Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

One More Time on Iraq War: The Fix Was In

CNN: Bush asked to explain UK war memo. Eighty-nine Democratic members of the U.S. Congress last week sent President George W. Bush a letter asking for explanation of a secret British memo that said "intelligence and facts were being fixed" to support the Iraq war in mid-2002.

This request will probably be ignored or dismissed as "old news" by the administration. But so what?

Who can possibly doubt anymore that the Bush administration decided to launch the Iraq war long, long before it made the official "decision" in 2003? This was obvious even before the war started.

So when the Democrats -- whose spines remain missing in action -- profess to be shocked, shocked by this memo, they're either liars or fools. Or both.

(Speaking of feckless, the U.S. mass media are finally waking up to this memo, almost two weeks after it appeared in the British press. About time...)

Taking Media Risks in a Dictatorship

An editor at the Guardian alerts me to This is Zimbabwe, a pro-democracy blog in a nation run by a despot. I admire the courage of the people who are doing this.

They remind us all that liberty -- including press freedom, something we take for granted in our privileged corner of the world -- is not universal. It takes bravery to obtain, and hard work to maintain.

The Media and Change

Lance Knobel delivered a brilliant lecture in Australia, and posted the text on his blog. Read "Nullius in verba: navigating through the new media democracy" and learn.

Jay Rosen, the other speaker on the program, discussed "Each Nation its Own Press" -- another terrific read.

A Reporting Tour de Force

Drunkenbatman's opus on his investigation into a software project is extraordinary. He's done apparently prodigious research, and does something more journalists should do: He tells us what he doesn't know, not just what he does.

BlogNashville, in Retrospect

Mark Glaser has a good roundup of the events at last weekend's blogging confab. Glenn Reynolds also looks back on the gathering in a TechCentralStation piece

An extra word here of praise for three of the principal organizers, Bob Cox, Bill Hobbs and Rex Hammock, and the volunteers who helped them. They did a great job.

Apple's Beta Operating System

UPDATED

I'm selling my old Mac Powerbook, and bought a new one that has Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) preinstalled. The changeover -- migrating my old applications and data to the new machine -- has been nothing but trouble. I won't go into the details, but aAfter following instructions to the letter I find myself reinstalling for the third time. Who has time for this crap?

Update: I was asked in the comments what went wrong. This: The utility that brings old apps over during the install created system problems -- such as making iChat unusable -- and the after-install migration utility simply failed to work at all. Then, after another clean OS install (and after then manually moving and/or reinstalling apps, Filevault failed when I turned it on for the first time (hung up, forcing hard reboot, damaging Home directory). Ridiculous.

Is it a customer's fault for using third-party software that may or may not be part of the problems? Let's say for the moment that it is (though that's a somewhat bizarre notion if you think about the purpose of a personal computer with an operating system that has programming hooks designed to let third parties create new applications).

If so, Apple needs to change its installation procedures and migration tools. It could tell people to reinstall all applications one by one. Or it could keep a database of software it knows to be compatible with the new OS and tell the migration utilities to refuse to touch anything else. But to provide tools that either break the system or fail to work at all is not very useful.

The Fallujah Mosque Shooting, Unedited

Kevin Sites, the American reporter who stirred up the world with his videos of the Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque last year, has posted the entire video online. He's also given NPR a long interview about it.

More on this from Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing.

A Blogging Beat at a Newspaper

I just got an email from a reporter for a Big Newspaper that's starting a blogging beat. Now that's a sea change...

Lucky Friday This Week

There's a gathering of grassroots-media types and celebration of JD Lasica's new book, Darknet, at the Varnish Gallery in San Francisco Friday evening, 6-9 p.m. Address: 77 Natoma street between 1st and 2nd St. and Mission and Howard.

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.