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Posterity is the new justification for FISA
You can picture it now. Just when they’ve whittled away the last possible explanation for warrantless wiretapping, History offers a new opening.
FBI wiretaps have “given us the most powerful and persuasive source of all for seeing how utterly selfless Martin Luther King was,” as a civil rights leader, according to a leading civil rights scholar.
Think about it. If we wiretap everyone, chances are something will be interesting. Then we can use the tapes for good, not evil. Do you hate history?
Silly Writers - There's No Money on the Internet
Also posted at OpenLeft
Poor studio executives. Even before the writers guild went on strike, the penny-pinching producers were couch diving for loose change to prop up their studios. For more than two weeks, 12,000 entertainment writers have been out of the streets, clamoring for a cut of money the producers supposedly make from “promotional” videos published to the Internet. They’re considered “promotional” because they’re not like the real thing shown on TV (even if there is original writing, like the mini-webisodes of The Office produced last year).
On TV you can sell advertisements in the middle of shows, and that’s how the studios make their money. But everyone knows you can’t make money on the Internet. It is a completely unexplored revenue stream.
Two brave studios are taking a plunge into the unknown depths of the Internet – NBC and Fox created a joint video venture called Hulu that functions like a closed-YouTube for promotional video clips from both studios. The website just started releasing beta invites for people to start exploring the site, and as you can clearly see from this screenshot evidence below, there is absolutely no money to be made from showing videos on the Internet.
Oh, that ad? That’s, uh, ... that’s a … LOOK OVER THERE!
Ahem. Let me repeat myself. There is no money to be made from the Internet. The writers are greedy – they already make an outrageous four cents for every $20 DVD sold, and now they want the same formula applied to Internet videos. Four cents? How can these impoverished studios afford that? Let’s ask the executives themselves:
So you hear that, writers? Get off the picket lines and get back to work — the producers have money to make on the Internet not on the Internet.
(Thanks to Matt Ortega for the screenshot.)
Someone at Microsoft got a little testy today, issuing a 10-point criticism of Google’s online application suite. The unnamed Microsoft spokesperson who first sent the list makes some valid points about the capabilities of Google’s documents and spreadsheets applications—it’s a good read.
These were announced a while back, but I finally got a chance to play with Digg’s widgets, which you can configure to display popular stories from the user-edited website. This would be a nice addition to website that covers a specific topic for which Digg has a category, like the 2008 election or the environment (or Xbox or 1337 haxors). Here’s a widget with the five most recently popular stories about the election:
McCain running Google Adwords campaign on "Iraq war propaganda"
John McCain’s campaign is running a Google Adwords campaign on the phrase “Iraq war propaganda,” as evidenced by this ad that I found on NoIraqDraft.com, my petition site against a draft for the War. I can understand the campaign wanting to bring in visitors on ads targeted by issue area, but this ad makes it seem like you can find propaganda on the war at John McCain’s website. I don’t think that’s what McCain’s campaign wants to be doing now, as his unpopular positions on the war and basically every other issue at stake led Ames, Iowa Republicans to support him less than every other candidate in yesterday’s straw poll. (The only candidate who got fewer votes than McCain is John Cox, a no-name fringe candidate who’s raised just $12,000 for his quixotic campaign.)
Billed as the “21st century take on the milk carton,” the missing kids screensaver flips through dossiers of more than 4,000 missing children. The program is targeted at high traffic areas to easily display a number of pictures to as many people as possible. This is an interesting idea. I just wonder to what extent they expect people to use this as a personal computer screensaver, because I can’t imagine many people want to be constantly reminded of missing kids every time they leave their computers alone for 5 minutes. (site)
techPresident Launches Politickr
Yesterday techPresident – a group blog covering the intersection of technology and the 2008 presidential race – launched Politickr. It’s their great implementation of the site I originally developed at Politickr.net.
FeedBurner + del.icio.us = smokin' hot deliciousness
On previous versions of my website, and all over the American Rights at Work website, I use del.icio.us to create a dynamically updated list of news articles or other links. I then take the RSS feed from the del.icio.us page and burn it through FeedBurner, which allows me to republish these links as HTML, as well as offer a once-a-day email service that collects the links from throughout the day and emails them to subscribers.
Anyway, a question came across a listserv the other day about how best to create a low-tech news clips service for an organization, so I wrote up my method, and it was well received. Kerri Karvetski of Company K Media wrote up the full method on her blog. Check it out.
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