Saturday, March 19, 2005



W hat the recent Gannon/Guckert episode and the Williams/Gallagher/McManus payola scandals have in common are that both provide evidence of the Bush administration's willingness to subvert the traditional watchdog function of the media by just about any means available An Indecent Proposal

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Uncle Sam's blog
The Internet appears to be the medium through which future international political opinion will be influenced most significantly

The Bush administration's latest budget contains a significant increase in spending on ''public diplomacy" -- government-sponsored programs to communicate with the citizens of other countries through the media and cultural and educational exchanges. The increase has been met with a sigh of relief from foreign policy watchers who believe public diplomacy is an essential pillar of American ''soft power" and have watched that pillar slowly crumble since the end of the Cold War.
During the Cold War, the US Information Agency led America's public diplomacy assault, broadcasting Radio Free Europe to Soviet Bloc states, broadcasting the Voice of America throughout the world, and sponsoring numerous alternatives to state-sponsored media in nonfree countries. The agency was dissolved in 1999 and its programs absorbed into the State Department, where critics say long-term public diplomacy efforts have been starved for attention in a department culture that is focused on short-term solutions to immediate crises.


Cold Voices : Joichi Ito, founder and CEO, Neoteny and Ethan Zuckerman, founder, Geekcorps: While we're building great new tools to build communities, we've done very little to ensure that people around the world have access to them Emergent Democracy Worldwide [How do you establish trust between between strangers on the Internet? Identity federation is one way to create a community of trust, but it relies on establishing the trust domains before the interaction Negotiating Trust ; Out of Many Blogs]
• · We want OpenSearch to do for search what RSS has done for content ; Google Hommage an OS X Google Google X Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you Googlex (dissappeared)
• · · Hackers foiled in attempt to plunder bank ; href="http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/parameters/05spring/payne.htm ">The media, in the modern era, are indisputably an instrument of war ; Subscribers Only (The New Republic) This week's hysteria over kids and "new media" is just that: hysteria
• · · · Top award for bringing the war home Paul McGeough named the 2004 winner of the Graham Perkin Award ; As Dan Rather’s old-media world fades out, the future is beginning to look weirdly like the past Premodern Amerika ; Overnight Success? The enduring myth of the overnight success is as old as publishing itself
• · · · · People talk about stories that resonate but aside from audiobooks and author readings, novels are silent - People talk about stories that resonate but aside from audiobooks and author readings, novels are silent People talk about stories that resonate but aside from audiobooks and author readings, novels are silent ; Czech out Mark of ex-Troppo fame who has a new blog: Redrag is his Solodom Blog
• · · · · · Talk about blog of mouth, this one is travelling around the net like wildfire What does it mean to be a professional blogger? ; The answer to that question was once easy. Until Jozef Imrich left Parliament House ;P in 1990s AD What Is a Journalist? ; Playgirl Editor-in-Chief Outs Herself as Republican!