Recently in Media Category

And I'm Tech Editor. We're #33 (up from 46). TechPresident:

Here's January's top 50 list, with the new Technorati ranking alongside each blog. Note, for the new listings I am just drawing from Technorati's "U.S. Politics Blogs" subcategory, which wasn't available back in January. So some blogs that lack a new ranking haven't disappeared, they just have been reclassified by Technorati...

1. HuffingtonPost (1)
2. Boing Boing
3. Daily Kos (8)
4. CNN Political Ticker (3)
5. Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish (21)
6. The Caucus (New York Times)
7. Treehugger
8. Threat Level (39)
9. Think Progress (2)
10. 538 (10)
11. Talking Points Memo
12. Washington Wire (Wall Street Journal)
13. Michelle Malkin (14)
14. Ben Smith, Politico (22)
15. The Corner (National Review Online)
16. Pajamas Media
17. Hot Air
18. Political Radar (ABC News)
19. Crooks and Liars (13)
20. Newsbusters (5)
21. Glenn Greenwald (Salon) (4)
22. Marc Ambinder (The Atlantic)
23. Swampland (Time)
24. Powerline (9)
25. Redstate
26. Americablog
27. Firedoglake (20)
28. Gateway Pundit (11)
29. Matthew Yglesias (40)
30. Hit & Run (Reason)
31. Feministing
32. TruthDig
33. Buzzmachine
34. CQ Politics
35. Open Left
36. Hullabaloo (28)
37. Talk Left
38. Taegan Goddard's Political Wire (33)
39. Mother Jones
40. Pam's House Blend
41. MyDD
42. Balloon Juice
43. Stop the ACLU (41)
44. The Next Right
45. The Moderate Voice (33)
46. Feministe
47. Real Clear Politics
48. Atrios
49. Little Green Footballs
50. Wizbang

Me, writing today at TMV, after struggling to get the Hope Bus video uploaded:

Despite any of the talk about Net Neutrality, networks are right now enforcing a tiered level of offerings that disadvantages production at all service levels. Where I live I can only get a 6 MB incoming line. Outgoing I'm limited to half the speed of a 1990s era 512k connection. They will not even sell me more if I am willing to pay extra!

We have seen this happen before. Broadcasting itself started out as an open platform, built by innovators, nurtured by government and fostered by and for educators. Once it was developed industry moved in. Promising improvements they pushed every notion of citizen production aside. It required, we were told, trained industry professionals to do anything worthwhile.

Cable did the same thing. Begun in rural Pennsylvania as a means to deliver broadcast signals to rural homes, CATV (CoAxial cable TV) used the promise of localism through channels dedicated to educational and governmental services and Public Access TV, to take on the broadcast network monopoly. Once it had its toehold, it starved and marginalized those channels. That same thing is happening today with the Internet.
YouTube, we're told, is filled with marginal citizen-produced nonsense and gets most of its traffic through pirated programming. Remix culture -- citizen use of the mediasphere -- is criminalized as piracy. And every attempt to by you and me to upload quality versions of what we produce is literally slowed down (and deteriorated) through service tiers that won't permit fast uploads.

Don't get me wrong, citizens reap great benefits from the Interent and we will see vast improvements over what we had before. We'll even be permitted to produce in the margins. But it's obvious to me that the days of the internet as citizens' media production haven are numbered.

I've been bugged the last few days by Norah O'Donnell's Today Show stand-ups. Today from Omaha wasn't so bad, but on the White House Lawn yesterday:

Today the president is going to try to capitalize on some of the momentum from last night, launching a five-state campaign-style blitz throughout the nation in order to sell his plan directly to the American people... Now on the Middle East, the president boldly says he believes that peace is within reach for the Israelis and the Palestinians. He warned Iran to end its support of terror and promised Iranians seeking liberty that the US will stand with them.

Ok, so it sounded worse than it reads. Then here's the day before:

The president will lay out a bold blueprint for his aggressive second term agenda. He will challenge Congress to tackle some politically divisive issues, and he will ask the world to join him in a new effort to help rebuild Iraq. Preparing for tonight's State of the Union address, the president wants to chart a new course, pledging diplomacy abroad, and championing the spread of freedom with the elections in Iraq. But advisers say he will not yield to growing demands to offer an exit strategy for US troops.

Hard-hitting, deep-digging, objective, independent reporting? It sounds more like she's regurgitating White House Communications Office agitprop to me.

Ana Marie Cox, aka Wonkette, is writing a book. I don't know if she has it in her. But then, Fox's Chris Wallace didn't have it in him either and he wrote a book. ("It was a kind of collaborative effort. My -- a fellow, an agent, Bill Adler (ph), came up -- called me up and said, Have you ever thought of writing a book? And I said, yes, but I never have had an idea." I'll say.) I digress.

I couldn't write a book. Writing a blog and writing a book are very different talents. Tom Wolfe is an accomplished writer, but that doesn't guarantee he would write an interesting blog. And Cox is great as Wonkette, a foulmouthed, hard-drinking, sex-obsessed politics junkie. But... I've seen Cox on cable and C-SPAN panels and read interviews and, well, she's not always the most articulate. And while Andrew Sullivan is gone for "say, nine months" to write his book, Cox is taking just one.

Don't get me wrong, I like Wonkette, love her politics, and am grateful that her guest blogger caught me in a dumb mistake just a week after I started blogging. That sent my traffic through the roof and earned me a Google ranking I had been trying to achieve for months. Not to mention great cocktail chatter.

I bet the book will sell; I'm not so sure I'll be buying.

Andrew Sullivan is going on hiatius for "a few months."

Why? The simple answer is that I want to take a breather, to write a long-overdue book, to read some more, travel to Europe and the Middle East, and work on some longer projects... It's not so much the time as the mindset. The ability to keep on top of almost everything on a daily and hourly basis just isn't compatible with the time and space to mull over some difficult issues in a leisurely and deliberate manner.

I don't always agree with Andrew, in fact I often don't, but I like his writing and I read his blog regularly. He's pointed to things others don't and often has a fresh and different perspective.

I subscribed to The New Republic while he was editor and tend to enjoy his magazine pieces more than his books. I agree with him most on the subject of gay marriage, though even there we part ways from time to time.

Friends in New York consider him the devil and will ignore the news. Not me. I hope he finishes his book and returns as promised "to blogging full-steam with perhaps a new direction or approach to refresh the material."

If I had found a podcast that I thought would be interesting, I might have delayed signing on to Audible.com. I looked. From today's San Jose Mercury News:

``You don't have to go hunting for news -- the news finds you,'' said Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS and creator of one of the earliest blogs, the Scripting News.

Podcasting works in the same way. Subscribe to specific Podcasts, and the software finds the latest feeds and transfers the audio files automatically to iTunes, Apple's digital media jukebox. When an iPod is plugged into your computer, it downloads the podcasts. The software also works with other music management programs and digital music players.

I've yet to figure out how to have the news find me. But then, I'm not as technologically agile as I once was. To date I've listened to one of Dave's podcasts; I would gladly listen to more. As I figure it out I'll let you know how it goes.

Here's where to start looking: iPodder, Podcaster.org and Podcast.net (the top in Google's search results but the site is down right now).

Oh, and the BBC is experimenting with podcasts.

Charlie Peters also had this item:

You may have seen on the front page of The Washington Post in late November the headline “Virginia wife slain after court denies protection.� ...A few days later, the Post ran two sentences in its correction box on page 2, saying that the original story “may have left the impression that the judge had refused� to grant the extension, and that in fact “additional documents show that the protective order was dismissed at the [wife's] request.� Are two sentences on page 2 enough to correct the erroneous main thrust of a front page story?

Obviously not. What to do with the complaint? Scott Rosenberg at Salon has an idea:

Software development teams have used bug tracking software for ages now -- why not journalists? ...The model doesn't map perfectly onto journalism, but it's not too far off: Let people file "bug reports" if they believe your publication has published something in need of correcting. The publication can respond however it seems appropriate: If the complaint is frivolous, you point that out; if it's a minor error of spelling or detail, you fix it; if it's a major error, you deal with it however you traditionally deal with major errors -- but you've left a trail that shows what happened.

He revisited the idea to answer comments and concludes:

I'm not suggesting that this idea is the single, one-fix-solves-all-problems answer to the ills of journalism today. It's a pragmatic, you-could-do-it-real-soon suggestion for beginning to deal with professional journalism's biggest problem: the public's loss of trust, which begins with the sense that media companies are big institutions that pay no attention to their own mistakes.

Agreed.

I miss C-SPAN's Booknotes. It was one of my favorite shows on television. It's replacement, Q&A, is a dud. (George Bush is the guest tomorrow). Maybe it will get better.

An author I'd have liked to see on Booknotes is Malcolm Gladwell. I enjoyed his first book, The Tipping Point (The New Yorker article it's based on is here) and look forward to reading the just released Blink.

One of my first posts, Everything's Derivative, was about another New Yorker article of his, the thought-provoking Something Borrowed: Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life? I'll have another Malcolm post later today.

If you watched last night's Nightline "Iraq, Why We Stay" Town Meeting to the end, you heard Ted Koppel's closing remarks interupted by a shouter:

I was upset that nothing was said about the health of our troops mentally, physically or otherwise. So, I satarted chanting "GULF WAR SYNDROME" over and over again, very loudly so it filled the church and drown out Ted Koppel. He replied, "I am sure I have no idea what you're talking about" and I yelled, "It's about Depleted Uranium!" Then I shut up, and he finished his closing and it was over.

The full account is well worth reading. Via Steve Gillard's News Blog.

Via Kudzu Files. A 17 year old guy's been blogging as The New Democrat since November. Along comes a former Swift Boat Veteran supporter, "Ricky Vandal," who starts a blog with the same name, except with the added tagline "Saving the Democratic party from the looney left." Centerfield was the first to try to help and has the details. Now lots of blogs are talking about it.

UPDATE: Happy ending.

The FCC rejected 36 indecency complaints by the Parents Television Council. Among the PTC objections, shows with "scenes in which male characters talk about kissing men and female characters talk about kissing women." Jeff Jarvis's Buzz Machine details all 36 of them, noting:

In the first set of rulings, the FCC seems to bravely decides that "dick" in various forms is OK. Ditto ass, penis, vaginal, nutsack, and a three-way. In the second set, they add the words hell and damn -- as if they were ever in contention as indecent and blaspamous -- as well as breast, nipples, can, pissed, crap, bastard, and bitch. It's the liberalization of America, I tell you, it's the second damned sexual revolution!