Google Searches Lead to Nicole Atkins
I've never heard of singer Nicole Atkins, who popped up on Google Trends this morning as a search spike. She performed her song "The Way It Is" on Late Night with David Letterman in October, a lover's lament with a great heartsick Roy Orbison wail.
She's scheduled to perform at this year's SXSW in Austin.
Author George MacDonald Fraser Dies
I've never heard of the Flashman series of novels by George MacDonald Fraser, but the description that has accompanied his obituary today has my curiosity sparked:
He wrote the first novel of the Flashman Papers in 1969 after he quit as assistant editor of the Glasgow Herald.
The book imagines what happened after Flashman -- the bully in Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays -- was expelled from Rugby for drunkenness.
Eleven more novels were to follow in the series, during which Flashman -- the most lily-livered hero in Victorian England - fornicates and brawls his way round the empire, provides Abraham Lincoln with his "you can't fool all the people all the time" quotation, and accidentally starts the charge of the Light Brigade.
Hoosgot: The Return of the LazyWeb
Hoosgot a web application for creating a hierarchical Dmoz-style link directory in a browser?
The term "hoosgot" is newly coined by Dave Sifry, a founder of Technorati and one of my former homies on the RSS Advisory Board. He's launched the web site Hoosgot (as in "who's got?") for lazy people who have technical requests for help. Just use the word "hoosgot" as a verb in a request on your blog (or @hoosgot on Twitter) and it'll end up on his site, where it's hoped someone more industrious can help you with a solution.
I really do need that software, preferably open source, PHP and MySQL. The board had an RSS resource directory created with Radio UserLand, but I'd prefer something lightweight and server-based.
Long Bet Winner: Weblogs vs. The New York Times
In 2002, blogging evangelist Dave Winer made a long bet with New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz: "In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site."
Today, Associated Press editors and news directors chose the top 10 news stories of the year, which makes it possible to determine who won the bet.
AP's No. 5: Chinese exports
The Times ranks 20th for the Nov. 30 article China Agrees to Remove Certain Export Subsidies. The weblog BloggingStocks ranks 19th for the Dec. 5 entry Chinese exports take off. Winner: Blogs.
AP's No. 4: oil prices
The Times ranks 15th for the Oct. 17 story Record Price of Oil Raises New Fears. The weblog BloggingStocks ranks 42nd for the Dec. 11 entry Is the Price of Oil 'Artificially' High? Winner: Times.
AP's No. 3: Iraq War
The Times ranks 20th for its special section on the war. The weblog Iraq War Today ranks 17th. Winner: Blogs.
AP's No. 2: mortgage crisis
The Times ranks first for the Sept. 2 story Can the Mortgage Crisis Swallow a Town? The user-generated weblog Digg ranks 19th for Monday's entry Top 5 Reasons Why the Mortgage Crisis = Global Warming, which links to a Dec. 17 blog entry on Solve Climate. Winner: Times.
AP's No. 1: Virginia Tech killings
The Times ranks 30th for an April 18 weblog entry, Updates on Virginia Tech, from The Lede: Notes on the News. The user-generated weblog Newsvine ranks ninth for today's weblog entry, Top News Story: Virginia Tech Killings, which is about AP's top 10 stories of 2007. Winner: Blogs.
So Winer wins the bet 3-2, but his premise of blog triumphalism is challenged by the fact that on all five stories, a major U.S. media outlet ranks above the leading weblog in Google search. Also, the results for the top story of the year reflect poorly on both sides.
In the five years since the bet was made, a clear winner did emerge, but it was neither blogs nor the Times.
Wikipedia, which was only one year old in 2002, ranks higher today on four of the five news stories: 12th for Chinese exports, fifth for oil prices, first for the Iraq war, fourth for the mortgage crisis and first for the Virginia Tech killings.
Winer predicted a news environment "changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want." Nisenholtz expected the professional media to remain the authoritative source for "unbiased, accurate, and coherent" information.
Instead, our most trusted source on the biggest news stories of 2007 is a horde of nameless, faceless amateurs who are not required to prove expertise in the subjects they cover.
First, Let's Shoot All the Photographers
The Lane Hartwell photo controversy is becoming a Venus morontrap. In the comments on TechCrunch, Robert Scoble flew into its maw and is being broken down into his constituent parts and digested by enzymes:
I think it really is lame to take pictures of people (who don't get a cut of the profits) at parties, without being commissioned, and then send in invoices for that work when it gets used in a parody video.
If photographers are getting paid to take pictures of me, why shouldn't we get a cut too as subjects? I didn't sign a model release for commercial work when Lane and other people take pictures of me at parties like she did of Owen Thomas. Did Owen sign a model release? Did he approve for his photo to be used for commercial purposes?
I think that when I do an event or party I'm going to only let photographers in who freely distribute their work without expectations that they'll get compensated for its use.
Hartwell is a photojournalist who contributes to Wired News, San Francisco Magazine and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She takes pictures of Silicon Valley notables as a member of the media and was working for Wired News when she took the picture in question. Scoble, who attended journalism school and spent the past 18 months shooting news video for PodTech, doesn't appear to understand the difference between a news photographer and a wedding photographer.
Scoble's comment rated an "extremely well said" from TechCrunch staff writer Duncan Riley and an attaboy from CrunchGear contributor John Biggs, two journalists who should put Scoble's logic into practice and begin sharing a cut of their earnings with the subjects of their reporting.
Credit: The photo of Hartwell was taken by Brian Solis and is available under a Creative Commons license.
Michael Arrington Crunchitizes Shelley Powers
I'd prefer not to rake the same person over the coals twice in one week, but TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington has been engaging in conduct that demands a public rebuttal.
Over the past several days, a bunch of bloggers have been arguing about photographer Lane Hartwell's decision to use a Digital Millenium Copyright Act complaint to get a funny music video yanked from YouTube and other sites. The video, a satire of Web 2.0 by the Richter Scales, included a photo taken by Hartwell without her permission. Her move was either completely justified or ruined everyone's fun, depending on what you think about downloading a bunch of images from Google searches and putting them in a video without asking anyone's permission.
In the midst of this tempest, Arrington launched an extended attack on Shelley Powers, a well-known blogger in the tech community, by accusing her of supporting Hartwell because she's a woman.
He first made this charge Saturday on journalist Mathew Ingram's blog:
Shelley, Lane's attorney is abusing the DMCA for his/her own goals. And copyright has nothing to do with "giving credit." It has to do with being forced to license work unless it falls under fair use, which this clearly does.
Mathew is right, you are wrong. But since Lane is a woman, it really doesn't matter what she did as far as you are concerned. She's a woman, so she's right.
The gender crack was completely out of left field, but when Ingram asked him to chill on his blog, Arrington dug in deeper:
actually, Mathew, I'll do whatever the ---- I feel like, and you can decide to censor comments or not.
Shelley is and always has been a fascist around these issues. If you're on her team (politically) she'll support you to the death. Not on her team and she'll find a way to take you out at the knees. People ignore her rather than call her on it.
On Monday, after Eric Rice strongly condemned Arrington's comments about Powers, Arrington renewed the attack on his personal blog:
I believe Shelley is the kind of person who sees the world through sexist glasses. She is unpleasant. She is a troll on TechCrunch who won't go away. ...
Every interaction I've ever had with Shelley has been unpleasant to the extreme, and I have never initiated any interaction. I believe she is biased, perverse and mean spirited.
As I commented on his blog, this is getting ridiculous. Powers is a well-respected member of the tech community, an author of numerous books and an outspoken advocate for equality in tech.
Anyone who knows her -- and many of us do through her writing -- can cite numerous times when she's criticized prominent women without a hint of favoritism regarding gender. The notion she'd take Hartwell's side because she's a woman is complete and utter BS without a scintilla of evidence to back it up. I suspect on some level that Arrington know this, because on his weblog he doesn't provide her full name or link to her blog, as if he's afraid of what his audience would think if they read her side. (I hate that -- when I slam someone on Workbench I link to them so people can judge whether I've lost my mind.)
At Arrington's instigation I discussed this subject with him privately, but I couldn't make him see that his treatment of Powers is unfair. He's using the huge megaphone of TechCrunch to malign her in a way that's not easy to challenge.
There's no good reason why he keeps attacking her character and making it sound like she harassed him by participating in the open forum he provides on his blogs. The following advice is much less effective without gender bias, but Arrington needs to person up and apologize.
Ron Paul's Raving Republicans
I don't think I've ever seen anything in American politics quite like the "Ron Paul Revolution," the fervent support for the grandfatherly old-school constitutionalist who is pulling liberty-minded voters and money into the Republican primary at astonishing rates. Check out the scene at Paul's New York City headquarters last night when the candidate broke another fundraising goal, raising $6 million in one day to break $12 million for the quarter.
I can't decide whether that rave-like scene is thrilling or terrifying. But Paul supporters should probably rethink holding their palms in the air as they chant "jawohl!", er, "Ron Paul!" and a skinheaded videographer documents the scene.
Paul, a 72-year-old ob/gyn whose 10 terms in Congress earned him the nickname "Dr. No" for his votes on spending bills, sounds a little crazy in the debates, but most of that crazy comes from how foreign his ideas have become in our country. Sixty years ago, his call to knock off government social and tax programs, avoid military adventures, and abolish the Federal Reserve was solidly in the Republican mainstream.
I can't say I'd vote for Paul -- I'm a Democrat who still believes in the necessity of many federal programs he'd destroy -- but I think he brings something important to our politics: a scalpel.
The federal government expanded at a rapacious rate under borrow-and-spend Republicans, and I don't see a Democrat who's strongly motivated to reverse that trend. In the last four debates I didn't hear one Democratic candidate talk about failed and expensive domestic programs that ought to be dropped. Democrats need to learn that the growth of the federal government's role in our lives isn't just about civil liberties. The more we spend on new do-goodery, the less that's available for the important do-goodery like Social Security, disease control, emergency assistance and renewable energy.
Credit: The photo was taken by Madwurm and is available under a Creative Commons license.
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