your weblog on projo.com edited by anyone? Do you feel weblogs like
this should be edited?
My
editor, Sean Polay, and I have a very relaxed relationship: He isn't a censor,
he catches typos, makes occasional suggestions and gives an opinion if I ask for
one. If I'm going
to do something unusual -- like blogging
a byline strike that the newspaper is not reporting, which I did -- I alert
him.
Newspaper
culture says everyone is subject to editing, and by having this relationship,
neither of us is left exposed. I've been an editor myself for 17 years, so I'm
used to it. But I couldn't file every 20 minutes if I felt like it -- although
I have filed early because I wanted to give other bloggers a chance to link to
it while the issue was hot, and told my editor I'd add "Web wire editor"
links later in the day. What
I can't do is blog at 3:30 a.m., as I did when Mom died.
So
in that sense the personal blog is a bolthole, too.
NYT:
Why have a weblog on a newspaper site? When
I blog on the projo site, the resources of The Providence Journal are available
to me -- photos, stories and, most importantly, access: If I call the White House,
they'll call me back.
Answering
that question from another angle, there are readers who come to the newspaper
site, and to Dallas News and some other
Belo sites that syndicate my weblog,
who wouldn't go out into the Wild Web. So there's a built-in readership available
to me.
NYT:
Is this something you would recommend to other papers and journalists?
Absolutely. We're educating and involving readers in the decisions that will
affect their future. The feedback is instantaneous, and the stories advance cooperatively.
It's exciting and stimulating to be a part of, with one foot in the newsroom and
the other in the "blogosphere."
The
newspaper doesn't cover the Web and how-to technology; it writes about tech companies,
and publishes tech columns, but there's no daily in-depth reporting, because they're
addressing an offline readership.
On
the projo.com site, we know everyone is online and interested in that medium,
its issues and the tools to negotiate it. What I write about and point to is likely
to be new, newsworthy and, I hope, useful to them. Since about half the site's
readers come from AOL, I try to explain tech issues in terms of how they might
affect us, and I translate deep-geek jargon into common language when necessary.
NYT:
What kind of policy should media outlets have toward personal sites created
by their employees? Is it any of their business if a reporter wants to spout off
on his or her personal weblog?
Our
union contract language, which addresses freelancing and probably applies to blogs,
says if the publisher feels your outside activity hurts the paper's business interests
you can be asked to stop. Then it's subject to the grievance process. That's
pretty broad, actually, and I can live with it.
As a journalist there are
things I can't do without compromising my objectivity -- sign political petitions,
lobby, serve on (corporate) boards. I don't belong to a political party. And I
don't publish every thought I have on my personal weblog.
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Subterranean
Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features
& interactive producer of projo.com | 
