Two views
: Two correspondents from Blogging the President went to the Politics Online Conference. Stirling Newberry says it was the place to be. Ellen Dana Nagler says it was a snoozer filled with laptopless peple who just wanted to use the Internet to raise bucks.
Irony noted
: Prof. Larry Lessig’s new book, Free Culture. $24.95.
But it will be free online next week.
: And give the good professor plenty of credit for linking to this review from Stephen Manes at Forbes (whose email address is, quite appropriately, at cranky.com):
Man the barricades for your right to swipe The Simpsons! According to Stanford law professor and media darling Lawrence Lessig, a “movement must begin in the streets” to fight a corrupt Congress, overconcentrated media and an overpriced legal system conspiring to develop “a
To the tune of: Those Were The Days, My Friend
: Jerry Colonna — VC, former partner of VC blogger Fred Wilson — had a wonderful tale the other day about running into a fellow VC from those good old daysand Tripod founder , Bo Peabody (with whom I served on the board of Plastic.com), and the memories it brought back:
I remember when we closed the deal to sell Geocities to Yahoo for more than $3.5 billion. I remember news of the deal began to leak out and the Times
Into the nest
: Lt. Smash, a veteran of the Iraq war, goes to the anti-war demonstrations and interviews the demonstrators. Great reading, through his eyes.
No, I decided to go to the protest because I wanted to learn what this anti-war movement is all about. Why were these people so vehemently opposed to the overthrow of a brutal dictator, and the liberation of 25 million people from under the yoke of tyranny? So I messed up my hair, didn
The Daily Oprah
: Scared ya, didn’t I?
But seriously, folks….
I just sent the letter below to Michael Powell at the FCC.
We should make a Freedom of Information request in about a week to see how many Oprah complaints they have vs. Stern complaints.
Witness
: Adam Curry on the changes he saw in Iraq:
I’ve seen first hand what work is being done in Iraq by the dutch troops, and although a different and much less hostile region than near Bagdad, I spoke to enough iraqi citizens in the province of Al Mutana to know that there is a great appreciation for the coalition ending Saddam’s regime and for facilitating the rebuilding of their country. Assuming there is indeed a void that has been created, folks certainly are happier. Not necessarily worse off.
Getting closer
: Tom sends us to a new RSS reader called Pluck that operates inside Internet Explorer. I’ve been waiting for a reader that would do that. I don’t ever want anything clogging up my Outlook more than it’s already clogged; I find a separate ap awkward; I find a web-served reader limited. What I really want is to be able to do everything — see what’s update; subscribe; read; link — inside my browser.
Pluck is a good start. But it has limitations. They foolishly came out without the ability to read OPML lists of feeds exported from other RSS readers (thus it’s near impossible to switch). I did as they said and put my file in the right folder; still didn’t work.
Because they trick the browser into looking at a Pluck page that, in turn, pulls up RSS files and web pages, it appears impossible to bookmark anything you’ve viewed through Pluck; that’s a big weakness.
All in all, what Pluck really does, based on a quick evaluation, is show the power of adding RSS to Internet Explorer.
When are you going to get around to it, Microsoft?
: UPDATE: UNINSTALLED: I couldn’t even find the place to put OPML files (and went twice to their forums to follow their inaccurate instructions). Without that, this is useless to me. Pluck got one chance to win me over. They lost it. Uninstalled. I plucked Pluck.
Hide your head
: The Scotsman talks to former bloggers to ask why they gave up their blogs and refers to them all anonymously. The shame. The shame.
