Tuesday, September 23, 2003

You want hijacking? You want piracy?

I give you VeriSign. Elliot Noss explains, in terms of stewardship, which VeriSign has, and is violating. He should know. He's the president & CEO of Tucows, and knows more about all this stuff than just about anyone else on Earth.

Bonus link: Andrew Leonard's Thanks, Verisign, for breaking the Internet, in Salon.

Xtreme liner notes

Ken Layne & The Corvids is a tale of song in words and pictures, featuring Ken, Matt and other worthies behind the band and the new CD-in-progress. Until the CD comes out, you can suppport the boys by picking up The Analog Bootlegs.

Buzz

Mickey Kaus, Glenn Reynolds and others are all over the Sacramento Bee's muzzling of columnist Daniel Weintraub's blog. The Bee wants everything it publishes, on paper or on the Web, personal blogs as well as front-page stories, to go through the same editorial mill:

The Bee has instituted some reforms. Weintraub's blog now goes to the editorial page editor or his deputy before it's posted on sacbee.com. Editors will not be allowed to write items for the Web without another editor's review.

Roger Simon nails it:

I was wondering when this was going to happen. The proximate cause was Weintraub making some nasty comments about Bustamante and the Latino Caucus, but that's Weintraub's job (he had been on Arnold's case too on a number of other occasions). He's in the opinion business. The real truth is that big media don't like giving their employees a free hand and blogs are the all-time loose cannons, set to go off at any moment, sometimes in the boss' direction...

In the future, in order to demonstrate their integrity, true blogs may have to be completely independent of major media.

Minor media, of course, are another matter. My belief is that those will be the first to learn how to use blogs, and bloggers, as symbiotic sources of both news production and editing services.

Meanwhile, yesterday's charges by the Zimbabwean government against the Daily News, its only independent newspaper, not only put our own journalistic freedoms in an extreme perspective, but also make me wonder if any bloggers are operating in that country. The Guardian's Weblog Special: Zimbabwe isn't really a blog, but it's not a bad place to start looking for information. Eatonweb Portal lists three Zimbabwe blogs. One is dead, the other two carry no news. Google Directory of Web Pages for Zimbabwe contains no blogs (far as I can tell). Perhaps the best we have are provided by the only journalistic content remaining on the Daily News website:

We apologize for the inconvenience.

The Daily News will be back online as soon as possible. Please come back regularly for updates on proceedings.

However Shumba is still online.

Please feel free to visit the Shumba Discussion Forum and air your views on our new topic - Media Freedom.

I can't figure how to copy and paste the links, since they're javascript popups. But they're worth following. There's real information mixed among the trolling, flamage and other public online forum typicalities.