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Strange, but this debate over Doonesbury and the coffin photos brings to mind something that "Sopranos" creator David Chase has said: That his goal is to make people squirm, to make them uncomfortable. I think that's part of the media's job--to make people uncomfortable, to make them squirm, to make them feel sick if necessary. I don't mean shock for its own sake, but the shock of uncomfortable and painful realities that force us to challenge our assumptions.
Jonathan Potts

Off the Record
I mean no disrespect to The Times, but what discriminating citizen can really afford to rely on only one source of news? And can't all discriminating readers contextualize what their newspapers (or television stations or radio hosts or Web logs) tell them?
· Paper of Record? No Way, No Reason, No Thanks
[Link Poached from http://www.timporter.com/firstdraft/ ]
· See Also Newspapers, especially, have a duty to show all aspects of a war, its ugly side as well as its public policy side
· See Also Critic: I know journos who want to write real press criticism

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Make no bones about trends:: Forget the BMW, the Armani suit and the Beluga caviar; the latest, must-have item comes in a bottle costing up to $300...
Students set to hit the latest e-books: textbooks, literature and art

Why aren't reporters probing Office of Homeland Security?
Coverage of the structure and actual performance of the Office of Homeland Security in particular is one of the great unreported stories in Washington. No one was asking questions about how every system designed to protect this country failed.
· What did Bush know? Let's ask, 'What's he doing now?'
· See Also Web Filtering and Surveillance
· See Also Sean Nicholls: ASIO lends Bob Carr expertise for material on all government websites
· See Also Balancing the Need To Know: public concerns and private concerns
· See Also Librarians' Index to the Internet, Information You Can Trust! http://lii.org/

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Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times: We had a truly horrible year at the New York Times last year. ... "The scariest thing of all of last year for me... wasn't Jayson Blair.... The scariest part was that the people we lied about didn't bother to call because they just assumed that's the way newspapers worked. That's scary.
As Jeff Jarvis says: Amen and amen again

Everything is Costed Nothing is Valued
ME and my big mouth… A reader has taken me to task for the items that appeared last month calling new Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore a crypto-communist.
· Hillary's Clover Moore challenge
· See Also Humans are herd animals. When we see other people trading up to better homes, we have an almost irresistible urge to join them
· See Also How much is Google worth? [Link Poached from JohnQuiggin.com ]

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John Howard and Alan Jones are friends. They're also political allies. Mutual backscratchers, in other words, for mutual advantage. Cool. But what happens when the third party in the mutual admiration and mutual benefit society is the bloke Howard appoints to enforce the law on radio broadcasting licence holders - in this case 2UE, in which Jones is a substantial shareholder - and to set standards of conduct to protect citizens from abuse of power?
Why the big parties won't keep Big Media honest

Blog Me Tender: Still, it puts bums on seats at conferences, eh? [/obligatory snark ]
I have to question the wisdom of putting people and their passions into boxes, particularly when many (myself included) love it out here on the new frontier precisely because we can avoid being boxed in by those who would diminish our work by drawing lines around it. Which be an exercise in self-deception, but that's the most delicious flavour, after all.
· Irak: Bloggers are editors, not journalists [ courtesy of www.iraqwarreader.com/ ]
· See Also Political Biases
· See Also Not to go blubbery on me the way you do when you read a dog story with a sad ending

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If only there were ice cream for everyone, Camelot would still be with us! Instead, we preach the American dream, and some of those born losers who find it hollow seek to even the score with a gun: And all you have to do/Is/Squeeze your little finger./Ease your little finger back—/You can change the world

Blogjam6
Meanwhile, Latham' s alleged plagiarism was a gift to bloggers. Of course everyone divided on partisan lines, but various commenters revealed themselves as sometime speechwriters. Chris Sheil at Back Pages confessed to popping bits of Gorbachev into a National Party minister?s speeches, while 'Nabakov' admitted:
I've borrowed stuff from sources as diverse as CS Lewis, Ian Fleming, Simon Schuma, Bruce Sterling, Larry Ellison, Nye Bevan and Sir Richard Burton....
· Lakatoi - cross-cultural observations and reflections by a former Australian Ambassador and High Commissioner, Dr James Cumes [Link Poached from Barista, Heartstarters for the hungry mind]
· See Also Blog-Tracking Gaining Ground Among U.S. Intelligence Officials
· See Also LawsJaming (@Technorati#1: Laws accuses Jones - National - www.smh.com.au)

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Building bigger roads to solve traffic congestion is like buying larger trousers to cure obesity.
Bob Passey (letter to SMH 23 April 2004)

Pearson and O'Reilly Do e-Textbook Deal
BooksSource: e-consultancyPearson launches web-textbooks programme"Publishing giant Pearson is launching a project in the US to offer students digital textbooks at half the price of the printed versions...The group's education division is to launch the project, SafariX Textbooks Online, as a joint venture with another US publisher O'Reilly Media, which offers textbooks on technology, and already uses the Safari system. Rather than offering textbooks for digital download, Safari hosts books online with the ability to annotate and navigate through a web browser.
· By making more and more e(in)Books digital, publishers can keep greater control over them and lower the expenses [Link Poached from Albert Einstein dated a librarian -- what more proof do you need? Johanna Fantova ]
· Finalists lists [link first seen at WebbyAwards][ via German Top 100]
· See Also Act Like Nothing's Wrong: Google ranks popularity, not authority. And popularity is a measure which is vulnerable to many games...giving some pages higher ranking than they deserve
· See Also How To Speed-Read the Net: Ditch your browser...RSS makes surfing for news a joy
· See Also Iraqis enjoy new freedom of expression on Web journals
· See Also Quoteblogs vs. Linkblogs: John Inluminant writes about quoting on blogs
· See Also Apple: The problem with most conferences is that the intelligence is sitting in the dark with its hands folded, falling asleep while a bunch of idiots on stage with PowerPoints talking nonsense
· See Also Free Books: Published before the 1920's

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The man who tells you that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is relative, is asking you not to believe him. So don't...
Roger Scruton

People have eyes: On whistleblowing and why it's so hard to do
The reprisals for being a dissenter are extremely serious in many cases, which is why you often get either the young or the old being rebels. Less to lose. The balance in society is way too skewed towards conformity. Dissent is becoming more important, but it's also more difficult to take on powerful corporations. And if you're on the inside of the corporation, it's easy to be targeted vehemently.
For speaking out, and bringing the wrongdoing to the attention of their superiors, employers, or an external agency with, at least on paper, the power to investigate and do something to remedy the situation, the employee, far from receiving praise for their honesty or rectitude, often receives the kinds of persecutions metéd out to Franz Kafka’s Joseph K in The Trial or Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984. In other words, it seems far more important to conform, stay silent, go along to get along, exist only for the advancement of your superior’s career, keep your mouth shut, don’t cause trouble, etc. and similar, because if you don’t, this is what will happen to you.
· Taxing World of Whistleblowers [ courtesy of Webdiary ]
· See Also Five years ago a brilliant man hanged himself: The spy chief left out in the cold (A tale of two thieves, in their own words)

Linking to political tales, Is the socially conscious novel a dead genre? Whatever happened to the idea that a book can change the world? Are authors so intent on their own characters that they can't be bothered to make their plots politically relevant to our increasingly dangerous world? Ray Conlogue is only asking, but modern authors seem increasingly hostile to the notion that they could actually advance political ideas or social agendas with their works of fiction. These days, novelists are perfectly within their rights to spend hours working on behalf of whatever causes they support, but to put the crusade to paper would apparently cross some invisible line of decorum.
· See Also Maybe it's that political writers tend to be such tortured souls. Or maybe the constant battle for public understanding and acceptance is just too much for some... Whatever Happened to the Political Novel?
· See Also Woodward chose to be a rich, not great, writer (TNR)
· See Also Dad ... what's a drug dealer? Someone carrying a small amount of cannabis on a suburban train...

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In the realm of life & death, all things being equal, most people find unhappiness more interesting than joy.
Most people somehow find unhappiness more profound or meaningful or important than happiness... Trying to hide the photos is dishonoring fallen soldiers (SeaTimes); when issues are about government censorship, not sensitivity

Escape, Desire, Culture, Receipts: Of Value And Survival
Sure, there's the obvious connection between art and money, writes Thomas Crow. But art also has its business in the world, in how a society functions and sees itself. As works of circulate from creator to patron, from dealer to collector, from private interior to public gallery, the transactions can be as much about sheltering the emotional, cultural and intellectual value of art as they are about money, even as prices climb and currency changes hands.
· I've always believed that one of the signs of a healthy society is when all aspects of that society communicate with each other [ One-in-a-million links: One Story Fits All? The trouble with escapes is that they simultaneously attract and repel ]
· See Also What makes Us Write? There are not too many Jozef Konrads, either, and Konrad published his first book when he was thirty-eight
· See Also Officially the Parliamentary Librarian is looking for someone who can demonstrate literary excellence though a substantial history of published works, including poetry
· See Also Edinburgh: City pitches for world's literary crown
· See Also Sexiest photo of MEdia Dragon in a parliamentary library: stack X collection

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Kapri is as charming as ever it was, the people as odd: everybody is very immoral, but fortunately not so dull as those who kick over the traces often are.
W. Somerset Maugham, letter to Violet Hunt (c. 1905)

MEdia Dragon eBook & My Passwords for a Chocolate...
Library e-books now on cell phones. David Rothman writes Patrons of the Cleveland Public Library's virtual side can now read e-books on cell phones, via the crossplatform Mobipocket reader. It's surprising how clear and readable eBooks appear on the color screen of my Motorola cell phone, says library official Cynthia Orr as quoted in an OverDrive news release. More at TeleRead.
· See Also Library e-books now on cell phones
· See Also The Electronic Paper Book (Wow!)
· See Also Window-Wire-Dressing?(WWD): Wiring Atherton Gardens, a much-studied public-housing estate in inner Melbourne, Australia, is subverting the ‘digital divide’ by giving the residents access to computers and the internet
· See Also Google flexes its muscles? What is Google cooking? [via Google's indexing of syndication feeds]
· See Also What Privacy Issues? I trust Google more than most governments: I was among the lucky Blogger users who received invitation to Gmail, but my dinasaur application failed to support the system
· See Also Gianna hangs up her blogging gloves: The blogworld will definitely feel Gianna's absence. Good luck with life, Harley, love, and happiness

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He had expected compliance, but not at the astounding rate of 65 per cent of subjects willing to deliver what they believed were lethal shocks.

Whatever you say, boss
An infamous experiment,threeyearsafterMEdiaDragonwasborn, showed how easily people could be led to kill.
In a post-Holocaust world, like in post-Cold War world, people were struggling to understand how scores of SS, and KGB officers, had shot, gassed and tortured millions of people to death, supposedly on orders from their commanders.
· Why even non partisan parliamentary officers will obey the deadliest orders

A sinister killer, a flight to Amsterdam, and hundreds of millions of dollars at stake . . . the asbestos saga reads like a novel
· ASBESTOS AFTERMATH: Hardie casts a long shadow

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Celebrating a universal moment devoted to the culture of reading isn’t an easy thing at the moment, nor perhaps when MEn Dragons are Losing Our (sic) Edge? The mouse, Yoda, that roared & Yoedeled! Virgin mouse gives birth: In a First, Mice Are Made Without Fathers... Running naked through the jungle, which didn't matter until somebody released some dragons...

Friday April 23rd is World Book Day
Although many locales are concerned about their populations leaning away from books and towards mass media, on April 23, the world will once again celebrate World Book Day. The day was chosen due to a significant confluence of important author dates; it marks both the day of Shakespeare's birth and his death.
· My book cycle [Link Poached from Google by not so Virgin Mouse]
· See Also Librarian's Dramatic Past Life: Here's a librarian to abolish stereotypes ...
· See Also Librarians, Escapes & Politics sells books, left and right [Engaging Ordinary Readers Sole Survivor: Wait a second. What is my role? ]
· See Also Library e-books now on cell phones
· See Also Killing Us Poetically: Poets die young -- younger than novelists, playwrights and other writers

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NOTICE IN A PADDOCK:
The Farmer allows walkers to cross the paddock for free, but the bull charges!!!
[In this extraordinary time, first we had Man Bites Dog to Death--headline, Sydney Morning Herald, April 11; & today We Know We Left Those Scissors Somewhere... ]

Much Ado About Something: South Treasures Meet North
Three things succeed on the internet: shopping, as perfected by Amazon; searching, as perfected by Google; and blogging as perfected by thousands of creative fingers and linkers...
In keeping with the egalitarian nature of blogs, via David Tiley of Barista fame is encouraging everyone to share small, but beautiful blogging treasures....
For my part, I suggested http://lakatoi.blogspot.com/
[Lakatoi by James Cumes:
Cross-cultural observations and reflections by a former Australian Ambassador and High Commissioner, Dr James Cumes. James born and bred in Brissie is now based in Vienna where he devotes his time to charities, writing and leading Victory over Want http://VictoryOverWant.org]
· http://www.crosswords.blogspot.com/
[ (Southern Cross) Words;]
(Southern Cross) Words by Gregory Altreuter :: Cross-cultural observations and reflections by a former New Yorker on Sydney Australia, including philosophical musings, art, music, literature raves, political obtuseness, and anything else that comes to mind on the differences between life directed by the Pole Star and living beneath the Southern Cross.
· See Also The rise of Weblogging has been a cold shower for the complacent mass communication industries [Link Poached from Webdiary: Blogjam5]
· See Also Jeremy Zawodny on creative linking [link first seen at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/aggregator/ ]
· See Also P23;S5 MEmedia Dragon
· See Also Metadata librarian becoming cool: Was it due to Harriet Klausner, retired librarian and #1 Amazon book reviewer?

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David Tiley is standing in for Tim Dunlop for the next four weeks. He is a writer, script editor, teacher and occasional director who works in film and multimedia, particularly on documentaries, and has done his bit as an arts bureaucrat. His blog Barista tries to find humour in a deadly serious world... Nevermind the substantiated accussation of MEdia Dragon being the prince of the link...

NEXT TIME DON’T BLOG SO CLOSE: Faherty has a dirty, dirty, suggestion
Juile Faherty writes an article in today's New York Times about BloggerCon II. The article focuses on the business potential of blogs and advertising again rises to the number one position for revenue generation.
There is too much emphasis on advertising and blogs. I realize that Adwords and BlogAds have created the possibility of instant micropublishing. I realize that when mainstream media reports on our corner of the world that they are going to report from their perspective - newspapers and magazines create content and then sell advertising. I also realize that people are finding success and that makes a good story.
· ConBloggerII [ courtesy of A Penny For...]
· See Also Sadly, the last thing most bloggers (and not just guys) think about is their feet
· See Also Warning! The dragon monster demands a mate! Well, I don't really have a girlfriend but in my fantasies in which I'm having sex with my girlfriend, you're her
· See Also And they say romance is dead: A lot of my day's taken up with a soul-aching commute into the city, and that just feels like dead time
· See Also The Zen of Blogging
· See Also Blogrunner

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I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
– Barbara Kingsolver Who's reading what? Laura Bush asked for preferences

The nature of meaning in the age of Google
Google may index billions of Web pages, but it will never exhaust the store of meaning of the Web. The reason is that Google's aggregation strategy is only one of many different strategies that could be applied to the semantic objects in public Web space. Hidden in the 'dogs' retrieval set of 14.5 million are special, singular, obscure, unpopular, etc., Web pages that await a different aggregation strategy that would expose their special meanings. To charge that Google has a bias against obscure websites... is to expect Google to be something other than Google. Google finds the common meanings. Many other meanings exist on the Web and await their aggregators.
· The culture of lay indexing [Link Poached from a paper by professor Terry Brooks]
· See Also This would be the time to say thank you to your local librarian
· See Also Luring readers with tacos: Reading nourishes the soul, and this week it satisfies the stomach, too

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I was repining at the thought of my slow progress—how few new ideas I had or picked up—when it occurred to me to think of the total of life and how the greater part was wholly absorbed in living and continuing life—victuals—procreation—rest and eternal terror. And I bid myself accept the common lot; an adequate vitality would say daily, 'God, what a good sleep I’ve had,' 'My eye, that was dinner,' 'Now for a fine rattling walk'—in short, life as an end in itself.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Frederick Pollock, 1919

I Can tell that we're going to be enemies: MEdia Dragon (TM) has dreams of blogging all about it
What dragon's blog would be complete without displaying something with a lot of dragonanger?
Weblogs have revolutionised the media. But are they more than just vanity publishing? And if so, what kind of content is best? Leading bloggers Salam Pax, Rhodri Marsden and Gregor Wright debate the issues. Via email, naturally ...
BTW, come and listen to a young man from Iraq with the pseudonym of Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger, @ Sydney Writers' Festival, May 17 - 23, 2004
· Being a Spy and a MEdia Dragon is a Conflict of Interest
· See Also Jungle Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness
· See Also Amazon: More Rain Forest... Criticism and Elitism [ The books Amazon natives are talking about now Buy this book, it's amazingly good ]
· See Also DID YOU SEE?: Blogs are all effectively Did You Sees, one person's effort to boil the news of the world down to a handful of salient items
· See Also Here's a word that will interest editorial page editors: No Word Is Mightier Than the Pollutocrat

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Occasionally, reckless use of a search engine uncovers something interesting. Even things like why Jozef Imrich just wants to be humiliated. Over and over again. Mortification: a collection of writers' most humiliating moments:
`Reading Canceled,' or three chairs occupied by people released from mental institutions and not thought to be violent; People who would much rather be gluing seashells to flower pots; Most frequently, though, no one shows up...

I didn't ask if blogging is journalism: If your mother says she loves you, czech it out.
Let's start with the basics. When a journalist writes a story, she calls a bunch of experts, and writes down what they say. Then the reporter thinks about what all this means. Maybe she interviews more experts. Maybe she interviews The Man on the Street to find out what it means to The Average Person. And then in the end, she strings together the quotes to make a story. This is an act of journalism. I think we all agree.
Enter the weblogs. They make it possible for the experts to go direct, without any intermediaries. A person who wants info can now find out what people think without going through the reporter. This is revolutionary
· This is what the Internet does to everything it touches [Link Poached from j's scratchpad ]
· See Also This is a draft of Chapter 9: Trust's Boundaries of my upcoming book, Making the News
· See Also Stories are generally about people in the last stages of physical, moral and social decrepitude, which explains the reflective and occasionally melancholy undercurrent in many of the tales
· See Also An excellent directory of library weblogs
· See Also A Novel Approach to Legal Research
· See Also OpentheGovernment.org: Ten Most Wanted Documents for 2004
· See Also Search Congressional-Research-Service Reports
Excellent roundup from Chris Sherman, a must read to keep up to date with what is really going on in the world of secret warrants & searches, Search Engine Milestones for March 2004 [ Google still has 40% of search referrals, Yahoo has 27%, MSN 19%, then there's the rest of the engines bringing up the rear

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How do I love alternativish countryfied Blogjam? Let me count the ways ...

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Oops, somehow MEdia D missed this link last week in the Sydney Morning Herald... The power of search
+ Use "" for phrase searching
+ Boolean available (and, or, andnot)
+ t: to limit to words in the title/headline of the document
+ d: to limit to words in the text of the document.
+ It's possible to combine the syntax
More Search News Tips & Topix

Open all hours
With the click of a mouse, libraries and museums are reaching a new audience.
It was Umberto Eco who said libraries had always been humanity's way of preserving its collective wisdom, a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten. Now, thanks to the internet, Australians are peering beyond the bricks and mortar, seeing libraries and museums for what they always wanted to be - citadels of ideas, repositories of human knowledge.
· Ironically, the web's flaws are what now help people appreciate the integrity of the information issued by libraries [ via Best Stack & Library in the World]
· See Also Special librarians are information 'detectives'
· See Also On the seventh day Cold River rested: eBook of the Month
· See Also And now, the good word by email - and that's gospel
· See Also Print-on-demand
· See Also Sifry's Alerts: BoingBoing adds Technorati support - you can too!

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To what extent might (bloggers) contribute to the spread of disinformation, and to tyrannies of misinformed majorities?
Rebecca MacKinnon

BloggerCon: On the lowered barrier of entry...
Jay Rosen is moderating a discussion at BloggerCon on Saturday of the questions, What is Journalism And What Can Weblogs Do About It? I am reading through his background essay and the associated comments to get a feel for what it will be like.
Right up front, Jay hits me over the head with insight in making sure that journalism is not defined as a profession, but an act...
Dave Winer: I think the best journalists around today are bloggers, not professionals, and I'm not saying that to be argumentative, I really believe it, and could and would debate it, except this is not the topic of this session.
· My advice to bloggers seeking traffic is to entirely ignore anything said by bubble-blowers [Link Poached from makeoutcity.com: all you need are kisses to start a makeout party]
· See Also Michele Catalano Of A Small Victory Gives Up Political Blogging
· See Also Virtual Opinion
· See Also Fascinating article on domain names: Get Out of My Namespace
· See Also The perils of NexGen Librarian

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As seen somewhere on the Mittel Earth Web:Just can't be stopped from blogging, no matter how little financial reward they find in it...
This blog complies with a paperwork reduction act...

Off the Beaten Path: The Speech Nobody Heard
We lost forty years in the refrigerator of the Cold War, [which resulted in] the postponement of urgently needed reforms," he said. "The fall of communism did not assure the triumph of social justice.
The global economy, like Morava River, is there. It is not going to move; the question is how not to drown in it.
· Terra Nostra: (KISS Keep It Strong and Spanish) [ courtesy of The Cold War Book Nobody Read: tip of the iceberg of frozen memories]
· See Also Mexican author Carlos Fuentes
· Myth and Reality for Immigrants in New York and Amsterdam [link first seen at Szirine Magazine]
Since you left me at eight I have always been lonely
· I'll be damned, You're a poet. Welcome to hell

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I am almost 61, live in Sydney, Australia and am retired from professional life. As I grow older, I grow more intolerant of bullshit, especially in political circles: The blog of John Boase

Blogs: Here to stay
They're hip. Influential. Out there. By one estimate, there are 2 million of them posted on the Internet around the world talking about everything from knitting patterns to the war in Iraq. But as blogs - or personal weblogs - move into the limelight, they're also coming under closer scrutiny. And the conclusions are in some ways sobering.
Take politics. David Winer says weblogs are going to play a huge role in politics. But all the buzz about politicians using them is overblown. The blog of Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean was just a "gimmick," says Mr. Winer, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and a pioneer blogger. And any blogs produced this year by President Bush or John Kerry will be "basically run by the ad agencies" - not the kind of honest, even intimate conversations that blogs can represent.
Here's his vision of how real "blogging" by a politician could work. A candidate for city council, for example, would write an ongoing blog to his potential constituents explaining his positions on issues. They could read his pitch and offer feedback, creating a kind of political dialogue that would be based on substance more than sound bites.
· Sound bites [ via CS Monitor]

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Is Amazon a media site or a retailer? The answer is BOTH
Amazon's much discussed skunk works search project goes live thisweek, so we can finally write about it. On first blush it's a very, very good service, and an intriguing move by Amazon. It raises a clear question: How will Google - and more broadly, the entire search-driven world - react?
Like Google, Amazon understands audience management, user-contributed content, and user-driven recommendation systems better than any "media site" today. They're focused on knowing their audience, building that audience independently of traditional media, and delivering offers to that audience -- on behalf of other "partner" retailers as well as themselves.
· In essence, Amazon seems to be making a play for Google's customers [Link Poached from Battlemedia]
· See Also http://a9.com/

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Baby dragons born in May are most likely to think themselves lucky, and October newborns the least...

Luckiest dragons in the world
We now come to one of my favorite times of year (in the United States at least), which is the federal income tax deadline. Why is this one of my favorite times? Well for one thing, a lot of people do receive tax returns at this time of year, which they immediately use to buy a lot of ebooks, which is what you should be doing with this years tax return.
By the same token, if youve had to pay (dont you hate that?), you probably wont want to go out and buy a big expensive paper book, when you can satisfy your reading addiction for a whole lot less by buying refreshing, entertaining, exceptional ebooks from Double Dragon.
If youre looking for another good reason to support Double Dragon, last year, when the IRS tried to collect taxes on my treasure hoard, I ate the auditor.
Not as tasty as a virgin, by any means, but it could be considerd a useful public service. One less tax collector to go around and I think my treasures are secure for the next year or two, though after that who can tell, for you humans have such short memories.
· We have added a bunch of new features to our DDP website: the ability to score a purchased title to receive up to 50% off selected titles [ courtesy of Double Dragon]
· See Also
Blake found this really interesting article and sent the link to me today.

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I THOUGHT THE READER WAS ALWAYS RIGHT
.-- but not in the news business: At a time when public distrust of the news media appears to be at a dangerously high level, there is evidence of a deep and fundamental disagreement between those who produce news and those who consume it.
· Public's cynicism about media has become a pressing concern
· See Also Club nights for the deaf and hard of hearing are growing in popularity. How do they work?

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You'll pull that drainplug from the wish fountain because I do not happen to be a 'Somebody:' I am Nobody...

Know-How Dragon: 10 Rules for Corporate Blogs and Wikis
Time capsule of conventional wisdom...
Recognizing that this is an emerging area, here are 10 rules for using blogs and wikis to achieve your branding goals. Brands are about trust, and authenticity is the foundation of trust. Blogs should be written as if close friends were sharing observations over a Czech beer.
Note: In addition, there is a link to an excellent presentation (pdf, 52 pages and all free),
· 1. Be authentic [Link Poached from Marketingprofs.com]
· See Also Gopher: Back in 1992, when yahoo was something cowboys yelled and ebay was just pig Latin...
· See Also Sneak Peeks at Tomorrow's Office
· See Also Boing Boing add Technorati support
· See Also Lawish Hall-Of-Fame 2004: 60 Sites in 60 Minutes

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...the whole problem: to have within oneself the inseparable reality and the physical clarity of a feeling, to have it to such a degree that it is impossible for it not to be expressed, to have a wealth of words, of acquired turns of phrase capable of joining the dance, coming into play; and the moment the soul is preparing to organize its wealth, its discoveries, this revelation, at that unconscious moment when the thing is on the point of coming forth, a superior and evil will attacks the soul like a poison, attacks the mass consisting of word and image, attacks the mass of feeling, and leaves me panting as if at the very door of life.
Wagner/Artaud, from Samuel Delany’s Longer Views

See Me, Blog ME We are rich dealers, and our drug is information
Turned on by online opinion sites? Then get ready for Web video journals
Boston-based music-video producer Steve Garfield, 46, is no ordinary blogger. Instead of simply posting his thoughts online in a chatty weblog like millions of others around the world, he links a Canon GL2 digital video camera to his laptop and uploads short clips of protest rallies, traffic short-cuts and even news events onto his personal Internet site.
· Lets get the Vlogs Out, changing things for the better through information [link first seen at MEdia Dragon is going to be famous: Google Says It Doesn't Plan to Change Search Results]
· Commissioner Gorelick is not the right person to probe intelligence lapses
· Athens 2004 Olympic Games (The official website) [Link Poached from In a parallel universe called 'what if:' Reading Poetry Is Risky Move]
· See Also It's a fine thing to act tough with other people's blood or be generous with other people health

Pun 4 Phun: According to Caterina SusSex
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
MEdia Dragon just finished reading for the second time story by Matt Frei Italy: Unfinished Revolution. And the fifth sentence on the 23rd page is: Businessmen thus found themselves in unenviable position of having to pay bribes not only to the relevant authorities in the country where the project was being funded but also to the political party at home that funded it.
· Italy's secret life laid bare [ via Memery]

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A Private Fantasy: 'Why can't I show a woman telling lies?'
The true writer must write not what is merely acceptable, but what is true. What then is the truth about women? David Mamet has an unpopular answer...
· Can We Think About Women That Don’t Interest Us? [link first seen at A&L Daily]
· See Also We all use stereotypes all the time, whether we own up them or not
· See Also Wireless Blogging now, with photos: Blogs give the great unwashed a place to hang their laundry--dirty [ via Tool for moblogging Kablog ]
· See Also WEB WON'T TOPPLE TYRANNY: Dictatorship.com
· See Also Is technology torture covered under the Geneva Convention?
· See Also Both art and psychoanalysis provide meaning, healing, and hope in the face of loss and emotional trauma
· See Also Even though MEdia Dragon has dissappeared from blogroll @ Catallaxy, the Newish Design, & Fonts, seem rather Cool

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That's what happens to exiles; they are scattered to the four winds and then find it extremely difficult to get back together again.
Isabel Allende

My Surreal Vienna: Do I dare to disturb real pages in BERLIN, NY, AMSTERDAM?
On July 7, 1980, I became the enemy of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and was sentenced to life imprisonment. On July 8, a part of my parents died. On Radio Free Europe they listened to my obituary, five years after their daughter Aga had died. It turned their world inside out. My parents believed I was dead for over forty hours. They were the longest hours in my Mamka's life. When my cousin Tibo eventually informed them, that according to the latest reports on Radio Free Europe, I was alive, Mamka just cried.
On July 8, I stood before the mirror as if I were another person from the one I had been the previous morning. I experienced a rude awakening from the outside world, a dark liquid world.
· Real and surreal: Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened [ via Szirine]
· See Also Beyond Cold (War) River [ courtesy of Amazon ]
· See Also How to write a blog-buster
· See Also In Amerika

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Peace on Earth and goodwill to all men (and women). Meanwhile most people simply don't have the patience to wade through 3 hours of testimony put to paper. One newish right wing blogger gathered the most salient quotations from Condi Rice's testimony for you to peruse: What should have made Condi hysterical, she deemed historical...???

Higher Beings: Rankings of the 29 most influential sites in the blogosphere
In the past, I have ranked blogs based on their Alexa(ndra) mortal ranking system. However, Alexa isn't a perfect tool and it also is unable to evaluate certain types of websites, which makes it less than ideal way of establishing a blogger pecking order.
· Therein lies another exquisite irony: When you're blogging, it's important to be reminded that you don't have all the answers [link first seen at Right Wing News] [Links Poached from Alexa ; Technorati; Daypop; Blogstreet; Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem ; Google ; Amazon ]

Amerikan Factczech.com and Antipodian Webdiary attract a legion of fans and perhaps a larger legion of enemies. They are one of those love-it-or-hate-it diaries. Plenty of pollies would like to see them silenced...
· See Also What To Do When Your Friends E-mail Lies To You: FactCzech & smell a rat
· War Websites: Webdiary
· See Also Now 44, Steven Patrick Morrissey: Life's full of tricky snakes and ladders. I decided earlier that I would revolve through the 40th door somewhere else other than England
· See Also All those long, difficult nights of pondering your place in this world are a thing of the past
· See Also Web Designs
· See Also People Search: Famous People [link with dubious results ASK Jeeves: But don’t get him wrong; there is a dragon the bloggers like to laugh at most (smile)]
· See Also Ironically, the gossip columnist got fired for gossiping
· See Also How to Annoy Anyone

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Artmakers typically assemble funding from a variety of sources, creating a money tree which, like a delicate house of cards, can collapse if one of the key components is missing...

Grave New World
A lot of people are funny: they think there’s more money in science than in art, and they are right. It’s absolutely true. The catch is that what drives us is not our rational brain but our whole human arsenal of emotions and thought. And our only way of understanding that is through the arts.
· Atwood: Art Explains/Inspires Science [link first seen at Boston Phoenix 04/01/04]

Mary Magdalene was a prostitute who gave up her life of sin to follow Jesus. That's been the view of the Catholic Church for most of the past 2000 years. But some people believe Mary Magdalene actually played a much more significant role in the life of Jesus, as his wife, the mother of his child and the most important of his disciples. They believe the truth was suppressed by church leaders. There is a theory the truth about Mary was kept alive by a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, whose members included some of the greatest artists and thinkers of Western civilisation, including Leonardo Da Vinci.
· The Da Vinci code: Believer or not, let's just read along

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Blood Diversity: Tracing the Deadly Path of the Ranking on Blogstreet: 1184 / 143768: AM I RICH YET? HOW ABOUT NOW?

One diversity for the price of two
An elite that is unwilling to make judgements about why any one cultural practice is better than another, to set universal standards about what role individuals should be expected to play across society, and to promote a distinct set of values that a society should agree upon, finds a useful tool in multiculturalism. This is why it has been so well-suited to Western societies in the past few decades, increasingly disorientated by the erosion of cultural and political certainties. Clearly, the official promotion of multicultural policy has not provided any solution to this disorientation - indeed, by actively encouraging expressions of difference and divisions between communities, it may well have fuelled the process of fragmentation
· Facing up to the M-word: Spike 1 [ courtesy of Spiked 2]

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Who wouldn't love this kind of payoff?
Invest $2,000 in an obscure concept that has no track record and watch $80,000 pour into your bank account in a mere three weeks.
Bonus: The money helps win you a congressional seat.
Unlikely as it seems, the Internet's recent explosion of blogging was one of the keys to Ben Chandler's victory last month in a special U.S. House election in Kentucky.
· Low cost and high impact: Web ads score a political hit

The Blogging Iceberg: Me Me MEdia Dragons
Comics have joked for ages that humans will eventually adapt to technology: growing nimbler thumbs for text messaging, or larger ears to compensate for poor signal reception. But in a remarkable breakthrough, scientists believe they have isolated the gene responsible for one specific kind of computer activity - and the race is on to commercialize it.
It's an adaptive, emergent property - and is sure to ignite the Nature versus Nature debate once again. Biologists believe they have found the genetic adaptation responsible for 'weblogging'. The discovery may take the form of what Stephen Jay Gould identified as a 'spandrel' a previous adaptation for which evolution had found no previous use.
· Boffins isolate 'blogging gene'
· See Also Blogging's Power to Change Journalism [No subscription required; permission granted by Ratcliffe: czech out the cool photo by his eight year olf daughter
· See Also Howard Dean's Blog For America was a political phenomenon that no one expected
· See Also Profs join students in blogging craze
· See Also If Howard Dean’s failed political campaign accomplished anything... Blogging For Business - Great Reasons For Every Business To Start A Weblog
· See Also If the numbers are to be believed, then, outspoken male bloggers all live on political Mars, while the more introspective women are blogging away from emotional Venus
· See Also Google, Yahoo! and Blogs

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It seems hard sometimes to say to someone don't make that mistake because I'm speaking now from pain, I'm speaking now from tears, I'm speaking from suffering, from joy, from love. Before I could only speak of what the future could be.
The only way to come up from low is to think high. That's what life is really about: up and down, in and out, over and under, night and day, dark and light, all right.
Solomon Burke

The original Greek meaning of PASSION is suffering
Which is your favourite ? An older book can become a new book again...
Only about 10 per cent of the commercial titles published each year are fiction, and fiction accounts for only about a quarter of retail sales. We talk about fiction incessantly -- the Man Booker Prize, for example, continues to bear far more prestige, and attract far more excitement, than its non-fiction equivalent, the Samuel Johnson -- but it is non-fiction, as a nation, that we are actually reading. There's a message too powerful to ignore Publishers love a sure-fire trend, but there is so much more to picking a bestseller:
Popular culture now hates high culture so much that it campaigns aggressively against it.
· The Real Read: a Recurring Sweet revenge part of the game of life [Link Poached from The Telegraph and Ottakar's launch The Real Read, a poll to find the country's best-loved work of non-fiction ]
· See Also Colm Toibin's a travelling Irishman, his subject is a dilettante American. Together they create a riveting portrait of obsession

Praise be to one Giant Confessional: it's like a one-on-one thing, and that's deeply intriguing
There is a voyeur in all of us. At some level, we are fascinated by other people's secrets, out of either prurience or a more fundamental need to affirm that we are not alone, that other people, too, have thought or done things of which they are not proud. Over the past decade, confessions have become a staple of culture... We have had bare-all books about everything from abusive childhoods to addiction, crime, obsession, failure and, of course, sex in all its myriad forms.
I think we've got this compulsive drive to feel that we belong, or that we're normal. The fascination with other people's messy lives is really about a sense of How do they deal with these things? And also, How do you place yourself on a spectrum of normality?
If Millet's book sold because it was so racy, perhaps Moody's is selling because it is so ordinary .....
· See Full Text Story For your eyes only: with innovations including reality television and web cameras, combined with a general loosening of social and moral taboos, we now have unprecedented access into other people's worlds

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The latest human activity to be mastered by robots (robot comes from the Slavic root robota meaning work) was demonstrated recently when Sony’s QRIO bot successfully conducted an entire orchestra.
What next? Presiding over the Parliament? ...Then again, any robot would do a better job than what I witnessed via my vampirish eyes between circa 1995 and 2000 at the Bear, Dracula, Pit... (praise be to Sir James Russell, Blogger's supermarket royal.)

Blogging Golden Rules or nothing
Having trouble reading Golden Rule Jones? You're not alone. According to a handy tool that tests web sites for readability, this blog scores a 12.9 rating in the Fog Index.
· I don't know how much I trust this damn thing
· See Also Google: omnipresent, omniscient, on the heels of Microsoft
· I'll tell you right now, there's no chance in hell Big Bad would be developing prostate cancer .*wink wink nudge nudge*
· See Also A mash note to the blogosphere: bloggers know what you're thinking
· See Also Double or nothing
· See Also Vodka is the holy spirit in a performance swimming in symbolism

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The Irony of the (Iron Curtain) Cross(ing:) 'Die, Die, Die, Until I Live:' Does not Christ see death as his servant when he likens his own death to that of the seed that falls into the ground?

Stories about sins and harvests are nearly always written through a subjective eye ... Who is going to hell in a handbag and who is going to be escorted to heaven by the heavenly hosts?
MEdia Dragon might be watchdogging sin, but even the most politically zealot police force on earth knows little how many sins, gnarly attitudes, selfish choices and unkind thoughts MEdia Dragon has allowed into this blog...
Rediscovering the Meaning of Lent... Easter take us safely into the places of darkness which we fear, into the suffering...
Did God approve of drowning of my two mates on 7 July 1980 and keeping their graves in Austria away from their families for 24 years? Is this the law of the Iron Curtain harvest? Seeds must die before they can produce freedom...

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One of the troubles of our time is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
W.H. Auden, letter to Louise Bogan, May 18, 1942

Down through the ages, the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus has been celebrated in writing, music, art and sculpture. Today...

The passion of Christ at Easter: Torah, Bible and Koran: Passover, Alas, not by me
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

One of the greatest gifts the internet might yet prove to bequeath Humanity is a realistic shot at fisking into permanent oblivion the sacrilegious trinity of Yahweh, Allah and God, an anti-Artistic Celebrity Triple Act which has stunk up the concrete human world for several Millennia now, proving along the way to be the most hateful, destructive, divisive and sub-human fictional triptych ever written by the hand of some genius guy (or, like I said, chick).
Is anyone else at Webdiary - or in the blogosphere for that matter - as bored as I am with constantly trying to have the ‘last word’ in these endless tit-for-tat cyber-battles? Trying to ‘out-ironise’ each new level of knowing irony?.
Art can’t be art without the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief on the medium’s intrinsic terms, so if your medium happens to be writing, the internet now makes art impossible, evidently. One single cyber-heckler can prick the bubble for every potential reader on the planet. One cynic can destroy a million idealists.
· Ironically, I suppose I’ll find out soon enough [ via Webdiary: Fisking Fatigue]
· See Also God is a 2-1 on chance, a favourite
· See Also A life lived for business purposes

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(7% of Australians and) only about 15% of Americans drive a manual transmission. This is not surprising. Most Americans couldn't find France on a map and couldn't name the chief justice of the United States if William H. Rehnquist bit them on the face. Once his stuff is put in front of you, you couldn't help but laugh. He made very good points about the cars, but the culture as well...

With Gorgeous language and Youth asides, Zadie Smith On The Pressures Of Being Hyped As A Young Writer:
The hype is an enormous psychological pressure on a writer. Not that anyone should weep for a writer who has earned loads of money. But the bottom line is, this is not a healthy thing to have in your head at eight in the morning when you’re trying to write something. It’s just very messy. Even in America you have a better chance of having a basically healthy literary career, at least in the beginning, than you do in England. We’re driven by the celebrity mania that this whole country is sunk in.
· It's a window into the sluttish ideas [Bookslut 03/08/04]
· See Also Stone Cold Movies: snow mobiles

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Hey, Blogjam4 did you know that a Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother? It is sometimes not made clear to readers of MEdia Dragon that this chorible (sic) literary blogger is literally closer to Barbara Bush than George ever could be.
Someone please tell me, on which page of the rule book does it say that you can't write a novel, have a life, and keep a weblog, all at the same time?
Whiskey River via Fait accompli

Barbara Imrichova: Literary Affair with the woman who was married to one President, and gave birth to the current President
As a religious practice, blogging acquired the same status as begging. Many theories have been offered to explain the phenomenon. It has been interpreted as a beating out of evil spirits, as beautification, and even - erroneously - as buffoonery...
And, as the Blog brewed, those who read before
The blog-inn bawled: Unbolt then the Door!
You note how little love while blogs remain unread
And, once dead, their brave blogging be no more!
· Indeed, once dead, their brave blogging be no more [link first seen at Boyton]
· See Also Ripe for Young coverage: Honor of Being (How Appealing) Appalling
· See Also New, fresh and alternative ways to encourage and enhance storytelling from different perspectives

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Google
Much is being written about Gmail, Google's new free webmail system. There's something deeper to learn about Google from this product than the initial reaction to the product features, however. Ignore for a moment the observations about Google leapfrogging their competitors with more user value and a new feature or two. Or Google diversifying away from search into other applications; they've been doing that for a while. Or the privacy red herring.
· The Secret Source of Google's Power
· See Also skeptomai: A special sense of humour
· See Also The Blogging of the President: 2004

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Name My Blog Contest - $250 Prize: Get the Money [ via RoadToSurfdom ]

We're More Productive, but Who Gets the Money?
It's like running on a treadmill that keeps increasing its speed. You have to go faster and faster just to stay in place. Or, as a factory worker said many years ago, You can work 'til you drop dead, but you won't get ahead.
· Treadmill

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Tall bloggers get married sooner, get promoted quicker, and earn higher wages. Short bloggers are unlucky in politics and in love... Humour matters...

The Way Bad Book That Sold Millions
A newspaper editor had an idea. In 1966, appalled by the best sellers of Jacqueline Susann and others, he challenged his colleagues at Newsday, where he was a distinguished editor and writer, to perpetrate a book so mindlessly crass it could not fail. 'There will be an unremitting emphasis on sex. Also, true excellence in writing will be quickly blue-penciled into oblivion'.
· The book went on to sell millions of copies, crack the New York Times bestseller list and earn its authors $1.25 million [ via Seattle Weekly 03/31/04 ]
· See Also No Cold River Book Left Behind
· See Also How America's Literary Culture Has Changed
· See Also Leipzig Is For Booklovers

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All genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil

Links for thousands of readers who shall remain nameless
Okay, I confess. Im not really a Dragon. I dont breath fire, eat young maidens, or fly through the air. I dont live in a cave or use a huge pile of gems and precious metals for a bed. In fact, if the truth be told, Im actually a pretty small lizard in the agama family, native to Australia. Id more likely end up in a pet store than in a fantasy novel, but I like to dream big.
· A Time of Destinies [Link Poached from DD ]
· See Also
· The Economist threatens to provide readers with The big book index every month now: Amazon
· See Also Hungry? These books are good enough to eat
· Stop pretending: spamming Cold River comes with a price
· See Also Georges Bataille, self-professed disciple of the Marquis de Sade, wrote sadomasochistic classics. Under a false name, of course, to protect his job as a librarian...
· The Barbarian Invasions: While Rémy huffs and puffs about how he voted for Medicare and he'll take his chances, Sebastien demonstrates that money talks
· See Also Survival: It covers a lot of human behavior
· See Also 100 Dragons that Matter in Knowledge Management 2004
· See Also Search Engines Love Media Dragons: Content Driven Blogs A Good Marketing Choice
· See Also In PDF Format this Special Report on Phishing: the creation of fraudulent e-mails and websites used to deceive individuals into divulging their personal financial data
· See Also The State of the News Media Dragons 2004 is an inaugural effort to provide a comprehensive look each year at the state of American journalism
· See Also The Internet is profoundly changing how scientists work and publish

A tribute to Ana Marie Cox and Blo.
I think there are many extraordinary blogs and some bring an enormous amount of insight and understanding to the world. Few bloggers attain the same respect in their lifetime as is given to Daily Kos, How Appealing and wonkette. They have almost single-handedly put the blogs on the political and legal map. A number of factors have coalesced to fuel the young at heart generation's appetite for all things bloggish. Not least the fact that Rittenhouse Review: JAMES CAPOZZOLA and Political Fact Czechers are frequently viewed as more trend-savvy, right-on-the-voting-public and creative than the rather dreary mainstream observers.
Closer to my exile home, Ken Parish notes thar it's well over-time to acknowledge Tim Dunlop's spectacular blogging achievement in undertaking an in-depth, multiple part review of former White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke's book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror. Tim combines his book review with an ongoing analysis of current US political events involving Clarke, especially Bush Administration reactions to his Senate testimony, making for a compelling commentary on US political events in the run-up to November's Presidential election...
This is a series which exemplifies the potential that blogging has to achieve things to which conventional political journalism simply can't aspire, and a challenge to the rest of us who believe that blogging can fulfill an invaluable role in a genuinely liberal democratic society. Unfortunately it's a challenge to which I won't be rising in the immediate future due to pressure of other work (not to mention an all-consuming romantic obsession against which blogging takes a distant second place).
· Even barbarians like Tim Blair have virtual hearts as big as all outdoors [Link Poached from Ken Parish]
· See Also Buzz around D.C. is that everyone loves wonkette: She's fun and fresh and right on the money -- and is writing what others think but can't always write.... She can curse, for example
· See Also .....How to increase your readership, some useful thoughts from How to Save the World blog.
· Blogs: mercenary forces matter...
· Making big waves on theWeb
· See Also The official weblog of Noam Chomsky
· See Also Search engines summarised by BBC via Barista
· See Also Missing Men - Abandoning TV For Online
· See Also Old School Googlers Are REALLY REALLY Good Guys
· See Also Email cuts you off, in one way, and yet it also links us all up to chattering classes

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Danish philosopher Sóren Kierkegaard, patron of Media Dragon, called it the root of all evil. A culture frantic to entertain, divert, and inform cannot drown out boredom. It’s still a part of our condition...

Failure to Challenge Critical Conditions
The failure to challenge is a fundamental flaw in US arts journalism. The tone in US arts coverage is uniformly respectful, uninquiring, inherently supportive. And how did this happen? Because there are few cities with multiple critical voices. This monopoly places an unhealthy burden on critics. If theirs is to be the only voice to pronounce on a new show or the fate of an institution, they are obliged to wear a mantle of responsibility that is antithetical to good journalism. A critic is licensed to get it wrong from time to time. Restrict that license and the reviews grow safe and solemn. An era of incorporation fostered a pontifical tone in American arts criticism.
· Why American Arts Journalism Is So Bad [ courtesy of La Scena Musicale 04/01/04 ]
· See Also Celebrating Boredom: We try our best to avoid it, but boredom has its benefits

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Born-again superstar
Everyone's looking for meaning but no one expected Jesus to be such a lightning rod for it. Mel's film, like The Da Vinci Code, has tapped into a wellspring of religious curiosity. That there is a crisis of meaning in Western societies is not new - expressed by individuals dissatisfied with
Me-Me-Media Dragon consumerism, in desperate need for something higher in which to believe, that might give shape and direction to their lives. We are familiar with the symptoms - from the New Age to militant environmentalism, even the Australian affinity for the beach, with its intimations of transcendence.
· The original Greek meaning of "passion" is suffering

Solomon Burke: It's important that we constantly stay mentally, physically, spiritually and financially on the move. It's important that we try to develop our talent every day and use every opportunity to make a difference and the only way to make a difference is to be yourself and be real with yourself. Sometimes it's hard because people want you to sound like this person or that person or look like this person and that person but you have to be you because that's when the soulfulness comes out in how you express yourself.
t seems hard sometimes to say to someone don't make that mistake because I'm speaking now from pain, I'm speaking now from tears, I'm speaking from suffering, from joy, from love. Before I could only speak of what the future could be.
The only way to come up from low is to think high:
· See Also That's what life is really about: up and down, in and out, over and under, night and day, dark and light, all right

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Blog Me Tender Lauren: We're living in the age of the greatest dispersal
Australia's first wave of postwar immigrants find it tough finding love in a new land.
Go ahead and denounce the soullessness of planned communities and condo villages and exurban developments. But it's way out there, amid the new towns and barely charted byways, that the American dream is most largely lived.
· Migrant Love: extraordinary social revolution
· Cyberspace: Searching for love is big business
· See Also Amerikan Dream
· See Also Women bosses are more caring and sharing - it's official. But only if there's no queen bee
· Zha Zha: Boomers are intent on re-making their roles as grandparents ...

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Can you imagine Enron axing frauds like editors do?
Andy Rooney says USA Today was wrong to keep Jack Kelley on the job long after some colleagues questioned his work, but it did the right thing by investigating his reporting. I don't recall offhand any other company selling a product that paid to have an investigation conducted of some aspect of its own business and then made public the details of what it did wrong, writes the 60 Minutes pundit. Half a dozen newspapers recently have fired reporters for dishonest or unethical reporting.
· Can you imagine Enron doing that ?
· See Also Kelley sounded like he believed every word he said

Fate takes Woniora Ground Floor: It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass . . .
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
[ 'Walking,' written by Mr. Theodore Roethke]
· Imrich’s model: Data Mining Through Social Networking [ via Alex Pentland: workplace spoken conversations ]
· See Also Six degrees of separation? Chermside’s & Brisbane’s small world

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Changing landscape of the Google News

My Brilliant Search Engines Spotlight on Google and Search Engines in Newsweek
Little Engines That Can - Even Google can't think of everything. A host of start-ups are working to fill niches and capitalize on the search boom
· All Eyes on Google
· See Also Giddy Over Going Public
· See Also Talk Transcript: Steven Levy Talked About Google and the Search Wars

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A team from the Czech Republic won this year’s Pooh-sticks championship
The race involves dropping a stick into the river and seeing how long it takes to get to the finish line. One reason to love my childhood memories of Czechoslovakia ... you wouldn't get a childhood filled with ghost and folkloric stories or anything this silly or cute anywhere else in the world.
· Pooh-sticks gold
· Lucrative Publishing Contract: Book deal for a baby dragon hoax author. I created the hoax in order to attract potential readers
· See Also Sex stimulates the brain and makes people more intelligent

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Blogjam3

The mainstream media are largely in denial about the blogosphere, often taking opportunities to run it down and dismiss it as a place where only crazies hang out. They do this while reading it religiously.
· There are plenty of crazies out there in blogland, but you're crazy if you think that's all there is to it. [ via Webdiary ] [ courtesy of Tim Dunlop]
· See Also Google create a profile of your democratic interests
· See Also Google Web Alerts