The Blogger To Be Named Later

A few years ago, outspoken tech blogger Russell Beattie got a phone call at home after he angered someone with one of the entries on his site. They asked to speak with his young son.

Beattie didn't want the incident to feed anyone's fear, but I think it's worth recalling in the discussion of whether it's OK to reveal a blogger's identity, as Michael Arrington appears to believe.

Arrington's put the chill on the unnamed author of Dead 2.0, a blogger critical of the web 2.0 bubble that has become Arrington's reason for being.

High-traffic bloggers should know as well as anybody that there's a damn good reason to remain nameless: Publishing on the web makes you a target for a considerable amount of abuse. We live in an angry world, and when you attach your name and face to a strong opinion on any subject, you're only one click away from being the focus of somebody's rage.

When I popesquatted last year and did interviews in which I jokingly asked for a papal mitre, a man named Roger Cadenhead in another part of Florida had the misfortune of being publicly listed in the phone book. He received so many hate calls that his wife called sheriff's deputies to their house.

I take anonymous and pseudonymous critics less seriously than people who identify themselves, but the idea that it's OK to out them as a matter of principle is reprehensible. There's nothing the author of Dead 2.0 could say about Arrington that he couldn't refute in a forum that draws 100 times as much traffic.

Florida · Domains · 2006/09/22 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Katherine Harris Clowns Around in Sarasota

An AP photo taken Tuesday at Sarasota-Bradenton Airport combines two of my favorite things -- Katherine Harris and sad clowns:

One of the best things about Harris is that she keeps firing staffers, reducing the chances that someone will might tell her things like "don't do a photo op in front of a suicidal clown."

But as much as I love this photo, I have to question the decision to place a giant mural of a sad clown at Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport.

Is that really what you want to see when you're getting ready to climb aboard a 23,000-gallon aluminum gas tank with wings?

Politics · Florida · 2006/09/22 · 25 COMMENTS · Link

Captcha Worth $500,000 to Inventor

The inventor of the captcha just received a $500,000 MacArthur Genius Grant:

Luis von Ahn, 28, computer scientist, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Von Ahn, who was born in Guatemala, helped develop CAPTCHA, a test used on many commercial Web sites to determine whether the user is human.

He also devised Google Image Labeler, a game in which two Internet users tag images in real time and are rewarded for using the same tag.

A little over a month ago, von Ahn gave a very entertaining talk on the Google campus. In that talk, he mentioned that if you could just hook his game up to Google images, and get 5,000 simultaneous players, every image in Google's index would be labeled in two months.

Programming · 2006/09/19 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

AutoWeek Runs Over Creative Commons Licensee

In its July 24 issue, AutoWeek magazine published a photo found on Flickr and broke both halves of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license that it used. They didn't credit the photographer or obtain his permission to use the image commercially.

Instead of apologizing and compensating the photog, AutoWeek Art Director Ken Ross made this claim in an e-mail reprinted by Lawrence Lessig:

... this image was obtained through the savethe76ball.com uncredited and in public domain. Our customary payment for this type of shot is $50.

When I wrote Ross this weekend and said they should admit a mistake and pay the guy, he responded that the dispute has been forwarded to their legal department. I hope it reaches the desk of someone with a basic understanding of copyright law.

Nothing created from 1978 onward in the U.S. is in the public domain unless there's an explicit declaration that releases it. Everything's automatically protected by copyright from the moment it is "fixed in a tangible medium of expression," to quote one primer.

Creative Commons · 2006/09/18 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Air America Struggles to Stay Afloat

I'm a day one listener to Air America Radio, yearning to hear liberal talk since Rush Limbaugh first slouched towards a microphone in the '80s. I've never understood how there could be no market for it, especially in places where conservative gasbags saturate the air. In Jacksonville, at least three different stations broadcast Limbaugh's show live, so you can travel the length of the area and keep up with the latest world crisis or societal moral collapse caused by the Clintons.

Air America's in financial trouble, which is no surprise because the network's been horribly mismanaged. An original founder ripped off a charity, misdirecting $875,000 to the fledgling radio network. The money's been repaid to an escrow account, but the scandal and the charity's shoddy financial accounting practices led to its closure.

You can say a lot about Limbaugh, and I have, but the guy never killed a children's charity.

Liberal talk would survive the closure of Air America, because two of the most successful hosts aren't members of the network: Ed Schultz and Alan Colmes. Colmes, who gets unfairly hammered as a liberal milquetoast, runs a funny late-night show after his Hannity & Colmes gig.

If Air America folds, I hope that it doesn't mean the end of Rachel Maddow as a nationally syndicated radio host. No one ever talks about Maddow -- Al Franken, Randi Rhodes and the unlistenable Jerry Springer get all the press -- but she's the best thing about Air America. She has a skewed sense of humor, an optimistic liberal take and likes to obsess over odd stuff, such as the announcer who introduces the presidential radio address each Saturday. Her program moves to 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern beginning on Monday.

One good thing that might come from the network's closure is the end of Springer's radio career. He's terrible, throwing out soggy liberal platitudes, agreeing with each caller and constantly pimping his own projects. If you think his Dancing with the Stars stunt is dull television, imagine hearing him devote an hour a day to it on the radio.

Jacksonville · Politics · Radio · 2006/09/15 · 59 COMMENTS · Link

Five Years On, 2,992 - 19 Lives Remembered

Today's remembrances of 9/11 use an official count of 2,973 people who died at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.

Someone at CBS News this morning goofed and used 2,992, a count that includes the 19 hijackers, as this screen grab from Google News shows:

Journalism · Politics · 2006/09/11 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

SMU's Loss to UNT Its Worst Ever?

Covering last night's UNT-SMU game, Dallas Morning News columnist Gerry Fraley writes, "The alumni wanted coach Ray Morrison's head after the Mustangs lost the first game in school history -- at TCU in 1915."

SMU had no alumni in 1915. That's the year the school opened.

Speaking as a UNT homer, the rest of Fraley's commentary is equally sloppy. The North Texas team that beat SMU as a five-point underdog Saturday is one season removed from four consecutive Sun Belt championships. Though the Belt's deservedly the worst-ranked conference in I-A, SMU is nine years removed from its last winning record. The Mean Green have been a better team than SMU for most of the last decade. It's no shock they're the better team this season.

Besides, if North Texas is lowly enough to hang the "worst loss ever" on SMU, a better choice for Fraley would've been 1990. During that season, SMU came to Fouts Field to play UNT when the school was still in Division I-AA and lost 14-7.

As a North Texas alumnus, that's my favorite game to have witnessed in person. The rivalry was so heated between crosstown schools that players and coaches exchanged a few punches at halftime in an incident that came close to being a full team-on-team riot. The incident would have been in heavy rotation on SportsCenter for days if it happened at a bigger school. Because it didn't, the media missed it entirely.

Sports · North Texas · 2006/09/10 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

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