From Salon:

According to a new Harris Poll, 50 percent of Americans now believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction at the time of the U.S. invasion. That’s a sharp and rather inexplicable increase from February 2005, when just 36 percent of the public held on to that belief. Ready for more? Sixty-four percent of the public still thinks that Saddam Hussein had strong links to al-Qaida.

[Tags: politics]

12 Comments »

I passingly daydreamed this morning about winning a new Hummer in a contest advertised on one of the items in our refrigerator. After paying the tax, what the hell would I do with a Hummer? Selling itwould just pass its demonic demand for fuel on to someone else.

No, the only moral option would be to dismantle it and bury its parts in graveyards scattered across multiple continents. But then, one day in the not so distant future, a call might be issued via SkyNet, and the pieces of all the buried Hummers would claw their way out of their graves and assemble themselves into a robotic army to claim the Earth as their destiny.

Maybe they’d make nice planters instead.

[Tags: hummers environment al_gore]

While I’m going all Hollywood, I had an idea this morning for the next blockbuster, so I’m blogging this to stake my claim on this Billion Dollar Idea™.

It’s a movie called “No See ‘Ems.” (Yes, I had this idea while out running, trying to breath by only exhaling.) Swarms of teensy bugs mutate. Get bitten by a bunch of them – you never know they’re there – and at first you feel really good, but then you slowly deteriorate into Pennzoil engine gunk. (The product tie-ins alone could finance the movie!) Once the government is persuaded by hunky Drs. Jolie and Pitt that the threat is real, they send in a heavily armed hit squad, led personally by Gov. Ahnuld. He unleashes the heavy personal mounted atop his Hummer, but they’re just wee bugs. And you can’t see ‘em. So, Ahnold gets the Pennzoil treatment. The crisis grows until we figure out their one vulnerability, which is Raid (product placement bonanza!), or fly swatters,or circling the globe with sticky paper, or some damn thing. All I know is that it requires Dr. Jolie to fight in a strategically torn medical outfit and things go blowy-uppy at the end.

“No See ‘Ems – The invisible enemy is inside us!” Coming soon to a theater near you.

7 Comments »

I just published a new issue of my increasingly intermittent newsletter, JOHO:

1 Comment »

Honey, coffee’s done

<

4 Comments »

Read the round up. Read Lebanese bloggers. We all need to be be made uncomfortable. [Tags: global_voices globalVoices mideast lebanon]

Be the first to comment »

Brad Sucks, the webbiest musician on the Web, has some new demos out, here and here. Plus, his band, Brad Sucks Live — just about inescapably pornographic in its implication — will be making a genuinely rare appearance at Riverpalooza August 12 in Ottawa. [Tags: bradsucks music mp3]

Be the first to comment »

Jay has started NewAssignment.net, a response (but not The Answer) to the question “Where’s the money going to come from to support real reporting in this brave new media world we’re building? ” At NewAssignment, story ideas will come from the Web. The idea will be developed initially on line. A budget will be created. Then a reporter will be contracted – for honest-to-goodness money. She’ll work in public, with any of us who care to contribute, in what Jeff Jarvis felicitously calls networked journalism.

Initially, the money is coming from Craig. (Thank you, Craig.) Jay writes:

NewAssignment.Net has no dogma about how the money comes in. It’s a charity and will raise funds for high quality journalism any way it can figure out that’s wise, that works and maintains the site’s independence and reputation.

That’s good. But it means that NewAssignment is not really a response to the money question. The charity model — even Jay’s non-dogmatic charity model — means that NewAssignment is going to be, as Jay says, a “boutique” firm that will cover stories otherwise being ignored. New Assignment instead responds to the question, “How can journalists and citizens work together, in public?” NewAssignment may validate that hybrid, networked journalism gets the job done. But as a charity, it is not — and Jay is clear about this elsewhere in his post — the business model for the future of journalism. [Tags: jay_rosen newassignment journalism media ]

2 Comments »

Mario Sixtus of Handlesblatt has posted a video interview he did in which he asked me about Cluetrain, PR, ID, Web 2.0, etc. [Tags: mario_sixtus cluetrain marketing pr]

2 Comments »

Aha! So, if you have Thunderbird set to compose and send HTML messages, but you want to send a single plain text message, you don’t have to redo your entire configuration. You can just hold down the shift key when you press the Write, Respond or Respond All button. Details here.

And, by the way, if you do want to change the default from HTML to text or vice versa, the switch is in Tools > Account Settings, not in Tools > Options, for reasons that I’m sure make 100% sense to very smart people. On the Composition & Addressing panel, there’s a check box for “Compose messages in HTML format.” [Tags: thunderbird]

3 Comments »

From the press release:

Socialtext, the first Wiki company, releases Socialtext Open at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). Available for immediate download, Socialtext Open is the first open source wiki with a commercial venture as its primary contributor. Over 2,000 businesses run Socialtext Wiki products today as a hosted service or appliance.

Based on the same great product, Socialtext Open is released under a standard open source license, and contains all of Socialtext’s enterprise grade code aside from enterprise management and enterprise integration tools. Socialtext also announced the availability of its Technical Professional Service, a new SOAP API and the Socialtext Open Roadmap for the next three months.

See the Socialtext blog. (Disclosure: Today’s announcement makes me proud to be an advisor to Socialtext. (Note: I had no part in the strategy.))

Technorati, to whom I’m also an advisor, has launched a big bucket of new features. I particularly like the search refinement tool. And they do a nice job when you look up your own blog. Under the surface, Technorati is making it easier for partners to use its data, which is good all around.

I’m not nearly as enthusiastic about the new design of the home page. The personalization helps, but it’s difficult to tell that it’s a site for searching through 50M blogs. Instead, it looks like it wants to be a media site that shows you “what everyone is blogging about.” The site’s focus on what bloggers with “authority” care about over-emphasizes the “short head” at the expense of the long tail. So, nope, I’m not a fan of that part of the makeover.

Past the home page, some of the the new stuff is both cool and useful…the best sort of tech. [Tags: wikis socialtext open_source technorati]

2 Comments »