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Archive for November, 2007

YouTube Gets Grounded

Published by William Beutler on November 29, 2007 in Blogs vs. MSM, CNN, Cable News, Debates, Journalist Bloggers, Memeorandum, Metapost, White House '08 and William Beutler. 7 Comments

The story out of last night’s CNN/YouTube debate is turning out to be less about any one of the candidates’ performances and more about CNN’s chronic inability to weed out participants whose partisan or ideological leanings should have precluded their involvement. It’s not just the top story on Memeorandum; it’s the dominant story:

Memeorandum reaction to CNN/YouTube Republican debate

One blog covering the controversy but not yet featured in the roundup — it takes some time and linkage to make the cut — but sure to be a staple of Memeorandum round-ups in the near future is CQ’s latest blog, opening for business today: Ground Game. It’s written by my old college buddy and current flatmate, Eric Pfeiffer (the journalist, not the furniture designer).

In addition to covering the issue of improperly-screened questioners, he discusses how much these things matter:

The real question facing Republicans today is not whether they should make use of emerging technology, but how the medium can be used to improve their communication skills.There’s a tendency in the media to overemphasize the real-world impact of online activism, but the danger to those who ignore the grassroots power of the internet is very real. … “It’s pretty remarkable that just a year after ‘Macaca’ the candidates are standing on a stage in St. Petersburg,” Grove acknowledged.

Make sure you follow those embedded links.

Meanwhile, many of the bloggers linked in the roundup pictured above are now questioning the usefulness of these YouTube debates as organized by cable news networks, or at least by the Cable News Network. But as Pfeiffer points out, that’s not the only way CNN’s YouTube partnership is outdated:

You Tube debates have already expanded to include a Mayor debate in Salt Lake City, several student council elections and campaign forums hosted by TV stations in Greece and Poland.

I probably should have known that, but it’s news to me. That’s good enough reason to bookmark and blogroll it. After you do, check this video out even though — and I really hate to do this to you — it’s all Greek to me:

Update: In an e-mail released this afternoon, RedState is calling on CNN to fire their political director. Considering the egregious and recurrent nature of this problem, I can’t say that sounds unreasonable:

Dear RedState Reader:

RedState is calling for CNN to fire Sam Feist, their political director; and David Bohrman, Senior Vice President and Executive Producer of the debate.

During last night’s debate, which CNN billed as “a Republican debate, and the goal was to let Republican voters see their candidates,” CNN either knowingly or incompetently allowed hardcore left wing activists to plant questions and Anderson Cooper willingly gave one of those activists a soapbox so he could harass the Republican candidates about military policy.

Simple googling would have revealed these left wing activists.

Had CNN done its homework, this would not have happened. They either willfully let it happen, or incompetently bungled it. Either way, heads should roll.

The RedState editors have a related post up on the site as well.

P.S. Can you just wait for the newly-announced ABC News-Facebook presidential fiasco debate?

Lee Siegel, Call Your Office. You Too, Mike Godwin

Published by William Beutler on November 28, 2007 in MSM vs. Blogs, Sports and William Beutler. Closed

LOL Baseball player, Philadelphia Phaillies, phaillingA friend has tipped me to a controversy in the baseball blogosphere — it goes strong even in the offseason — between long-lasting (or maybe just lasting-long) Philadelphia Daily News sports columnist Bill Conlin and the blogger at Phillies-focused Crashburn Alley. Philadelphia magazine’s Daily Examiner blog explains:

What started out as an innocent you suck/you’re old!-type e-mail pissing contest about Jimmy Rollins’s MVP award suddenly turned ugly when Conlin made the unfortunate decision to write this in one of his e-mail responses: “The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler’s time on earth — I’m sure he would have eliminated all bloggers.”

In context, it’s kind of funny, actually, but once Conlin — already an easy target for the online attack dogs due to his propensity to wear his Old Media badge with pride — started name-dropping Hitler coupled with the word “eliminate” to a blogger who’s already pissed off at him, well, he was asking for a pillorying. Headlines talking about how touchy he was instantly morphed into “Sportswriter Praises Hitler in Attack on Bloggers.” Yikes.

We’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Conlin’s actions are not the same as those of widely-loathed TNR contributor Lee Siegel — the unlucky will remember that Siegel posed as a fan of his own work in the comments of a TNR blog post last September — but it sounds to me like Conlin is guilty of the same kind of contempt for debate on the web that tripped up Siegel.

We might even call this self-destructive contempt Lee Siegelism. Conlin and Siegel, as others before and after, wrongly think that “anything goes” when it comes to the blogosphere, so they procede to do just about anything they see fit and don’t expect to be called on it. Big mistake. Siegel and Colin certainly are far from being newcomers to journalism, but well into their careers, the media has changed. When it comes to this flatter, meritocratic media age, they’re the newbies. And it turns out they’re the ones who need to learn some respect.

P.S. I’m a Nats fan and reader of Ball-Wonk — so the team from Philadelphia will always be the Phaillies to me.

Worst. E-mail Alert. Ever

Published by William Beutler on November 27, 2007 in E-mail, MSM, Obituary, Seriously, Sports and William Beutler. 3 Comments

There is no joy in Washington, D.C. today. As virtually everyone with a television set or Drudge Report bookmark knows by now, Washington Redskins star safety Sean Taylor died early this morning from gunshot wounds incurred while confronting a home invasion in his Miami home.

As a District resident and fan of the Potomac Drainage Basin Indigenous Persons, it’s a gloomy day. But as a subsciber to the Washington Post, it’s even worse. Here is an e-mail alert I received barely two hours ago (at 8:48 a.m. to be specific):

Washington Post's grievously outdated news alert regarding Sean Taylor

I realize that this e-mail alert generally aims to highlight news and opinion from the print edition, but this is obviously one of those times when they should have updated it with information from the web edition. Obviously. Methinks the Post will be getting some angry e-mails about this one.

P.S. My fantasy football season is over, realistically if not mathematically. So what the hell. Here’s my act of solidarity:

Posthumously adding Sean Taylor to my fantasy football league

If you find this less a sign of respect than either creepy or funny, well, you’re probably right.

Mark Halperin’s Imperfect Contrition

Published by William Beutler on November 25, 2007 in Campaigns, Elections, Journalism History, MSM and William Beutler. 2 Comments

The left is having a field day so far this morning with a New York Times opinion piece by Mark Halperin, onetime leader of the ultra-insidery ABC’s The Note and current auteur of Time’s similarly-named The Page. In the piece, Halperin apologizes for treating presidential politics like a horse race, and more or less blames it on Richard Ben Cramer’s famous tome on the 1988 race, “What it Takes.”

Apart from deriving an equivalence between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that one need not be a member of the leftroots to find inadequate, Halperin dons his finest hairshirt and wails about his years in the wilderness:

For most of my time covering presidential elections, I shared the view that there was a direct correlation between the skills needed to be a great candidate and a great president. The chaotic and demanding requirements of running for president, I felt, were a perfect test for the toughest job in the world.

But now I think I was wrong. The “campaigner equals leader” formula that inspired me and so many others in the news media is flawed.

…

So if we for too long allowed ourselves to be beguiled by “What It Takes” — certainly not the author’s fault — what do those of us who cover politics do now? After all, Mr. Cramer’s style of campaign coverage is alluring in an election season that features so many candidates with heroic biographies and successful careers in and out of politics. (Not to mention two wide-open races.)

Well, we pause, take a deep breath and resist. At least sometimes. In the face of polls and horse-race maneuvering, we can try to keep from getting sucked in by it all. We should examine a candidate’s public record and full life as opposed to his or her campaign performance. But what might appear simple to a voter can, I know, seem hard for a journalist.

It’s not that he’s wrong (although he might be). Rather, it’s that Halperin is not the person to deliver this message. Otherwise, he will have to change his style of reporting, immediately. What are the chances of that? Well, let’s have a look at what The Page looks like today:

Time's The Page, by Mark Halperin, as vapid as ever

That’s what I thought. In fairness, maybe Mr. Halperin hasn’t figured out what comes next. Until he does, “POW!!! BAM!!!! BOP!!!!” it is.

The Prince and the Photographer

Published by William Beutler on November 24, 2007 in Entertainment, Seriously, Wikipedia and William Beutler. Closed

If you’re interested in popular culture or copyright law, or especially if you’re one of those few who happens to be into both, then you surely can’t have missed the recent controversy surrounding efforts by one Prince Rogers Nelson to remove images and video from online media sharing platforms, and now even from fansites. In September, when the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince was just targeting YouTube (somewhat successfully) and the Pirate Bay, one could at least acknowledge he was focusing on genuine copyright infringement, even if one thought he was making a mistake. But now,

Fan sites dedicated to Prince say they have been served legal notice to remove all images of the singer, his lyrics and “anything linked to Prince’s likeness”, and have vowed to fight what they are calling censorship.

This undertaking is beyond vexatious. This is, after all, the same man who gave away his last album in the UK’s Sunday Mail. Is he a Radiohead-like supporter of “free culture” or is he a jealous protector of his identity? He’s apparently both, and this isn’t necessarily contradictory — no more so than any photographer who has different copyright settings for different photos on his or her Flickr account.

Photograph of Prince, currently appearing on Wikipedia, taken by James "Jimieye" HughesSpeaking of which, lately I’d been wondering about the photo of Prince on his Wikipedia entry (at right). Specifically, I was wondering why it was still there. Edit Wikipedia long enough, and you’ll notice that one thing its editors closely monitor is the uploading of new images. Not only would the Wikimedia Foundation prefer to avoid being sued, the school of thought known as “deletionism” seems to be the dominant ethos.

Turns out the photograph remains where it is (for the time being) because it was uploaded by the photographer himself, one James Hughes of Ballymena, Northern Ireland. That settled that, but that wasn’t all. What was the story behind the photo? Had he been contacted by Prince’s lawyers? Via FlickrMail messages, he told me this week that so far he has heard nothing, and is pretty sure Prince has “bigger fish to fry.” He doesn’t expect Prince’s ill-conceived plan to get far enough to affect his work, although he did seem amused by the whole thing. The photo itself is from Prince’s first visit to Ireland in the 1990s, which Hughes shot for a local magazine. As he explained:

I remember they where very strict with us up front for 3 songs and his managment were all beautiful girls. Apparently he didn’t trust men, though he always had his heavies around. I was told off for taking pictures of bouncers lifting fans out of the front who had passed out. I think hes one of the greatest songwriters alive though he’s also a nut case, like most people in the business both go hand in hand.

I’m not myself a huge Prince fan (I do have 1999 in my iTunes) but out of two Prince fans I spoke to for this post, Hughes was one of two to call him crazy.

And that’s probably all I’ve got to say about it.

It’s unfortunate for the Prince fans, especially the die hards who run fansites and now find themselves under attack by the very object of their infatuation. I am no copyright expert, but it seems to me that while Prince is not ultimately going to win, he will get further than most simply because he has the means to drag it out. The good news is that his opponents… that is, his fans, have joined together in a coalition against him, Prince Fans United.

I have to wonder if, as old media monoliths dissolve and new alliances of artists rise, we’ll see more artists acting like Radiohead or more like Prince. Of course, attitudes and behaviors will depend on the artist, so generalization at this point is risky. As I write this, the old music labels are still here and they’re still fighting to save a terminal business model. But it’s still my guess that artists (and other celebrities) in the near future will be more accommodating than they are now.

It seems odd that someone who has fought the record labels for most of his career is now making the same mistake of misunderstanding his audience. Maybe it’s not — maybe this whole time he only intended to replace them, not their narrow thinking. Let’s hope he makes a federal case of it — say, Prince v. Prince Fans United — and hope this unprecedented attack on his fan base eventually sets the right precedent.

P.S. Though I don’t usually spend much time thinking about Prince and may never publicly write about him again, I’m clearly irritated by his current agenda. Therefore, below the jump, is my contribution to the vast archive of unauthorized Prince artwork on the Internet.

Continue reading ‘The Prince and the Photographer’

The Kos Bubble and Rove 2.0

Published by William Beutler on November 20, 2007 in Asymmetrical Media, Blogger Panels, Blogging Officials, Brick-and-mortar consultants, Daily Kos, George Allen, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Netroots, Tech Blogosphere, Technology, Television, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 7 Comments

Whether or not Kossack heads actually exploded throughout the leftosphere this weekend, I cannot say. Reports will trickle in… or not. But Newsweek’s experiment of pairing the Great and Powerful Kos with the Great and Powerful Rove is off and running, and it’s not too soon to draw some preliminary conclusions. First, in terms of drawing blog hype, Newsweek could hardly done a better job of securing two more polarizing and potentially intriguing figures — for the left and right each, I’m having a hard time coming up with any two people in politics who inspire as much passion in their detractors outside of current and former presidents.

I’ll leave the reviews to others, but 24 hours after both stories hit the web, how are they doing in terms of measurable attention? Newsweek provides two metrics that we must assume are the most accurate, simply because they are based on internal numbers, even though Newsweek does not provide actual numbers. I understand why they don’t release them, but if the Digg-ification of the Internet continues apace, they will eventually. So which of the two was e-mailed more than the other?

Newsweek's Most E-mailed Stories

As we see, this was a clear win for Rove. As of about 10 p.m. on Monday night, Rove’s piece has been e-mailed more often — but we still don’t know by how much. Second, Newsweek’s list of the top 10 most viewed stories:

Newsweek's Most Viewed Stories

Even without precise figures, this one paints a clearer picture: Rove is at number one, and Kos is nowhere to be found. Short of a Chris Bowers Google bomb, Rove is the greatest and most powerful.

How can this be? Kos is arguably at the zenith of his fame, with appearances on The Colbert Report and Meet the Press earlier in the year, still reigning as one of the RNC’s favorite bogeymen. Rove on the other hand is out of the White House and for all anyone knows, out of national politics. It may say something about Time readers just not knowing who Kos is, but I’m operating under the assumption that the online version of Newsweek reaches what IPDI has termed the “Poli-fluentials.” To be sure, time will tell. One possibility is that Kos, with his eminently Internet-based platform, stands to do better over the long run. But I also ran the Newsweek column’s permalinks through Technorati to find out how many times each had been linked by another blog. It wasn’t close. At all:

Ouch. Then again, if you look at the top blogs linking to both articles (results above are sorted by authority) a clear majority hail from the left. Maybe the left still remains more interested in Rove than the right is in Kos.

Another possibilty is more subjective, but I’ll offer it anyway: Maybe Kos just isn’t that interesting a writer. Like more than a few in my line of work, I’ve been perusing Matt Bai’s “The Argument” lately, and Bai does little to conceal his skepticism of Moulitsas’ political knowledge. Now, I have read both articles, and I did find Rove’s much more interesting. But don’t take my word for it — the blogosphere seems to agree. I have also seen both speak in a public setting, and perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, but the seasoned campaign veteran was certainly more compelling than his younger upstart opponent. And there was the time when Kos got a tryout with ideo-journalistic Washington, but didn’t quite make the cut.

An aside: Last week I went with my colleagues and associates Jon Henke, Leslie Bradshaw and Jesse Thomas to see Rove co-keynote Yahoo’s Citizen 2.0 midday bash with Max Cleland (!) at the Willard Intercontinental. They’ve already written about it in detail, but I can’t help noting that their study merely put a slightly different gloss on the IPDI report linked above, i.e. “Citizen 2.0″ has replaced “Poli-fluential.”

Just about Rove, however, I must say: His arguments and observations were as well-honed as any “Internet expert” I’ve seen address a political crowd. And Rove knew what he was talking about: He recalled early computer hard drives he owned, admitted to his membership in the Apple cult, delivered a paean to Moore’s Law, and mused about the long-term effects of TiVo and time-shifting. He spoke of the Allen/Webb race (though he didn’t use the word “Macaca”) and cited studies of the blogosphere like any contributor to TechPresident. That’s why I was a little surprised and disappointed to see Michael Bassik dismiss him as “Not Citzen 2.0″ when in fact the definition given by Yahoo! makes Rove almost the perfect example. I was less surprised to see Think Progress willfully misinterpret the goings-on, but Henke has that one covered. Say what you will about Karl Rove, but don’t say he’s not a geek.

On the other hand, he did mispronounce “Kos.”

P.S. This is as good a time as any to share this photo, taken with my iPhone, of Karl Rove taking a picture of me with his iPhone:

Karl Rove and his iPhone, taken with my iPhone

The man on the right is former Senator Cleland. Believe it or not, they got along like old chums. My guess, and it’s just a hunch, is that Cleland is better at hiding his thoughts and feelings than his boisterous persona suggests. The man on the left appears to be from an Aphex Twin video.

P.P.S. What if Rove turned to blogging? Tom DeLay’s occasionally updated blog is in relaunch limbo at the moment, which provides not the best precedent (despite my own pleasantly surprised initial reaction) but then DeLay was never known as a thinker, either, and left official Washington under considerably less triumphant circumstances. So I think Rove could do well, and I bet he would even write it. If he consented to participate in rightosphere activities like appearing on Heading Right Radio (warning: automatic audio), he could quickly become one of the most influential voices on the Internet. But even then, I’m not sure he’d be the most influential voice on the right.

P.P.P.S. Then again, we haven’t even begun to address the matter of which fledgling columnist Google thinks is the greater and more powerful.

Joe Trippi and Twitter’s Second Life

Published by William Beutler on November 11, 2007 in Howard Dean, John Edwards, Tech Blogosphere, Technology, Twitter, Web 2.0, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

It’s too soon to tell whether Twitter will break on through to the mainstream side; it has long since reached critical mass in the tech community, but the politico adoption rate remains low, and the entertainment ’sphere barely knows it exists. Blogging took this path to becoming a household word, so it seems reasonable to assume it might happen that way again with microblogging.

This is not to say it necessarily will, but we can mark one point in favor: after three and a half months away, Joe Trippi is Twittering again.

When he first signed up in July, his tweets (as messages sent through Twitter are called) merely answered the ubiquitous question hovering above the input space:

What are you doing?

This is what he was doing:

Hanging out with Ted! 07:54 PM July 14, 2007 from web

Participating in Live Earth today — Help spread the word. 08:45 AM July 07, 2007 from web

watching movies with my son Ted! 07:48 PM July 04, 2007 from web

He dutifully answered a few times, and then like most political types who have tried, merely set it aside, gave up entirely or just didn’t get it.

Here are two basic points about using Twitter: One, your best tweets will not come while sitting at a desk — in order to be interesting to others, you have to be doing something, which means getting out of doors, and this tends to mean sending text messages from your cell phone to Twitter. Two, sometimes you should just ignore the inquest about your current activities and just use Twitter to say something.

As for Trippi, his November Twittering has been done almost exclusively via SMS. And he most certainly is much busier now than he was in July, Noam Scheiber detailed last week. Trippi joined the Edwards campaign as a mere add-on adviser in April, but in recent months he has apparently taken a lead strategic role. (For what it’s worth, John Edwards himself has been on Twitter since January — Matt Gross’ handiwork, I pesume.)

This recent burst of Trippi tweets are both a glimpse inside the manic campaign schedule and a glimpse inside the frazzled psyche of its owner. They’re on the edge. In the moment. They don’t appear calculated, are not especially guarded, and sometimes they make no sense at all. This is, after all, the man who nearly went blind due to low blood sugar on the trail in 2003, and whose tearful exit from Burlington was broadcast live on national cable news.

A few tweets offer a keyhole view of the campaign:

up late working on a youtube video for John Edwards that will be released later today. Released our first Iowa ad earlier today. 01:32 AM November 02, 2007 from txt

Just finished another day in iowa. This time I really do know I won’t be doing this again. But Edwards was good all day 02:06 AM November 05

Others detail the life of Trippi:

Exhausted but still going. Actually went out and played pinball til 1am with a NY Times reporter last night in Iowa City. Had a lot of f … … 03:13 PM November 05, 2007 from txt

Off to Cedar Rapids for Edwards. Its my 10th wedding anniversary. I am so screwed 10:55 AM November 08, 2007 from txt

And still others… who knows?

price today 03:13 PM November 05, 2007 from txt

Stars 08:55 PM November 05, 2007 from txt

It almost dares you to ponder what he was thinking at the time. For the record, my guesses: Staring out a train window at night, standing in the grocery checkout line watching the total rise. Some people would call this bad Twittering, certainly for its incomprehensibility, but I disagree — this is more interesting than using it as a distribution list or RSS feed receptacle (perfectly legitimate uses, by the way).

Of course, there’s no reason he couldn’t drop it again just as quickly. An application like Twitter, which asks so little, is also easily forgotten. Twitter participation can be streaky, more so than blogs. Unless and until it develops into a full-blown next-generation instant messenger (my prediction) the site will remain erratic and insular. On the other hand, that’s why some of us pay attention in the first place.

P.S. Trippi isn’t the only person famous-within-his-respective-field to start tweeting again this month. Only Thursday, widely-heard tech podcaster Leo Laporte finally ran up the white flag:

I surrender Twitter. You win.

Laporte abandoned Twitter under entirely different circumstances. He ditched it for competing microblogging service Jaiku in April, citing fears of brand confusion. The flagship of Laporte’s podcast fleet is christened This Week in Tech, or TWiT for short. I assume he’ll explain in the next installment. Maybe there is hope yet that he will relent on the term podcasts, which he gave up for “netcasts,” which isn’t catching, and which I felt compelled to throw scare quotes around.

P.P.S. Aren’t you glad this post wasn’t actually about Second Life?

Getting Sober with Drinking Liberally

Published by William Beutler on November 8, 2007 in Brick-and-mortar consultants, Conferences, Democrats, Netroots, Republicans, Seriously, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I’d like to learn a little more about that Drinking Liberally group.
– Ex-White House adviser Karl Rove

The only phrase I identified with on the screen was Drinking Liberally.
– Ex-Senator Max Cleland (D-Georgia)

This afternoon I hit up an invite-only conference sponsored by Yahoo (okay, Yahoo!), “Citizen 2.0: Radically Rethinking Democracy in the Political Age.”

The two keynotes, Karl Rove and Max Cleland, didn’t have much in common besides their receding hairlines — though they did get along swimmingly, considering everything and all. And they did both take the opportunity to riff on the lefty drinking club with chapters nationwide, featured in a video segment prepared by Yahoo!, Drinking Liberally.

Their utterances were separated by about 30 minutes, so one could say it was a recurring theme. All the more so, the Drinking Liberally badinage continued on as Cleland self-deprecatingly compared his own medicore Internet skills to common blood alcohol levels, coining a term no less silly than Yahoo’s!: Citizen 0.1.

Afterward there was a cocktail reception, and then I took some colleagues to another happy hour. Rest assured, however, I was only drinking moderately.