Tuesday, August 13, 2002

Including best use of Flash in the history of the Republic

Leonard Lin has put up the compleat Larry Lessig Oscon Keynote site. This was a historical event: a ya hadda be there kinda thing.

If you read nothing else today, or this year, make it this.

The train has left the station, but it's never too late to jump on

David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined get's a great review from Scott Rosenberg in The Media titans still don't get it, in Salon.

It's a great piece. And I'd say that even if he didn't say nice things about stuff I've said.

By the way, follow David's blog today to Dan's excellent call to arms in the copyright war.

Don't roll the credits just yet

Lisa Rein points to this piece on college radio stations being forced off the Web by the new CARP regime.

She also urges listeners to support the stations that are sticking it out.

I'm just wondering if there's a Burning Bird festival going on in the desert. A man with burning gas isn't that big a deal, right? But a bird would be cool.

Burningbird's Body Parts campaign to draw RageBoy out of his cave has met with success.

It's also number 5 on Blogdex.

By the way, Shelley (the very bird who burns but is not consumed) is in love with her Ford Focus. Here she (the car) is.

To dim with faint praise

The significant news in this Times piece about blogs is that Cameron Marlow, creator of Blogdex, says their number "has probably passed the half million mark."

But it's clear the author isn't on top of her material here. Otherwise she wouldn't write "And while most online harangues presumably lack the public profile and scathing eloquence of history's most redoubtable pamphleteers..."

Presumably? Well, 500,000 is a pretty big haystack, so why not look for those kinds of needles at the top? It won't be long before you find Andrew Sullivan, a gent with a high public profile whose eloquence is a big reason he's up there. Here he is, scathing the New York Times:

This is preposterous. The only reason invading Iraq is being discussed at all is because of September 11 and what it taught us. It taught us that we are extremely vulnerable to terrorist assault, that these murderous fanatics are capable of anything, that they would use weapons of mass destruction in a heartbeat if they could get them. It is no secret that Iraq is the prime potential source of such weapons, and it is headed by a despot who has used them himself, and would dearly love to deliver them to America. What more do we need to know? The far-left notion that this is a cynical war for "protecting American interests in the Middle East" is absurd. Such a war might indeed make the Middle East a safer place, but the war is about protecting America and the West, as well as liberating the Iraqi people from one of the most evil tyrants in history. That the Times cannot or will not see this shows that they have learned nothing from the catastrophe of last year.

By the way, this is the best summary of the warblog case I've seen so far. Nothing in it about "humiliating the Arab world," either.