Reuters: "The U.S. Department of Defense denied reports by Iran's official IRNA news agency Saturday that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been captured. IRNA quoted a story on Iran's state radio Pashtun service which reported "a very reliable source" as saying bin Laden had been captured in a tribal area of Pakistan."

I tend to agree with the rising swell of voices opining that he has indeed been captured, or is at least under close surveillance, and will be produced - like an election-winning rabbit from a hat - some time before November 2nd.

Halley nails it in her "One Big Bad Boyfriend" post:

"...we were talking about how your old job sucked. Anybody's old job. Everybody's old job. Your old job was like one big bad boyfriend -- you knew there was everything wrong with the relationship, but you just weren't sure how to get out, until he dumped you.

And you hung around the house loveless, but free. You hung around the house jobless, but free. You learned to live with less. You were jobless but FREE for a while, for QUITE a while and then one day you realized, you'd never go back. Hell no we won't go."

I've had the calls.  Been approached, solicited: "hey - you've worked for a whole bunch of big corporate clueholes, you'd fit right in over here."

But I won't heed the call, I won't be dazzled by the shiny offers and the fancy titles.

I'd rather be Second Junior Underassistant of Being Able to Sleep at Night, than Senior Executive Vice President of Soul-Sullying Duplicity again.

And I'm getting there...I'm getting there.  Good news coming round the corner...

Excellent news: David Weinberger has just been offered a fellowship at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Mazel Tov!

I'm a sucker for data navigation systems that use a hyperbolic tree approach to represent the relationships between data points.*

I'm also a big fan of thesauruses (thesaurii?).

So any site that manages to combine the two concepts into something useful and beautiful, totally twists my melon.

Thanks to Jeff Roman for the pointer.

*(Damn! That has to be the finest goddam opening sentence of any blog post ever written.
If there was a Bulwer Lytton award for blogging, I'd smoke it!)

Here's the most entertaining thing about that Mel Gibson movie so far. IMDB gives God a screenwriter's credit.

Stu Savory, in a comment to my post below (about issues of punctuation tying up court proceedings in the San Francisco same-sex marriage shenanigans) points out the obvious groaner I completely missed.

Whereas Judge James Warren took issue with the way the plaintiffs made use of a semicolon, the plaintiffs, of course, are up in arms over the misuse of colons.

On reflection, I'm kind of proud that I missed that one ;-)

Lots of echoes bouncing around the big ole chamber pot of the blogosphere tonight.

Dave Winer wants a whole bunch of bloggers to show up at BloggerCon and talk about Nuking the Echo Chamber.

Meanwhile David Weinberger continues to worry whether echo chambers even exist.

Then The Wonderchicken gets all splenetic about the self-referential insanity of it all: riffing on the theme of a metachamber.  If a room full of the "Usual Suspect" bloggers are all gathered in a chamber, echoing each other on the subject of echo chambers, does all the noise cancel itself out leaving a blissful silence? Or would there still be a barely audible but no less irritating ultra high frequency whine?

Me? 

I'm just as confused as always about all this meta-metaphysical matter.

I've decided it's safest for me to adopt the characteristic blogger's behaviour when faced with a situation one cannot grok: to vent all this confusion and uncertainty - I've decided to launch another blog!

But this one will be different! Oh, yessiree. In a radical departure from the norm, this blog will only be used to explore one-dimensional lefty libertarian ideas, and will constantly restate the same point of view, cunningly paraphrasing itself on every consecutive post.

It will not ping weblogs.com, have an RSS or Atom feed, a blogroll, outgoing links, a sitemeter, or any real content to speak of.

To help prove that the phrase "echo chamber" is a null concept in blogspace, please refrain from linking to this blog. Or talking about it.

In fact, if you're not careful - if I detect so much as a trace of an echo - I'll delete the little sucker faster than you can say 'Ev'.

No neurons were injured in the making of this post. Or used.

Just upgraded to the latest BlogJet beta.

Happy happy; joy joy: they've added a 'Code' tab, so you can see what's going to get squirted through your blog tool's API before you hit post.

Seems faster too.

Highly recommended if you haven't tried it yet. The advent of WYSIWYG blogging for the HTML-challenged.

Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them - A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right

I was going to wait for the paperback, but stumbled into Indigo by accident at lunchtime; picked it up and couldn't put it down.

Plus it was 40% off with my iRewards card. Had to be done.

[Later] Read the first 4 chapters on the streetcar - hilarious, wonderful, terrifying.

   You lookin' at me?

I've just launched a radically pointless new Flickr group exclusively for people who have chosen a close-up image of their own eye to use as their Flickr buddy icon.

Wandering through Flickr late last night, I noticed that quite a lot of users have chosen to do this. 

Hence the obvious, compelling need to launch the Mr. Starey Oot group. It's almost, but not entirely, completely without purpose.

Destined to hang around tediously for the requisite 15 minutes before collapsing in on itself under pressure of the group's combined ennui.

Sounds thrilling, no? Want in?

I personally guarantee to make no guarantees of any kind.

WASHINGTON (Feb. 24) -- President Bush backed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage Tuesday, saying he wants to stop activist judges from changing the definition of the "most enduring human institution."
  
"After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization," the president said. "Their action has created confusion on an issue that requires clarity."

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the argument continues to hinge on a fortuitous accident of punctuation:

Two judges delayed taking any action Tuesday to shut down San Francisco's same-sex wedding spree, citing court procedures as they temporarily rebuffed conservative groups enraged that the city's liberal politicians had already married almost 2,400 gay and lesbian couples.

The second judge told the plaintiffs that they would likely succeed on the merits eventually, but that for now, he couldn't accept their proposed court order because of a punctuation error.

It all came down to a semicolon, the judge said.

"I am not trying to be petty here, but it is a big deal ... That semicolon is a big deal," said San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren.

The Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund had asked the judge to issue an order commanding the city to "cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnizing marriages of same-sex couples; to show cause before this court."

"The way you've written this it has a semicolon where it should have the word 'or'," the judge told them. "I don't have the authority to issue it under these circumstances."

Pedants, editors, and punctuation purists arise!  Sharpen your semicolons, take up your Strunk & White; for today WE MARCH ON WASHINGTON!

Dan Gillmor is working on what sounds like it should be a terrific book - it's certainly a great topic that deserves considered study.

From Dan's blog:

"The book will explore the intersection of technology and journalism. The working title is "Making the News" -- reflecting a central point of this project, namely that today's (and tomorrow's) communications tools are turning traditional notions of news and journalism in new directions. These tools give us the ability to take advantage, in the best sense of the word, of the fact that our collective knowledge and wisdom greatly exceeds any one person?s grasp of almost any subject. We can, and must, use that reality to our mutual advantage."

He's inviting readers to come forward with content, comments, and critical input for the book in progress. Part of Dan's research for this project involves uncovering clear, referenceable examples that illustrate the seismic shift he's documenting. 

I don't think Dan could find many better examples than this morning's post from Doc Searls: All the news that's fit to fool. Go read it.  A hilarious example of what happens when old school inkblot media pick up stories off the Net, and forget to run them through their false authority filters. 

Amazing and highly entertaining to see this stuff happen. 

Perhaps the most astonishing part is how the Chicago Tribune, which prides itself on meeting the "...expectations of our readers, viewers, advertisers and shareholders through the superior quality of our journalism" lifted a story from the Net and gave it full credibility in print, even though the source very clearly describes itself as: All fake. All the time.

"Recognized around the world as the best source for
completely fictional news and information.
When you're not looking for a reliable, accurate site for industry news,
there's only one place to go: Denounce."

Fantastic.  There's another mission for Jeff Jarvis here, too - time for someone to go to the source and ask the editors at the Tribune, "Dudes, what were you thinking?"

Of all the photos of Jeff Skilling being escorted into the Houston federal courthouse in yesterday's papers, Tim Johnson's shot for Reuters, which appeared on the front page of yesterday's ROB, was the one that best capured the schadenfreude for me. 

There's an episode in The Bonfire of the Vanities (I'm thinking of Tom Wolfe's outstanding 1987 novel of corporate hubris, not the soggy, misguided turkey of a movie) in which the central character, Sherman McCoy, is arrested and stripped of his Wall Street/Park Avenue trappings to expose the very mortal man behind the "Master of the Universe" veneer.

His expensive silk tie, his belt and even shoelaces are removed as he's carted off in handcuffs to the cop shop to be charged. 

It's a masterful piece of storytelling. Wolfe chooses a simple, brilliant device to pour salt in McCoy's wound - the sytrofoam packing peanuts in the back of the cop cruiser that cling to his suit trousers add the final touch to this portrait of humiliation. If you've read the book, I'm sure you'll remember the scene.

In Tim Johnson's photo, Jeff Skilling doing his 'perp walk' is Sherman McCoy.  Look at him: belt and tie gone, rumpled shirt, the half-defiant, half-pleading stare into the camera, even what looks like a gum wrapper adhering to the heel of his $200 shoe.

It's the punishment of Nemesis perfectly captured in that one shot.

As Rotman business school prof, Joseph d'Cruz put it in yesterday's Globe: "This is justice as theatre."

"I get briefed by [chief of staff] Andy Card and [National Security Advisor] Condi [Rice] in the morning. They come in and tell me. ... I glance at the headlines just to [get?] kind of a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read [sic] the news themselves. ... And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."

I think that might just be the single most telling statement Dubya has ever made.

Link, btw, by way of David Weinberger's genuinely important new piece at Salon. 

David's article on the concept of Echo Chambers is so damn good it deserves much more than the offhand, sidebar mention it's getting here.  But I'm running on about 2 hours sleep last night and fading fast. Just go read it, please. 

(And yes: I know the linky-love going back and forth between David and I could easily be seen as another example of the echo chamber effect. But frankly, my dear...)

I liked this story at Marc Snyder's new place, covering the back room discussion on a journalist's blog after their story about the Pixies reunion in the French daily, Libération, got butchered by an inept editor.

The cool part is when Pixies frontman Frank Black chimes in in the comments.

Once upon a time, in a part of the house where grownups rarely visited, there was the Land of the Stuffed Animals.

It was a happy place where all the animals got along (as their hearts were as plush as the rest of them).

But one day the stuffed animals discovered a strange looking thing...

[Bonus updatage: I should point out that this particularly fine and nutty link was forwarded by Gerard, who has the unique misfortune of being one of my brothers.

I cannot begin to imagine what on earth (or...um...beneath it) he was Googling when he turned up this tale of plush Cthulhu. Best not to speculate, don't you think?

Meanwhile, in much the same vein, Gezzie also discovered this other toothsome morsel:

The Cthulhu vs. Microsoft Look & Feel lawsuit ]

(with apologies to E.J. Thribb)

So. Farewell then
Howard Dean
"Ordinary American".

It would seem that
You've blogged your last.

Or have you?

A beginning,
You said,
Not an end.

While we figure
That one out;

Can I get my $50 back?
Thanks.

[UPDATE: An alternative take, courtesy of my bro Gezzie]

Dean, Dean
He is a has been
Vanishing from
Th' political scene
Quicker than a nipple
That's deemed obscene.

...but you don't actually have to be all that smart.

[UPDATE May 29, 2008: For some reason, this 4-year old post is attracting A LOT of traffic in the past 24 hours. Lots of searches for "What foreign nation has a five-sided flag" - or variations of that question.

You won't find the answer in this post BUT if you contact me through Twitter (either by tweeting me @michaelocc or by direct message) I'll gladly tell you the correct answer. I can also tell you which American state has a five-sided flag too, for extra credit. I'm just curious to know the origin of this traffic spike - another online contest somewhere, perhaps? Now, back to the original post...]

Thanks to a listserv posting by the splendidly-named Dawn Quiett (of Quiett Publicity, no less), I just came across this geography contest currently running in the Miami Herald. Prizes include a two-night stay for two people at Izzy Sharp's swish new Four Seasons Miami, four passes to Busch Gardens - nice stuff like that.

It's a tough quiz, with questions like:

"One American state and one foreign nation have five-sided flags. What are they?"

...and 29 more where that one came from.

Of course, it turns out to be a whole lot easier once you learn (thanks Dawn!) that they lifted all but three of the questions from the San Francisco Chronicle, where the answers were already published in the December 28th edition.

I thought for a moment: perhaps they're sister papers at opposite ends of the country, figuring no one would find out? But no - looks like the Herald is a Knight Ridder rag, while the Chronicle is owned by Hearst.

I'm struggling to resist the urge to email the author of the original quiz in the Chronicle, just to see what he thinks.

The last three questions the Herald added in its version are seriously easy, but just in case you need an extra hint:

28. The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

29. Bagan, in Myanmar (Google it - fascinating place).

30. The Reichstag, Berlin.

So. If a whole group of bloggers spot something dopey like this and jump on top of it, does that mean we made a blogpile...?

(Apologies in advance, btw, if this turns out to be glasscock - kind of hard to check).

The marvellous Marc Snyder has just launched a new blog, focused on the excesses and successes of this curious PR business.

Off to a strong start with a terrific post about what has to be the worst news release ever sent across the wire in the history of the known universe.

A small sample:

SANTA BARBARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 10, 2004--Roaming Messenger(TM) (OTCBB:RMSG - News) today reported that the company has received news coverage in publications around the world related to its beta test of the Roaming Messenger system on Motorola's(TM) XP200 SmartPhone.

WTF? 

The easiest shot to take at this is to point out that their "news release" has absolutely no news value. 

But it's worse than that - by pointing out the fact that they've had all this terrific coverage all over the place, you've got to figure that any editor worth their salt is probably going to respond by saying: "Oh, well I guess we won't be needing to write about you guys at any time in the near future then..."

The ticker code in their dateline makes it fairly clear that the intended 'target' for this self-stroking bucket of ordure is the investment community.  The only way they could make this appeal more blatant would be to add a quote from the CEO telling us how 'undervalued' his stock is (currently ticking down from around a buck twenty, FWIW).

(Hmmm...can a bucket of ordure actually stroke, I wonder? Further: can it stroke itself?  If a bucket of splosh hits the wires in the forest and nobody gives a rat's ass...)

Do you think any of RMSG's shareholders will pause to figure out what they paid for this vain and fruitless little exercise?

Let's see. If they used an agency to draft the release (and if they did: what the hell were you guys thinking?), they probably paid around $200/hour for at least 4-5 hours of work. 

Then they actually sent the thing out over the wire, fercrissakes - which would have cost them an absolute minimum of US$1,000 at BusinessWire rates.

So that's nearly $2K right there, not including the hidden costs of time for any of their own people involved in writing, editing, reviewing or approving this. 

I imagine they're the kind of firm where the CEO, CFO, VP Marketing, and corporate counsel all insist on signing off on any form of public communication before it goes out the door (and you just know they all think they're great writers). So factor that all in and you're probably looking at something like $4-6K just to put the release out.

And "listen closely," as Conan O'Brien's stupid dog sock puppet thing said: "Hear that? It's the sound of no one giving a #$@~&*!"

As Marc says: "Some things just make me want to cry..." Which brings me back to the point of this post, before I got lost in rant mode: welcome, Marc. The world always needs more smart flacks with blogs.

Or as jmhm puts it, over at Sisyphus Shrugged: "You people should have thought about how you were going to live with violent anarchy and a destroyed infrastructure before you forced us to bomb the shit out of your country by obdurately insisting that you didn't have the weapons you didn't have."

Make sure you click through to the AP story underneath.

Joey the Accordion Guy just pointed to a highly entertaining little cartoon over at Rory Blyth's Neopoleon.com.

The cartoon tells the tale of a meeting full of fluffy marketing twits, trying to figure out how to port data from an Access database.

For the record: I'm guilty of having worked as senior marketing twit for a number of unfeasibly large companies.

I can personally attest to the terrifying accuracy of this "process of discovery", as Rory calls it, having found myself, on more than one ocassion, in the midst of discussions exactly like this one.

My all time favourite was the one about the CEO's assistant who had printed and filed copies of all his email.  Cretinous, yes - and yet not all that uncommon.

But it gets better...

We'd just implemented a document management system right across the corporate network.  The CEO wanted all his old email indexed so that he'd be able to search on it. But the efficient EA had deleted all of his old email ("but that's what IT told me to do - that's why I printed them").

No problem! They realised they still had all the printed copies - so they set up a process to scan and OCR the entire archive.  I promise, I'm not making this up.

Doubly utterly cretinous? 

Yes - but wait, there's more...

The company this happened at was a software developer. And guess what kind of software we developed?

Yup - you guessed it. Document management software.  The very same document management system we had just finished installing.

I pointed out that we could always retrieve the old email from the backup tapes, then headed back to my office to polish up the C.V.

Earlier today I noticed a link from Jeneane's SiteMeter referrer logs showing up in my own SiteMeter referrer log.

I was tempted to click on it, but held back for fear of creating a rift in the fabric of space-time.

"Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum."
"Ah," nodded Arthur, "is he? Is he?"

There are a lot of nasty things one could say about Canada's new PM, Paul Martin - and probably just as many nice things too. But whether you support him or not, you have to admit he's got major cojones.

His Liberal government is currently neck deep in a deeply disturbing scandal around the misuse of hundreds of millions of taxpayers' money.

It's a story that has been around for a long time, but burst back onto the front pages last week when Canada's fearless Auditor General published a report into the government's sponsorship program citing "widespread non-compliance with contracting rules", "highly questionable methods", and "little evidence of value received for the money spent".

If something like this boiled up in the U.S., one can imagine Dubya maybe, just maybe agreeing to a carefully controlled and edited press conference with a hand-picked group of media.

If the same thing were to happen in the U.K., you'd expect to see Blur facing some tough interrogation in Question Time, and trotting out a few polished platitudes to the reporters in front of No. 10.

Well, for the record: I'm no great fan of Paul Martin. But for the guy to agree to appear on a national radio phone-in show yesterday showed genuine integrity and guts, IMHO.

Two straight hours of direct, unfiltered questioning from ordinary Canadians right across the country - live on national CBC radio's Cross Country Checkup and simulcast on CBC Newsworld TV.

A lot of spinning, a lot of "on message" righteous indignation - but an impressive thing to do all the same.

Particularly considering he agreed to go through with it even after this piece appeared from the show's host, Rex Murphy, a couple of days prior to the scheduled appearance.

Via Martin Röll, via ActionContents: "yesterday at the hotel bar in the infamous etech lobby i learned from a credible insider source, that orkut was by no means programmed by orkut in his "extra project time", but that google had 40 people for 4 months working on it full time. the cheesy design and the orkut folklore is just a cover-up, in order to make it appear low-key."

Like Halley Suitt I'm occassionally creeped out by some of the search terms that show up in my referrer logs.

Also like Halley, I use SiteMeter to track the tiny amount of traffic this blog attracts.

One of the things SiteMeter lets you do is drill down through the log to discern the first 24 bits of the 32-bit IP address at the other end of the search.  You get the network part of the address and the first 8 bits of the host address - so you can usually tell the domain name the searcher was coming in from, but you wouldn't be able to identify their actual machine.

It's frustrating - you can almost, but not quite, see them sitting somewhere out there at the other end of the Net, typing in these bizarre and unsavoury searches. 

So you can tell, for example, that the last creep to show up (horribly disappointed) at this blog searching for "preteen magazine" came in via a Google search from a PC running WinXP and IE6.0 somewhere in the Netherlands. And you can tell, from the front end of the IP address, that he's using Planet Internet as his ISP. 

But you can't quite uniquely identify the creep with enough info to be able to flood his machine with deathpings.  If only...

There's a feature SiteMeter ought to add - every time you get something nasty popping up in the referrer logs, you should just be able to click on the offending record to send a whole bunch of ping -f -s 65000s to shut the lowlife down.

Mwuuh hah hah harrrrr.

Ah HA! Another actual nodule of tangible worth surfaces from the mess of Orkut.

Cruising the links just now led me to discover a pointer from my friend David Akin's profile page to one for his fellow Globe & Mail reporter Mathew Ingram.

Following that thread leads to the exciting (to me) discovery that Mathew blogs!  How'd I miss that?!

Further link-hopping down deep into the Globe's own website, uncovers even better news.  Not only is Mathew blogging (and has been for a while, it seems) - but he's also actively team blogging with colleague Ian Johnson within the Globe's walls. 

Their "Geek Watch" column at Globetechnology.com is certainly very blog-like anyway.

OK, so these small moments of discovery (gratifying as they are) are still not something one can easily assign measurable value to; but the feel good ROI feels good to me.

I moved this blog into its new home here some time around July of last year.  For the first three or so years of its life, this blog lived at an upgraded ad-free Blog*Spot site, here: http://llareggolb.blogspot.com.

Now, the top level of that old Blog*Spot URL appears to have been co-opted by someone describing himself as "SEO Dave" a "search engine optimization expert consultant". 

Old links pointing to content on my former BlogSpot home now lead ultimately to here.

This also means, of course, that anyone who failed to update their blogroll when I moved (*ahem* Doc *cough* Jeneane *nudge* AKMA, et al) is now pointing to this SEO Dave's site where he brags, among other things, about his current campaign to "Google Bomb" himself to the top of the old "miserable failure" search (which used to be a gag search pointing to Dubya's home page, but now points to a bunch of other places) and win this strange SERPS competition. 

It also means that the #1 Google search result for my own name currently returns this SEO Dave person's site. This feels really, really weird.

What the hell's going on with that?

UPDATE: Blogger Support have managed to take back the URL, but all of the old stuff that used to live at llareggolb is gone.  Sucks.  It's almost like having negative Googlejuice.

There's stuff I want to be saying about Bush's military service records ("...nine days of active duty between May 1972 and May 1973") and the obvious, unfavourable comparisons with John Kerry.

Plus, I've been thinking more about Orkut and its ilk, and how they could improve the service. (BTW: this may be hard to believe, but when I created my Orkut card, I actually had no idea Orkut had an actual jail 'feature' - their description of what happens to accounts that are frozen for real or perceived violations of their TOS.  Bizarre).

But no time to rant about all that stuff now. 

One thing I can't allow to pass, though, is the news that Verisign is planning to relaunch its universally reviled Site Finder service this spring, according to the Washington Post. 

While the Post piece adopts a justifiably outraged tone throughout, I still wish the reporter had done a better job of nailing the Verisign spokesdrone on some of his points:

"Site Finder was not controversial with users, 84 percent of whom said they liked it as a helpful navigation service," said Tom Galvin, VeriSign's vice president of government relations. "We continue to look at ways we can offer the service while addressing the concerns that were raised by a segment of the technical community."

First: where the heck did that 84 percent number come from?  84 percent of what sample size? 84 percent of what kind of narrow-ass survey approach did you use to produce that figure?*

Further proof that 76.04 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Second: "...concerns that were raised by a segment of the technical community." Doesn't the arrogant, dismissive tone of this characteristic Verisign piece of spin just make you seethe?

This is exactly the sort of thing that I most despise about the job often done by people in my profession (if one can even call it that).  It's a subtle, insidious, and downright dishonest manipulation of the facts through slippery allusion. 

Widespread outrage and censure from significant individual influencers and large organizations right across the Net is greasily downgraded to "concerns" raised by "a segment" of the community so artfully dismissed as mere techies.

Compare the Verisign guy's flippant trivializing of the issue with ICANN's characterization of the "widespread expressions of concern" for the impact Site Finder would have on "the security and stability of the Internet".  Some of the most telling expressions of concern are in the public record, and can be reviewed at ICANN's site (in the section "Internet Community Comments".

Again - why isn't this economy of truth challenged more directly by the reporter? 

In the reporter's defense, he does step out of the way and give Verisign a second opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot -- belittling the issue and demonstrating their bloody-minded refusal to accept certain key infrastructural strengths of the Internet.

The Verisign spokesweasel says that in their opinion, the opposition to Site Finder stems from "...an ideological belief by a narrow section of the technological community who don't believe you should innovate the core infrastructure of the Internet."

Contrast this with Doc & David's useful definition in their World of Ends piece, that: "Adding value to the Internet lowers its value." Or, as they go on to say:

"If the Internet were a smart network, its designers would have anticipated the importance of a good search engine and would have built searching into the network itself. But because its designers were smart, they made the Net too stupid for that. So searching is a service that can be built at one of the million ends of the Internet. Because people can offer any services they want from their end, search engines have competed, which means choice for users and astounding innovation."

One of the many things wrong with Site Finder is that it tries to make a search service infrastructural. 

And it's their search service - not one the user has chosen, which constitutes a flagrant misuse of their government-sanctioned monopoly.

IMHO, of course.

*A little further digging reveals that the 84 percent figure comes from an earlier survey commissioned by Verisign, and carried out by Markitecture and Harris Interactive some time last year. 

The actual result originally quoted was that: "84 percent of Internet users who have tried Site Finder said that they preferred the service to receiving an error message" - a still slippery use of stats, omitting, as it does, the essential word "surveyed"; as in: "84 percent of Internet users surveyed...".

Nowhere in the original press release or in subsequent references to this statistic do they mention the sample size of their survey.  The typical Harris Interactive poll, AFAIK, is based on a "nationally representative telephone survey" of between 1,000 and 2,500 adults from across the U.S. 

So 84 percent of those people surveyed (out of a total US online population of around 280.5 million), who had experienced the Site Finder "service", answered some probably very tightly worded closed-end question, expressing an implied preference for Site Finder over a 404.

Bonus link: Site Finder and Internet Governance by Jonathan Weinberg

When I used to run media training sessions, one of the pieces of advice I'd always give was: "if you don't know the answer, don't speculate".

Getting drawn into rambling conjecture on a subject you know little about is a sure fire way to come across as weak, confused, or insincere.  It's the old rule: when you're in a hole, stop digging.

Well I don't think they could pay me enough to take on the task, but sure as heck someone should have done a better job of coaching Dubya before his Meet the Press interview this morning.

Where are those WMDs, George?

"They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we'll find out."

What does that sound like to you?

Most honest and direct statement of the interview, IMHO:

"...I'm a war president.  I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind."

That much, at least, is clear.

Bonus link: How to spot a liar

Maybe it was the traffic from Boing Boing that tipped them off, but as Gary notes, it looks like I've found a somewhat unconventional way of escaping the Canadian winter.

Guess it was all those WMD posts that ticked off the feds...

At least I can still get a WiFi signal, though.  Is that why they call it Camp X-Ray?

RageBoy responds to my "Get out of Orkut Free" offer, with the perfect yang for my ying:

I would like to get in on this too, as I am also "self unemployed" (try this on your creditors; it really stops their minds). So here is my bookend offer:

...using my years of take-no-prisoners PR training, bolstered by the benefits of a low-grade California grammar school education (where learning how to extract oneself from sticky situations wasn't worth a shit), I will wrathfully craft the perfect up-your-ass reply (i.e., re-butt-al) on your behalf, guaranteed to:

• Decimate your tormentor's already fragile ego;
• Make you appear the nadir of snarling ingratitude;
• Neatly exterminate annoying social lepers and prevent them from darkening your door again ever.

just click the little button below and all this orkut "karma" can be yours today! 

Like me, RageBoy is currently somewhat bereft in the employment department. Unlike me, he is not 'enjoying' the dubious pleasures of a rapidly-dwindling severance package.

Click the button, send him dough, fuel the beast.

Still lots of rumblings and mutterings going on about Orkut. 

One of the features I'd like Google to give some more thought to is a way of declining declarations of friendship, or opting out of communities you wish you hadn't joined, without coming across as just rude.

On three occassions so far I've had complete and utter strangers wanting to add me to their Orkut 'friends' list -- people I have never met, spoken to, or even exchanged email with. 

At such moments, Orkut presents you with a stark, binary choice. You can either click 'yes' - instantly anointing some potential stalker with the balm of your e-friendship.

Or click 'no' - which feels, to me, like the online equivalent of turning on your heel and walking swiftly from the room, leaving them standing there with their flapping hand still outstretched in aspirant friendship.

This is one reason why I like Jeneane's comment about the gradations of interpretation when you add someone as your friend. Declaring friendship doesn't have to be an on/off choice - there should be a variety of ways of saying 'wanna be my new friend?', or; 'you seem cool - mind if I hang out with you for a while, see if something develops...?', or; 'hey! we know all the same people - maybe we'd like each other too'.

But for those situations where you really do want to answer 'no', but don't want to give offense, I've come up with what I think might be a useful value-added service for Orkut members.

In preparation for the inevitable backlash, here is your own personal Orkut opt out card, yours to keep and use as needed:

Here's how it works: next time someone you either don't know (or just plain don't like) either:

• Invites you to declare everlasting Orkut friendship;
• Asks you to join some sordid little community of assorted weirdos and mouth breathers, or; 
• Writes some unctuous, insincere testimonial you'd rather not accept;

Relax!

Just email me your Get Out of Orkut Free card, a link to the Orkut profile of your clingy admirer, and a medium pocket-sized wad of tightly-rolled unmarked bills (US$ preferred). 

Then, using my years of smarmy-arse PR training, bolstered by the benefits of a top-notch British grammar school education (where learning how to extract oneself from sticky situations was a key survival skill), I will lovingly craft the perfect saccharine-laced rebuttal on your behalf, guaranteed to:

• Preserve your would-be friend's ego;
• Make you appear to be the epitome of charm, grace, and impeccable manners, and;
• Neatly extricate both of you from an uncomfortable social quandary with no loss of face on either side.

All you need to do is copy, paste, send.

You know it makes sense.

This is a yay big file, but if you've got a broadband connection it's worth waiting for the download.

Could this be considered empirical evidence that French people really do have a sense of humour?

A few more thoughts on Orkut.

First, I've realised that yesterday's post actually served to perpetuate the minor elitism of Orkut; including, as I did, links to members' profiles only accessible if you happen to already be a member.  And you can't become a member unless someone invites you, of course.

So if you care that much and really want to see what all the fuss is about - feel free to drop me a message or leave a comment in this thread and I'll be more than happy to invite you.  Trust me, though: it's not that exciting.

Secondly, I'm encouraged to note that my Friends of Orkut Connectedness Quotient (my FOCQ) has dropped significantly since posting last night's comments. Clearly the system has sensed my somewhat negative, or at least hesitant, vibe, and responded appropriately.

According to the welcome screen this morning, I am: "...connected to -32257 people through 24 friends."

Excellent!  At last, some real value in the system becomes evident.  If this trend continues, my network will soon implode completely - collapsing in on itself under the weight of all that negative connectedness.  Can't wait!  It's going to be so much easier to stay in touch with people in my network when I no longer have any people to stay in touch with.

Well I was going to try to post something pithy, considered, and insightful about all this Orkut malarkey, but after Jeneane's recent torrent of excellent posts on this subject, there really isn't all that much left to say.

Having said that, of course, I'm still going to ramble the heck on anyway. I'm sure you wouldn't really expect anything less.

I have (like just about everyone else) some real doubts about these social networking thingies. An email from Tom Matrullo (a consummate gentleman who I've never met, and yet someone I consider a real friend) reminded me of our shared discomfort with the Friendster thing, back when that was, as Tom puts it, "the efriend machine of the moment".

I ended up quitting Friendster very shortly after I'd joined for a whole bunch of reasons and, as I just said to Tom, I still have grave misgivings about this rather ill-defined friend of a friend stuff.

Some of my concerns are linked to the issues David Weinberger eloquently identifies, when he says:

"Artificial Social Networks like Orkut get it backwards. They are built on explicit and precise declarations of relationship." (in the interests of balance, however, you should also check out Jeneane's response). 

And yet, I have to confess that I am kind of relishing the inherent brokenness and cheesey, chintzy cheeriness (half dead and half alive ;-) of Orkut.

Yes, it's based on an inherently dodgy premise, and yes, the binary explicit declaration of friend/not a friend bugs me - but there's some fun to be had for a' that.

Perhaps part of the appeal of things like Orkut are the similarities such services bear to obsessive-compulsive collecting behaviour.  There's something of the baseball card or beanie baby phenomena about Orkut and its ilk. It's not really about making new friends and expanding one's functioning business network - it's about collecting. 

The little 'friend' pages with their cute, fuzzy-bordered photos and profile info even look kind of like trading cards. 

And how much of the drive to spend time on Orkut is based on the urge to compare your personal whuffie stats with those of your peers? "Ooh look, Gary has 33 friends, I only have 19.  Grrrrr. But then Simon only has 4. HA!"

The next logical step, of course, has to be for someone to build the Orkut Top Trumps game.  Remember Top Trumps? For the uninitiated, this was a fab set of trading card games that were all the rage when I was at school in the UK in the late 70s.  I guess they were the Yu Gi Oh of their day.

You had a set of cards with themed photos on one side (e.g. sports cars, military planes, sports stars, etc.) and a set of interesting stats on the other side (e.g. top speed, wing span, height).  The game was all about winning cards from your opponent by correctly answering questions about the stats on the back of a card held up to you.  "How many cylinders does this car's engine have?" - that kind of thing.

Collecting both real and faux friends through networking webspaces such as Orkut feels a lot like Top Trumps or some other card-swapping and collecting game (none of which I was ever terribly good at, btw). 

You start off with a tiny circle of the few actual friends who invited you. Two or three little photos, each with their own oh-so-ironic profile comments. Then you start surfing through their networks, following links to friends you wish you had - building your collection as you go.

Oh look - he has a Pierre Omidyar.  I wish I had a Pierre Omidyar.  Wonder who Pierre has - ooh! ooh!  A Wesley Clark!! Dang! That makes even my Esther Dyson look a little sick. Hmmm... I'll see your John Perry Barlow and raise you a Marc Andreessen and a Jeff Bezos...

Harrumph.

Two final thoughts (for now) on the topic of Orkut.

1. With absolutely no offense to the eponymous founder, I have to say that I'm finding it very hard to take the name 'Orkut' seriously - just reading the word makes me think of this.

2. Amen to that.

As I type this, I have another browser window running in the background, trying to open the website of the Government of Canada's Broadband Initiative.

The little IE flag has been waving for 10 minutes now, and the progress bar is still only 40% advanced across the bottom of my screen.

Are they trying to tell me something?

...here's a quick recap of some of the news from the last 48 hours:

A letter sent to US Senator Bill Frist's office appeared to containg the lethal poison ricin.

251 pilgrims were trampled to death in a tragic stampede during the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Bush ordered an investigation into the U.S. intelligence on purported Iraqi WMD. Incidentally providing further evidence, as if twere needed, that he should never be allowed to ad lib in public, when he said: "What we don't know yet is what we thought..."

Suicide bombers in Iraq killed 67 people and injured at least 267 others at the start of the festival of sacrifice, "Eid ul-Adha"

The MyDoom computer virus succeeded in bringing down the SCO web site - even though everyone had at least a week's notice that that was what it was designed to do.

Oh...and the Patriots won.

(Or a few quick thoughts on Janet Jackson's lady bumps).

From the various high res shots making their way round the 'Net, a few things seem fairly clear:

1.  Her rather strange Hellraiser costume was clearly designed with removable busten-halter bits: those weren't just studs around the boob line, they were snaps.

2. Why would anyone wear such an uncomfortable looking nipple ring under tight-fitting latex unless they intended to show it off later?

3. Justin clearly knew exactly what he was doing - knew the snaps were there, and knew exactly where to pull.

4. So the only question that remains is why, Janet, why did you choose such a dreadfully unflattering outfit?

Google News round up for the day:

1. "David Kay, the arms inspector who changed his mind about the existence of unconventional weapons in Iraq, is perplexed by all the fuss he has caused. The weapons are simply not there, he says; it is empirical."

2. "With an election due in November, the US President has decided to defuse what threatens to be a red-hot political issue for Democrats who are accusing him of misleading Americans on the need for the war.  Mr Bush is expected to announce this week a bipartisan inquiry to examine the intelligence that was presented as the main reason for the invasion of Iraq."

3. "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Dick Cheney, August 26, 2002

4. "We also want to look at our war against proliferation and weapons of mass destruction in a broader context," Bush said. "So I'm putting together a independent bipartisan commission to analyze where we stand, what we can do better as we fight this war against terror."

5. "Saddam Hussein engages in acts of terrorism, he hates the United States and we know he has weapons of mass destruction," says [Richard] Perle [chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board]. "To ignore all that is too big a risk"

6. Rumsfeld: "My view of the past - with respect to Saddam Hussein - is that he spent all of his time trying to deceive inspectors and trying to prevent them from having knowledge of exactly what he has. And we know he has weapons of mass destruction, and thus far he denies it."

7. "We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad." Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003

8. "Frankly, [the sanctions] have worked. [Saddam has] not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction." - Colin Powell, Feb. 24, 2001

9. "...Fresh evidence emerged last night that Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, was so disturbed about questionable American intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that he assembled a secret team to review the information he was given before he made a crucial speech to the UN security council on February 5. At one point, he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."..."

10. "We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd." Tony Blair, March 18, 2003

 

11. "I'm sort of mystified," Kay said. "Quite frankly, the easier political strategy would be to say, 'Look, everybody agrees that we're better off with Saddam Hussein gone, but on the other hand, it's clear that not all our advance information was good."'

12. General Peter J. Schoomaker, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, "...said the attacks on America in September 2001 and subsequent events had given the US army a rare opportunity to change. "There is a huge silver lining in this cloud," he said. "War is a tremendous focus... Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that [terrorists] have actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph." He said it was no use having an army that did nothing but train. "There's got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for," he said."..."

("For What Little It's Worth")



In comments at various other's blogs, and email discussion with one of my brothers back home, I've been venting my disgust at the Hutton report's treatment of the Beeb. Repeating some of those thoughts here, FWLIW...

Reading the Grauniad's coverage of Hutton and the Beeb fallout set me off. In particular, the Leader column from last Thursday's paper:

“...But have a sense of proportion. Of all the corporation's fiercest newspaper critics, not one has any kind of process for dealing with complaints, let alone an independent system for correcting and apologising promptly and prominently. Scan the pages over coming days for corrections over all the wrong predictions on Hutton or tuition fees. There won't be any. The fact is that the BBC, in most of its editorial processes most of the time, simply towers over the army of enemies who will now be queuing up to kick it in the teeth...”

And I can’t imagine the editor, publisher, or owner of any major national daily or independent broadcast company falling on their own sword in the wake of such unwarranted and unnecessary criticism.

I don’t think Davies or Dyke really needed to resign, and yet I’m heartened and kind of proud, if that’s the right word, to note that they did.

(As for Gilligan? Sure - he should have quit long ago. He's clearly something of a nork, a crappy reporter, and an all round slimebeast. he did, however, manage to get the message right in his statement about quitting: "I accept my part in the crisis which has befallen the organisation. But a greater part has been played by the unbalanced judgments of Lord Hutton").

Hard to tell really if Davies and Dyke's decision to act should be considered noble hara-kiri, or a less "honourable" but no less understandable result of extreme frustration at the government’s continued interference with the wafer-thin premise of a free press.

One thing I hold, though, is that the Beeb is truly unique. It is the only national broadcaster in the world to have such rigorous internal standards of fact-checking.

They are very, very far from perfect in this respect – yet they continue to be a benchmark by which all other media should be judged. Would that all newspapers and broadcasters were so ‘sloppy’ in their approach.

And would that all news organizations were able to maintain such standards of editorial independence.

Gilligan (and his editors) made very serious mistakes in the manner of their reporting – but they fulfilled their principal obligations as mainstream journalists: to bring information of national importance into the public domain.

The last lines of last Thursday's Guardian piece serve as a sad, unintentional epitaph for Dyke. Written prior to his resignation, they entreat him:

“...most important of all, he must make sure there is no collective failure of nerve in the corporation - particularly given the forthcoming process of charter renewal and the fact that the new chair of governors will ultimately be appointed by the prime minister. BBC journalists must go on probing, must go on asking awkward questions - and must go on causing trouble.”

I hope that whoever steps into Dyke's shoes continues to use them to kick Blair’s (and everyone else’s) arse.

For the record: I'm still (just barely) a Blair supporter - if only because the alternatives are infinitely worse. But I want the BBC and print and broadcast media around the world to continue to kick him and his cabinet, and Her Majesty's opposition, and Bush, and Paul Martin, and other figures of power and influence, every single day.

Kick them. Hard. And keep kicking them, even when they're down. Keep them honest and transparent. Make sure they're doing something to earn our votes and the money we pay them.

As Anthony Lester QC, quoted in Saturday's Guardian put it: "I think it very regrettable that some sections of the media have attacked the BBC without realising the dangers inherent in the Hutton report to free expression for themselves and their readers..."