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One Google service I do not miss is SideWiki.

Good riddance to bad rubbish

The problem with Sidewiki is that it was an attempt by Google to put their own content on every single page on the Internet.

Sure, if a small company wants to try and build something like that, fine (and many have tried: Third Voice, Diigo, Fleck, ShiftSpace, Stickis, and Trailfire, to name just a few -- I should note all of them are either out of business or no longer actively marketing web annotations). If there really is a true grassroots desire with Internet users to be able to add annotations to any website, let the movement build up organically. But what Google did was make Sidewiki part of their popular toolbar; they leveraged the userbase of another unrelated product to hoist Sidewiki upon web pages. People who didn't know what Sidewiki was were suddenly under the impression that webpages now had a comment bar on the left hand side.

They never even implemented a way for webmasters to opt out of it, despite repeated requests for them to do so.

Sidewiki was a haven for spammers, trolls, crackpots and pretty much no one else. Here is some of the documented abuse Sidewiki was forcing webmasters to put up with: http://marketersboard.com/google-sidewiki-controversy/

Finally, I will direct you to Jeff Jarvis' well articulated criticism of Sidewiki.

So will IPv6, Semantic Web, Social Web, Facial Recognition, and any P2P protocols coming in future seriously invade our privacy. Neither did HTTP, IPv4, and SMTP cared about privacy.

Get over of the privacy FUD and face the reality: We the programmers who design the architecture of the Internet don't care about privacy. Tell me brilliant slashdotters, if you have the manpower and time, how would you redesign IPv6, Semantic Web, or any other protocols from the ground up to protect users' privacy, and whether you would or should care about privacy protection within the protocols?

The age of privacy is over, the Internet is all about publicy. I might get troll for saying this, but privacy is more like copyright protection and censorship rather than freedom and openness. For those of you who are still open minded towards the discussion on privacy and publicy, please do visit Jeff Jarvis' blog and reconsider whether you'd like to join the publicy camp instead.

Watching bit and pieces of the interview I have no doubt that she had not prepared for this, was just not a good choice of an interviewer given the audience and a host of other issues... HOWEVER these comments are kind of interesting to keep in mind "After she asked if someone could send her a message later on why she 'sucked so bad', I'm sure I could hear the person at the mic say something like 'it's because you're wearing a dress' I could be mistaken though." "And for those who think that sexist crap doesn't still happen, it does. Unconsciously mostly, but ALL THE TIME in social media. I witnessed Jay Rosen's citizen journalism pal, Leonard Witt, again at the Computation + Journalism Symposium recently at GA Tech, introduce one of the very few women panelists at that particular conference, Ms. Culver from Pownce, by talking throughout the entire introduction time he was allotted ONLY about Twitter... fer chrissake, and barely once mentioning Ms. Culver's own product or work! And the sad part... he never even realized what he was NOT talking about. Shame again." http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/03/10/zuckerberg-interview-what-went-wrong/

I felt the same way when New York's MTA copyrighted the subway map (Here's Jeff Jarvis on the issue).

Jeff Jarvis takes it apart better than I could.

First, I'll admit that I haven't read much about citizen jounalism other than Jeff Jarvis' http://www.buzzmachine.com/, but as a non-blogger thinking of getting in to it, I was wondering:

Much of the discussion seems to be about getting out from under the control of "gatekeepers" like publishers and media owners. Yet, while the internet is less concerned with money, it has its own form of currency: popularity, in the form of the link.

Doesn't this just turn the highest-traffic sites into new gatekeepers? Especially as the number of blogs increases, the gap between "rich" and "poor" expands?

I suppose what I'm really asking is, it's hard enough to get noticed today- how will someone just starting out get noticed ten years from now?

This gives a whole new meaning to "Web 2.0 is made of people!"

<sarc>
"yes we know we don't have any newspaper anymore, either"
</sarc>

Don't count on it. .. more... more... more...

Considering that Media Research Center (mrc.org) bills itself as "The Leader in Documenting, Exposing and Neutralizing Liberal Media Bias", I think they may have an axe of their own to grind. The fellow running the place was also responsible for the manufactured outrage over TV indecency (y'all remember Janet Jackson's nipple, right?)

On your other link, I can't figure out what's being claimed. Is it that the soldiers were "coached" or that they were "pre-screened"? All I see is Scott McClellan denying everything. Now, the administration's habit of appearing only for military audiences or for folks who've signed loyalty oaths... well, that's a bit more troubling.

While my brother and I completely agree with you on all these points, he has a plan and the Infantry is a big part of it. He graduated w/ a BS in Politcal Science a couple of years before he signed up, and could have gone straight to OCS... But his plan is to gain experience/respect in the Army now by doing their hardest (from what I hear) entry-level job, later he hopes to become a police officer in a large city (he already has an app in w/ the NYPD) and later still to go in to politics. I'm really proud of him for taking on these challenges, even if I abhor the policies of his commander-in-chief. When Doug was in basic training, the running joke was that the one liberal in the Army had died and Doug had to take his place.

I submitted this question more than a week ago, before he had shipped out. I waited a couple of days to see if it had posted, but he was due to ship out on the 1st so we went ahead and bought a refurbished Dell m700 with all the hardware he specified (DVD, wifi) - he was wary of ordering a computer once he was in country since the last time he went APO/FPO shipping tooks months.. My family has had mostly good experience with them (I still wish I could put linux on my Axim X30, but I'm not a developer and I'm patient - so there you go) and I didn't see anything about "Dell Hell" http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2005/08/17/de ar-mr-dell/ until a few days after we ordered.... D'oh!

I'm starting to think this might be okay, he was reassigned to a headquarters company (the Army reasonably pulled him off of active patrols after he suffered two separate incidences of heat stroke during training at Ft. Bragg) and probably will not be leaving the base this time. I have forwarded the link to this story to him, and hopefully he'll read it and take some of the good general advice proffered here..

As far as fixing the Vaio goes... I'm going to be cannibalizing that for parts ;) ... I'm thinking about building it into some kind of funky case and making it into a network-booted piece of furniture... Wish me luck!

-g

Okay, granted.

since everyone bitches about how they have no content, let's see how many present their content, or rather: how many are black text on white background...

EVIL

* underlined+bold
* drop shadow
* cream background, not much of an improvement. some of the header text is glossy (shiney / embossed / see above one / other various "auto-artistic" trash ).
* the tiny images illustrating each entry, are dithered (i guess with a "web palette" [making it look even more horrible], which people stopped doing 5+ years ago) then jpg'd.
* cyan background (the name of 100% green + 100% blue)
* purple text, orange links. no, that's not better.
* yes i really want to be tortured with your family album pics
* half of the people leave directly (or die) with the header
* light yellow (piss-water yellow?) background.
* "I.Mter-
views" ?
i don't get it. dashes in headlines are satan.
* scary vector portrait
* horrible. evil. tasteless.
* scarier than the sixapart girl.
* yellow background.

GOOD

* pear/white background. title with first letter biggie, first line in different font from rest.
* greenish tasty tone over everything ...which i didn't follow. great. thanks. as for the equally bad link-colours being that horrible default-blue/purple, it was only around 10%. this was checking 70% of the a-list. methinks those popular people should hire someone to design their site

good design = pyros, don't remember any other. and yeah, it's not a blog.
says intersting things = ms g33k. who i'm not sure is a good thing to link, i won't link myself.

I'm curious to see who ends up in the top spots for the blogebriy top 100 (the superstars of blogging). I'm hoping to see Jason Kottke pretty high up there. I mean... quitting job to go blogging full time (and money made not through ads but a fundraiser in the style that of NPR). Jeff Jarvis also has gone blogging full time (well... more so consulting about blogging) and you can catch more on that here

Yeah, I'm sure their accountants haven't done any research at all into what will make them more money. They surely should take the advice of some random joe on Slashdot, who I'm sure owns at least two or three national newspapers, and knows what he's talkin' about.

Right, because clearly all their Wise Men have already found the key to running an online news operation profitably. Which is why they are casting around for a new strategy, right?

Feel free to read up on the newspaper business sometime and see just how at sea these people really are when it comes to online/"new media". Here's a few links to get you started.

• The Migration (by Jay Rosen of NYU Journalism School)
• Tipping point (by pro journalist Jeff Jarvis)
• The Abandoned Newspaper (by pro journalist Tim Porter)

There are a lot of people in journalism today running around without a clue as to What's Coming Next. Don't assume that just because someone works at the New York frickin' Times that they're immune.

Now having said all that, I'll repeat that YOURadio is big news and good news for a few reasons: First, it is big media recognizing that it's time to listen -- and do more than listen: Let the people speak. It is big media recognizing the value of citizens' media. Second, it is an admission that the old, one-size-fits-all, top-down, one-way models of programming are broken and the audience can do it better. Third, it an admission that the old business models are soon to break and that the people can provide more talent for less than the old talent could. It's nothing less than the economic salvation of old media... if old media is smart enough to financially support citizens' media and not just exploit it. What's important is that a big media company knew it was time to stick some dynamite up the alimentary canal and push the plunger. It is the tipping point.

I won't tax you by asking you to back up any of these claims or cite sources. After all, you're not some huge media company. :)

Bloggers think they're going to be the revolution of the press, and that they'll take the place of the New York Times and Washinton Post, and Newscorp will crumble at their feet.

I certainly don't see any major blogers making any such claims. Blogs will not replace big media in the same way that newspapers did not replace books. They are not out to destroy old media, they are out to destroy the MONOPOLY old media has on information. If you don't like it, stick to television. It has short films and pictures, and not so many viewpoints so you don't have to worry about getting confused.

Not with the half-assed misinformation and melodrama on the vast majority of the political and "news" blogs I've seen (to say nothing of the wild spitting and sputtering in the comments).

Again... are you taking about big blogs like Insty or Jarvis? Or are you taking about tiny blogs that nobody reads? You'll notice the calmer, more even-handed blogs tend to rise above the spittle-spewers, in the same way that CBS News always rated higher than Morton Downey, Jr, The Rush Limbaugh Show, or Donahue.

Not as long as they have no problem with their complete and utter lack of accountability

Oh no! People are publishing without asking permission. Who will contol these people?!?!

Who the fuck should they be accountable TO, I ask you? They are accountable in the sense that if they have no information or false information, people will no longer read them. What other accountability do you need?

of any type, and the vicious, one-sided partisan nature designed solely to incite vitriol in their groupthink audiences.

I can't imagine where you come off calling blogs GROUPTHINK. Visit a thousand blogs and you'll find a thousand different views. Even among those that agree will have different reasons for their views. Are you really suggesting that everyone stating their views for the world to see is inferior to the television / newspaper monopoly?

Not while they do nothing more than constantly pat each other on their virtual backs and reinforce their own worldviews and twisted near-conspiracy theories, ignoring any and all other sides of the story while simultaneously thinking of themselves as "open minded"

This isn't a problem with blogs. This is a problem with every political person since three cavemen voted on who was going to be in charge of widlebeast procurement. News flash: People with strong opinions will express them forcefully.

...and the only revealers of "the truth".

Everyone who has an opinion believes they have the truth. How is this in any way related to blogs? You see lots of closed-minded politial hacks on the editorial pages, the sunday morning political shows, and talk radio.

Which is better: The "truth" as seen by the editor, or the "Truth" as seen by thousands of interested people who want a better life for themselves, and all of whom have varying opinions on how things ought to be done? Blogs run the full spectrum of views from the ararchists over at No-Treason to the collectivists at DNC Underground, and everything in between.

[...] But many, particularly political blogs, have no regard for anything but the furtherance of their own agendas, taking things wildly out of context, and going on vindictive missions to build a one-sided case to paint the target of their ire in the worst possible light, without any consideration for any other motivations or other sides of the stories.

If the same were true of

What's the deal with the PDF-format anyway? The document is 17 pages of Powerpoint-like slides. I'm sure some nice, simple HTML could have displayed that much more quickly.

Boy, that's for sure. And you're not the only one who thinks so; see Jeff Jarvis' and Doc Searls' rants on the subject, which prompted a response from ChangeThis' founder, Seth Godin:

I hear you. But I think the comparison is not apt. The right comparison is to compare our PDFs to books.

Books are not searchable. They cost money to reproduce. You can't print multiple copies and Google searches them even less well than they search PDFs.

You don't hear anyone whining about books...

Anyway, we use PDFs because they're a lot more booklike. They read better. They stick together when you forward them. They print better.

Maybe he should have just gone all the way and printed them as books, then?

Link:
http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_10_26.htm l#008280

----

Please visit Slashcode bug #981137, which concerns automatically hyperlinking URLs in "Plain Old Text" mode, and add a comment to show your support for a speedy resolution. No progress has been made on this trivial feature request for longer than six months.

Are you going to judge him by his words, which dissemble, or by his actions, which demonstrate his acceptance of the influence of the PTC?

In October Michael Powell was on a call-in radio show. Stern called, here's what transpired...

http://www.jimgilliam.com/audio/2004-1-26_stern_po well.mp3 - MP3 of Stern vs. Powell

Transcript from Buzz Machine - http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_10_26.htm l

Stern: Ronn, hi.

Owens: Is this who I think it is?

Stern: Yeah, and I want to say hi to the commissioner and a friend of mine told me the commissioner said he was going to be on the show....

The commissioner has fined me millions of dollars for things I have said and consistently avoids me and avoids me and I wonder how long he will stay on the phone with me.

Owens: Go ahead and ask your questions.

Stern: Hi, Michael, how are you?

Powell: Hi, Howard, how are you?

Stern: Does it make you nervous to talk to me?

Powell: It does not....

Stern: All right, so well, I've got about ten zillion questions for you because you honestly are an enigma to me.

The first question being: How did you get your job? It is apparent to most of us in broadcasting that your father got you your job. And you kind of sit there:

You're the judge, you're the arbiter, you're the one who tells us what we can and can't say on the air and yet I really don't think you're qualified to be the head of the commission. Do you deny that your father got you this job?

Powell: Well, I would deny it exceedingly. You can look at my resume if you want, Howard. I'm not ashamed of it and I think it justifies my existence. I was chief of staff of the antitrust division, I'm an attorney, I was a clerk on the court of the United States I was a private attorney I have the same credentials that virtually anyone who sits in my position does and I think it's a little unfair that just because I happen to have a famous father and other public officials don't that you make the assumption that is the basis on which I sit in my position.

Owens: Caller already asked this question so move on....

Stern: So out of all the people that sit on the commission, you were moved to the head of the class. I don't buy your explanation but OK.

You know, the thing that amazes me about you is, you continually fine me but you're afraid to go to court with me and I'll explain myself if you give me a second:

Fine after fine came and we tried to go to court with you to find out about obscenity and what your line was and whether our show was indecent, which I don't think it is. And you do something really sneaky behind the scenes. You continue to block Viacom from buying new stations until we pay those fines.

You are afraid to go court. You are afraid to get a ruling time and time again.

When will you allow this to go to court and stop practicing your form of racketeering that you do by making stations pay up or you hold up their license renewal?

Powell: First of all, that's flatly false.

Stern: It's not false. It's true.

Powell: I'm afraid it is. There's no reason why Viacom or any other company who feels that they have been wrongly fined can't sue us in court. We have no basis whatsoever to prevent them from going to court.

Stern: You're lying. I've lived through your fines, Michael. And Mel Karmazin came to me one day and said, Howard, we're gonna have to pay up some sort of cockamame (sp?) bunch of fines that we don't we're wrong because we can't get our paperwork done. We are finding it increasingly difficult to boy radio stations. I know you're not telling the truth. And I question why you are selected to be one who is the FCC commissioner....

I'm going to Sirius satellite radio....

Owens: That's the question I was going to ask. Now he's going to go to satellite. One of the things that I read is that there are people who said cable TV, satellite rad

Checking the "About Us" page of an organization's website is not really adequate research to determine the character of an organization. It's more informative to look at their actions, like this. Oh and there's also this little nugget of hypocricy. And, well, Jeff Jarvis deals with the numbers game that PTC tries to play. An organization whose membership is 0.3% of the population producing 99% of the complaints to the FCC seems a little disproportionate. All this is just the tip of the iceburg. The PTC is not the good guys they pretend to be.

Also keep in mind that these are the people who are horribly offended at the hilarious spanking incident on Angel.

What we have here is a case of a few people with no sense of humor capitalizing on a million Americans who don't realize what they're really supporting.

Credit for this story ultimately should go to blogger Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis is a longtime journalist, former TV critic, and currently head of the internet division of a major U.S. media company. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the FCC's data and followed it up with a searing analysis.

Jarvis is a professional, but anyone can do this. Dig in and report. Many hands make for light work, and all that.

Credit for this story ultimately should go to blogger Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis is a longtime journalist, former TV critic, and currently head of the internet division of a major U.S. media company. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the FCC's data and followed it up with a searing analysis.

Jarvis is a professional, but anyone can do this. Dig in and report. Many hands make for light work, and all that.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_11_15.htm l

It appears so, yes...
Of course, you could also go with bitlog, torog, blorrent, ...

"..if there was no Macrovision license, we would run into a lot of copyright problems with things like remote access and "TiVo to Go" functionality."

why bother giving credit where it's due when there's karma-whoring to be done?

Here you go > http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_10_26.htm l#008280

Transcript of the conversation can be found on Jeff Jarvis's Buzzmachine.

(Sorry Jeff)

BuzzMachine covers many topics from journalism, to every day life, to politics. Jeff started blogging after living through 9/11 first-hand. His political views tend to really be near the center. What I like about his political blogging is that he strives to stay away from the simplistic polarized political rants, and "gotcha" politics that plague so many other blogs i've seen, as well as mainstream media. He recently started spurring very intelligent and useful debate about various specific 2004 election issues. Jeff welcomes disagreement and all forms of thought-provoking debate, which is precisely what he has been yearning for, for years. To me, Jeff Jarvis' blog embodies that the Internet should be all about: less about mudslinging, more about exchange of thoughts. If he ever was to run for President, he'd get my vote.

BuzzMachine covers many topics from journalism, to every day life, to politics. Jeff started blogging after living through 9/11 first-hand. His political views tend to really be near the center. What I like about his political blogging is that he strives to stay away from the simplistic polarized political rants, and "gotcha" politics that plague so many other blogs i've seen, as well as mainstream media. He recently started spurring very intelligent and useful debate about various specific 2004 election issues. Jeff welcomes disagreement and all forms of thought-provoking debate, which is precisely what he has been yearning for, for years. To me, Jeff Jarvis' blog embodies that the Internet should be all about: less about mudslinging, more about exchange of thoughts. If he ever was to run for President, he'd get my vote.

BuzzMachine covers many topics from journalism, to every day life, to politics. Jeff started blogging after living through 9/11 first-hand. His political views tend to really be near the center. What I like about his political blogging is that he strives to stay away from the simplistic polarized political rants, and "gotcha" politics that plague so many other blogs i've seen, as well as mainstream media. He recently started spurring very intelligent and useful debate about various specific 2004 election issues. Jeff welcomes disagreement and all forms of thought-provoking debate, which is precisely what he has been yearning for, for years. To me, Jeff Jarvis' blog embodies that the Internet should be all about: less about mudslinging, more about exchange of thoughts. If he ever was to run for President, he'd get my vote.

Jeff Jarvis, a well-respected and popular blogger, has put together the best review of Fahrenheit 9/11 I have seen so far.

Back a few months ago, I had written a couple of personal thoughts about Michael Moore and his rhetoric.

The executive summary of all my nonsensical ranting is that I've always believed the Iraq situation is far from being the black and white portrait Moore attempts to paint with his rhetoric. While blaming everything on Bush would make things a whole lot easier, and has been serving Moore's book and movie sales very well, I believe this approach oversimplifies a set of very convoluted problems and sets us up for future failures in our foreign policies.

While it is important to acknowledge and reflect on Bush's failures, it is equally as important to look beyond the conspiracy theories, acknowledge the fact that regardless of what party you're looking at, regardless of which country, under-the-table deals and corporate interests always have and always will be a part of the picture, attempt to find what the right course of action is, pursue it and limit casualties on all sides.

The fact that the official democratic candidate, John Kerry, was one of the few to vote for the military intervention, should at least get people to think that maybe, just maybe, there were good reasons for it, even if the ones invoked by this administration (immediate threat, WMD) appear to have been wrong.

Some more details about AOL Journals from:

1. An AOL employee involved in the Journals project.
2. San Francisco Examiner columnist Jeff Jarvis who was invited to an exclusive preview (five high profile bloggers were invited)
3. Thoughts on AOL Journals from Internet consultant and professor Clay Shirky, one of the five invited

Blogs: AOL Journals Coming This Fall

AOL has discovered blogs. AOL Journals (so named because AOLers were confused by the term ''blog'') will make its debut this fall. The new service will let subscribers use AOL Instant Messenger to post to their blogs/journals with RSS/XML. AOL by Phone users will be able to leave voice mail that will be posted to their blogs as MP3s. More thoughts on the AOL Journals beta from Clay Shirky and Shelley "burningbird" Powers

The demo was going to be off-the-record, but because the opinion grinders in the room didn't turn the team into mincemeat -- reaction started with "this doesn't suck" (noted as high praise indeed), and quickly elevated to "they have a clue," and ended with "good job"...

Actually, no one's telling you you HAVE to switch from blogging to "vlogging" ($1 to Jeff Jarvis), just saying that the potential of audio and video are there if you (or any other blogger) have a use for it.

I wonder if the same people who think vlogs have no practical uses and the text blogging is much better would have been as staunch in defending newspapers against the introduction of the television newscast?