Entries from April 2003 ↓

At a busy intersection, on the concrete divider island, an older black man, standing silently. He’s holding a cardboard sign, hand-lettered, saying “HOMELESS. PLEASE HELP”. The driver of the car in front of me throws a dollar bill towards the man as the light turns green. The bill flutters into the traffic lane and the old man watches it, wisely waiting until the cars are gone before I see him in the rear view mirror, stooping to retrieve the donation.

Over at different strings, Kriselda called my attention to a recent lawsuit brought by four concert-goers against the band Creed. According to the MSNBC report on the suit, filed on April 22 in Chicago for the events which occurred at the December 29, 2002 concert:

I’m looking at a little raffia basket full of the 300-400 ticket stubs my wife and I have accumulated in the 20 years we’ve been together. Most of those stubs are for music events: concerts and nightclub shows. When you go to that many shows, you get all kinds of experiences, from the transcendent(Luna at Irving Plaza) to the abysmal (Smashing Pumpkins at Lollapalooza, Randalls Island, NY in 1994) to the so-bad-it’s-brilliant (Johnny Thunders at the Cat Club, NYC). The thing is: you never know what you’re gonna get.

What did these litigious concert-goers get for their money? They got a show. They got a 2-hour car-wreck of a show. They got a glimpse of the performer as a fallible human, not a mechanical jukebox. They got to watch the rest of the band — and it is a band — attempt to soldier on through their mate’s antics. They lived through an experience, which — while it wasn’t what they’d bargained for — was certainly memorable, certainly something which will stick with them for the rest of their lives.

And what do they do? They sue. They sue because the concert didn’t meet their expectations. They sue because the live performance wasn’t of high enough quality. To which I say: if you want perfection, play the fucking CD at home and save your money, and the court’s time, and the livelihoods of the venue owners and employees. Save everyone the trouble and stay in your living room and when the CD is over, press “Play” again and the performance will be exactly the same as you expected.

Because… what’s next for these plaintiffs and their attorney? When they attend a Broadway play and the star’s understudy plays the role, will they sue? When they go to the baseball game and the star player is on the disabled list, will they sue? When they take the kids to the zoo and the pandas aren’t frisky, will they sue? Is this a whole new practice area for their attorney’s firm? Or is it just another punchline to a lawyer joke?

(And all this about a band with a large Christian-rock following. I know nothing about the plaintiffs’ religious background, but I wonder: did these idiots even stop to think that this is probably a sick man on that stage? Did they pause in their self-righteous arrogance for a second to give this man maybe a little understanding, a little brotherly love, a little forgiveness, a little tolerance?)

I just hope a judge with a smidgen of common sense tosses this case before it really gets started.

Also read this article on Collateral Language, which came out last September.

[via Paul McFedries' Word Spy]

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this piece of legislation introduced last week by Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), a member of my state’s Congressional delegation. Bartlett wants to move Income Tax Day from its current April 15 to the first Monday in November — the day before Election Day. As Bartlett says:

On the one hand, I’m always tempted to ridicule such symbolic gestures: the “freedom fries” flap comes to mind. In addition, I fear that the elections would be solely focused on economic issues, rather than the broad slate of issues we should be discussing.

On the other hand, there is a kernel of practicality to this proposal. I wonder how this proposal would affect Congressman Bartlett’s party. With an economy showing signs of weakening in the autumn of 2000, would the Bush/Gore issues have been the same? How about the outcome? With the economy a mess, unemployment up and corporate scandals raging, how would the electorate have reacted in the midterm elections of 2002?

In his entry entitled, “This explains it all…” David Weinberger refers to a recent Harris poll on “The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans 2003.” The results indicate that

Americans, as a whole, seem to be like the current occupant of the Oval Office in their religious faith and superstition. But what I want to know is how this compares to the rest of the world. How do our religious beliefs stack up against our allies, who are increasingly nervous about the religious fundamentalism in George W. Bush’s public statements.

According to this article in MSNBC/Newsweek [Google cache link]

I want the Harris people to use the same questions in Britain and France and Germany and Russia and China. I’d like to see the World Values Survey at the University of Michigan perform a study on their data comparing religious beliefs in the US and the rest of the world. I want to know if we really are still living in the Dark Ages.

Chris Rock says: “”You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn’t want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named ‘Bush’, ‘Dick’, and ‘Colon’. Need I say more?”

(I actually found this one in my email a few days ago and clip-filed it for posting, but couldn’t find a reliable source for the quote. Still, it’s got that hyperbolically-funny-but-true Chris Rock vibe to it… and I needed a laugh.)

If the reports are true, how long before Steve becomes Big Brother? With Apple poised to spend US$5-6 billion purchasing Universal Music, how long before DRM becomes part of OX 10.4 “Bobcat”? When will iTunes rat you out to the RIAA?

Or maybe, just maybe… this is the start of a change which needs to come from within the industry… Maybe Apple/Universal will get together with Sony, similarly divided between media and technology, and start bringing some sense to the digital download debate?

So, here’s the problem: I’ve been using Syndirella for all my news aggregating. It’s a great program, and although Dmitry doesn’t really have the time or enthusiasm to upgrade it much further, it is open source, so someone might pick up the slack. (Fingers crossed.) Since I’ve been using Syndirella, I’ve been reading the web with my browser a lot less often, so when I come across an interesting site, I grab its feed, rather than put it into my blogroll. I’ve got about 300 blogs in my feed list and I’d like to show them on my blogroll, but I don’t feel like copying and pasting all 300 links into the form at blogrolling.com.

One of the things Syndirella does well is export its feed list to OPML and OCS. Blogrolling.com supports some OPML interaction for those people using Radio. (Maybe I’m just not understanding, but I don’t think this applies to any other blogging software.) I’m looking for an automated way to make my blogroll and my feedlist mirror one another in Moveable Type (or Blogger, or whatever) and in Syndirella (or FeedReader or Amphetadesk or NewzCrawler or whatever), probably using OPML as an intermediary, but without requiring me to muck around with any of those “P” languages (Perl, PHP, Python) in which I am utterly incompetent. A tall order?

In the comments thread attached to Kos‘ article entitled “Baseball Hall of Fame cancels Sarandon appearance“, a commenter named Wilhelm lets ‘er rip, brought to the boiling point by this latest outrage as well as

As Kate said in a comment further down the page: “Wilhelm needs a radio talk show. We need this kind of liberal left energy on the airwaves.” (Well, perhaps it’s a little TOO much energy…)

Hi, Dan,

The book, along with this chance at a type of collaboration you are offering to your readers, is going to be a great experiment.

For your Part III, Chapter 8, I think the Agonist story you wrote about earlier provokes some interesting questions for “Making the News”. At the beginning of the new Gulf War, Sean-Paul Kelley, the guy behind The Agonist, made a decision to sit in front of his computer as much as he possibly could, aggregating news from websites, radio, TV and any other information sources he could get his hands on. He’s a graduate student down in Texas, with a wife who reads and writes Russian. For those of us without the time or the inclination to hunt for nuggets of truth amidst all the bias and web-slag, his site was a real find. I’m not sure how many of us staked out his site at the beginning of the hostilities, but I don’t think any of us had any illusions that his sources were anything other than other media outlets; the value he provided was collection and presentation. His role wasn’t much different than Paula Zahn’s, except that his sources were more varied and I doubt he smiled as much when he reported enemy deaths. Does anyone believe that Paula herself is developing primary sources? Isn’t it clear that Zahn is presenting her colleague in Qatar, who is presenting the guy embedded with a particular unit, who is then presenting to us what the military allows him to say?

Perhaps people visiting the site later believed that Sean-Paul’s mysterious references to “little birdies” or “unnamed” sources were bonafides, but these lapses in attribution can just as easily be chalked up to Sean-Paul’s personal voice — humor and an air of espionage. My assumption was that some of his sources were from reader emails; in fact, half the value of Kelley’s site was the wealth of comments from readers: they verified reports, suggested new sources, added new items, and contributed breaking news during the breaks Sean-Paul’s biological nature required of him. Give it ten years of development and research and Google News may be capable of providing this service for the next Gulf War, without the bathroom requirements.

Blogs aren’t “journalism” — at least not in the American “objective” sense; to judge them by the standards of professional journalism is to do both a disservice. Blogs depend on journalism, serving as an echo chamber for the good stuff, a debunker for the garbage, and a collection point for the stuff which may have been overlooked in our info-glutted culture. For a pro, mis-attributing or claiming another’s work as your own is both unethical and proof that they are not doing their job properly. For an amateur, its more of an ego-stroke than anything harmful, akin to the guy at the water-cooler using Ebert‘s words to describe what he “heard” about the movie he hasn’t yet seen. “Plagiarism” is the term that’s being tossed about, but I think plagiarism would require that Kelley attributed the work to himself, which I don’t believe he did, any more than Al Gore attributed to himself the creation of the Internet.

As for the charge that Sean-Paul was “stealing” information from Stratfor: that’s a tricky one. Can information be stolen? Are thoughts, ideas and knowledge property which can be owned by one person? Once Stratfor releases the information to its subscribers, can Stratfor rightfully determine who those subscribers may or may not relay that information to? It also leads into the question of “fair use“: how much of Stratfor’s text could Sean-Paul copy-and-paste as fair use? Many bloggers — Lisa Rein comes immediately to mind — copy entire articles and save them to their own websites in order to comment on them; Kelley took snippets and clips. According to the developing code of weblogger ethics, he should have attributed the excerpts to Stratfor. When it was pointed out to him, he apologized, then immediately began attributing every article, went back into his archives to attribute all un-attributed information and worked out an amicable arrangement with Stratfor for using some of their material.

There are some ethical lapses here, but nothing horrible like the recent spate of professional newspapers quoting other newspapers without even an attempt at independent verification, as in the (overblown) flap about General William Wallace’s assertion that “enemy tactics had been ‘a bit’ different from what was war-gamed against beforehand”. In failing to verify the quote with the General, many newspapers repeated someone’s original error and left out “a bit”, suggesting that the US armed forces had been porrly trained and were in danger due to foolish assumptions. And it is certainly nothing like Fox News partisanly using its Times Square news ticker to taunt war protesters with insults and slurs.

Many of the people who posted heated rants on Kelley’s “The Agonist” comments board said that, in light of the revelations that he had “stolen” content, they could no longer trust his information or rely upon his data. This is a touchy-feely reaction with no basis in reality: no one has questioned the veracity or reliability of any of Kelley’s or Stratfor’s reports, merely whether Kelley properly credited them. This has no bearing on reliability. Every major newspaper has a “Corrections” column running nearly every day, and consisting mainly of corrections to misattributions of photographs, authors and sources. Few people would claim that the New York Times is no longer reliable because its editors forgot a photographer’s byline. (In this respect, conscientious bloggers are more like print media in that they frequently correct their mistakes with updates to the original articles or post new entries reporting their errors; contrast this with the lack of corrections in television journalism.)

I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this episode, other than it is still very early in the history of this new medium to understand exactly what should be the distinctions between journalists and bloggers and how they should ethically act and interact. I’m sure Gillmor can analyze this better than I can.