While re-designing the archives, I needed some icons to help illustrate the different story types.

In an ideal publication, every online article has a consistent URL format, which remain permanent, and every article allows threaded comments. In reality, few major newspapers follow these simple rules. This alone partly explains the popularity of weblog and CMS platforms like Drupal (used here), which support these. (Incidentally, Clark Hoyt announced yesterday that the Times will be supporting comments on every article.)

Pick any item that's been in the news. It's quite likely that a Huffington Post contributor has taken a stab at it– and left it bleeding.

In Unread Alerts, I suggest that anybody with a cell phone ought to know the contact points for their local news organizations. Finding the contact information is a different maze on each site.

That somebody in America can publish antisemitic literature to encourage hatred and bigotry is regrettable, but it is protected by the First Amendment. That said, YouTube is a private service, and their community guidelines prohibit hate speech.

Well, some user JewsWorldPower signed up three months ago, and this person does things like posting copyrighted video from the Colbert Report with antisemitic text in the description alongside. Surely Stephen Colbert has even less interest in being associated with antisemitism than he does in having his video pirated.

There are a few sites which provide a summary of, and a search within, print/online news stories: Google News and Topix are the obvious leaders. But there's nothing comparable for television video, let alone audio.

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive is the best model. It not only has a search, but it allows the user to browse any month of news coverage since August 1968.

 “The Public Interest has had more influence on domestic policy than any other journal in the country – by far,” wrote David Brooks in his Times column in March 2005, after the quarterly had finished its forty year run. “All we'll have are the archives, at www.thepublicinterest.com.”

This document lists the various groups I am inviting for assistance on the PONAR (Protocol for Online Abuse Reporting) project. As I get endorsements and sponsors I will update this document.

Ordinary folks who are the aggrieved parties

I was directly motivated to start this effort based on conversations over the years with people who have been the victims of online abuse and harassment. I have expressed some of the early formative ideas of PONAR to members of victim's aid group are taking their considerations quite seriously.

Why bother? Can't commenting policies be written in plain English, or just applied ad hoc?

The articulation CommResp is intended to serve two purposes. One, to serve publishers and readers in directly communicating what rules apply. But more importantly, it should suggest the realm of possibilities for what rules there can be.

I had some questions for the Intellipedia project, the wiki-based, open-editable encyclopedia for use in the U.S. intelligence community.

I’m a bit late in responding to Clive Thompson’s article Open Source Spying in the New York Times Magazine from December. Naturally the subtitle "Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?” caught my eye, due to my work in teasing out the different claims of technology boosters claiming to have solved the larger problems of information retrieval. Case in point? It’s not just the ability to find information; I was able to find the article by giving Google the search terms Thompson Times Magazine. I also needed to evaluate the quality of that article, and whether any information was out of date. That problem is hard (ie., not yet automated). The blogs, by themselves, don’t do anything at all to solve it. The favored blog search engine, Technorati, lists 341 blog posts linking back. How do I find the needle in that haystack? (Wikipedia was at least helpful by suggesting related sources for Intellipedia.) The general problem of a blog community as an echo-chamber I have discussed at length in the New Gatekeepers series of two years ago.

One of the more damning things about evidence is that there are usually parties who want it removed, such as by the accused.

1. Does dKos have room to grow?
2. Among the “Big Five” most read bloggers by journalists (according to a study this past summer), there’s only one liberal site– Talking Points Memo. Is this a problem? dKos is further down the list. Should it crack the top five?
3. Do the sheer number of contributors make dKos stronger?
4. Why be part of dKos, and not be part of MyDD? From a handful of measures, dKos is 10x bigger; what if there were two equally strong collectives to crack the top 5?
5. Do you consider yourself part of the blogosphere?
6. Do you see any values or methods used on dKos which should be shared with the larger blogosphere?
7. Would you see a benefit in extending Scoop to institutions which are considering setting up blogs?
8. How much do you use the dKosopedia vs. the classic Daily Kos diaries?
9. How about the citizenry and local party leaders/activists? Should they be engaged through dKos? or through scoop-like sites, or through anything in the netroots?
10. Do you understand what Kos’s ethics are?
11. Are you worried that, given Kos’s penchant for saying what’s on his mind, he may put the entire website in jeopardy? considering all that you have on the website.
12. Do you think that Kos is deserving of the revenue for the site? Has anyone considered a revenue-sharing program? Or, at least a way to offer reward top contributors with prizes?

I’d post on my own in Kos, but I don’t have a diary yet, so Paul said he’d try to post this in his. I suppose it’s easiest if dKos members want to post their answers on there and not here. I hope that this is even more helpful for the dKos community than it is for me. I originally started out writing a piece on Kos as an instution/advocate/observer, particularly related to the DNC Chair race and netroots efforts– this had 7500 words by the end of Decemeber. I held onto it do a little more research, and to work on other things. I now realize I ought to continue the research after the DNC Chair race is decided. This discussion is incidental, but is very helpful in shedding light on the big picture.

First, some background. A couple of weeks before Election Day, the Republican party obtained a hard copy of the Democrats’ 46-page “Victory 2004 Florida Coordinated Campaign” and posted it online (in PDF format). The GOP claimed that this document, which had a page for signatures from the Kerry-Edwards campaign, the state party, and union groups, proved that the Democrats were engaged in illegal coordination betwe. The Democrats responded that the coordinating committee was in fact an independent entity allowed by the law, the Florida the Republicans were engaged in the same. The Republicans said they’d file suit with the FEC.

“Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies….”

Putting aside the question of where the Bush’s quote ranks with other incredulous answers in uttered in Presidential news conferences (cf. Eisenhower on whether he could give an example of a major idea of Vice President Nixon’s that had been adopted in his administration: “If you can give me a week, I might think of one.”), as well as how grace under pressure is perceived as a reliable indicator of leadership (Eric Rauchway considers these in Altercation today), not too mention, after three years, is this guy still embarassingly underprepared for the most important job on Earth? let’s actually consider the point.