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February 13, 2004

Memorial
: Howard Sherman happens upon a moving ad hoc 9/11 memorial.

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Exactly when did Canada lose its sense of humour?
: Conan O'Brien brings Triumph the Insult Dog to Canada and fur flies:

Canada's government has condemned a show by U.S. late-night television host Conan O'Brien that insulted people in French-speaking Quebec and seemed to suggest everyone in the province was homosexual.
Ottawa and the province of Ontario paid C$1 million (400,000 pounds) to help O'Brien -- who appears on the NBC television network -- bring his show to Toronto for a week to boost the city's profile after a deadly SARS outbreak last year....
"We want to disassociate ourselves from the comments which were broadcast last night because we do not support them in any way," junior government minister Mauril Belanger told Parliament.
At one point in the show, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog -- a hand puppet that is a regular on the show -- said to a Quebecer: "You're French, you're obnoxious and you no speekay English." It told another: "I can smell your crotch from here".
O'Brien's team were also shown replacing street signs in the province with those that read "Quebecqueer Street" and "Rue des Pussies".
Alexa McDonough, a legislator for the left-leaning New Democrats, described the program as "racist filth" and "utterly vile" and demanded the government seek the return of the C$1 million subsidy.
"There may be those who would say, 'Isn't this interfering with freedom of expression?' It's not interfering to say we will not publicly fund this kind of vile, vicious hatemongering," McDonough told reporters....

More Bark de Triomphe insults:

"So you're French and Canadian, yes? So you're obnoxious and dull," the puppet told one passerby. "You're in North America, learn the language," he hollered at another.

More:

One bewildered man was asked if the Canadian health care system had provisions for "personality implants." Yet another, a rotund fellow who seemed to be a separatist, was told: "Maybe you should try separating yourself from donuts first."

I have just one request for Triumph: Go to France, next. Please!

: Tim Blair is all over Canada.

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Can you hear me now?
: Ben Hammersley plugs Chris Lydon (yea!) and Audible.com (boo) in the Guardian.

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Sacrilege
: Good Bill Maher line on his show tonight: "Lethal Weapon VI, otherwise known as The Passion of the Christ."

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Hillary redux?
: A friend at the office starting me thinking... Wouldn't it be ironic if a Kerry intern thing took off and led to a collapse that opened the door for Hillary to step in? Michele is already foreshadowing it.

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A worse comb-over than even Donald Trump
: Michele found it.

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I've never known an intern. Never seen one. Honest.
: Aaron Bailey nominates me for President.
You can go nominate yourself. Lockhart Steele has the details. Or go to American Candidate, the reality show about the unreal process of picking a President, and apply.

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Cosmos quotient
: After Dave Sifry's great talk at ETech last week, I keep thinking of new things I want him to do, some we discussed, another listed below. And here's one more: I wish I could track a site's inbound links over time to sniff out the trend. The inspiration:
Dean's site is now 24 on the top 100. I'll bet he was much higher a week ago and a week before that, but I don't have the stats to back that up. It would be a good indicator of his trend.

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Treo 600 screwup
: More than a week ago in New York, Dan Gillmor and I were comparing notes on Handspring's shocking and shameful underestimation of the marketplace for its wondergizmo, the Treo 600. I told Dan that a Sprint sales guy at Times Square had told me that he gets 15 requests a day and he said I should multiply that by the 15 or sales people in just that store. Dan now finds evidence of how behind Handspring is.

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Blog talent pool
: Somebody (Technorati/Sifry/Marks?) should create an easy and reliable means of searching for talented bloggers looking for work -- or reports of jobs available.
I leave it to better brains than mine to propose the standard for announcing your status (a tag or just a standard set of words in a post linked to your resume) and your talents (see David Galbraith's one-line bio) and the means of searching for the job seeker or job sought.
But there are lots of -- too many -- damned smart bloggers looking for work and why shouldn't this industry, like all others, have a means of finding a new gig?
(Besides, I'd be curious to see how such a distributed architecture would work and Technorati and jobs would make a great laboratory to see whether the meme standard would spread and whether this distributed marketplace would produce results.)

: This is inspired by the news that Steve Hall is the latest talented blogger to be looking for a job. He's a smart adman, as his blog attests. So hire him already.

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Lines in the quicksand
: Blogs make their own rules.
Today, Campaign Desk interviews Wonkette (aka Ana Marie Cox) about out-Drudging Drudge and linking to a tricked up Amazon wish list with the alleged/reputed/reported/rumored name of the alleged/reputed/reported/rumored Kerry intern. She says:

"The [rules] are different for every person. That's the tragedy and triumph of self-publishing. I've gotten s*** from people [pause] or, say, static from people who I think sort of take the CJR position. [Which is? Campaign Desk was curious to know]... that I shouldn't do it, shouldn't even mention the actual topic, don't hint. Obviously that's not my position. I've also gotten static from people, well my boss, who thinks I should publish everything I get... He's British....
"I've drawn a line for myself in a universe where there are no lines. I've drawn my lines. I think given some time I could probably develop a more philosophical justification of where I've drawn the line, but the one I have for you now is I tried to choose a middle ground, something I'm going to look back on and feel comfortable with.
"Journalists do this all the time... they insert the word 'alleged' when writing a story about someone who has committed a crime...The word alleged just floats right by [readers]...Journalism is full of these half-assed lines that people draw."

Campaign Desk also took bloggers to task for releasing exit polls before real polls closed, violating a recently embraced journalistic canon.
Markos Moulitos of Daily Kos responded:

Problem is, blogs aren't necessarily bound by journalistic ethics. As a blogger, I make my own rules. People don't like them, they are welcome to head elsewhere to get their information.
I love your site and all, but I do find it amusing that you guys are trying to apply rules to a medium that doesn't have rules. Blogs are the wild west of the media world. They are journalistic outlaws. We can gleefully police traditional media based on the rules they have set for themselves, even as we equally gleefully flaunt those rules.
As such, the concept of "ethics" doesn't really apply. We cater exclusively to our readers, in a way that traditional media outlets can never match (what with the quaint but unattainable quest for fairness and balance). As such, our readers draw our boundaries. If my readership was outraged about my running exit polls, then I would stop. And while a handful of people were upset, the vast majority approved (and "rewarded" me with out-of-control traffic).

Well said. New world, new rules. It's a world of individuals and so the rules will always be set by individuals. That will be difficult to bear by those who are accustomed to an industry, which can set its rules by consensus and shame. Not so here.

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New lows of lazy
: Go to Jill's site to see a great picture she captured: Somebody driving his dog for a walk.

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How to network: the reality show
: VentureBlog gives good and practical advice on how to network (rule No. 5: Don't ask for anything but advice). Compare the social-network software products out there to this spec for real life. They don't match up. That's a problem for the social software companies.

: See also Clay Shirky's excerpt of Seb Paquet's summary of Danah Boyd's smart talk at ETech on social software. These social software things aren't capturing the social interaction that happens in real life; they are creating a new and different interaction as people play the software like a game. And that's fine if it's a game you want to start. But these guys are fooling themselves if they think they are using technology to replicate and improve upon real life (that is, VisiCalc replicated and improved upon cipherin'; Microsoft Word replicated and improved upon typing; Quark replicated and improved upon print design; Blogger replicated and improved upon publishing).

: See also the InternetNews report on the panel Fred Wilson attended last week, in which the honest social-software exec admits to no revenue.

: It was at that event that social software company Visible Path announced a $3.7-million funding round led by the often-smart Kleiner Perkins. Unlike the other social-software products, this one is about selling, not shtupping.

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Bob Quits: an advocacy/advertising/reality blog
: BobQuits.com is a blog and cam journal by a sheet-metal worker who's trying to quit, put on by American Legacy, the antismoking ad group put together by the big tobacco settlement. I don't know how real this is (Bob's not his real name... and what if "Bob" falls off the wagon?). But it is an interesting approach, using real people and blogs to advertise and advocate.

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Graveyard, Inc.
: I shuddered when I read in the NY Post that Disney is reaching out to AOL Time Warner as a white knight.
Oh, yeah, that makes perfect sense: Let's take one badly managed giant and merge it with another badly managed giant and then we end up with an even bigger badly managed giant. You could call it AOL-Time-Warner-Disney-ABC. Or you could just call it Graveyard, Inc. Where shareholders' money goes to die. (Can you tell that I own both stocks?)
And while we're at it, why don't we throw in other companies that don't know what to do with themselves in this digital age: a few record companies, maybe a book publisher, plus Blockbuster, and maybe even a portal (since they're already outmoded).
Who cares about consolidation? Let them consolidate themselves silly!

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Hear it
: Here's audio of Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen, and me on our ETech panel. Jay went first and got applause after his intro. Tough act to follow.
: And here's Jay on Etech and Trippi and politics and....

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Politics makes strange bedfellows
: Poor Wonkette had to suffer through listening to Imus to report the "news" on the Drudgerumor of a Kerry affair:

Imus denigrates the story even as he asks about it: "There's probably nothing to it. . ." Kerry responds emphatically, "There's nothing to report, there's nothing to talk about, I'm not going to talk about it," adding, "The answer is no." (There wasn't really a question, but hey.)

: By the way, if I were the DNC or RNC, I'd go and register Drudgerumor.com for use in moments such as this. It's available.

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Book burners
: I'm glad to see that there's a bit of a backlash to the backlash to the boob starting.
For two mornings running, Howard Stern has been playing the over-the-top performance of Republican Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico at the hearings on the boob. She is one scary lady.
Charles Taylor at Salon recognizes just how scary she -- and this posse of prudes -- is:

Nobody was as ready for her close-up as Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., her voice quaking with outrage as she said, "You knew what you were doing. You wanted us all to be abuzz. It improves your ratings. It improves your market share, and it lines your pockets." (If Wilson is going to pontificate on what's aesthetically offensive, then someone should tell her that green plaid suits look terrible on everybody but OutKast.)
No one, though, has yet commented on the contradiction inherent in Wilson's statement. If this kind of entertainment improves ratings, market share and profits, then it suggests that the people who want it dwarf the 200,000 who lodged complaints about it. If it's the government's job to listen to the voice of the people, then we have to acknowledge that the number of people who buy, download or listen to Justin Timberlake, Janet Jackson, Nelly, P. Diddy and Kid Rock far exceed those who'd prefer the halftime show go back to Carol Channing and marching bands.
While the rage over Tittygate has, like the rage over many other social issues, been driven by an extremely vocal minority, it would be dishonest to imply that the allies of those people exist solely in the Bush administration and on the Republican side of the congressional aisle. Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has done as much to bring the specter of government censorship over media as anyone (he's the man who wanted to mandate the V chip), spoke up for increasing the fines against broadcasters who violate FCC rules....
All of this would be laughable if it weren't so scary. One of the most persistent refrains in Wednesday's hearings was the threat to regulate the content of cable networks as well as their broadcast counterparts. What that means is that the government is now proposing to control the content of channels that private citizens choose to come into their homes.

: The Santa Cruz Sentinal is also getting frightened:

Government should not decide what adults can or cannot see on TV.
The biggest danger to the American way of life in not Janet Jackson’s right breast....
What frightens us is the government reaction to the breast-baring incident. We don’t like what happened on television, but we are downright horrified at allowing government regulators to decide standards for us....

: The Guardian finds the irony, of course:

To European eyes, the tolerance of violent images and bashfulness over sex in the US has long been perplexing.
Director Bernardo Bertolucci railed against the US censors of his new film, The Dreamers. US distributors had initially planned to cut much of the nudity, but have since decided to give the film the rarely awarded NC-17 rating....
"Some people obviously think the American public is immature," Mr Bertolucci told the Los Angeles Times....
This is a country in which Wal-mart, the biggest retailer, will happily sell guns, but bans racy lads magazines, partially obscures women's titles such as Cosmopolitan and Marie-Claire, and sells CDs with swear words bleeped out.

: The Hindustan Times also finds irony:

The real problem is far deeper. It stems from the fact that in America as in other western societies exposing woman's breasts in public is considered shameful and inappropriate. Breastfeeding is seen as ‘indecent exposure’. Breasts are to be hidden, because they are sexual, and therefore they are forbidden. Parents teach their children the same way. It is quite possible to imagine that a child grows up in America without ever having seen a baby being breastfed! Yet, on the other hand, children often see breasts (although never the nipples) displayed in a sexually provocative fashion on television and all over the print media.

: The Delaware County Times finds overreaction:

But you really don’t have to look that far to find troubling fallout from l’affaire Jackson. In fact, you only have to look as far as Haverford.
That’s where Edna Davis runs the Tyme Gallery. Until recently she had displayed in her window a painting by a Philadelphia artist. It was based on a classic art deco work by Tamara de Lempicka called "Adam and Eve."
It depicts a nude man and woman. It’s not pornographic; it’s art. It’s not Janet Jackson; it’s not even the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. But in the overheated days following the Super Bowl, it apparently was enough to set someone off, even though it had been hanging in the window before and no complaints had been lodged.
That, apparently, was then; this is now. Meaning post-Super Bowl.
Police paid Davis a visit and said they had gotten complaints. Davis didn’t want to make waves. She took the painting down....
It was an overreaction, from the initial complaints right down the line.
That’s the dangerous road we’re heading down in reacting to the Jackson case....
Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill. Jackson’s plastic surgeon apparently already did that.

: Even on The Hill, there are a few cooler heads: Rep. John Shimkus, a Republican of Illinois, said:

“There’s a danger that this thing gets too hot and we get carried away.”

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