Month: August 2004

Eric Zorn notes today that his blog experiment is one year old and reflects on what he’s learned. It’s a great write-up from an established journalist who’s not only glad he did it, he’s cutting out his Sunday column in the Chicago Tribune in part to spend more time on his blog. And in a…

By the way, since a few have asked: I’ve turned over maintenance of the Obama blog to the campaign; my job was to help get it off the ground. Now that Barack has an opponent (and what an opponent he is!), the campaign should start to use the blog as an integral part of its…

Too good to pass up: The feature I’d most like to see in any new social network: Import from some other social network. Get me out of the middle of re-re-re-re-confirming that I am so-and-so’s dear friend. These social networks in my experience continue to be all maintenance and no value. [ Joho the Blog…

Wow. Kudos to Bill O’Reilly for condemning the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (ahem) ad: “I believe Jim Rassmann when he says that Kerry saved his life by pulling him out of a Vietnam river while under fire. Rassmann is a former Green Beret, a former police officer and a long time registered Republican until…

This is great news, courtesy of This is Rumor Control: From The Command Post today comes some interesting news about the blending of blogging and politics in Iraq. … Now two popular Iraqi bloggers are stepping into the political arena. Ali Fadhil and Mohammed Fadhil, of Iraq the Model, have announced their candidacies for the…

Met OneMan and Hiram out for drinks last night. Jake was supposed to join us, but claimed a work-related obligation (I think it was that he just wanted to drive Cross’s 300m a little more) and had to take a rain check. It was a fun night, we’ll have to do it more often. See?…

Yesterday, I wrote about a local publication that ran two fabricated letters to the editor (also known as “astroturf”). I sent a brief note to the Editor in Chief of Sun Publications alerting him to the fact that both letters weren’t original letters but were in fact created at President Bush’s reelection website. To his…

Ernie: “You know, I don’t know if you are all aware of this, but ‘perpetuity’ is a really long time.”

Kos discovered another astroturf operation from the Bush campaign. Sure enough, the Naperville Sun (Correction: the letters ran in a sister publication, Fox Valley Villages) ran two of the form letters as letters to the editor last month (here and here.) In a nutshell, the Bush campaign: you can come hear us speak only if…

Not a moment too soon, Jay Allen has released an “emergency release” of MT Blacklist, the comment spam blocking plugin for Movable Type. Jay recently won the developer’s contest sponsored by Six Apart, and his victory was well-deserved. Unfortunately, a public release of his phenomenal tool wasn’t available until today for those of us who’d…