Judge Censors Stories on Kansas City Power Company
A circuit court judge in Kansas City has issued a temporary injunction ordering two news sites to remove articles from their web sites published Friday about the city's Board of Public Utilities on the grounds the power company would be "irreparably harmed" by their publication.
The articles, published by the Kansas City Star and The Pitch, describe a confidential document produced for the company in November 2004 that evaluates whether to tell the EPA that power plant upgrades did not comply with the federal Clean Air Act.
Attorney Stanley A. Reigel, in a 15-page document, identified 73 repairs or upgrades that were constructed without permits required under the Clean Air Act passed in 1977, according to The Pitch.
The work was done at the utility's three power plants: Nearman Creek Power Station, Quindaro Power Station and the now-closed Kaw Power Station. The work was completed between January 1980 and November 2004. Reigel determined that 15 of those repairs and upgrades were "questionable" and another 15 projects would be "probably not defensible" if the EPA conducted an audit.
Any one of those projects "puts BPU at risk" for an audit by the EPA, Reigel warned. Fines for utility companies in similar cases amounted to $1,000 for each megawatt of energy produced by the plant. Together, the Nearman and Quindaro plants produce 631 megawatts.
The stories had been cached on Google and elsewhere by the time Judge Kelly Moorhouse issued the unconstitutional order, making her actions utterly futile. Bloggers Brad Friedman and Justin McLachlan have reprinted them on First Amendment grounds.
Ironically, Judge Moorhouse graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia, home to one of the country's most prestigious schools of journalism
.XFN: Mark Up Your Friends
I added XFN support to Workbench this morning, putting keywords like "friend", "acquaintance", "met", and "colleague" inside the links on my blogroll. This tells XFN-aware software how I know people, which can be used to build distributed MySpace-style social networks across the web.
I'm a generation too old for this kind of thing to seem normal, but I'm curious to see whether anyone's doing interesting stuff with this data.
WordPress MU also supports XFN. Any time you add a link to your blogroll, click the Link Relationship pane to expand it and define how you know the linked site's author:
My newly codified relationships should be picked up soon by RubHub, an XFN search engine with a disturbing name. I do not plan to rub anyone on my blogroll, no matter how close we seem in this site's markup.
Jimmy Wales Invites Admin to Succeed Elsewhere
Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales threw Ryan Jordan under the bus this morning:
I have been for several days in a remote part of India with little or no Internet access. I only learned this morning that EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes. I understood this to be primarily the matter of a pseudonymous identity (something very mild and completely understandable given the personal dangers possible on the Internet) and not a matter of violation of people's trust. I want to make it perfectly clear that my past support of EssJay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on. Even now, I have not been able to check diffs, etc.
I have asked EssJay to resign his positions of trust within the community.
Assuming this is an order disguised as a request, it's the right outcome, but it's impossible to come away from this incident with much confidence in Wikipedia when so many site contributors defended his right to lie about his identity. There aren't many situations in life where an anonymous mob of people, working in an atmosphere allergic to the concept of personal accountability, is relied upon to achieve a societal good.
Cracker Adds PHP Exploit to WordPress 2.1.1
WordPress has issued an urgent upgrade for users who downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days:
It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.
This is the kind of thing you pray never happens, but it did and now we’re dealing with it as best we can.
Wikipedia Editor Faces Consequences
One of my favorite short pieces of writing is Douglas Adams' pedantic history of the world, a chronology that notes the start of the new millenium. He must have been sorely disappointed when the events of Jan. 1, 2001, did not transpire as expected.
I am a pedant. I once alarmed my relatives in the middle of the night by rearranging their collection of leather-bound Franklin Library Pulitzer Prize classics in the order they won the prize. My brother-in-law, who must also be a pedant, immediately noticed the next morning that the books were no longer in alphabetical order by author's last name. In the ensuing disagreement, a pedantic time was had by all. (Wikipedia, to its enduring shame, lists winners in reverse chronological order.)
As a pedant, I've tried to resist getting sucked into Wikipedia's internal politics, because I know I'll have such a great time I'll completely lose interest in the outside world.
Wikipedia has developed a labyrynthine internal bureaucracy at Internet speed. It's so compelling that some of the most active contributors to the site don't work on encyclopedia entries at all, contributing instead to the endless debates about the production of encyclopedia entries. Masters of the form take it a level deeper, debating the policies that govern these debates.
Bureaucracy's engrained so deep in Wikipedia that there's an official job called Bureaucrat. Twenty-three people have attained this level, a heady rush that must be similar to how I felt when my magic-user reached 22,501 experience points and became a Thaumaturgist before he was eaten by a bulette.
I broke down and posted around a dozen comments yesterday within Wikipedia about Ryan "Essjay" Jordan, the fake tenured professor of theology experiencing a come to Jesus moment after rising to Wikipedia's leadership. He's been pimping his bogus academic credentials since the first edits he made on the site and was promoted by founder Jimmy Wales after admitting the ruse. As a member of Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, Jordan will judge whether site contributors should be banned for inappropriate or unethical behavior.
If there's any accountability at all within Wikipedia, there's no way this guy should remain in a position of authority. Wikipedia has huge potential for misuse, as any number of biographical subjects can attest, and it depends entirely on the notion that its editorial process can be trusted to produce an authoritative reference work read by millions of people.
As it turns out, I might get my wish that someone be held accountable over this incident. A Wikipedia administrator with 40,000 edits has suggested that I lose editing privileges.
For the past 48 hours, Rcade has made absolutely no contributions to the project except to this discussion. ... There are limits to discussing this subject, and Rcade needs to be introduced to these limits and now.
When I told this to my wife, she was completely in favor of my ouster. I'm glad she doesn't have an account on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia Admin Loses His Religion
Seth Finkelstein covers the latest scandal to embarrass Wikipedia: a site administrator and Wikia employee who's been lying for years about his academic credentials.
Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old in Kentucky who's never taught a class, claimed on his Wikipedia bio and in an interview with the New Yorker to be a tenured professor of religion with four degrees: a bachelor of arts in religious studies, master of arts in religion, doctorate of philosophy in theology and doctorate in canon law. The magazine ran a correction after he bragged on his Wikipedia talk page about fooling reporter Stacy Schiff and the magazine's fact checker:
I did six hours of interviews with the reporter, and two with a fact checker, but I was really surprised that they were willing to do an interview with someone who they couldn't confirm; I can only assume that it is proof I was doing a good job playing the part.
Jordan serves on one of Wikipedia's management committees and was hired in January by Wikia, the for-profit company affiliated with the site, after acknowledging the fraud. If Jordan can be believed, he told Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about faking his bio before being hired:
Before I accepted the position, I provided all my real details to Angela and Jimbo, and immediately provided the same information to Brad Patrick; I also placed it on my Wikia userpage, from where I expected it would fairly quickly make it's way back to Wikipedia.
Reporters who cover Wikipedia should consider its role in this deception. Someone at Wikipedia recommended Jordan to Schiff as an interview subject, Wales hired him after he admitted the ruse and nobody told the New Yorker it had been scammed. When contacted by the magazine, Wales said, "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it."
In a furious debate going on within Wikipedia, one of Jordan's fans makes a defense of his actions that nicely demonstrates what a trainwreck the project has become under the situational ethics of its management:
... 2. If you believe what people say on the internet, you are stupid. 3. There is no honesty policy on wikipedia, and people have a right to protect themselves. ... 5. If the New Yorker is stupid enough to believe everything everyone tells them, that's their problem.
Update:
A member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, Erik Möller, is urging Ryan Jordan to step down:
Creating a pseudonym is one thing. Creating an elaborate fake persona with fake credentials, and using it in arguments, letters, and interviews is another. I am deeply troubled by this behavior, consider it highly unethical, and would like to ask you to seriously consider stepping down from your official Wikimedia roles. At the very least, I believe you owe the community an apology for this behavior. You have damaged both the reputation of the project, and your own. I am deeply saddened and disappointed.
Möeller was elected to the board in September 2006 to assume a term that ends in December 2007.
Toronto Star: Only 100 Blogs Make Money
A story on the business side of blogging in today's Toronto Star makes a wildly inaccurate claim -- only the top 100 blogs make money.
Many blogs do make money but a vast majority of them don't, according to Derek Gordon, vice-president of marketing for Technorati, a San Francisco-based Internet search engine for blogs. The site tracks about 65 million blogs. It also ranks them.
"Typically, the top 100 blogs do some form of monetization," says Gordon.
There's money being made in blogging beyond the big names. I run four blogs that aren't anywhere close to the top 100 -- ranking on Technorati from 4,000 to 10,000 -- and they've become a decent part-time job. (I could double the income overnight if I wasn't rejecting all text-link ad offers.) Randy Charles Morin recently turned his KBCafe blog network into a full-time gig because of the revenue it's earning.
Take a look at the rate card for the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, the group that kicked my ass to the curb in 2005. Even in a slow period before the presidential election ramps up, the 20th most popular blog in that network is making $500 this week in ad revenue.
Aaron Brazell recently put his TechnoSailor blog up for auction on SitePoint Marketplace, a place where web publishers can sell established web sites.
TechnoSailor has decent-but-not great numbers -- a Technorati ranking of 2,300, Google page rank of 6 and monthly income of $250 -- yet the auction sold for $23,750. The deal subsequently fell through when they couldn't reach terms on a contract, but it's comparable to what buyers are paying for other sites in the same marketplace.
A business reporter who thinks there's no money in blogging should talk to people like Morin, BlogAds founder Henry Copeland and the publisher of SitePoint. As blogging matures and some publishers look to get out, the ones who sell out are going to be pleasantly surprised at what their sites are worth.
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