Monday, September 26, 2005

A report from my meeting at Yahoo last Thursday, where we discussed the user interface for subscribing and I was informed that Yahoo is making their user's subscription lists available in OPML.  

I may have missed the season premiere of The West Wing (good thing there's BitTorrent) but I won't miss tonight's opening of Commander In Chief, starring my favorite actress of all time, Geena Davis, as the President of the United States. What could possibly be better?  

The word meme has a hidden meaning.  

Kudos to Danny Sullivan for straightening things out with David Berlind. Class act.  

If you have any thoughts on the next generation of user-oriented blogging tools, please let's start talking about it now. 

Jon Udell explains how to approximate a River of News in Bloglines. At dinner the other night Scott Rosenberg told me that this could be done. But that doesn't solve the problem for the 98 percent of users who think three-pane is the only way and would not be able to figure how how to hack it up. And Udell points out the method is less than perfect. Someday one of the current vendors will just copy the method used by My.UserLand in 1999, and cloned by Radio in 2002. Maybe if we had patented the River of News more developers would have copied it? Probably so. : 

Jakob Nielsen: The Power of Defaults. 

The editors of News Hounds are trying to train the trolls. 

Let me be totally clear about this 

I'm getting tons of mail about the bit below. Let me say something very clearly. I voted for Clinton, but when he lied repeatedly to cover up, I urged him to resign so we could move beyond his failings. It's time for Republicans to have some self-respect and stop standing up for Bush. There's nothing to argue about here, no spin possible. Bush is very bad for us. Americans are dying because of his dishonesty and incompetence. If you can't see the problem, nothing I can say will help you see it. We need to solve this problem, we need to solve it.

I just re-read some of the stuff I wrote about Clinton and his crimes. What's striking about it is how far we've slid. In 1998 we were debating whether or not to remove a President (he was impeached and tried, if you recall) for doing something that's so tame compared to the crimes of Bush. I can't believe we're not doing something about it. The Congress is Republican-controlled, but the press must be also, otherwise why aren't we talking about making major changes in government?

Dan Gillmor says that communities are the losers as journalists are laid off at local newspapers. I say good riddance. These guys are so far from doing their jobs. We need a total house-cleaning across the board. This system doesn't work. A few years ago I tried to engage Dan in a discussion of the conflict of interest the press has, it's so huge it's like an elephant in the middle of the room, but they'll never write about it. They need to start explaining the role of the owners of the media companies in governance. I have a funny feeling there's a lot of dirt there, because we never look there.

Broussard and Russert 

Amyloo and Doc Searls on Aaron Broussard's Meet the Press appearance, which I wrote up yesterday. Especially important is Amy's perspective. "The MSM needs to say, "Now wait a second. So what's the important thing here? Did Bush breeze through his mililtary service? Yes or no. Did the nursing home resident die because the rescue coordination was screwed up? Yes or no."

Russert had a chance to put the Dean Scream in proper perspective, but went the other way. He had the chance to get to the core issue of the screwed-up CBS story about Bush's military service, to get the story back on track in time to teach us something important about our presiden, but he went the other way. And he had a chance to do the most real journalism of his career and keep the open dialog that came out of the Katrina disaster. He chose to go the other way.

But Broussard said as long as you keep giving me airtime I'm going to keep using it to expose your bullshit. And for that, Russert and NBC are in league with Brown and Bush. Part of the same team, determined to keep the discourse low and in Broussard's words, black-hearted.

I don't like what the conservatives do with blogging, they give what we do a bad name. We should be willing to go where ever the story leads. I called for Clinton's resignation, now it's time for conservative bloggers to do the same. We need a house-cleaning in the Bush administration, we need to get the cronies out and get competence in. Same goes for our journalists. They were culpable here. Had Russert and his colleagues pressed Bush on his military career, we might have avoided the disaster of Mike Brown by avoiding the larger disaster of George Bush. Time is right to ask how many other Browns are there? They're as dangerous as Osama bin Laden, and luckily we can root them out and get rid of them, we're not powerless. Russert should be our tool in this crusade, instead he's nitpicking and looking for an emotional joyride.