Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

A Citizen Fights Back, Via Web

A mall developer sicced his lawyers on a man who started a website to praise a new mall. He says: "Since I possess very limited resources with which to defend myself from this legal onslaught, I decided that my best option was to make use of that great equalizer, the World Wide Web."

Did he ever.

(Via BoingBoing)

A Buggy Car/Phone Combo; Customers, Not Companies, to Rescue

That's a reference to the semi-compatibility of the Bluetooth connection between my phone, a Treo 650, and my new Prius. It took a workaround simply to get the car and phone to recognize each other at all.

Naturally, neither PalmOne nor Toyota has thought to prominently tell customers about this on the part of their websites they produce themselves. No print publication would dream of looking at something so obscure, of course. The companies are letting the customers do their own reporting.

I'm hoping to find help for my next problem -- getting the now-paired phone and car to truly communicate as they should. I've been unable to upload my phone's address book into the Prius computer -- well, it uploads but most of the numbers don't display properly on the car's screen. Apparently if there's a dash (-) or parenthesis in the number that chokes the Prius database software. Idiotic. Other phones seem to work.

Yes, this stuff is still fairly new. But PalmOne's adherence to Bluetooth standards that other phone makers seem to understand well enough is leaving something to be desired.

The car, meanwhile, is quirky. I manually punched in some "one-button" phone numbers -- the car won't let you dial entire phone numbers via the built-in screen while it's moving -- but when the car is moving it also hides the numbers in the one-touch screen. You have to memorize what the one-touch numbers are (which isn't that hard for a couple but gets difficult for lots of them). I've found nothing online about this problem.

Once, we rode around in buggies. Now, what we ride around in is buggy.

Theocrats Running Rampant

Frank Rich (NY Times): The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay. Next to what's happening now, official displays of DeMille's old Ten Commandments monuments seem an innocuous encroachment of religion into public life. It is a full-scale jihad that our government signed onto last weekend, and what's most scary about it is how little was heard from the political opposition. The Harvard Law School constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe pointed out this week that even Joe McCarthy did not go so far as this Congress and president did in conspiring to "try to undo the processes of a state court." But faced with McCarthyism in God's name, most Democratic leaders went into hiding and stayed silent. Prayers are no more likely to revive their spines than poor Terri Schiavo's brain.

The Wrong Standard

Barron's (reg req): The Most Respected CEOs. (Warren) Buffett is the ultimate example of a CEO who counts -- Berkshire Hathaway wouldn't exist without him. Some worrywarts at Barron's were concerned about putting him on the list because of the ongoing investigation into a potentially dubious reinsurance contract that Berkshire's General Re unit provided to American International Group. That deal may not have represented Berkshire's finest hour, but it in no way diminishes Buffett's extraordinary achievement. Berkshire stock stood at 15 when he took over 40 years ago and it's now at $87,000 a share. That pretty much says it all.

First, a disclosure: I am an investor in Berkshire Hathaway, and have been since the mid-1980s. More than not, I admire Warren Buffett as a visionary and an advocate of honest capitalism. In particular, his loud complaints against sleazy accounting tricks and excessive pay for unaccountable executives who use those tricks to help pad insiders' pockets have been a welcome part of the conversation we all need to have about the nature and future of a system that, while imperfect, is plainly the best of the alternatives.

That's also why I get frustrated by the anything-goes attitude on Wall Street and in Washington and so many other places where cynical people ignore the context in which capitalism operates. Corporations are creatures of the state, not God, and they exist in a real world where employees, suppliers and communities should be, but frequently are not, given sufficient consideration next to pursuit of profits.

A spectacular return on investment does not pretty much say it all. It tells only part of the story.

If it turns out that Berkshire Hathaway has played a significant role in the growing insurance scandal, that would be more than a passing thought in my book. It would be an unfortunate contribution to the unethical culture that has become such a dismal hallmark of American business in recent years.

Buffett has earned the benefit of the doubt. But he has some questions to answer.

I hope Barron's -- like its sister publication, the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper of depth and influence -- will be asking those questions.

Bubble, Bubble, Bubble...

NY Times: Trading Places: Real Estate Instead of Dot-Coms. Real estate-crazed Americans have started behaving in ways that eerily recall the stock market obsession of the late 1990's.

And they've been doing it for several years here in California.

In mid-2003, in a Mercury News column, I wrote:

"Just as I didn't understand why stock prices were rising so much in the late 1990s, I don't understand what's going on here, either. Of course, maybe house prices will go up forever at a rate wildly exceeding inflation even as rental prices plummet periodically.

"I'm hearing some circular logic from those who believe this is sustainable. Prices keep rising because -- well, because they keep rising. We heard that kind of stuff in 1999 about stocks.

"Yes, there are some valid reasons, too. Supply is constrained and low interest rates are a huge help. But there's not much room for rates to fall. If true deflation sets in, home values will drop. If interest rates rise, as they seem to be doing now, sales will eventually slow and prices will drop.

"The housing bubble, if it is one, feels doubly troubling for another reason. With stocks, losses were limited. Home buyers, especially recent ones, are vastly more leveraged. Even a modest price correction of tens of thousands of dollars would erase their entire investment, or more."

As I've also said, we have one endlessly renewable resource in America: financial suckers.

I fear what will happen this time, because the damage will be so much worse for our overall economy.

A Living Will for These Times

A new "For Sale/Barter" ad on craigslist begins:

Dear loved-ones,
I make the following statement in a sound state of mind and of my own volition:

If I am rendered comatose and determined to be in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for a period longer than one month and if no imminent cure is forthcoming, I do not wish to be kept alive by artificial means including but not limited to nourishment, hydration, etc.

However....

If, due to the absurd political state of affairs in this country, my persistent vegetative state and impending unplugging can be parlayed into some sort of political leverage, I wholly endorse using my predicament in whatever way possible for the purposes of passing legislation favorable to my general political and ethical outlook. Here is a list of top-tier causes I support and will continue to support, both while in my PVS and after my eventual death.

• Debt Relief to Impoverished Nations: I will agree to stay in a PVS for an indeterminate amount of time if the United States aggressively pursues a policy of debt relief and debt forgiveness to developing and impoverished nations.

There's more, much more.

Google and Transparency

UPDATED

I remain an admirer of Google, but like many other people I'm worried that the company is getting too big for its virtual britches. As Jeff Jarvis and others have noted lately, there's a worrisome bent toward "trust us" in the operation of Google News, a site I like but find frequently frustrating.

Google News embarrassed itself by including a disgusting Nazi-ish site (I will not link to it myself) in its source-crawl. The company has removed the site, thankfully, but not before enduring well-deserved ridicule for having included the garbage in the first place.

The problem is, among other things, a lack of transparency. Why doesn't Google just post a list of the news sites it uses as sources? I can't see the harm in doing this, and can see a lot of value.

Update: A Google spokesperson says: "I believe we did not list all the sites for competitive reasons. But, I do hear what you're saying and can pass your feedback (which we take very seriously) to the News team."

So the answer is No, for now. Too bad.

Until Google does the right thing, we'll have to use a list being compiled via a programming script at the Private Radio blog. Some of the sites surprise me, and will probably surprise you, too. (How long do you expect it will take for Google to demand that the blogger stop?)

---

On a separate matter, the excellent Philly Future -- a combination blog, citizens news and photo sharing site about Philadelphia -- is appropriately miffed that Google has absolutely no listing for the site. (UPDATE: This is being fixed; see Matt Cutts' comment below. Thanks, Matt!)

Karl Martino, who runs the site (and is former colleague of mine), wrote me:

I think Google has banned Philly Future from indexing.

Over a year ago a porn redirector owned the phillyfuture.org domain. I think that is what caused Googlebot to stop visiting the domain.

I've been posting in various message boards trying to get help. I've used their online forms to submit the site and ask for help a few times - but I can't seem to get a real response from Google itself except to: "be assured that these changes are automated. It is certainly our intent to represent the content of the internet fairly and accurately." from an automated reply. Basically - I keep being told to sit tight.

There is a nice Google employee blogger who is attempting to help - but he can't seem to figure out what's wrong. I've done all the right things according to him.

It's been a year now that I've had the Phillyfuture.org domain up. Googlebot has not visited. Philly Future is visitors traffic from MSN an Yahoo! - but not Google.

If anyone from Google is reading this, how about fixing what is obviously a bad setting?

For me, this is one more reason to use the other search engines for at least some of my searches.

Update: Google has responded to Karl, and it looks like all will be well. I'm glad to hear it.

So Where is Kyrgyzstan, Anyway?

UPDATED

I'm pretty good on geography, but when I read about the revolution and/or coup in Kyrgyzstan I had to confess to myself that other than knowing its general location in mid-Asia I couldn't place it on a map. I'm betting I'm not alone in this. Yet few of the news stories came with a map.

Seems like an obvious thing to include. Newspaper editors would include one as a matter of routine, even though it would take away space from the story. Web publishers have no excuse for not including maps, period.

(Map, showing general region, via CIA World Fact Book)

Not Being that Bozo on the Airplane

Had to cancel a trip east due to a nasty case of bronchitis from a chest cold. Yesterday I could barely complete a sentence without coughing up a storm; glad I had some strong medicine last night.

Not only was traveling a lousy idea for me, but I didn't want to be the guy on the plane who's coughing his lungs out, freaking out the other nearby passengers who'll spend the next day wondering if they're about to get sick, too.

Congressional Cowards

Question: If the Republican sock-puppets who passed the Schiavo law weren't doing it mostly for political posturing, why didn't they just do what they've made abundantly clear they expect the federal judiciary to do: Order the doctors to put the feeding tube back in. What hypocrites they are.