Category: Uncategorized

I’ve turned comments back on for new posts. SixApart released a patch (that was quick!) to take care of the comment mailer issues.

Damn it! I bought the Bruce Hornsby Greatest Hits album from iTunes last night (stop laughing; I like it). At least 3 of the tracks are live tracks. I happen to like some live tracks, but the vast majority of live tracks (not just these) are utter crap. If we have to label explicit lyrics, we need to ammend the law so every live track be labeled as such.

This has been a good week for comics and their writers.

First up, Penny Arcade does it again, taking the major sports leagues to task for these idiotic exclusive deals with various game companies. Why is this bad for video games? Because.

And Auchtoon does it again. Now, I’m no economist (and nowhere near retirement) so this social security thing hasn’t blipped too much on my radar (I know, I know), but Auchtoon takes a decidedly local spin on this issue. Hell, even I chuckled. Link

And, of course, Dilbert is killer this week as well. Well, Sunday was anyway.

In a tribute fitting a man of his caliber, an asteroid has been named in honor of the author, humorist, and activist. Asteroid 2001 DA42 is now known as douglasadams. MSNBC helped in the naming process, although it’s not exactly clear what they did other than suggest him as a candidate. If they were the only ones, I would be extremely surprised. Nonetheless, the asteroids name obviously has significance for any Adams’ fan. I let MSNBC say it:

Not only did it memorialize the year of Adams’ death (2001) and his initials (DA), but it also referenced the number 42 — which is absurdly meaningful in the “Hitchhiker” saga as the “answer to the Ultimate Question.”

It’s an honor far too long in coming, but well deserved and appreciated by his millions of fans. I know I personally want to thank Adams for giving me the spark to read and write, showing me that brilliance, humor, and science are not mutually exclusive things.

Link

There’s a huge vulnerability in the current version of Movabletype, so I’m disabling comments. Hopefully a patch will be out soon and comments will return.

Much has been written about the New Journalism; that somewhat revolutionary way of publishing that boggles the minds of many newspapermen and cheers the fanboys to no end. I don’t profess to be Dan Gillmore (or, for that matter, any of the people who rank in the Technorati), but I was a journalism-type person at one time and earned recognition as a writer at one time (now, long past, I’m sad to say).

This issue, is a blogger a journalist, has taken on a life of its own. The debate has centered not around when to abide the same protections given a journalist to a blogger, but when to deny a bloggers ability to publish what would be acceptable-or, not to put to fine a point on it, required-of a journalist.

The examples are piling up everyday. Dan Rather. The Kerry Vietnam films. The Bush Vietnam record. Ken Jennings. The damage being done to the 1st Amendment is beginning, and the freedom of the press, that esteemed fourth estate, is next in the sites of the sharks.

But is every blogger a journalist? Of course not, and anyone who implies otherwise either has an agenda or is an idiot. Want proof? Surf any random page on LiveJournal. Nothing against the people who live and breathe the community that is LiveJournal, but it’s not exactly the Times. If any random user posts something to their blog, are they automatically entitled to the protections, both legal and social, that any credentialed journalist is entitled to? I don’t believe so. Many would agree, some would not.

But there’s no getting around one thing. Libel is a real threat and one little understood. Bloggers may be the pajama mujahadeen, but they aren’t well represented by their lowest common denominator.

And therein lies the problem. While journalists on the whole share a common trait (the attempt at factual reporting) they also have drawn a line-both in the legal arena and in the public eye-of where a real journalist starts and where they end as well. No one believes Weekly World News when they print something like “Aliens Claim Jacko is Their Son: And They Want Him Back!” But they do believe CBS when they report that the incumbent President lied about his service record. CBS is also protected from libel because they *cough* honestly *cough* believed that the report they aired was true.

CBS took a beating because they are a major, reliable, constant source of hard news. And they have been for decades. WWN doesn’t get that same truck with the public because, well, they’re a rag. This line, this difference, is evident. Now, I picked extreme examples, but the fundamental point is the same: not all newspaper writers are journalists. So too, not all bloggers are journalists, or should be accorded the protections inherit in being a journalist.

So, really, what we have is a problem outside of the argument of what protections bloggers should have. We have a problem defining who gets that protection. I have few answers to my own question and, honestly, I would prefer to draw that line pretty low. Too high and people like me get left out on our own.

I have the creeping suspicion that the answer is not a good one, that it lies somewhere in the realm of the answer to “How do you identify art?” You just know art when you see it.

Applying the same test to bloggers and protection is a problem. Is Jason Kottke a journalist? Not in the traditional sense. But when he broke the Ken Jennings story (identifying when Jennings would loose on Jeopardy!), he certainly entered that realm, reporting current events in a timely, relevant, appropriate manner. In fact, he did it so well, he got legal attention from Sony, who owns the Jeopardy! franchise. But, interestingly enough, the Washington Post, who ran with the same story, didn’t. Many have speculated that this was a symptom of picking on the source with no funds for a defense. While that’s an obvious play for the legal team at Sony, I suspect a part of the decision to lay into Jason was that no lawyer at Sony had the first clue who Jason Kottke was. Hence, he was an easy target because he didn’t have “LLC” tacked to his website.

I don’t believe there are easy answers to this debate. In fact, I think it’s going to take something fundamental, something at the Supreme Court level, to honestly and finally decide that online publishing is protected. That’s a scary thing to say because really, at the base level, everything said here on this blog, or on any blog for that matter, automatically fall under the protection of the 1st Amendment. But really, as Mr. Kottke illustrates, they don’t. There is a fuzzy area, one that creeps wider every year, that envelopes publishers on many fronts. Too many laws now contradict each other; laws that were never designed to deal with a world completely connected. A world that transmits a fact around the world, back again, and relegates that fact to yesterday’s news in a matter of hours.

I hope the answer is settled soon. I hope the web really does transform the world. It won’t be Utopia because Utopia is a construct. But the future reality, for the first time in a long time, can be better than that which spawned it. But that’s only if we find our way to talk about it.

It was bound to happen

Get Your Own

I just had a moment of clarity, and it creeped me out. I won’t relate who’s blog I was reading, but suffice it to say I was exploring my region when it dawned on me what bothers me so much about Ann Arbor and zealots in general. They define themselves via hate.

I’m talking about a lot of groups here, but the one that struck me was someone defining themselves via their feelings on the current administration. While that can of worms threatens to explode all over the place, I’ll leave it alone since I have problems with Bush an Co. myself (asta la vista Ashcroft; don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out), but seriously, when you define yourself, who you are, with something you hate, that’s a serious issue.

These same people would come out of the woodwork if I went around defining myself as someone who’s not to keen on the current state of minority rights. It feeds back into the attitude around blogs that as long as you conform to some pre-defined way of being (hate Bush, crusade for gay rights, call America “Jesustan”, anti-DRM, pro-iPod, etc), you’re ok. Hate all you want. Define yourself that way; no one is going to call you on being a bigot in your own right. As long as you’re “right”, according to the bulk of the Technorati Top 100, it’s ok.

I saw a great quote (and I can’t find it now), but it really speaks volumns. “Republicans think Democrats are wrong; Democrats think Republicans are evil.” There’s a lot to that, more than the chuckle you just had reading it.

This line takes the cake, and makes me reflect that, while I live in the alternate reality of Ann Arbor, I don’t live in the City (that’s San Francisco). Why is that important? Because of lines like this:

While the goal is reducing plastic bag pollution, paper was added so as not to discriminate.

Thank god all those paper bags aren’t being discriminated against. Well done, San Francisco.

Link

Required “I have a blog” link for the week: Bunny Suicides. Yes, that’s what it is. And damn it, I laughed out loud.