Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

Huffington Uber-Blog Launches

The Huffington Post has launched, and it's part-Drudge (though from a different perspective), part blog of blogs. It's obviously version 1.0, which means you should give it time to settle down.

The great Harry Shearer will "Eat the Press" -- this could be fun.

Overall, the site seems to be aiming at the role of op-ed page of the Net. I'm watching with great interest, and reading some of it, too.

Weird Characters on Mac

UPDATED

I snipped the above from the unmediated site to show a problem I occasionally run into when browsing on my Mac: Quotes and apostrophes (and some other punctuation marks) get garbled with odd characters.

I'm not sure what causes this, but it causes me to avoid returning to such sites.

UPDATE: From the comments -- is this the answer? (There are some terrific, detailed comments if you're into the nuts and bolts of why this happens.)

More Evidence of Housing Trouble to Come

Marketwatch: Getting in at any price. Homebuyers increasingly approach home loans much the way consumers buy cars, shopping for the lowest possible monthly payment to avoid being left out cold on the housing-boom sidewalk. But the explosion of such products, a sign of looser lending standards, suggests many consumers are taking on complex loans without fully understanding the risks they face when interest rates rise in the future, some analysts say. And that could pose a ripple effect in overheated real estate markets.

See also, from the Washington Post, "It's on the house,", an article about the dangerous trend in which "everybody is paying for everything with (borrowing on) home equity" -- and we, the taxpayers, subsidize this. The home mortgage interest tax deduction is a questionable policy to begin with, but we turn that into a subsidy of totally unrelated spending by extending the deduction to loans on equity for spending that has nothing whatever to do with home ownership.

We are less a nation of risktakers than a culture of reckless spendthrifts.

Aggregating the Critics

Now Google is collecting movie reviews...

Another Legal Threat Against Speech

A Florida newspaper is reporting legal threats against parents who've been criticizing a charter school company and its operations in this forum. The name of the company is Charter Schools USA.

I hope the parents in the community remove any actually defamatory statements, if there are any (and the parents deny that there are). According to the news story, the company wouldn't specify which postings it found objectionable.

But I hope the parents will aggressively defend their right to be critical of a school administration that cancels PTO meetings, among other acts that sound pretty arrogant from a distance. And I hope they get help in that defense from free-speech defenders in the legal community.

Here, meanwhile, is the almost certain outcome in the wider Web community. Many people will now a) link to the story and the online forum; and b) mention the name of the company. (The story was just Slashdotted, which means it's going to get huge play online.)

One result? Before long, if you type "Charter Schools USA" into your favorite search engine, that news story -- and the forum, assuming it stays online, along with some withering commentary about the company -- will be near the top of the rankings. One suspects this will be a consequence that Charter Schools USA did not foresee.

Making Books of Blogs

An Israeli company plans to take the best blog postings by customers and put them between covers, says Nir Ofir, the editor.

Kansas, U.S., Beg for Ridicule

As the New York Times reports, advocates of "intelligent design" -- a code phrase for creationism -- are pushing Kansas toward classroom teaching designed to undermine Darwin's incredibly well-supported theory of evolution.

Unsurprisingly, people testifying in favor of this idiocy -- and the Board of Education member leading the charge -- haven't fully read (KC Star) the proposal. They're apparently taking it on faith.

Meanwhile, India and China and other nations are training young people to understand science and math at levels U.S. kids don't begin to approach. As America fiddles, replacing science with religion, our future may go up in the smoke of self-inflicted ignorance. Our international competitors must be laughing at us.

We are faithless to our children when we put them at such a disadvantage.

Google's New Misstep

I'm still a fan of Google, but the company has some blind spots. On privacy, for example, Google folks say all the right things, but "Trust us" is not enough for me.

The latest uproar -- a justified one, I believe -- is over the new "Accelerator" product. As CNet reports, there are issues galore on this.

As if the privacy concerns weren't enough, there are suggestions that the tool also can cause trouble with Web-based applications.

Perhaps Google needs to think a little longer and harder before unleashing its latest ideas on the Web.

And perhaps the rest of us need to be much more cautious about giving our trust to the company. Flush your Google cookies often, folks. Or anonymize them.

It'll Be a Blend of Old and New

Craig Newmark: Newsrooms are important. With all the excitement about citizens' media, it's easy to forget how important current news operations are. We have a lot of journalists there, but also, fact checkers, editors, and so on, and they perform an indispensable function.

Blogging for Human Rights

The excellent organization called Human Rights Watch is asking bloggers to help "prevent discrimination, uphold political freedom, protect people from inhumane treatment in wartime, and campaign to bring offenders to justice."

I trust this will annoy the pro-torture community.

Bonus: Human Rights Watch RSS feeds.