BuzzMachine

Republic.net
: Jack Balkin looks back on a year of blogging and uses the occasion to debunk the idiocy of Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com, a tribute to Internet ignorance and technological xenophobia that contended that the Internet would restraint free speech and that argued somebody should tell us what links we’re required to give. I always thought his arguments were so patently inane that they didn’t deserve the bits to rebut them. But Balkin, as he has done all year, raises the level of discourse.

Bush blogs!
: Well, that’s Jeb Bush who blogs on his brother’s campaign blog. And it’s a demonstration of why we really don’t want politicians blogging.

Op-ed
: The Star-Ledger asked me to write an op-ed about Dean and blogs post-Iowa (which seems like a month ago already, eh?). It’s appearing in Sunday’s paper. The text is below. I’ll put up a link to the Ledger when it’s up.

For those who’ve been reading this blog, much of it is a rehash meant for the nonbloggers still out there.

Click on “more” if you want to see it…

(more…)

Treo madness
: The Times magazine catches up to Treo madness with Gizmodo‘s Pete Rojas as its guide.

No feed, no read
: I find that if a blog doesn’t have an RSS feed, I don’t end up reading it.

It’s the economy, stupid
: Tom Friedman gives us a bonus sixth part to his five-part series (confirming my suspicion that last week’s was an Iowa special edition) with a simple message: The cure to the problem of the Middle East is jobs.

I was at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley a few days ago, and they have this really amazing electronic global map that shows, with lights, how many people are using Google to search for knowledge. The region stretching from Morocco to the border of India had almost no lights. I attended a breakfast at Davos on the outsourcing of high-tech jobs from the U.S. and Europe to the developing world. There were Indian and Mexican businessmen there, and much talk about China. But not a word was spoken about outsourcing jobs to the Arab world. The context

Simultaneous translation
: Can any sane person tell me what the f this means?

Howard Dean’s bark was missing its bite. And his socks were missing their warp. Not to mention their woof.

If copy like that ever passed my desk, I would (a) demand a rewrite, (b) fire the person, (c) not run it. But then, I don’t work here.

Y’know, I’ve never hopped on the bandwagon trying to run over this writer but I’m running to catch up and jump on now.

If you’re not interactive, you’re deaf
: It pisses me off that I can’t leave comments at CampaignDesk.org. This supposed watchdog on the press and the campaign calls coverage of the Dean Scream “cheap shots.” I’d like to respond. But I can’t. What are you afraid of, guys?

Bryan Keefer writes something that’s nothing short of a Dean apologia, arguing that poor Howie was just trying to be heard above the roar of his eager supporters. Crap. He knew he was on TV. His rant was a coldly calculated move that backfired badly. He decided to come out looking not like a loser. And he ended up looking like a loser of another variety. And the voters and many a pundit and most comics and lotsa bloggers called it.

I would say that on CampaignDesk’s site. But they don’t want to hear from us.

The piece ends:

In the hermetically sealed world of campaign coverage, Dean’s post-caucus speech is no longer just a speech — it’s a symptom.

Who’s hermetically sealed?