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| Thursday, November 18, 2004 |
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Serious 
Stay tuned
| | The Palestinian Authority announced today that it will Open Source its late leader Yasser Arafat; the action means Mr. Arafat¹s ideas, politics and peccadilloes are no longer propriety to the Palestinians but freely available to the world. It is believed to be the first instance of the open-sourcing of a world leader. |
| | There¹s a lot of great radio out there, but the radio is one of the worst places to find it. As a distribution channel, radio is an ever more narrow and annoying pipe that has to homogenize and consolidate its product in order to save its business. Which makes for a worse air product. |
| | I didn't fully grok the conundrum until I read that. In the same post Peter also points toward a possible route from podcasting to its first natural mass (using that adjective loosely) market: public radio: |
| | Check out PRX.org. This site officially makes a market between independent public radio producers and public radio stations: program creators upload hundreds of original shows they hope stations will license and air. But what it does for the rest of us is let us all listen to wonderful, passionate radio programming while going around the constipated trickle that is your local public radio station. You register for free, agree to review shows you listen too, and you¹re on your way to a candy shop full of great documentaries and original programming. |
| | I just signed up. I can't get it to bring up a Real stream on either of my platforms, so I can't give it more of a review; but I can say I think there is a potentially huge sybiotic relationship with podcasting that's possible here. |
| | Peter's most recent post is Scratch Code, which packs an expert history of computer art into a modest-length blog post that opens with encouragement to visit the latest at bitforms. |
| | An auspicious beginning. Stay tuned. |
Preplug
Good One
Yes, Virginia. There is a...
| | Not to hard to guess who it is. And if you follow that link, you don't have to. |
Stained hats
| | Juan Cole, who is more knowledgeable about Iraq than approximately 100% of us, and who is resolutely fair in his coverage, says this (excerpted from a much longer post) about the terrible mess that is Fallujah: |
| | I don't like the timing of the Fallujah mission. I don't like all the mistakes made along the way, which produced this operation. I don't like its tactics. I don't like the way it put so many civilians in harm's way. I don't like the violations of international law (targetting the hospital, turning away the Red Crescent, killing wounded and disarmed combatants), etc. I protest the latter. I don't know enough about military affairs to offer an alternative on the former issues, and don't mind admitting my technical ignorance. You can't do everything. |
| | But the basic idea of attacking the guerrillas holding up in that city is not in and of itself criminal or irresponsible. A significant proportion of the absolutely horrible car bombings that have killed hundreds and thousands of innocent Iraqis, especially Shiites, were planned and executed from Fallujah. There were serious and heavily armed forces in Fallujah planning out ways of killing hundreds to prevent elections from being held in January. These are mass murderers, serial murderers. If they were fighting only to defend Fallujah, that would be one thing; even the Marines would respect them for that. They aren't, or at least, a significant proportion of them aren't. They are killing civilians elsewhere in order to throw Iraq into chaos and avoid the enfranchisement of the Kurds and Shiites. |
| | Some of my readers still want good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats. That's not the way the world is. It is often grey, and very bleak. |
What you already know, nicely detailed
| | Blogging is almost exclusively a part-time, voluntary activity. The median income generated by a weblog is zero dollars. How then can a collection of decentralized, contrarian, and nonprofit Web sites possibly influence world politics? |
| | Blogs are becoming more influential because they affect the content of international media coverage. Journalism professor Todd Gitlin once noted that media frame reality through "principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters." Increasingly, journalists and pundits take their cues about "what matters" in the world from weblogs. For salient topics in global affairs, the blogosphere functions as a rare combination of distributed expertise, real-time collective response to breaking news, and public-opinion barometer. What¹s more, a hierarchical structure has taken shape within the primordial chaos of cyberspace. A few elite blogs have emerged as aggregators of information and analysis, enabling media commentators to extract meaningful analysis and rely on blogs to help them interpret and predict political developments. |
Walk in Peace
| | I learned this morning in our local paper that Tom Dibblee, one of the truly great field geologists — a man who, I am sure, has purposefully walked (and certainly mapped) more of California than any other human being, ever — has died, here in Santa Barbara, at 93. |
| | His death earned about six inches of type on Page 3 of the paper. What a shame that they didn't have a worthy obituary ready for publication. (Maybe they do, and they're saving it. I dunno.) In its stead, here's a 1992 piece from the Dibblee Foundation site. |
Anals of Online Advertising Idiocy, Part F
| | I just sent this IM to Steve Gillmor, the latest post on whose blog I am trying (unsuccessfully) to read, and which I hope he'll pass on to whomever: |
| | Blinking ad by IBM on http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gillmor/ makes the text of the page itself disappear, as the ad goes through some kind of animated bullshit. Earth to advertisers on Web sites: WE HATE THIS SHIT. Thank you. |
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