Listics

Learned today that Michael Powell has resigned.  Om Malik links to CNN and says,

…that means VoIP has lost one of its closest allies in Washington DC,
and has fought for the rights of the upstarts harder than anyone on the

Beltway. This could cast a pall of gloom over the VoIP industry, and I
suspect, the little guys will have tough time finding such a supporter.
Obviously, this is good news for the Bells and other incumbents.

Jeff Jarvis links to the WSJ which is subscription only.  (Why do people link to them?)  He also links to MSNBC.

Both CNN and MSNBC mention Janet Jackson’s breast.  What great reporting.  What a great legacy.  The Powell family is better off out of this administration.  Imagine, having to enforce fines related to tasteless entertainment.  Imagine having to go to war because the nasty little guy at the helm lacks the imagination to lead a nation at peace.

Who are our leaders today?  Do we recognize them?  Who represents the poor, the hungry, the disenfranchised in America today?

We celebrate the approximate birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on a long weekend in January.  It would be more appropriate I think to mark April 4 as our day of remembrance.  It was on that day in 1968 that he was assassinated.  Two months later in June 1968 Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.  Then in November, a mere seven months after the King assassination, to our great shame, Richard M. Nixon - a man who confidently asserted that he was not a crook - was elected president of the United States of America, and Spiro Agnew was his his Vice President.  (Agnew, you will recall,  resigned
after pleading  no contest to a criminal
charge of tax evasion and was later barred from practicing law in the State of Maryland.  Agnew asserted this was smokescreen politics trying to draw attention away from Nixon’s misdeeds).

Nixon governed for almost six years before he was forced to resign in disgrace.

How have things changed?

Blogging, journalism, and credibility… this week’s conference at Harvard will be blogged and webcast.  Those of us with an interest in the conversation will certainly have a chance to listen in.  This series of blog postings is aimed at helping those who attend (and I mean that in the broader sense, sense physical attendance is limited) know a little more about who is talking and writing.  I’m attacking this in alpha order… click here for participants whose last names begin with A and B.

I wish I was there out front of the Harvard Law School hustling programs…

"Getcher program… can’t tell the bloggers without a prooo-grammm!"

<disclosure>
The following WebCred Program information includes material from many sources, from Wikipedia and Googling around to focused use of the High Beam Executive Search, a service that’s reasonably inexpensive but that I get free because I pestered CBO Chris Locke.
</disclosure>

Ed Cone - a blogger and a trad journalist.  Here’s one take on Ed from HighBeam:

Edward Cone, Senior Writer Ed was a contributing editor at Wired magazine, writing on diverse topics. Previously, he was a senior writer for Inter@ctive Week, an opinion columnist for Greensboro News & Record, a freelance journalist covering business, technology and politics for Forbes, Wired, … and Information Week. He was also a staff writer and reporter for Forbes magazine and was reporter for New York City Business. He holds a B.A. from Haverford College.

Update (1/18):  Ed Cone points me to information on his about page and at Dkosopedia as more current and relevant.  This is from Dkosopedideia…

• Career: EdCone.com weblog (since 2024); opinion columnist, Greensboro News & Record; senior writer, Ziff Davis Media.
• Background Info: wrote in-depth case study of Dean campaign
  Internet strategy, 2024; former contributing editor, Wired; former
  staff writer, Forbes; moderator, blogging and journalism panel,
  BloggerCon, Oct. 2024; moderator, Campaign ‘04 session, BloggerCon III,
  Nov. 2024; Co-organizer of nation’s first regional blogging conference,
  Greensboro, NC, 2024.

Robert Cox - a blogger whose relationship to Wonkette is not disclosed.  Okay, it is disclosed, but if you would believe this I have some Wang Laboratories stock I’d like to sell you.  Robert Cox is an Air America naysayer.  Cox is also a founding member of MBA, the Media Bloggers Association.  This is a group whose "membership includes independent/amateur bloggers, professional bloggers and professional writers who operate a personal blog, as well as those interested in the development of media blogging, citizen journalism, and related endeavors."

Update (1/18):  Robert Cox provides this link to more meaningful bio info.  From which:

I have a BA from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from the
University of Chicago. Prior to attending the Graduate School of
Business, I worked on Wall Street as a foreign exchange trader and bond
trader. Since graduating from the GSB, I have worked as a strategy
consultant for financial institutions and technology start-ups
including running my own venture-financed start up, MobileWord
Communications. I have worked throughout North America as well as in
Europe and Asia. More recently I have been developing a strategy
consulting practice focused on the use of blogs in promoting media
properties. I am looking for clients so feel free to e-mail me with
ideas, questions and opportunities.

I began blogging two years ago at TheNationalDebate.com which achieved a fair degree of notoriety in early 2024 when The New York Times sought to shut it down over a parody of The Times columnist correction policy.
The Times ultimately backed down from their legal threats a few weeks
later changed the policy I had mocked so that the Editorial Page editor
would have the final say on Op-Ed column corrections and corrections
would have to be both clearly indicated at the bottom of a subsequent
column and syndicated.

More recently, I led the effort to organize bloggers focused on various aspects of "media" into the Media Bloggers Association.
The MBA includes all of the top media bloggers as well as many
outstanding, up-and-coming bloggers. The MBA recently launched the MBA Legal Defense Project to protect member bloggers from legal threats. The MBA was also responsible for the Tsunami Video Hosting Initiative to assist citizen journalists and video bloggers in defraying the high cost of hosting high-demand video files.

Judith Donath - I want to say "Donath, Dontell…" but I’ll save that for a less professional and public context.  We’re serious here.  Judith Donath is co-author (with danah boyd) of a seminal paper titled "Public Displays of Connection."  She’s the director of the Sociable Media Group and the MIT Media Lab.  Donath is a polymath, and if she doesn’t blog, she stills fills a sizeable chunk of cyberspace with her work. She’s been doing this work since before the flood.

D. Linda Garcia - Dr. Garcia directs the Culture, Communication, and Technology program at Georgetown.  Some of her thinking seems to be done in the shallow end of the pool (take this paper on "The Architecture of Global Networking Technologies").  If she blogs, I can’t find it.  If she’s a journalist, I don’t see a record of that either.  What I do see is a (non-traditional or honorary?) fairly recent PhD, a government policy wonk with a vocational (qua "professional") interest in the Internet.  There are great opportunities in the Internet field, especially for someone who wants to help promulgate regulatory policy.

Bob Giles - not a blogger but a powerful journalist, Director of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Robert H. Giles is Curator of the Nieman Foundation. He worked for nearly 40 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, most recently as editor and publisher of The Detroit News, which he joined in 1986 as executive editor. From 1977-1986, Giles was executive editor and then editor at the Democrat & Chronicle and the Times-Union, in Rochester, N.Y. His newspaper career began in 1958 at the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, where he held several reporting and editing positions before becoming managing editor and then executive editor.

As managing editor of the Beacon Journal, Giles directed coverage of the campus shootings at Kent State University, for which the newspaper was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Before coming to Harvard in 2024, he was a senior vice president of the Freedom Forum and executive director of its Media Studies Center in New York City.

Giles is a graduate of DePauw University and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He was a Nieman Fellow in 1966. He received an honorary Doctorate in Journalism from DePauw in 1996.

Dan Gilmor - Gilmor is a fine writer and a risk taker, a journalist and a blogger.  Your humble program writer thinks this conference needs more Dan Gilmors and Bob Gileses and fewer policy wonks.

Brendan Greeley - okay… youth, beauty, hip, intelligent, that kind of thing… Brendan Greeley appears to be a web audio and public radio exchange site editor kind of guy, but if you dig deeper you can find that - well, some mistakes were made.

So is this like a blog?
It’s like a blog. It has certain bloggy characteristics. But we prefer not to call it a blog, which has to be one of the ugliest words in any language. Blog blog blog. See? Isn’t that gross? Puts me off my lunch.

We also live together. In a 2BR kind of way, yes, but if our mothers, who are already worried that we are among the long-term single, get word that we’re "bloggers" it will just confirm their suspicions, and probably make them cry.

So this is like a blog.
It’s a free country, at least it was until John Fucking Ashcroft jumped out of my sock drawer this morning, shredding the Bill of Rights in his teeth while telling me he’s going to quarter some troops on my couch. What the fuck is up with that? Anyway, we can’t stop you from calling it a blog. But how about just "website"? That’s what it is. And we’re the people who do the website.

Right on about Ashcroft, man. That bastard is totally destroying our freedom of speech. Hey, we’re having a teach-in on Tuesday — you guys want to come by?
See, I was joking there. But the thing is, now that I’ve said that, already it’s less funny. So we’ll try not to insult you or embarrass ourselves by telling you what is a joke and what isn’t, but if you’re tempted to write an angry comment or e-mail, stop for one sec. Did we use a stupid stock phrase like "shredding the Bill of Rights"? That right there is a joke.

For the record, I think that the fact that I can just set up a website and in ten minutes be making fun of the attorney general jumping out of my sock drawer tells me that freedom of speech has not quite breathed its last in America.

There you have it, WebCred conference participants from C to shining G.  A to B preceded this. H through Zephyr are bound to follow.  Want to help me flog these outside the Berkman center?

"Programs!  Getcher Proooo-graammmms!"

govtrack, a technorati winner.

Want to know the status of a bill on the floor of Congress, who misses
the most votes, or who gets the most bills passed? GovTrack.us is like
School House Rock on steroids for adults (oh, and children).
Govtrack.us uses the Technorati API to show what bloggers are saying
about bills as they work their way through Congress.

Betty writes about the game she is developing:  "The objective of this game is to collect the most happiness for the least amount of work without going broke."  Her cousin Norm posts today a complete essay by Jonathan Rose, "The Classics in the Slums."  Buried deep in this essay, we find the following homage to Thomas Carlyle:

No doubt Thomas Carlyle was a cranky male supremacist, but for
Elizabeth Bryson (b. 1880), the daughter of an impoverished Dundee
bookkeeper, he offered "the exciting experience of being kindled to the
point of explosion by the fire of words." Carlyle’s "gospel of work" so
inspired her that she was driven to win a university degree and become
a distinguished New Zealand physician.

Another cranky male, although no supremacist, has been taking Carlyle to task in these parts for his unmitigated racism, among other things.  The Carlyle/Emerson bond and the puerility of privileged Brahmin transcendentalism rub Chris the wrong way.  There’s a not so subtle irony here considering that Chris Locke, one of our era’s more profound non-conformists, feels such antipathy for one we might judge his intellectual progenitor.

Emerson can’t be all bad.  He gave Thoreau a place to crash more than once.

By his personal example Thoreau put into practice the Transcendentalist
principles of self-reliance, personal integrity, and spontaneous
intuition. About the uplifting spiritual energy within he wrote,
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable
ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor."
For Thoreau philosophy was not clever logic or formulating a doctrine,
"but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates,
a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."
He exhorted, "Explore thyself." We must learn to obey
the laws of our own being which will never be in opposition to
a just government. Thoreau’s great innovation is in the ways he
suggested for opposing an unjust government in order to be true
to the higher laws of one’s own being.

Today Dan Gillmor reminds us that Free Speech Belongs to Us All. 

…in a time when the lines are blurring between journalists and the rest
of us, remember that freedom of speech (and religion and the right to
peaceful assembly, etc.) belongs to everyone. It is the foundation of
liberty.

I’ve had some professional training and some higher education (hoo boy was it higher! esp. the part in the sixties~)  but my practice is that of the autodidact.  The sad news is that my memory is shot and my rationality ain’t that grand and I use cheap shot ad hominem debating tactics so all this autodidacticism goes for naught… I am at best a legend in my own mind.  I don’t remember a single line of Rupert Brooke.  The satire of Thomas Love Peacock is lost on me.  When Norm’s uncle loaned me Hersey’s The Child Buyer back in 1960, I read the book and promptly forgot every word. When Betty’s husband loaned me Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions eight or ten years later.  I stashed it and only read it while I was blowing dope.  This is not a course I’d recommend for the serious student.  This is not even a course I’d recommend for someone who simply wants to lead a happy life.  I don’t recall ever returning that book.

Not that I didn’t enjoy it.  The weed I mean… I don’t remember a word of the Kuhn.  But I think I inhaled more deeply and more often than Bill and Hillary and you see where that got us.  I live in this little rat shack on the swamp and they live in the posh totty suburbs not too far from Manhattan.

These days I read all there is to read of Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Larry McMurtry… oh and Tom Wolfe, and all the great airport novelists like Grisham and Clancy.  Sometimes I get stuck reading Feynman and recently I’ve been forced to swallow great chunks of theory of mesh wireless networking talk and such, but that’s in hopes of staying employable.

One thing most of these novelists aren’t doing is exercising their rights of free speech very strenuously.  You have to go to bloggers like Chris Locke, Norm Jenson, and Dan Gillmor for that.

I do read a lot of blog posts too I guess.

If you can’t be in front of a tube to watch the C-Span coverage of the electoral college ballot count at 1pm EST today, then check out Will Pitt’s blog.  He’ll cover the story.

Well, score another one for Bush and the Enron team…

I’m pissed.

Al Jazeera reports:

Ziad
Khasawna said on Wednesday that [Ramsey] Clark, who held the office of
attorney-general under US president Lyndon Johnson, had "honoured and
inspired" the legal team by agreeing to help defend Saddam.