Jeneane tops the Times in this clip from David’s Maastricht keynote. This is the bloggo-omphalo analysis… are you an innie linker or an outie? The New York Times is an innie. Jeneane is an outie:

Just an observation that gormless seems to have replaced feckless as the mot juste at UFOB recently.

In June, Deadspin, the sports blog, put Chris Mihlfeld’s reputation on the line with a false accusation about drugs. MSNBC picked up the story and reported it as true. Here’s how Ben Paynter reported the situation in the Kansas City Pitch in a long feature article on Mihlfeld the following month:

In April of this year, Grimsley admitted to federal investigators that he’d used amphetamines, steroids and human growth hormone. Grimsley’s confession became public on June 6, when federal agents filed excerpts of it in court papers. In the confession, Grimsley identifies a personal fitness trainer, whose name is blacked out in the document, as someone who once referred him to a source for speed.

On June 8, the popular sports blog Deadspin.com claimed to know the name of that trainer.

“His name is Chris Mihlfeld,” the site reported.

A day after the blog post, MSNBC’s Countdown With Keith Olbermann flashed a mug-shot-like picture of Mihlfeld on the screen. Olbermann spun the initial Web report into a theory that Mihlfeld was baseball’s new bad boy.

“Chris Mihlfeld is suddenly one of the biggest names in baseball,” Olbermann declared. “He’s the personal fitness trainer of baseball pitcher Jason Grimsley, and Grimsley is the man who admitted to federal agents that he used amphetamines, steroids and human growth hormone as part of his training.”

Yesterday the LA Times published a story that shredded the Deadspin accusations. Today Deadspin issued an apology to Mihlfeld.

Next up: Keith Olbermann. Be a man Keith. We love you when you’re ripping W. a new one, now give this young man in Kansas City the apology you owe him.

Looks like the score today is Paynter at The Pitch, one — Leitch and Olbermann at Gawkermedia and MSNBC, zero.

Hey! Here’s a link to a very good paper on libel in the blogosphere by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Law Professor at the University of Tennessee. I wonder if Mihlfeld could use it?

Just a quick link to the post by Papa Meloney regarding the Murry Gunty thing. It’s good to know somebody reads this stuff and understands it.

A friend emailed with a pointer to an article in the Washington Post by Terence O’Hara that includes the line:

“If Murry Gunty didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him,” one liberal blogger, Frank Paynter, wrote.

Consider the nano-Warhol juice this sucks out of my allotment. Every blogger will be famous for 15 nano-seconds and this article uses up at least one.

The article offers a lot of room for quibbling. Mark Pincus’ blog post about Mr. Gunty was pretty straight forward. The fall-out when SixApart tried to influence Mark to anonymize Gunty was worth a few comments. But all in all, there were very few people engaged in the discussion, and O’Hara’s assertion that “several” bloggers started their own discussion strings about the long ago incident is off center. A few bloggers (as many as four or five, hardly a ground swell) remarked on SixApart’s efforts to censor Pincus, but the long ago incident stands by itself, well covered on the net and in the press during the nineties and not worth re-hashing except in the context of true or false.

O’Hara suggests that “dozens of posters” were attracted to the matter. I hope he can forgive the quibble that there is in web publishing a distinction between a “commenter” and a “poster.” A poster originates a discussion. A commenter engages in a discussion of a post. These little things matter. They help us establish a common ground. There were by my recollection probably less than a half dozen posters, originating material in their blogs that related to Murry Gunty’s poor choices as a student and the attempt to blot out memory of these misdeeds by censoring Mark Pinkus. I would be surprised if as many as twenty-four people offered comments — twenty-four being the number necessary to lend accuracy to O’Hara’s use of the word “dozens.” I’m sure that between January and August at least twenty-four comments relevant to those few blog posts were made, but many were made by the same person.

If anything about the article annoys me, it is not so much the cluelessness regarding web publishing contextual matters, terms of art and so forth, but rather O’Hara’s selection of my header as the pull quote from my post. I thought my post was carefully wrought. I tried to avoid inflammatory rhetoric, and qualified what I wrote. Over the last few months I have moderated and discarded a couple of comments that came my way because I couldn’t verify their substance and they seemed unfair to Mr. Gunty. The fact that I used an attention grabbing headline has come back to bite me. It’s all that O’Hara found interesting in my blog post!

O’Hara’s gratuitous observation that Pincus’ blog post had a higher Google rank than Gunty’s corporate bio is also worth a quibble. The static nature of Milestone Capital’s corporate flackery will obviously pull fewer readers than dynamic content in a well read blog. The Post article is rife with that kind of nonsense, the stuff that obscures the perfectly valid point that attempting to squelch free speech, freedom of expression and freedom of the press as it might apply in a web publishing context is a foolish thing to do and perhaps Mr. Gunty would have been better off practicing a little detachment.

And, as Scott Johnson said then,

I can understand that Murry Gunty doesn’t want this information to show up in Google — and a blog does that well — but he did cheat. Now you can argue that everyone deserves a second chance but this wasn’t cheating by a Harvard undergrad. It was cheating by someone at Harvard Business School (HBS). Given all the problems with ethics in corporate america and the prevalence of HBS grads in corporate management personally I think calling someone out with a history of cheating and making them visible in Google is a fine thing.

Check out the itinerary Amanda posted! Memphis to St. Louis to Kansas City and back to Louisville? A few hundred miles this way and a few hundred miles back! I’m happy they’re coming through Madison. I’ll try to get my fat face in a few shots, ever angling for another 15 pico-seconds of fame. Better, I’ll try to get a few pictures of Amanda and her entourage. She’s doing good work, you gotta admit it.

Neil Patel offers five hints for making your blog popular through content. The hints are simple:

1. Break news.
2. Post on weekends.
3. Write timeless posts.
4. Teach don’t sell. And,
5. Join in on conversations.

Here’s some breaking news! Next weekend I will offer training centered on the following timeless posts:

I expect a huge conversation to come out of our examination of these five timeless posts. Naturally, everyone is invited to join in!

The God Delusion arrived today! In a fit of bibliomancy, I opened it up and found on page 104 the assertion that “Pascal’s wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God.” I’m going to like this book! In fact I intend to read some tonight right after I check out the video clips at One Good Move. Thank’s to Norm Jenson for all of this.

Josh Wolf is starting a service to allow people to blog from behind bars. being behind bars right now, it’s slow going, but here is the site…

prisonblogs.net

Josh Wolf tells Amanda, “I may be the first video blogger to go to jail for my video blog. I’m not confident I’ll be the last.” Josh Wolf, since returned to prison, reflects on the Federal run against state and local shield laws that provide journalists and their sources protection in this interview by Amanda Congdon. He has been jailed for refusing to turn over videotape outtakes to the San Francisco police department. The SFPD receives Federal funds so the Bush administration has leveraged that to continue their assault on journalists the Billl of Rights by taking this local matter before a Federal Grand Jury.

Amanda does a good .mp3 interview and (on the vid) shares neo-slang: “What’s the dilly?”

“Commit random acts of journalism… go to jail.”

Second day on Amanda across America… top marks.

Allan Moult’s “Leatherwood Online” now features the art of Richard Wastell, paintings and drawings in reaction to the clear felling of old growth Tasmanian forests. There may or may not be a better place for UN intervention against corporate greed on behalf of environmental concerns. The old growth forests of Tasmania certainly should be on a list of areas deserving international attention and protection.

…the particular agony of Tasmania is in the end neither environmental nor political but spiritual, and it is merely one end, one highly visible end, of a continuum that extends from the muddy ash of the Styx valley to the blood spattered walls of Baghdad and the torture cells of Guantanamo Bay.

The t-shirt says “Peace.”

Welcome back, Amanda.