Media: May 2005 Archive Page

Often, when studying history, the details are lost in an attempt to fully understand the bigger picture. We do not look at what the individuals faced, the decisions they had to make. This project will not only examine the Holocaust as a whole event, but delve deeper into the history to see what choices people had to make as the Nazis stormed their homes, took them to ghettos, and forced them to dig their own graves.

It will be important to approach this subject with caution and seriousness. It was a horrible experience that we can never recreate or even relate to. As you create your story, pay close attention to the details. Read the stories of those who lived and were able to share with world what they experienced. This project will hopefully draw you into the time period and help you understand it more thoroughly. --[Holocaust Choose-Your-Own Adventure Assignment] (Stories of the Holocaust Wiki Project )

Part of a project that asked students to create a branching narrative (of the Choose Your Own Adventure model) describing the fate of a Jewish family during the Holocaust.

On the one hand, this is an excellent way to get students to imagine all the possibilities, rather than simply following the story of one particular family. I particularly like the concept of an Intersection Point, where it seems events take on a more communal focus.

On the other hand, it would take a strong teacher (and supportive administration) to manage something like this.

Seton Hill has a National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, and I'm currently involved in doing some editing and design work for them. I don't have any particular knowledge of the subject matter, but I can tell that emotions run high on topics such as simulations (in which students act out the roles of prisoners or guards) and the over-emphasis on rescues (when in fact few people were willing to risk themselves for their Jewish fellow citizens).

Via Weblogg-ed.

The traditional, dominant method for getting academic work, research and ideas reviewed and accepted by peers is for work to be published via a recognised source. Publication in a acknowledged journal demonstrates the work meets a required standard for acceptance into the academic community.

When an academic is working on an idea at a very low level they may call upon colleagues within their department to revise and pass comments. However, this process is less well suited for work that is at the ?working or draft stage?; i.e., not quite ready for submission for publication, but well past the beginning stages of development. It would be ideal if a wider body of reviewers could assess the work. --David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller --Weblogs: a contributory element to the research dissemination process (ePortfolio Research and Development Community)

If you like, you can see Google's HTML translation. [Update, 31 May: Karissa tells me that the URL is broken. Oh, well.]

It's kind of nice to see, in the opening paragraph, references to blogging at Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, the University of British Columbia... and our own Seton Hill University. We weren't worth mentioning by name in the body of the article, apparently, but there we are, in footnote 5.

As these groups lose their remaining original members, others are on stages around the country are using their names, Porter said. Some groups claim an association with the originals, while others say they own the rights to use their titles.

"Imposters bask in reflected glory. None contributed to the respected legacies that they claim to represent and the billing should reflect accordingly," she said, adding that it is a matter of what is advertised versus "what am I getting? The public doesn't know that and they capitalize on it."

Groups that perform without saying "tribute," according to Sonny Turner, an original member of The Platters, are "unequivocally misleading ... (It's) like buying a knock-off Rolex watch." --Amanda Cochran --'Truth in Music' stalls in committee (Tribune-Review)

A high school friend of mine is the drummer for an 80s and 90s cover band called Gonzo's Nose. I've never heard them play, but I do read their website from time to time. It pokes fun at the fact they have been "playing other people's music since 1996".

As I understand it, the music industry lets other performers pay a standard fee if they want to "cover" somebody else's work. I seem to remember a Gonzo's Nose anecodote about band members encountering groupies who don't know what a "cover band" is.
While those fellows are based in the Washington, D.C. area, I wonder how the proposed Pennsylvania legislation would have affected them, if at all.

"People buy games for gameplay, not to hear voices," counters Finlayson. "And technology creates gameplay, not actors. People who play these games understand that, and in fact, some gamers turn the volume down because (they) find those voices distracting. In film or television, the actor's performance makes the experience. In video games, it does not." --Xeni Jardin --Strike Looms Against Game Makers (Wired)

Finlayson's job is to talk tough in order to scare the unions during the negotiations, but the truth of his statements really depends on the kind of game.

Someone tell me that a game version of Elmo's World doesn't need Kevin Clash's voice. Okay, transmediated games are one thing, but that's not really what Finlayson is talking about here.

I just finished playing The Longest Journey the other day. It probably took me about 60 hours, stretched out over many weeks. When my wife took the kids to visit her parents last month, I got to put in some long hours on the game, but when they came back, it was time for the end-of-term crunch, and until I submitted grades last week, I had little time for gaming.

I'm not when I'll ever have the time to write up a full review of The Longest Journey, but I was consistently impressed by the talent of Sarah Hamilton, who voiced the herione, April Ryan.

Obviously, in an adventure game driven by plot and character, the voice talent is extremely important. Broadway shows were once mainstream entertainment for the masses, but are now mostly the realm of the elite, due to high ticket prices (which reflect not only actor salaries but also the special effects and lavish production values that movie-bred audiences expect)

[Update: I just remembered that a writers' strike in the early 90s helped ushered in the era of reality TV -- COPS and America's Funniest Home Videos were both products of the networks' need to fill air time without using scripts.]

How will an actor's strike against the gaming industry affect the development of the plot-heavy, character-driven games that have the potential to raise digital narrative out of the pop-cult ghetto?

At any rate, I'm looking forward to Dreamfall -- The Longest Journey, though I still have Deus Ex 2 and Half-life 2 on my playlist. (Sadly, Deus Ex 2 will only play on my office computer, and I never have time to play it when I'm at work... and while the demos of Half-Life 2 do run on my home computer, I'm going to wait until the price comes down a bit before I splurge for that one.)

Something important is happening in the world of journalism:. It's an evolution from the lecture model, to which we in mass media have become accustomed in the past century, to something closer to a conversation. The shift stems from the collision of technology with media.

This evolution is having an effect on all three major constituencies of journalism. The most important of those is what I call the former audience -- the people who until recently were our readers, listeners and viewers, who until recently were either buying our lectures or not. --Dan Gillmor --What Professional and Citizen Journalists Can Learn From Each Other (Bayosphere)

Whether there is a subscription requirement or a Site Pass, there is still a wall around Salon's content -- and that means the blogosphere ignores it. Without this persistent cross-linking, relatively few read its words, and as history is being made -- or Googled -- every day, Salon's footsteps in cyberspace become fainter and fainter. --Adam L. Pennenberg --Salon's Balancing Act (Wired)

Murdered blogger's last entry helps find killer (Suspect admits to the deed) Here's his last entry. --Murdered Blogger's Last Entry Helps Find Killer (Metafilter)

The comments left on Metafilter add much more to the story than those left on the victim's site.

There may be a coming generation who will know the literary classics only from television's adaptation of them, but that knowledge is better than no knowledge at all. I'm a novelist, so I'm hardly going to argue against the irreplaceable conditions of prose, the pattern and rhythm and truth of good writing. But literature is also about narrative and morality; if it takes a television show to get some of that over to an audience - and possibly to send them to the original source - then there are small grounds for moaning. --Andrew O'Hagan --The Plot Flickers (Arts.Telegraph)

Maybe when Joe and Mary Sixpack compare the real world they live in with the consistently troubled, violent, sensationalized world the news media present to them day after day, they notice the obvious discrepancies.

A perfect example is crime coverage. If you relied only on newspaper front pages and TV news -- as so many older suburbanites unfortunately do -- you'd be afraid to go out of the house. --Bill Steigerwald --Real vs. media world (Tribune-Review)

We need more stories in our lives, yet we don’t have much time for them. Most digital cameras and webcams allow you to take one minute of video and audio at resolutions suitable for the web. The solution: 60 second stories, of course.

We are pleased to announce the 60 second story competition. 60 second stories are works of fiction recorded by their authors as digital videos, less than one minute in duration. Files size must be less than 5MB, and work must be submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Entries are being accepted from now until June 8th, 2005. --60 Second Story (Contagious Media)

"We need a cultural shift so that young girls and women feel that playing games is not a testosterone monopolised hobby reserved for their boyfriends and husbands," urged Mr Lowenstein.

For this to happen, game producers need to think radically about the sorts of games they make, said the ESA president.

As part of this, games had to become easier to play, as often people are intimidated by the technology or the complexity of a title. --Alfred Hermida --Call for radical rethink of games (BBC)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

America's entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe's biggest broadcasters -- the BBC -- is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it.

Unlike Hollywood, the BBC is eager and willing to work with a burgeoning group of content providers whose interests are aligned with its own: its audience. --Cory Doctorow --The Beeb Shall Inherit the Earth (Wired)

It's that abrupt elbow in a graph of growth or decline when the new technology or paradigm truly kicks in, and suddenly there is no going back. From that moment, the new stuff takes off and the old stuff goes into rapid decline, whether it is a new standard of modem, a new video game, a new microprocessor family, or just a new idea. I think we've just hit such an inflection point and -- though most of us still don't realize it -- the personal computer, video game, and electronic entertainment businesses will never be the same. --Robert X. Cringely --Inflection Point: This Week Changed the World of High Tech Forever, Though Most of Us Still Don't Know It (PBS | I, Cringely)

1. Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
2. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time -- protect your privacy.
3. Identify yourself -- name and, when relevant, role at IBM -- when you blog about IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
4. If you publish a blog or post to a blog and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: "The postings on this site are my own and don?t necessarily represent IBM?s positions, strategies or opinions."
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
6. Don?t provide IBM?s or another?s confidential or other proprietary information.
7. Don't cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.
8. Respect your audience. Don't use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc., and show proper consideration for others' privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory -- such as politics and religion.
9. Find out who else is blogging on the topic, and cite them.
10. Don't pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don't alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
11. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective.
--Guidelines for IBM Bloggers: Executive Summary (IBM)

A good set of guidelines for the blogosphere in general.

Six in ten among the public feel the media show bias in reporting the news, and 22% say the government should be allowed to censor the press. More than 7 in 10 journalists believe the media does a good or excellent job on accuracy--but only 4 in 10 among the public feel that way. And a solid 53% of the public think stories with unnamed sources should not be published at all.

Perhaps the widest gap of all: 8 in 10 journalists said they read blogs, while less than 1 in 10 others do so. Still, a majority of the news pros do not believe bloggers deserve to be called journalists.

Asked who they voted for in the past election, the journalists reported picking Kerry over Bush by 68% to 25%. In this sample of 300 journalists, from both newspapers and TV, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 3 to 1--but about half claim to be Independent. As in previous polls, a majority (53%) called their political orientation ?moderate,? versus 28% liberal and 10% conservative. --Joe Strupp --New Survey Finds Huge Gap Between Press and Public on Many Issues (Editor & Publisher)

This article notes that the survey may have over-sampled upper management, with 43% of respondents being editors or news directors, many of them well-paid, and only 47% rank-and-file reporters.

Are classic essays like Swift's still being written, or has the elegant thoughtfulness that is the essay's legacy been winnowed away by its rapacious bastard offspring, the blog? And will the Internet generation, suffused by the blogosphere, lose the ability to write essays altogether? (The plethora of essays for sale online to students portends they may.)

Blogging has replaced the real essay for most people under 30, just as the Internet has replaced the daily newspaper. Polls show more than 60 percent of online readers trust independent news sources like blogs over mainstream news sources. But while blogs provide immediacy, they also breed inaccuracy - from spelling and grammatical errors to errors of fact. An essay, despite the immediacy and passion with which it might have been written, has still been perused by an editor, a copy editor and a fact-checker before it saw print. (Even Swift had an editor.) A blog has been reviewed by no one, edited by no one - not even, in many cases, been proofread by the author.

Some bloggers, such as Andrew Sullivan and Richard Scheer, are former newsmen with real journalistic credentials. Others, like Matt Drudge, are more like Stowe's Topsy - they just grew. Blogland isn't like the world of mainstream journalism, and bloggers are not usually serious essayists like Sullivan or Scheer. Any dot-commer can blog - a serious journalist with years of experience like, say, myself, or the teenager down the block spewing political rants during breaks from Grand Theft Auto. The problem in the blogosphere is that the kid and I will be received with equal credibility. --Victoria A. Brownworth --The Long Arm of the Blog (BaltimoreSun.com)

While Matt Drudge has often been lumped with bloggers, his site is a collection of links, with an occasional news/gossip exclusive. Drudge has shown what the democratization of journalism means for politics, but to compare him to an essayist is like comparing a ballet dancer to a polka dancer. Yes, both are dancers, but the set of skills involved are completely different. I can't tell you how many times that an outsider's attempt to analyze the blogosphere reminds me of the old story of the blind men and the elephant.

Citing the prevalence of online essay banks and the prevalence of bloggers in the same paragraph, and then implying that the two are somehow causally related is silly. Online essay banks were there long before the bloggers showed up.

For someone who strikes such a literate tone, I'm surprised Brownworth starts off with this example: "But blogs are pretenders to the throne of true essay writing. They mimic the essay much as Eliza Doolittle mimicked the Queen's English before Professor Higgins got his hands on her." Excuse me? While Eliza does show up at Higgins's house asking for lessons, she doesn't make any attempt to mimic the Queen's English beforehand. It's only Higgins who, intellectually smug and self-assured, gets it into his head that if only Eliza spoke more properly, he could pass her off as a duchess. "I could even get her a place as lady's maid or shop assistant, which requires better English."

If you consider what happens to Eliza after Higgins makes her too good for Covent Garden, and she gets tired of the ruse that lets her play the lady, I'm not so sure that Shaw's Pygmalion is the literary example I would choose if I were trying to make a point about the superiority of essays to blogs.

Brownworth dismisses all the things that blogs do better than essays, so naturally when she evaluates blogs on the same set of criteria that have been historically developed for essays, she's going to find bloggers come up short.

"Bloggers are more Web-cam style diarists than essayists," she says. Okay. And the average essayist, if placed in front of a web cam, would produce a pretty boring video diary -- if judged according to the criteria that are active in the webcam community.

As a writing teacher, I struggle to get students to plan ahead, to condense, to revise. So I can identify with Brownworth's woes. But an experienced diaryblogger has a certain set of skills that a non-writer has never developed.

Brownworth, whose essay invokes Orwell to attack the achievements of bloggers, uses a bit of Orwellian rhetoric herself. Brownworth's final warning, " Blogland is a sprawl, fast encroaching on the fragile landscape of the finely wrought essay," invokes the "urban sprawl" that encroaches on the "landscape" of pristine nature.

This presumes that the "finely wrought essay" is natural, while it is in fact the result of hundreds of years of conventions, aesthetic rules and personal judgments.

The essay is just as artificially constructed as the weblog. Yes, the essay has been around for hundreds of years, but its existence depends upon the existence of an intellectual aristocracy of educated men and women with the necessary leisure time to write back and forth to each other about subjects that they deem important, using rhetorical techniques and organizational patterns that they themselves deem effective.

The great Greek orators voiced similar complaints about a vulgar form of communication that they said killed spontaneity, and would permit anyone with a smattering of technical skill to masquerade as a great communicator.

The bastard art the Greek orators derided was called "writing".

Link via metafilter.

The departure of Griego Erwin, who wrote three columns a week, continues the run of recent embarrassments for newspapers, many of which have cost writers their jobs.

Last week, USA Today Pentagon correspondent Tom Squitieri resigned under pressure after lifting quotes from another newspaper and using other quotes without attribution.

That followed on the heels of the resignation of veteran Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Al Levine, who pilfered information from two Florida newspapers without crediting them.

Los Angeles Times reporter Eric Slater was dismissed last month when editors at the newspaper could not verify information in an article he wrote about fraternity hazing at Cal State Chico.

The recent headliner in the string of news scandals was bestselling author, sports columnist and TV personality Mitch Albom, who was suspended from the Detroit Free Press for describing a scene in the stands at an NCAA basketball tournament game before the game had been played.

With polls showing journalists already held in low esteem, the run of bad news has alarmed many in the business. --James Rainey --Newspaper Columnist Resigns After Inquiry (Yahoo! News (will expire))

I have recently decided that not being in a class that requires blogging is a bad thing. Because i am not required to do blogging, i don't do it. This isn't because i don't want to, it is because i don't have time to. If it were required, i would make time to do it, seeing as how blogging would be a part of my homework. I fear that in mentioning this, i am going to be bombed with blog-required classes, but, i almost look forward to it *shudder* So, next semester blogs, come on, bring it on. I will be attempting to blog over the summer, although i don't know how often this will be... --Lori Rupert --I bid thee farewell (Kaleidoscope)

One of my students posted this pretty much on her way out the door for the summer.

How many other American journalists, perhaps not as secure in their position as I, have thought to do a story and decided that it's too close to the bone, too questioning of the American government or its actions? How many times was the risk that our own government might come in and rifle through our apartment, our homes or take us away for questioning in front of our children a factor in our decision not to do a story? How many times did we as journalists decide not to do a story because we thought it might get us into trouble? --Molly Bingham --Home from Iraq  (Courier Journal)

This is an extension to the point raised by Time's exposure of the Hawaiian Good Luck Sign. It's possible to be a good journalist without revealing everything that you know. A reporter's obligation to tell the truth without bias conflicts with the right to privacy of sexual assault victims. Journalists also regularly protect the names of minors.

It's troubling enough when an American news reporter wants to refers to US forces as "us". What happens when the American forces become "them"?

We are prudent, practical, common-sense people. And what could be more common-sense ? more downright American ? than chopping down vast acres of trees, loading them onto trucks, driving the trucks to paper mills where the trees are ground into paste and reconstituted as huge rolls of newsprint, which are put back onto trucks and carted across the country to printing plants where they are turned into newspapers as we know them (with sections folded into one another according to a secret formula designed for maximum mess and frustration and known only to a few artisans) and then piled into a third set of trucks that fan out before dawn across every metropolitan area dropping piles here and there so that a network of newspaper deliverers can go house-to-house hiding newspapers in the bushes or throwing them at the cat, and patriotic citizens can ultimately glance at the front page, take Sports to the john, tear out the crossword puzzle and throw the rest away? --Michael Kinsley --Remember: You Can't Swat a Fly With a Computer (LA Times (registration))

Given the dominance of Hierarchical folders over the last 40 years, this is a major development in the history of information management. Implicit in Google's product offerings is an declaration of war: Hierarchy is doomed, and Search is going to kill it. --John Hiler --Google's War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders (Microcontent News)

The article doesn't deliver as much philosophical speculation as the blurb suggests... it's actually a historical retrospective, rather than a set of musings about the future. But it's still a good retrospective.

We edubloggers talk and write about this a lot, this idea that the tools of the Read/Write Web necessarily change the relationships and construction of the classroom. When audience moves from one teacher to many readers, when assessment moves measuring correctness to measuring usefulness, when we ask for long lasting contribution of ideas instead of short-lived answers to narrow questions, it requires us to rethink our roles as teachers and to redefine our curricula. Remember, we don't own the content any longer. Our students teach us the tools. They are already connecting and collaborating. To hold on to the vertical classroom is to risk irrelevance...soon. --Will Richardson --Horizontal Classrooms (Weblogg-ed)

Okay, okay, I'm rethinking, I'm rethinking!

3) The most common excuse for guests not being asked to come on show was ?I am taping my own show at that time.? Realized I no longer know anyone who doesn?t have own talk show.

8) The better writers are on the page the worse they sometimes are on the air. What TV requires is not someone who is authoritative but someone who looks authoritative. Genuine articles are often hopelessly out of the demo, with coke bottle glasses or unfortunate predilections for a thoughtful pause. --Tina Brown --Ten Things I Learned at Topic A (The Huffington Post)

I'm not a TV news kind of guy, so I can't say for sure whether I've ever seen her broadcast work, but I know she wasn't exactly a smashing success as editor of The New Yorker.

Yes, she's exaggerating, but talk about an echo chamber. Does the world really need yet another way for Tina Brown to share her ideas with the world?

And compare her point #8 with a recent spoof article from The Onion:

"[Canton] went on like that for six... long... minutes," Salters said. "Fact after mind-numbing fact. Then he started spewing all these statistics about megawatts and the nation's current energy consumption and I don't know what, because my mind just shut off. I tried to lead him in the right direction. I told him to address the fears that the average citizen might have about nuclear power, but he still utterly failed to mention meltdowns, radiation, or mushroom clouds." ("Actual Expert too Boring for TV", posted 04 May 2005; will expire soon)

When she writes "not being asked to come on show," does she really mean "not being able to come on show"? Why would "I am taping my own show at that time" be an excuse for not asking someone to be on her show? Or does she mean a person who was not asked to be on her show would use that story to explain the oversight to a third party?

There's no way to ask that question on the blog and get a clarification, since there's no way to post a comment. So the world will have to shrug and hit the "go back" button.

MIT Technology Review Online on March 21 retracted two stories written in whole or in part by Michelle Delio, citing the publication's inability to confirm a source. On April 4, InfoWorld edited four articles by Delio to remove anonymous quotes.... Penenberg provided Wired News with a list of 24 stories that contained sources he could not confirm... Delio, in communications with Penenberg and Wired News, stands by her reporting and the existence and accuracy of her sources.

[...]

Wired News is not retracting any of these stories. Rather, we are appending notes to the stories, indicating what we have been unable to confirm about them and editing them, as noted, where appropriate. By keeping these stories posted and clearly marked, we hope that our readers can help identify any sources whom we cannot track down. --Wired News Releases Source Review (Wired)

Interesting development. I've probably linked to dozens of Delio's stories. I think I once sent her an e-mail that was critical of a phrase that I thought was biased, but that's insignificant.

Keeping the articles up, noting which details are unconfirmed, usefully takes advantage of the flexibility of electronic text.

The columnist who once ran for governor of California launched a Web site called The Huffington Post on Monday. It features dozens of name-brand bloggers, as well as news coverage. Is this a welcome addition or an unwanted intrusion? --Blogs of the Rich and Famous (AOL -- Daily Pulse)

Now this is funny... when AOL is tweaking you for not getting it, you know you're in trouble.

It almost seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she served up liberal celebs like red meat on a silver platter for the salivating and Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out. --Nikki Finke --Deadline Hollywood: Arianna's Blog Blows (LA Weekly)

--Google Movie Reviews (Google)

Amazing... one page gives you the showtimes and rating of movies playing in your area, along with a link to the IMDB.

I learned about this on Dan Gillmor's site.

The Huffington Post: First Response (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

What will be the contributions of a large bunch of people, who could have blogged on their own if they wanted to, but were motivated to do so by the Arianna Huffington brand name?

I briefly checked out The Huffington Post today. I was never too impressed by the collective achievements of the celebrity intellectuals that Salon pulled together in its heyday. The experiment will expose a wider range of people to the potential of the internet.

John Cusack's entry on Hunter S. Thompson is probably the most literate and engaging thing on the site. Playwright David Mamet has some existential fun with the nature of truth and authority in the blogosphere; I hope his future entries are less "cutesy." Scientist and media expert Jay Winsten's comment on the Center for Disease Control's overstatement of the effects of obesity on health also caught my eye.

A significant number of the other contributors are of the "My homework assignment was to post a blog entry... how does this work?" variety. See Al Eisele, a columnist whose blog entry reads like a column, and the co-blog of writer Brad Hall and actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who attempt a comedy routine. Including charter school activist Roger Lowenstein was a good idea, since his criticism of teacher unions and the left in general will deflect criticisms that Huffington is simply trying to create a liberal echo chamber, but somebody ought to tell him to break up his prose into browser-friendly chunks. On the other hand, comedian Ellen DeGeneres, who has written several humor books in a narrative, conversational writing style, seems right at home in the medium. She should really choose link text that is more cognitively or emotionally significant than the word "here," but that's a common characteristic in the writing of hypertext newbies.

Does that little graphic of the speaker really need to be Flash animation? Why wouldn't a GIF suffice?

I do like the openness the site shows on its wire feed... while there's no way for visitors to post comments to the blogs written by the contributors I've mentioned above, it is possible to comment on wire stories (which are excerpted on site) and on Huffington Post exclusives. The site invites leads and scoops, so it's in direct competition with The Drudge Report, the retro design of which is getting less and less cool every day.

Well, the grades for graduating seniors are due today, so it's back to the salt mines for me.

Update: Online reviews from AOL ("Blogs of the Rich and Famous") and the LA Weekly ("Arianna's Blog Blows").

A Metafilter poster echoes Yeats: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards blogging to be born."

My goodness, that Metafliter post is full of good bits. The next comment says The Huffington Post is "like a Drudge Report, only happier and more famous."

And check out the hilarious Guardian spoof.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play. --William ShakespearePrologue, Henry V (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This fall, I'll be teaching a survey of drama course, covering from the ancient Greeks to the present. I've taught it before, but not at SHU. It will be packed with first-semester freshmen.

I think I'll begin the course with this passage, to drive home the point that reading a playscript is an extension of the co-creative, interpretive act for which Shakespeare here calls.

It's also not a bad metaphor for close reading, or, by extension, education in general. The more you put into it, the more you get out of it. I don't have the budget of George Lucas, the background dancers and laser shows of Britney Spears, or the time to wordsmith 50-minute lectures (like the ones delivered by my own professors, who taught only two classes each term, with graduate students to run the discussion sections and mark the papers).

I don't even have the pretty colored pie charts, like their $85 science textbooks do.

But somehow, I've got to compete for their attention, against all the pleasures of their newfound freedom. And the contents of their iPods.

Of course, I've got some pretty good course material to work with. I can show video clips. I can invite drama majors to do scene work. If the classroom dynamic is good, we can even do impromptu staged readings.

I also have the benefit of the knowledge that I will probably see most of these freshmen again, in another class, perhaps even the following semester.

Shakespeare's audiences probably included many who sought escapist entertainment, just as some of the incoming freshmen will think of college as their own escapist playground. I think the key here lies in the Chorus's efforts to align the audience and the players on one side -- united in imagination and possibility, against the limitations of form and dreary reality on the other side.

--Hawaiian Good Luck Sign (USS Pueblo.org)

Communist North Koreans captured the U.S.S. Pueblo, imprisoned its crew, and began using them for propaganda purposes, coercing them to write apologies and trotting them out at press conferences that North Korea used to its advantage.

The October 18, 1968 issue of Time revealed that the men of the Pueblo, while appearing to cooperate with the North Koreans (out of fear for their lives) were actually giving their captors the finger. Korean culture did not recognize a raised middle finger as a gesture of contempt.

The North Koreans, learning the truth through the magazine, punished their prisoners severely.

The Time photo caption makes a witty allusion to Marshall McLuhan. The men had reasoned that their captors would probably learn the meaning of the gesture sooner or later, but the ethics of exposing a prisoner's only means of communication is troubling.

For future reference... here's another troubling photo.

Update: My brother-in-law, Robert, notes that I got a historical detail wrong in this entry... I've deleted the offending passage. Thanks for the correction.

--Bad Timing In the Worst Way (BreakTheChain.org)

How strange... when I catch a glimpse of the Twin Towers in the background in Sesame Street videos that we taped years ago, or on the cover of a Curious George book, I still cringe. But for this ad, I felt a pang of sympathy for the advertising designer, who had no idea what kind of emotional impact his or her image would create.

From a website about chain e-mail letters.

Tom Bosley Haunts Me (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm laid up in bed, having gotten my usual end-of-semester cold a week and a half early. (Last time at least it had the courtesy to wait until a few hours after I submitted final grades to start hammering me into submission.)

It suddenly occurred to me, from out of nowhere, that despite what Tom Bosley told me at the beginning of each episode, I really don't care that Happy Days was filmed before a live studio audience. I don't care now, and I didn't care back then.

I did take a trip down memory lane, courtesy of The Greatest American Hero fan site.

Sigh. Sometimes I wish the dark secrets I hide from my students were less... lame.

Two and a half decades later, as the little yellow notes celebrate their silver anniversary, it?s easy to forget what a recent innovation they are. Thanks to their material simplicity, they seem more closely related to workplace antiquities like the stapler and the hole-punch than integrated chips. Instead, they?re an exemplary product of their time. Foreshadowing the web, they offered an easy way to link one piece of information to another in a precisely contextual way. Foreshadowing email, they made informal, asynchronous communication with your co-workers a major part of modern office life. --Greg Beato -- Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes (The Rake)

Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: "It's pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It's the news value that is most important."

He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review - despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.

As a result, says Prof Spencer, flawed research is finding its way into the leading journals, while attempts to get rebuttals published fail. --Robert Matthews --Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global warming' (Telegraph)

This is my favorite conspiracy theory.

I spend so much time trying to drill into the heads of my students that information published in peer-reviewed academic journals is more valuable in a term paper than random stuff you find on the internet. But here's another reminder that the peer-review process is only as good as the peers doing the reviewing.

The appeal of the blogs? Humor seems to be the biggest attraction. Ironic detachment from the news, an ability to deflate egos and refreshing, undisguised opinion are also valued. All are antithetical to most news organizations.

American newspapers traditionally and scrupulously segregate fact-based reporting from opinion by designating pages for each. Radio and television try to ensure that opinion remains secondary to reporting. Conclusions should be drawn warily. Bloggers tend not to care if they, and their readers conflate opinion and fact. It's part of the appeal of the blogosphere.

As news organizations fight to regain their battered credibility and vanishing audiences, the blogs and the number of people who read them continue to grow. The blogs entertain, they provoke, and they are not constrained by journalistic standards of truth telling.

This is a challenge and a danger for journalism. --Jeffrey A. Dvorkin --When Those Pesky Blogs Undermine NPR News (NPR)

The issues extend beyond the world of journalism.

Dvorkin notes that "younger people find the Internet a more useful place, and a more nimble way to get their news," but when he says " blogosphere has proven once again to be an amoral place with few rules," he misses the point. The internet is full of moral people, too. But because the mass broadcast media offers its audience only one meaningful way of personalizing its content (the on/off button), Dvorkin is thinking in monolithic terms.

He is right to note that there are instances where the public's right to know does not supersede issues of national security, but the specific case he mentioned -- the U.S. government issuing a redacted report that could be easily, trivially manipulated to reveal the redacted text -- is itself a newsworthy story. Journalists are trained to understand that just because they discovered a name (or a fact) does not give them the moral justification to publish that name (or fact) in every circumstance. That's because journalists are trained to think of the impact their work has on the general public. Bloggers, who may be writing for an imagined audience that consists only of peers, may simply not understand what it means to post a personal comment on their weblog.

A former student of mine from the University of Wisconsin, who started blogging for a class project and kept it up after she graduated the class and entered law school, kept detailing her escapades with alcohol and misadventures with boyfriends. I was often horrified to read of her exploits, but 1) they were funny and 2) they helped remind me that the "good students don't drink too much, only bad students do" binary opposition I carried in my head was false. At any rate, when I last checked this student's blog, she had removed all the entries and replaced them with a statement suggesting it was time for her to move on. I guess she doesn't want future potential clients to Google her and read of her exploits.

This student wasn't a journalist, but she named the names of her friends, not just herself. Presumably her friends have blogs that might mention her name.

Since more and more students are arriving at college already having blogged socially, it seems to me that part of freshman orientation should include a "be careful what you write" warning, along with "don't walk home alone" and "don't procrastinate."

The later spinoffs were much better performed, but the content continued to be stuck in Roddenberry's rut. So why did the Trekkies throw themselves into this poorly imagined, weakly written, badly acted television series with such commitment and dedication? Why did it last so long?

Here's what I think: Most people weren't reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren't reading at all. So when they saw "Star Trek," primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by. --Orson Scott Card --Strange New World: No ''Star Trek'' (LA Times (will expire))

I watched Star Trek religously until I took my first full-time teaching job, during the last season of Deep Space Nine and the third or fourth season of Voyager. A new job, a new baby, and a TV with poor reception. Oh, yeah, and Babylon 5 was still on at the time. My sister would tape the show for us and sends us batches of 5 or 6 at a time, and we would watch them straight through. Very powerful to see it all in that manner.

In total, I've watched about 10 minutes of Star Trek: Enterprise, and though I'm still a Star Trek fan, I'm satisfied with the Trek I have and remember.

I am actually very slowly working my way through a 1986 Star Trek novel depicting Kirk's first mission on the Enterprise. I enjoy the way the novel depicts "down time" on the classic Enterprise, which is something we only rarely saw on the original show.

Over the last 50 years, we've had to cope with an explosion of media, technologies, and interfaces, from the TV clicker to the World Wide Web. And every new form of visual media - interactive visual media in particular - poses an implicit challenge to our brains: We have to work through the logic of the new interface, follow clues, sense relationships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the very skills that the Ravens tests measure - you survey a field of visual icons and look for unusual patterns.

The best example of brain-boosting media may be videogames. Mastering visual puzzles is the whole point of the exercise - whether it's the spatial geometry of Tetris, the engineering riddles of Myst, or the urban mapping of Grand Theft Auto.

The ultimate test of the "cognitively demanding leisure" hypothesis may come in the next few years, as the generation raised on hypertext and massively complex game worlds starts taking adult IQ tests. This is a generation of kids who, in many cases, learned to puzzle through the visual patterns of graphic interfaces before they learned to read. Their fundamental intellectual powers weren't shaped only by coping with words on a page. They acquired an intuitive understanding of shapes and environments, all of them laced with patterns that can be detected if you think hard enough. Their parents may have enhanced their fluid intelligence by playing Tetris or learning the visual grammar of TV advertising. But that's child's play compared with Pokémon. --Steven Johnson --Dome Improvement (Wired)

IQ test scores are rising around the globe. Maybe we're getting smarter, or maybe our increasingly technological lives are giving us more daily experience doing the abstract reasoning tasks that, in a simpler age, most people only encountered during an IQ test.

The movie wasn’t perfect, but there was a lot to like and a lot to laugh at. I so enjoyed myself that I became even more puzzled than I was before about the handfuls of invective that many reviewers of the film have been flinging at it, risking damage to their digital watches in the process. --Nick Montfort --Actually I Quite Liked It (Grand Text Auto)

Montfort's review of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy leaves me feeling hopeful.