5 March 2006 @ 5:52PM >> Ed Driscoll has posted an interview with me on do-it-yourself video production.

24 February 2006 @ 9:17AM >> Over at TCS Daily, Ed Driscoll takes a look at the state of independent online video and declares that the days of the one-man TV network are “coming soon.”

Ed interviewed me for the piece, and I obligingly supplied him with this rah-rah quote:

Ten years ago, the expense associated with putting together even the most rudimentary online video would have put it out of reach for most people. Even if you had your own camera, you probably didn’t have video editing software or a computer capable of running it. If you did have access to an editing suite, then you probably didn’t have sufficient bandwidth to make the resulting video available online. And even with unlimited bandwidth, the people on the other end — the potential viewers — probably didn’t have enough bandwidth to watch what you made. Today, however, none of those are limiting factors. You can buy a usable consumer-level DV camera for around $500. You can buy a “pro-sumer” DV camera for under $3000. You can even shoot in high-definition HDV for under $5000.

And near-ubiquitous bandwidth availability is also a factor. Although high-speed broadband has been available in most corporations for a few years, broadband is just beginning to penetrate the home market in large numbers. This means that we’re really at the very beginning stages of mass viewing of online videos. We haven’t hit the inflection point yet, but I suspect we’ll see, within a few years, the same massive growth with online video that we saw with the web in the mid-1990s. Eventually, maybe 10 years from now, we’ll have full-screen, full-motion on-demand high-definition video available directly to the home [via the Web]. That’s the ideal video delivery platform, and if we’re still a decade away, it means there’s plenty of room to grow in this market.

My favorite quote from the piece, however, is Driscoll’s closing: “If Dan Rather could host a TV show for 25 years, why not you?”

13 February 2006 @ 3:44PM >> In the London Sunday Times, Andrew Sullivan wonders why the “Islamo-bullies get a free ride from the West”:

You’d think, wouldn’t you, it might be helpful to view the actual cartoons so you can see what on earth this entire fuss is about. But the British and American media have decided that it is not their job to help you understand this story. In fact it is their job to prevent you from fully understanding this story. As of this writing no major newspaper in Britain has published the cartoons; the BBC has shown them only fleetingly and other networks have shied away. All have decided not to give you this critical information, without which no intelligent person can construct an informed and intelligent position on the matter. You’re on your own.

The reasons given are conventional enough: the press doesn’t want to inflame matters further; the cartoons are indeed offensive, and no editor has to publish images that would appal readers; reprinting would merely play into the hands of extremists, and so on.

The one argument you haven’t heard is the one you hear off-camera. Many editors simply don’t want to put their staffs at risk of physical danger. They have “offended” Muslims in the past and learnt to regret it. In New York the editors of a free alternative paper, the New York Press, decided they wanted to run the cartoons so their readers could have a grasp of what this huge story is about. The owner refused. The staff quit en masse. The editor claims the owner gave him a simple explanation: “I’m not putting lives in danger. We’re not getting things blown up.”

And, according to an editorial in the Boston Phoenix, Sullivan is right. The Phoenix admits that one of the reasons they won’t run the cartoons is “[o]ut of fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do.”

This is, frankly, our primary reason for not publishing any of the images in question. Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year publishing history.

In other words, after just a few days of rioting, the media has already bent over, surrendered, and accepted Sharia law as the arbiter of its editorial decisions.

Our media has just taught a valuable lesson to the various interest groups of the world: if you want to control how your group is covered, be as threatening and violent as possible.

Sullivan notes that online media—not the establishment media—is now the only source for full coverage of this story:

The fundamental job of journalists is to give you as much information as possible to make sense of the world around you. And in this story, where the entire controversy revolves around drawings, the press is suddenly coy. You can see Saddam Hussein in his underwear and members of the royal family in compromising positions. You can see Andres Serrano’s famously blasphemous photograph of a crucifix in urine, called Piss Christ. But a political cartoon that deals with Islam? Not our job, guv. Move right along. Nothing to see here.

[...]

And so we have two media now in the world. We have the mainstream media whose job is increasingly not actually to disseminate information but to act as a moral steward for what is fit to print, to become an arbiter of sensitivity, good taste and political correctness. And we have web pages like Wikipedia or the blogosphere to disseminate actual facts, data, images and opinions that readers can judge with the benefit of all the facts, not just some of them.

Take a look at the cartoons. Sure, they obviously offend some people, but they’re not outrageous, certainly not in the context of a free society. Other groups have managed to bear similar offenses or worse without resorting to uncontained rampages of violence. And in those cases, the media didn’t worry much about who might be offended.

The fact that the cartoons are so mild is a huge part of the story. After all, if people are threatening death over these cartoons, what else will set them into a murderous rage? Wouldn’t this information be helpful?

Apparently not, in the view of our media. It is quite easy to stand up as a noble defender of press freedoms when the only people on the other side are finger-wagging octogenarian letter writers complaining about an errant nipple during a Superbowl half-time show. But the pitiful reaction of the press in this instance shows that they are nothing more than bloviating pushovers who will hand over their freedoms as readily as the French in 1940 the first minute they’re faced with anything more dangerous than a pile of letters to the editor. But they’re worse than just being cowards, because they’ve just reinforced the only lesson that radical Islamists seem to understand: the best way to achieve their goals is through mob violence.

Will we ever see stories that are as critical of Islamofascism as they are of, say, the American government? I wouldn’t hold my breath. Our media has just proven that fear will cause them to cover up anything that might “offend” the mobs of Islamic arsonists. (This isn’t exactly new territory for the establishment media, either.)

Who knew that the first major surrender in the War on Terror would come so easily? I didn’t. But I can’t say I’m surprised to see that it’s our media selling us out.

3 February 2006 @ 9:33AM >> Since the beginning of the year, both Microsoft and Google have seen self-inflicted public relations disasters stem from their decisions to censor political content deemed inconvenient by the Chinese government. Now, Microsoft has decided to make own employees over its abrupt censoring of a Chinese blogger, Microsoft Corp. has formulated a new policy to deal with requests from a government that alleges that posted material violates its laws.

The measures were detailed by Microsoft’s top lawyer, Brad Smith, at the Government Leaders Forum in Lisbon today.

Smith said Microsoft will remove blogs only when given proper legal notice. And even then, it will block access to that material only within the country where it is deemed unlawful. The site will still be viewable from outside the country, he said.

[...]

“Obviously, what we are trying to do with the kinds of principles we articulated today is ... obey the law in the countries in which we do business but also pay appropriate respect to the needs of our users, both those who put information up on a blog and those who want to read that information around the world,” Smith said.

30 January 2006 @ 5:37PM >> Google recently modified their official statement on censorship, SayAnything reports. In the wake of Google’s deal to censor content on behalf of the communist Chinese government, the self-proclaimed Don’t Be Evil company is no longer able to stand behind this statement:

Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results.

And with a swift deletion and a quick save, Google revises its principles.

28 January 2006 @ 11:25AM >> Google has been taking a lot of flak, rightfully so, for censoring search results to satisfy the Chinese communist dictatorship.

The search engine is placing notices on each page notifying users that items have been censored at the request of the Chinese government, so it isn’t quite as bad as Microsoft’s actions to placate the Chinese, which include taking down entire websites without notice, rendering them inaccessible to the entire world. Google’s censorship applies only to the version of the search engine aimed at the Chinese market. Still, for a company whose motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” the action is at best hypocritical, and it shows the slogan to be nothing more than empty P.R. sermonizing.

The simplest illustration of the moral compromise made by the Don’t Be Evil company comes from Jonah Goldberg, who recommends searching for “Tiananmen” on Chinese Google and comparing that to the results from the uncensored Google. That’s right, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, an inconvenient historical fact for the repressive Chinese regime, has gone down the memory hole thanks to the good folks at Google.

I’ve refined the search a bit for an even starker contrast. Here’s what comes up in the standard Google image search for “Tiananmen Square Massacre”, and here’s the scrubbed version on Chinese Google.

What makes Google’s actions even more hypocritical is that, just a week before this Google flap erupted, the company was hailed by privacy advocates for refusing to turn over to the U.S. Justice Department aggregate data on searches for child pornography. What a brave stand!

So Google has the backbone to rebuff to the U.S. government’s attempts to fight child porn, but the Don’t Be Evil company is willing to help China continue to repress its people by erasing moments from history like the Tiananmen Square massacre.

---

Update: Google’s blocks on certain words can apparently be avoided by a little creative misspelling.

11 January 2006 >> The second podcast in the newly-inaugurated series hosted by the husband-and-wife team of Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith is now online.

Stuart Browning and I were the guests, discussing the digital video revolution and the two film projects we’re working on with our production company On The Fence Films.

You can listen to the podcast at Dr. Helen or Glenn’s website InstaPundit, or you can grab the MP3 file directly.

8 January 2006 >> Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and his wife Dr. Helen Smith have begun a podcast series. The inaugural podcast contains interviews with commentator Michelle Malkin and musician Audra Coldiron of Audra and the Antidote.

Earlier today, Stuart Browning and I were interviewed by Glenn and Helen for a future podcast. We discussed the digital video revolution, Internet video distribution, our production company On The Fence Films, Stuart’s short film Dead Meat on the Canadian healthcare system, and the latest developments with our upcoming film Indoctrinate U. That podcast may appear as early as next week. I’ll post a link when it does.

2 January 2006 >> A rap video spoof by a pair of Saturday Night Live veterans has become something of an Internet hit.

I can see why. It’s funny and different.

And it makes you wonder about the future of broadcast. Tivo and other DVRs give SNL an opportunity to be seen by people who are otherwise not in front of their TVs on a Saturday night, but the Internet got this video in front of people who aren’t in the habit of recording the show in the first place. That’s the way you build an audience.

It’s just another example of the increasingly blurred line between online and broadcast video. Can full-catalog video-on-demand via the Internet be far behind?

2 January 2006 @ 1:26PM >> In times past, the valor of our men and women in uniform was worthy of coverage from the establishment media. Nowadays, the media rarely notices our soldiers unless they can be added to the death count. Leave it to the blogosphere to cover the stories that the establishment media ignores. The website Riehl World View presents 2005: The Year in Military Heroism.

19 December 2005 @ 11:50AM >> Nearly three years after I posted my first video on this site, the establishment media has declared video blogging the latest craze. It’s nice that the media dinosaurs are finally noticing, although it is regrettable that the label vlog is being used for video blog. The term blog is annoying enough, but vlog? Come on! It sounds like the noise someone makes when coughing up phlegm.

15 December 2005 >> For far too long, newspaper websites have required that users register in order to read articles. Not only is it annoying for the user, it increases the chance that your inbox will become laden with spam. It also largely removes the newspaper from the global online discussion; bloggers are far less likely to point readers to a site that requires them to jump through hoops just to read an editorial or news item. On the web, if you can’t link to it, it might as well not even exist.

So I’m happy to report a welcome trend: some newspapers are seeing the light and doing away with the digital gates. Let’s hope that continues. In the meantime, for people who wish to keep their e-mail addresses private, there are other ways of crashing the gates.

22 November 2005 >> Apparently, either a video glitch or not-glitch resulted in a few flashes of an “X” over Vice President Cheney’s face while he was delivering a speech. A number of conservative bloggers are criticizing CNN under the assumption that the glitch (or not-glitch) was both deliberate and an example of political bias.

Sorry guys, I don’t see it. I recognize the possibility, but I also recognize a much larger number of possibilities for actual glitches in video production. True, I don’t work in live video, but I’ve seen software bugs and unintuitive behavior cause bizarre flashes where one video track has been accidentally merged onto another. It looks to me like something similar happened with CNN. This could have happened at the venue, or anywhere between bouncing the feed up to a satellite and back to earth, or maybe in CNN’s studios in Washington or Atlanta. It could have been because someone was sitting on a button or briefly brushed one a few times.

If you watch the video, additional text seems to appear below the X, partially obscuring the news ticker on the bottom. The online version isn’t of high enough resolution to make that text legible. But perhaps someone who recorded it can decipher the rest. My assumption is that a placeholder track got superimposed on the live feed by mistake.

There are plenty of examples of media bias that are far more provable. To latch onto a few flashes of an “X” as major evidence of bias—when no such evidence exists beyond the act itself—undercuts the possibility of being taken seriously when talking about the more tangible stories.

Maybe CNN should get the benefit of the doubt. There’s an old saying: Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. Given CNN’s recent performance in the marketplace, that statement seems apt.

8 November 2005 @ 10:38AM >> Senator Norm Coleman describes the threat:

It sounds like a Tom Clancy plot. An anonymous group of international technocrats holds secretive meetings in Geneva. Their cover story: devising a blueprint to help the developing world more fully participate in the digital revolution. Their real mission: strategizing to take over management of the Internet from the U.S. and enable the United Nations to dominate and politicize the World Wide Web. Does it sound too bizarre to be true? Regrettably, much of what emanates these days from the U.N. does.

The Internet faces a grave threat. We must defend it. We need to preserve this unprecedented communications and informational medium, which fosters freedom and enterprise. We can not allow the U.N. to control the Internet.

Absolutely. Any organization that lets Libya, China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia sit on its Commission on Human Rights clearly can’t be trusted to keep the Internet free. Do we really want the likes of Fidel Castro having a say in what is and is not acceptable online discourse?

30 October 2005 @ 2:03PM >> Early last year, I wrote about my battle with spam e-mails. Now say hello to splogs (”spam blogs”), the latest way for spammers to annoy you and degrade the utility of the internet:

At first glance, it seems like a regular blog. But look closer and you’ll see there’s something very odd about the blog’s content: It’s very familiar. Too familiar.

That’s because you wrote it, six months ago, on your own blog. The rest of the content doesn’t make sense: The same word repeated over and over again. There are ads all over the sidebar for products like Viagra and mortgage loans.

This, you realize, is a splog, and you’re the victim.

“Splogs,” or spam blogs, are the latest way for spammers to manipulate the blogosphere for profit. The phenomenon hit an all-time high recently, when Google’s blog-hosting service, Blogger, was inundated with more than 13,000 fake blogs spawned by a script (all have since been taken down).

[...]

While splogs may seem like a minor annoyance to the individual blogger, the overall effect of splogs is far-reaching. “What happens when all the search terms become infested with these splogs?” said Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome. “It makes it that much harder to find the stuff you really want to look for.”

19 September 2005 @ 7:57PM >> The New York Times launched a brilliant new initiative that just may help improve its image. Stung by constant embarrassment over the mental droolings of columnists like Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert, the Times has decided to partition off the offending writers, putting them behind a wall that costs $49.95 a year to breach.

No longer will the great unwashed masses of Internet writers be able to directly cite the work of these columnists, which may be precisely the point. Who’s going to bother paying for the privilege of fact-checking Paul Krugman? I’m sure I’m not the only one who won’t be forking over any cash to wade through the high school fantasies of Maureen Dowd, whose meandering columns read like notes taken by her psychologist.

I understand why the Times wishes to build a cocoon around itself, but doing so may only hasten its descent into irrelevance. Still, as an online-only reader of the paper, I applaud the decision. Not having the option of reading those columnists is going to save me a lot of time.

5 August 2005 @ 2:45PM >> Technorati, a weblog tracking service, recently reported that the number of blogs online doubles every five months. This led technology reporter Michael S. Malone to wonder whether blogs are subject to Moore’s Law.

What’s Moore’s Law?

Whenever you hear the word “doubling” related to anything high tech, the first thing that comes to mind is the Law of Laws in the digital world: Moore’s Law of Semiconductors. I probably don’t have to remind you of what it says: the performance of semiconductor devices doubles every two years.

Gordon Moore, one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley and a co-founder of both Fairchild and Intel, came up with this “law” in the mid-1960s while preparing for an industry speech. Basically, he tracked the capacity of all of his company’s memory chips up until that date ... and discovered, to his astonishment, that they made a straight line on a sheet of log paper. He then took a chance and predicted that this trajectory might be maintained for a few more years.

I saw Gordon make a follow-up presentation in the late 1970s. He was still amazed: the chart now included logic chips, memory chips and even microprocessors — and yet the semiconductor world was still clicking along at this mind-boggling pace, doubling performance every 18-24 months. And it worked along multiple axes: hold performance constant, and chip prices halved every couple years. Hold those two variables steady and chips got smaller at the same rate.

Malone cites former Intel CEO Andy Grove, who argued that industries can achieve faster advancement as they adopt more technology:

[W]henever you could find something that could be managed by digital systems — not an automobile but an engine computer, not a doctor but patient diagnostic and monitoring equipment, not a chromosome but gene mapping — it was like strapping that industry to a comet. Almost overnight the rate of change literally became exponential, improvements asymptotic, and miracles began to occur.

So, will Moore’s Law affect online media like blogs? Malone seems to think so:

That’s why we in the tech industry have become very attuned to the doubling curve. Whenever and wherever it pops up, we pay a lot of attention. And now, here it is, not surprisingly, characterizing the blogosphere. After all, the world of blogs has gotten a lot of early-PC and early dot.com attention over the last year, becoming one of those hot terms that everyone is using, and the tech playground towards which all of the usual early adapters have raced. It has also had some big early victories (pulling down Dan Rather, stealing readers from newspapers and television, setting much of the debate in the last presidential election), and it is beginning to show some of the early signs of consolidation (TechCentral Station, Pajama Media), the creation of larger and better-funded enterprises (Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere), industry organizations and conferences, and a growing support infrastructure (from search engines like Technorati, to free blogging services from the likes of AOL and MSN).

[...]

All of this suggests that the blogosphere is, like those other industries and professions under the regime of Moore’s Law, ripe for investment, for miracles and for the creation of great fortunes. When? There’s the real question. The PC industry ran for a long time under Moore’s Law before it finally found its destiny with the Apple II. Until then, a lot of very smart people devoted a lot of their lives and imaginations to personal computing with little in the bank to show for it.

2 August 2005 @ 1:43PM >> Judge Richard Posner has a lengthy, thought-provoking article in The New York Times on the changes brought on by an ever-increasing choice in media consumption.

Among the topics Posner addresses is the adversarial-yet-symbiotic relationship between online citizen-journalists and their professional counterparts in the establishment press:

What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.

This means that corrections in blogs are also disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the public. This is true not only of newspaper retractions - usually printed inconspicuously and in any event rarely read, because readers have forgotten the article being corrected - but also of network television news. It took CBS so long to acknowledge Dan Rather’s mistake because there are so many people involved in the production and supervision of a program like ‘’60 Minutes II'’ who have to be consulted.

The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek’s classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It’s as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.

How can the conventional news media hope to compete? Especially when the competition is not entirely fair. The bloggers are parasitical on the conventional media. They copy the news and opinion generated by the conventional media, often at considerable expense, without picking up any of the tab. The degree of parasitism is striking in the case of those blogs that provide their readers with links to newspaper articles. The links enable the audience to read the articles without buying the newspaper. The legitimate gripe of the conventional media is not that bloggers undermine the overall accuracy of news reporting, but that they are free riders who may in the long run undermine the ability of the conventional media to finance the very reporting on which bloggers depend.

This is an interesting point, but I think Posner is conflating two separate issues. Bloggers are undoubtedly dependent on the establishment press. A significant portion of what bloggers comment on happens to be the end-product of the news industry, and that end-product would not exist without the news-gathering apparatus of the establishment press.

However, bloggers are not any more “free riders” than people who write letters to the editor. The only difference is, if I write a letter to the editor of The New York Times, the odds are very small that it would be run, and if it is, I’d be lucky to get more than a hundred words printed. But with a website such as this, I effectively bypass the gatekeeper who decides what to print, and I can find an audience for my thoughts.

Posner’s real issue isn’t with bloggers, but with the current business model of the print media. It wasn’t hordes of drooling bloggers that forced The New York Times to publish their articles online for free; they—as did most of the establishment media—decided to do so voluntarily, long before there were such things as blogs. Inherent in putting up a web page is the ability for other people to link to it. That’s what blogs do; they link to other sources, many of which run ads on their pages.

So if I send a reader from this site to The New York Times, I am not diminishing the financial position of the Times unless they’ve structured their business in such a way to take a loss from web-based readers. But considering the prevalence of ads on the Times website, they are likely benefitting—not hurting—by my sending readers their way. Either way, it is not incumbent upon bloggers to devise a working business model for the establishment press. We bloggers haven’t even found a reliable business model in which we can make money, and I don’t see anyone in the old media shedding tears over that.

In the long-run, I think blogs help the establishment press by (1) forcing them to have a better product, and (2) putting more people in contact with that product. Whether people like or dislike what’s produced by the media is not determined by blogs. But blogs are great at shoving potential customers through the doors of sites like The New York Times, CNN.com, etc. If those potential customers feel like they’re being played for fools once they’re inside the gates of Big Media, that’s out of our control.

25 June 2005 @ 11:34AM >> Several months ago, Google News—which accepts other opinion sites—rejected this site for inclusion in their roster. But apparently, a jihadist web site suits Google News just fine.

24 June 2005 @ 5:52PM >> A press release from World Ahead Publishing—a publisher of conservative and libertarian books—charges that Google banned an ad for a book critical of Bill and Hillary Clinton:

Popular search engine Google reversed course late last week and banned a previously approved online ad campaign for a new book that documents abuses of power by Bill and Hillary Clinton. The surprise move prompted the book’s author and publishing house to publicly question if the politics of Google’s CEO - a financial backer of Hillary Clinton - played a role in this change of course.

“Google’s decision to reverse its prior approval and shut down this banner ad campaign reeks of political bias,” charges [author] Candice E. Jackson. [...]

The controversy comes at a time when the search engine giant is facing increasing scrutiny for claims of editorial unfairness by conservative organizations. Last month RightMarch.com, a conservative activist group, went public with claims that Google was rejecting its ads targeting House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi while at the same time running identical ads attacking Republican Leader Tom DeLay.

Representatives for Google - whose corporate motto is “don’t be evil” - attempted to defend the surprise ban on the book’s ads by claiming their policies prohibit ads that are against an individual. But while the ads for the book - which featured images of the book’s cover and pictures of the former First Couple - were suddenly deemed too offensive, Google happily accepts advertisements with headlines such as “Hate Bush? So Do We,” “Bush Belongs Behind Bars,” and “George W. Bush Fart Doll.”

Early last month, a similar controversy erupted when Google accepted ads targeting Republican Congressman Tom DeLay while rejecting similar ads targeting Democratic Congressman Nancy Pelosi. On May 9th, WorldNetDaily reported:

Google, the Internet’s No. 1 search engine, is still running attack ads against besieged House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, despite assurances by the company’s spokesman they were all pulled last week.

The issue of the anti-DeLay ads came to light when a conservative activist group discovered the ads and designed a similar campaign, using the same verbiage, targeting House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

When the anti-Pelosi ads were rejected by Google, RightMarch.com protested what it saw as political bias in Google’s content.

When questioned about the apparent double-standard by WND, Mike Mayzel, spokesman for Google, said both the anti-Pelosi ad and the anti-DeLay ad were pulled.

“Both ads were taken down,” he told WND. “Any assertion to the contrary is false. As soon as an ad is reviewed and found to be in violation of our policies, we take it down as soon as possible. Any suggestion we would leave some ads up longer than others for reasons of political bias is false.”

However, a search of Google’s site yesterday shows at least three more anti-DeLay ads still running[.]

As of this writing nearly two months later, anti-Tom DeLay ads are still running, despite Google’s assurances that they wouldn’t be. However, one anti-Nancy Pelosi ad is also running, which makes me wonder whether the problem is one of corporate political bias or simply one of bias—or incompetence—on the part of individual staffers who administer the ad approval process. Google may have dozens of employees who approve these ads, which could explain the inconsistent application of its policy.

Whatever the explanation, this kind of information doesn’t exactly help Google’s case:

A WorldNetDaily search of Google executive and employee political contributions filed with the Federal Election Commission showed nearly 99 percent of its $469,500 went to Democrats over the last three election cycles.

As a private company, Google is fully within its rights to accept or reject any ad it sees fit. However, if these charges are true, then the public should at least be aware of the fact that Google is making political calculations in the selective application of its ad policy. Google would also be wise to tighten up the application of this policy; the appearance of bias for a company that aspires to be the world’s gateway to the Internet would be devastating.

13 May 2005 >> A new net-based software service from the BBC aims to revolutionize the way online news and media are distributed. “BBC Backstage” gives software developers the ability to extract, reorganize, repackage and display content in new ways:

backstage.bbc.co.uk attempts to encourage and support those who have provided most of the innovation on the inernet - the passionate, highly-skilled & public-spirited developers and designers many of whom volunteer their time and effort.

In the past the BBC has not always encouraged such “amateur innovators”, however public-spirited their intentions and products. backstage.bbc.co.uk aims to foster a newly constructive and open dialogue with the wider development community using BBC content and tools to deliver public value.

Sounds promising. I hope other media firms will consider similar experiments.

11 May 2005 >> Wisdom from The Tao of Glenn Reynolds:

“The criticism bloggers make of journalists is they make mistakes they could fix with five minutes on Google. The criticism journalists make of bloggers is they make mistakes they could correct talking to someone for five minutes.”

5 May 2005 >> NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin discusses a Pentagon report issued in the form of a PDF file that was insecurely redacted (blacked out). The insecure file made it possible to retrieve the hidden information, which some people did and then posted online. Dvorkin uses the occasion to smear the entire blog world. So, following in his spirit of painting an entire segment of society with a broad brush, I will engage in Dvorkin’s game.

[T]he blogosphere has proven once again to be an amoral place with few rules. The consequences for misbehavior are still vague.

As opposed to what? CBS News? The consequences for misbehavior there are hard to determine, since the head of CBS News is firmly in place, and an aging Dan Rather was allowed to keep his job for six months after airing a bogus report and then defending it for days. The only people who paid consequences were the no-name, relatively low-level hacks who did the grunt work. The people in charge of the actual vetting process, the professionals that supposedly separate the trustworthy establishment media from the fast-and-loose, wild west world blogging paid no price at all.

Actually, even though none of the honchos paid a price, CBS News did, and paid dearly: the damage to the network’s reputation will persist for years. And in the news media, where the only lasting currency is trust, that’s really the only consequence that counts. The thing is, the exact same rules apply in the online world. Get busted doing something bogus, and good luck getting your reputation back. The guilty have nowhere to hide in the world of Google searching and historical caches like the Wayback Machine.

The possibility of civic responsibility remains remote. It is a place where the philosophy of “who posts first, wins” predominates.

Again, as opposed to what? The establishment press places a premium on breaking news and getting exclusives. And when they make mistakes, they often blame it not on ideological bias (despite the fact that I rarely recall liberal Democrats getting burned by sloppy reporting) but on a rush to get a story out first. That’s apparently what led a New York Times reporter to promise one side of a story that nobody from the other side would be contacted: in order to get an exclusive.

Despite the shoddiness and complete unprofessionalism of the blogosphere, Dvorkin cites an odd example to bolster NPR’s blog cred:

Even one of NPR’s newest programs, Day To Day is collaborating with Slate.com, the online magazine.

Hey, look, kids! Daddy-O is hip to the scene, man! He listens to all the grooviest music like The Monkees.

Excuse me for cluing in the square guy, but online, you can’t get much more establishment than Slate, a web magazine funded by Microsoft and founded by current L.A. Times editor Michael Kinsley. Nor does the Slate association help NPR’s case as far as perceived bias goes. The closest fixture Slate has to a conservative is self-described Democrat (and must-read) Mickey Kaus.

The appeal of the blogs? Humor seems to be the biggest attraction. Ironic detachment from the news, an ability to deflate egos and refreshing, undisguised opinion are also valued.

Whereas in the establishment media, disguised opinions seem to be valued...

American newspapers traditionally and scrupulously segregate fact-based reporting from opinion by designating pages for each.

Hahahahahahahaha! Pardon me while I wipe up the coffee I just spat all over my monitor.

The blogs entertain, they provoke, and they are not constrained by journalistic standards of truth telling.

Has Mr. Dvorkin been sleeping for a few decades? Journalists don’t seem “constrained by journalistic standards of truth telling.”

At least the blogosphere doesn’t claim to be something it isn’t. The establishment media constantly assures us of its fail-safe editorial processes and vigorous fact-checking, yet we still see example after example where journalists have let their opinions drive their coverage of the news. Blogs are being honest about shoveling opinion, whereas the professional journalists continue to issue shopworn platitudes about a pristine objectivity that’s probably not even possible in the first place.

Perhaps these younger people will outgrow these youthful informational indiscretions and come to their senses — and back to media that can serve them best...

And while you’re at it, remember to buy from Amalgamated Buggy Whip. Don’t believe Henry Ford’s hype! Those so-called “automobiles” are absolute death traps. Why pour some putrid exploding liquid into a hard-to-understand machine when you can motivate your stately equine conveyance with one of our nice-smelling leather cords!

Dvorkin closes his column by quoting some big media editors who apparently hate getting e-mail. Here’s a solution: if you in the establishment media think you’d be better off by ignoring your customers, stop giving out your contact information. Step back even further from the people who consume your product. Go ahead. I dare you.

31 March 2005 @ 5:30PM >> It’s a very brief mention, and he is a little confused over the name of this site, but Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post did mention this site in passing:

In the spate of blog attacks on the media, critics have featured such headlines as “GOP Slimed by Another Fake Memo?,” as a site called Evan’s Journal put it.

How does that saying go? Any publicity is good publicity as long as you spell my name right? Maybe that should be amended to: ...as long as you get my site right.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin responds to the Kurtz article, noting:

We still don’t know who wrote the memo. We still don’t know who distributed it. ABCNews.com still hasn’t retracted its unsubstantiated characterization of the memo as “GOP Talking Points.” ABC still has not acknowledged that Kate Snow misspoke. The Post still hasn’t acknowledged that it wrongly implied that the memo was written and/or distributed by Republicans.

16 March 2005 @ 2:59PM >> Over at Slate, Jacob Weisberg asks, “Who is a journalist?”

[M]edia outfits including the Times insist on the need for a federal “shield law” that would create a privilege for journalists akin to privileges for lawyers, doctors, and priests.

A majority of states have such media protection ordinances on the books. But there’s a big problem with journalist shield laws, which advocates have yet to answer. How do you decide who is a journalist? If you create a privilege that applies to a group, someone has to decide who belongs and who doesn’t. [...] Journalism does not require any specific training, or institutional certification, or organizational membership, or even regular employment. It’s just an activity some people engage in that is protected under the Constitution.

The question of who gets to call themselves a journalist and who doesn’t is an important one, especially in light of the McCain/Feingold campaign finance law. McCain/Feingold carved out wide exemptions for establishment media. If you write your opinions in a newspaper, if you give your opinions as a guest on Hardball, or if you can find Hollywood distribution for a film that contains your opinions, you are exempt from McCain/Feingold.

And while the Internet is also currently unregulated, the Federal Election Commission is now examining whether that should change. If it does, web-based commentators like me could have our free speech rights curtailed whenever election season rolls around. Suddenly, where an opinion is expressed would determine whether or not it is subject to restrictions. Michael Moore can put out his sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11, and he’ll enjoy unfettered free speech rights. However, if I create a similarly political film in the future—and if I can’t secure Hollywood distribution and can only make it available online—I might be breaking the law simply by expressing my opinion.

That’s why I’ve signed the Online Coalition petition to preserve free speech rights on the Internet. The goal is to get the FEC to continue the current hands-off policy towards the Internet. But the real problem is McCain/Feingold. Shame on Congress for passing it, shame on President Bush for signing it, and shame on the Supreme Court upholding it. All three branches of government have conspired to take a huge chunk out of the First Amendment. Muffling the cacophony of free speech might make things more palatable to the governing class, but for those of us who like to think we’ve got the right to express our opinions, it is a disastrous turn down a dangerous road.

14 March 2005 @ 4:57PM >> Reuters reports:

U.S. media coverage of last year’s election was three times more likely to be negative toward President Bush than Democratic challenger John Kerry, according to a study released Monday.

Apparently, people aren’t surprised:

“It may be that the expectations of the press have sunk enough that they will not sink much further. People are not dismayed by disappointments in the press. They expect them,” the authors of the report said.

Is public disenchantment with the establishment media working to the advantage of online outlets? Could be:

The study noted a huge rise in audiences for Internet news, particularly for bloggers whose readers jumped by 58 percent in six months to 32 million people.

That could also simply be the result of more and more people coming online. Still, when there are so many alternatives available, it doesn’t help to have dissatisfied customers.

11 March 2005 >> BlogAds posted the results of its 2005 Blog Reader Survey. The results are quite interesting. To me, the most surprising revelations are:

• More than three-quarters of respondents were male.
• 39.3% of respondents identified themselves as Democrats, while only 27.3% said they were Republicans. (19% identified as independents.)

19 February 2005 @ 5:09PM >> Dana Milbank has graciously agreed to an interview. Thank you, Mr. Milbank, for getting back to me so quickly.

I will be submitting questions by e-mail next week. Feel free to e-mail me if you’d like me to consider including your question for Mr. Milbank. Please note, however, that I will not be sending an exhaustive list; e-mail interviews can be time-consuming for the interviewee, and I appreciate the time that Mr. Milbank is giving.

19 February 2005 >> Dana Milbank, a Washington Post reporter that many conservatives perceive as having a thinly-veiled liberal bias, was recently interviewed by the hard-left blog Daily Kos.

In April 2004, Markos (”Kos”) Moulitsas Zúniga—the proprietor of Daily Kos—made news around the blogosphere after the charred bodies of four dead Americans were strung up from a bridge in Fallujah. His compassionate response to the grisly display was, “They were there to wage war for profit. Screw them.” But instead of the comment relegating Kos to political oblivion, the Democratic political establishment ignored it and embraced him. Why? Because his site is a fundraising powerhouse that funneled around a half-million dollars to various Democratic candidates.

Given the extreme partisanship of Daily Kos, it seems like an odd choice for Dana Milbank’s first blog interview. By all appearances, it just furthers the perception that Milbank himself is a partisan journalist. Would he grant an interview to a conservative blog? That’s what I intend to find out.

Earlier today, I left Mr. Milbank a voicemail requesting an interview and followed it up with an e-mail. As yet, there has been no response. However, as a public service, I will persist in trying to get an interview with him, and I will keep you posted about my progress—or lack thereof.

If Milbank is willing to grant interviews to left-wing blogs but won’t submit to questioning from conservatives, one could reasonably conclude that it is an indication of his personal political preferences.

For now, I’m reserving judgment. The life of a reporter is very hectic, and in fairness to Mr. Milbank, he has not yet had a reasonable amount of time to respond.

Stay tuned...

18 February 2005 >> From Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal piece:

“Salivating morons.” “Scalp hunters.” “Moon howlers.” “Trophy hunters.” “Sons of Sen. McCarthy.” “Rabid.” “Blogswarm.” “These pseudo-journalist lynch mob people.”

This is excellent invective. It must come from bloggers. But wait, it was the mainstream media and their maidservants in the elite journalism reviews, and they were talking about bloggers!

[...]

When you hear name-calling like what we’ve been hearing from the elite media this week, you know someone must be doing something right. The hysterical edge makes you wonder if writers for newspapers and magazines and professors in J-schools don’t have a serious case of freedom envy.

The bloggers have that freedom. They have the still pent-up energy of a liberated citizenry, too. The MSM doesn’t. It has lost its old monopoly on information. It is angry.

But MSM criticism of the blogosphere misses the point [...]

When you think of new media, Peggy Noonan isn’t exactly the first name to come to mind. But the rest of her article demonstrates the depth of her understanding of the new world of Internet media. If a more insightful analysis of the world of blogging has appeared in the establishment press, I haven’t read it.