BoingBoing bloggers talk about Violet Blue controversy's implications

BoingBoing: Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, John Battelle, Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin. (Photo: Bart Nagel)

The previous post was focused on the circumstances around BoingBoing blogger Xeni Jardin's unilateral removal of dozens of Violet Blue-related posts over a year ago. This post, which excerpts from the same conference call with Jardin, David Pescovitz, BoingBoing Gadgets editor Joel Johnson and Federated Media CEO / BoingBoing business manager John Battelle, relates to how BoingBoing's editorial policies have been affected by the controversy.

Xeni Jardin: The crux of what happened here is that BoingBoing began as a personal hobby. If you count the years, BoingBoing has not been a business a lot longer than it's been a business. It's been a "thing" since the mid-1980s when Mark [Frauenfelder] and Carla [Sinclair] started it as a fanzine....

When we first reached out to John [Battelle] to help us think about ways to make money to cover our hosting costs, one of the first things he asked us was: How do you guys manage your editorial process? I remember that he was taken aback by the fact that we don't coordinate with each other before we post things.

David Pescovitz: We don't have beats, we don't have assignments or anything like that. We just post about whatever happens to interest us at any moment. Even as it's grown, that complete editorial autonomy has remained.

Xeni Jardin: Often, because of that autonomy, over time I might publish something that Pesco published three weeks ago or three years ago and maybe he or a reader will poke me and say, hey, he already posted this -- you gotta take that down. And that's the cost of what we do autonomously and asynchronously and in four or five different time zones.

There wasn't some kind of sinister plot here. It's just kind of how we did things. And we're realizing now that we might want to take a different look at that, and maybe we have to have a process or a policy.  We realized that this has become a thing. But at the time, I did that for personal reasons, and for a back story that will always remain private. 

John Battelle: What we have here is a balancing act between what has made BoingBoing so good, and increasingly, listening to a community that wants BoingBoing to stay good. What's made it so good is that it's kind of an asynchronous jam between four musicians, without being in the same place or looking each other in the eye. 

Anything that we might change that affects that magic, we really have to think about. And what the community has asked us to do is think about it. So the [current] de facto, undiscussed, presumptive policy, which we recently just declared as part of this whole dust-up, was: Every individual has the right to do whatever they want to do. They can post anything they want, about anything they want, whenever they want without asking permission, and if they want to change those posts or take them down, they can do that too.

Our learning from this is that we need to step back and have a conversation, listening to all the feedback we've been getting, and see if we need to review this approach and change it. And that's exactly what we're doing.

BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin  (Photo: Robert Sachs)

Myself and L.A. Times blog editor Tony Pierce spoke earlier Wednesday to BoingBoing bloggers Xeni Jardin and David Pescovitz, as well as BoingBoing Gadgets' Joel Johnson and John Battelle, the chief executive of Federated Media and BoingBoing's business manager. It was a long conversation, so I'm going to split it up into a couple of issues-centered posts. This one touches on when and, to a lesser extent, why the Violet Blue-related posts were unpublished.

What can you say about why the posts disappeared?

Xeni Jardin: When I decided to unpublish these posts -- and I did that -- it wasn’t like there was a policy or practice in place where we would all confer with each other before we posted something, so I didn’t confer with all of my editors before taking it down.

Did you think people wouldn't notice, or if they did notice, that they wouldn't care?

XJ: God, I don’t know if I really thought through all of that. I just really didn’t. It’s hard for me to articulate exactly how weird this is. Suddenly it became this big huge thing with all this public scrutiny and all this speculation. But at the time I just wanted to take this material down for a host of reasons that I don’t want to talk about in public because I don’t think it would do this person any good. We don’t blog in detail about every minute decision we make about what to publish and what not to. 

 ...There wasn’t an attempt to hide it. And I didn’t bring it up again in part because it involved some personal, private stuff that I don’t tend to get into. Like whether someone’s character is this or that, or whatever kind of personal dirty laundry was involved.

Regarding the decision to remove:

XJ: My biological father who died when I was a kid was a painter and a print maker.  He went through different phases in his creative work. A lot of what he did was paint very beautiful photorealistic portraits of nude women. Sometimes he went off into experimental territory that he was embarrassed about... sometimes he would just grab batches of the stuff that was crappy as years went on, and go to the backyard and burn it. And it wasn’t that he was censoring himself, and God knows nobody else was censoring him. It was that this was his creative work. This was art. And he felt like some of it wasn’t representative of who he was anymore and he didn’t want it to be available to the world to see.

That’s how I felt with this situation. (I mean, there were other reasons for removing the posts.) But –- it was my work. And I felt like: This is my work, this is my blog. This is not the same thing as Wikipedia or the paper of record. It’s BoingBoing. And I have the right to take these things down while I think about whether I want them out there or not.

And on factors that influenced the decision not to broadcast it:

XJ: Please try to bear in mind, a year and a half ago when I unpublished this stuff, it was a time when there were a couple of hate web sites specifically about me.  Kooky, creepy Internet guys were posting all sorts of grotesque, sexually explicit stuff about me, and trying to find photos of my house and information of my family.  Really gross stuff that frightened me.  When you’re at the receiving end of that kind of attention, would you voluntarily go out with private information in something that just felt sensitive and felt like your private editorial prerogative?  It would be the last thing you’d do in that situation. 

More here about the what this means for BoingBoing's posting policy and its future.

Previously:

BoingBoing and Violet Blue: Game Frakkin' Over
Violet Blue still in the dark about her 'behavior'
Regarding BoingBoing's factual dispute on Monday's Violet Blue post
Violet Blue scratches her head over BoingBoing purge

 

In the first episode of an innovative documentary series “In Their Boots,” the sister of a wounded soldier explains why the family cooperated with the filmmakers.

"I think it’s important to educate America,” said Christy Babin, whose brother Alan, an Army medic, was gravely wounded during the assault on Baghdad in 2003 and still must cope with the debilitating effects of traumatic brain injury and a stroke.

The story of the Babin family, particularly Alan’s mother, Rosie, is altogether heart-wrenching. Much of the footage was shot by Rosie Babin, who is remarkably resilient and determined.

What makes “In Their Boots” different from other documentaries is its manner of presentation: A different episode will be shown each week on www.intheirboots.com, followed by an interactive discussion with viewers via webcams and instant messaging. The Babin family episode is set for 4 p.m. Wednesday.

Each episode will tell a different tale of service personnel and their families. The effort was backed by a $4-million grant to the liberal Brave New Foundation from the Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund to raise the awareness of a public that, without a draft, is largely insulated from the grim realities of war and its aftermath.

The Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund is supported by the California Community Foundation, one of the oldest, most esteemed philanthropic groups in the nation. For three years the filmmakers fanned out across the country.

They decided that showing their work online was in keeping with how the generation that is fighting the two wars gets its information. This is the YouTube, Facebook, etc. generation and so how better than online to tell their stories?

Brave New Foundation President Robert Greenwald is known for his activist documentaries, with targets including Wal-Mart, Rupert Murdoch and various aspects of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war. But the first episode of “In Their Boots” has no evident political agenda.

Instead, the Babin family is shown at work and play, as Rosie and her husband, Alain, help their son with his daily needs and then on a ski holiday. The emotional high point may be when Rosie ponders what happens to Alan when she and her husband are gone.

Alan Babin was wounded while dashing to help a downed colleague. For his bravery, he was awarded the Bronze Star.

On camera at least, the Babin family neither condemns the foreign policy that sent their son to war nor do they support it. If there is a journalistic hole in the story it involves the unanswered question of how much medical and financial help Alan receives from the Veterans Affairs Department.

But that’s a quibble. This first try of “In Their Boots” is powerful and goes a long way toward fulfilling Christy Babin’s desire that Americans be educated about the uncomfortable truth behind the service and sacrifice required of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

-- Tony Perry

Photo of Alan Babin courtesy of "In their Boots"

Having looked into this teapot tempest and spoken to both Violet Blue and Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing, I can say three things with confidence:

1) BoingBoing messed up, not in taking down Violet Blue's posts, but in taking them down under cover of night and then, when caught, trying to skirt the issue rather than owning the mistake.  This is a business and a major media outlet, not a page on LiveJournal.  If you're going to be transparent, be transparent and keep your readers informed about what you're giving them, and what you're taking away.  There are no transparency exceptions for "personal issues."

It appears Jardin now understands this:  "Some of the things that were natural to do when it was four people just doing it as a hobby," she began when we spoke on the phone, then finished on a different track:  "We rearrange things as we go along and realize the volume of any small actions you take will be a lot louder. We’d never handle it the same way again."

2) The reasons behind the mistake of number one are indeed rooted in personal dynamics between Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue.  What little I know of those dynamics I decided quickly was none of my business. When I realized this was a private matter and not some kind of baseless, mean-spirited ostracism, or legal dispute, or vendetta, I began to feel the story's importance shrinking, even while attention to it was ballooning. Problem was, the people involved didn't come clean until way too late, after it had already morphed into a sleazy gossip yarn.  Maybe a little quicker with the sunlight next time.

3) Bloggers are weird.  (c.f. this)

image courtesy flickr user borkurdotnet

I spoke to Violet Blue again this afternoon. My second and third requests to talk to a BoingBoing blogger were not accepted. I don't like writing stories with only one side represented, but if the other side won't talk to me, there's not a lot I can do. Here's some of what Violet Blue said:

-- "I still have no idea what they're talking about. I've been racking my brain to try to figure out what happened a year ago that might’ve made me public enemy No. 1 with BoingBoing. What did I do that was so rotten and bad that made them feel like they needed to remove all my posts?"

-- "I really want them to explain what I did."

-- "I'm thinking too, OK, could there be something embarrassing? But there isn't anything I've done that's secret or weird or anything like that."   

-- "I've been getting e-mails all morning asking me what the event was -– and I just have no idea."

-- "I was really close to Xeni," she said of Xeni Jardin, blogger and long-time BoingBoing contributer.

-- "I haven't incited anything, I haven't kept it on the top of my blog."

-- "They basically used the nuclear option for a personal grievance."

-- "I have nothing to hide because I really don't think I've done anything wrong."

-- "I haven't e-mailed them because I don't know what I'd say, and it's too embarrassing."

-- "They should've said something to me."

-- "It would be like going to your old house and finding your old yearbook and finding names crossed out of it and pictures ripped out."

In its explanation of the Blue purge, BoingBoing cited what it called an "erroneous" claim that it had removed 100 Violet Blue-related posts. They did not name the allegedly erroneous post as mine or even bother to link to it, so let me name the post: it was mine, and I linked to it earlier in the sentence. Notably, BoingBoing did not offer the correct number of purged posts (saying only that they had "unpublished some posts relating to her"). Also, someone from BoingBoing refused to tell me how far off my count of 100 was.

Let me correct the record. With some help from Violet Blue herself, and her boyfriend, who stayed up late last night writing a script to scan the WayBack Machine for Blue BB posts, I can present this spreadsheet. 

It contains 72 BoingBoing posts containing the name of Violet Blue. I found one duplicate in the 40 or so that I spot checked. This was not a high duplication rate, and Violet's boyfriend, she said, had written a second script to eliminate duplicates. Maybe it missed one or two.  So maybe 72 is slightly high.

In any case, let's say that more than just "some" posts were removed. And let's also note that this search only went from January 2005 to August 2007, when the archive ends. Further, BoingBoing's Internet archive has many different gaps in it where other Blue posts might have been sitting.

In sum, I was remiss to take at face value Violet Blue's number of 100. I should have said at least 70.

I apologize for the imprecision.

Another Big Bang for the Internet
Image courtesy woodleywonderworks

In a story with the excellent headline "Internet body approves domain name big bang," Agence France-Press reports that ICANN, the Internet naming authority, will now allow an essentially unlimited number of Internet addresses to be created and registered.

This seems likely to herald the end of ".com" as we know it -- why append that silly and now mostly meaningless suffix when you could have a nice, specific site address, instead?  Home.ebay, or Mandalay.casino or BofA.bank.  How about Graumans.chinese, or taqueria.chihuahua or disney.land? Scout.blog, wherecanIbuy.a.hummer? 

Maybe people will even create new URLs just for one-time news events: BillGates.later, Guns.R.Legal, HolyCrap.They.Caught.A.GreatWhite. 

Feel free to leave some suggestions in the comments.

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

Last week, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan appeared on Comedy Central to blast U.S. coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying "if I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States, I would blow my brains out."

Logan has repeatedly argued with the idea that the U.S. press is putting a negative spin on Iraq, saying that if anything, the picture Americans get consistently fails to convey the gravity and horror she has seen on the ground.

Then yesterday, CBS extended Logan's contract and broadened her beat to include international security issues and matters of U.S. policy, making her one of the top international affairs journalists in the U.S.

And now today, strange timing, Logan has fallen into the gossip world's unflattering cross-hairs, with The New York Post and National Enquirer (with major amplification from The Huffington Post) spreading an anonymously sourced, partly contradictory story about Logan's sex life.

I won't stoop to repeat the "details" here, save to say that the Post's story leads with information -- such as that two men "brawled" over Logan -- that is disputed by more "sources" quoted later in the same story.

There can't be anything surprising about how Logan's personal business can sell more tabloids and rake in more cheap hits than her ascent into the top tier of journalism. Or that more people would click on a headline with the word "steamy" in it than would be interested in the astonishing way Logan called out her own media establishment for whitewashing the war.

Harry Shearer, host of Le Show (and soon to be a Walk of Famer) will talk to L.A. politiblogtrix  Arianna Huffington on today's "Politics of Culture" on KCRW. The two friends have become fixtures of the blogoshere, of course, with Huffington heading the Huffington Post (to which Shearer contributes), and now with Shearer's quirky stylings at My Damn Channel. 

Huffington will no doubt talk about her new book, "Right is Wrong," and hopefully Shearer will imitate Larry King.  He's really good at it.

2:30-3:00pm on 89.9

Image via Huffpost

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

From the Digg files: In the "Daily Show" clip below, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan says she'd "blow [her] brains out" if all she had to watch was the U.S. media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication being that this nation's war coverage is highly whitewashed.

Viacom, which has a $1B lawsuit against YouTube, is -- not surprisingly -- one of the top 5 takers-down (at least recently) of unlicensed clips from the site.  Whether they knock off this clip will be an interesting test of Viacom's tolerance for news-related use of their footage. I'm no fair use expert, but I think a length of 1:42 is riding the perimeter of what's acceptable for an excerpt of copyrighted content, so there's probably some gray area about whether this is actually a fair usage.

The poster, FreePress.net, has the licensed (Comedy Central) version embedded in their own story about Logan's appearance, but they clearly wanted to give this powerful clip more exposure. And that means YouTube.

I for one was struck by Logan's candor. What she says about the sanitizing of war coverage borders on media sacrilege. You rarely hear that kind of opinion from a major media representative, let alone on a major television station. Impressive.

The WSJ, TechCrunch-WaPo, CNET, TechSpot, PCWorld and the rest of the peanut gallery are chuckling at Mozilla today after the company had trouble keeping up with all the demand for FireFox 3.0 on its self-proclaimed worldwide "Download Day," the object of which is to set a Guinness record for the largest number of downloads in one 24-hour period.

Well, I'm here to tell you that, after only two tries, I got my shiny fresh copy of the 'Fox, and my download took only about 10 seconds. Rumors of Mozilla's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I wonder why the temptation to jump on Mozilla's back for a couple of minor technical glitches in what is, after all, a commendably ambitious and successful publicity campaign. Have we bloggers forgotten that Mozilla has been giving us a top-notch browser for years now -- for free? Considering all that, you'd think the blogosphere could return the favor and give these guys a 45-minute grace period to figure out a server tweak or two before we pilloried them. 

From all the jeering, you'd think it was a piece of cake to rig up enough servers to support tens of thousands of simultaneous downloads, when even the biggest online retailers in the world can't do it.  I can't say my hands are clean when it comes to shamelessly bashing the good-faith efforts of others, but it's nice to have a reminder about how easy it is to win a sword fight with a chainsaw.

The Technology blog has it...

As Agence France-Presse reports, Lance Corp. David Motari, who everyone thought was the guy who'd tossed the puppy, actually was. Motari and another Marine are being disciplined, and a Marine press release says that Motari is being "processed for separation."

Why it took three months to "investigate" whether Motari was responsible for the video (his name was used in it, after all) is not clear. You'd think they could have closed the case in one day and saved the Marine's family a world of terror and harassment. But when it comes to unflattering situations involving personnel, the Armed Forces are not generally known for their speed or transparency.

Now that the facts are all in, we can wonder about what it would take not just to commit such a brutal act but to record it, and then to let the tape get posted online. The Marines like to invoke support-our-troops-type rhetoric to insulate themselves from criticism ("The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud"), but what they're really doing is calling Motari an isolated sicko and sweeping the bigger issue under the carpet. 

All you have to do is look around for 10 minutes and you can find a dozen videos of wartime cruelty to animals, so to pretend this is a one-in-a-million situation is disingenuous. Let's be honest: Terrible things happen in a war -- to humans, to animals, to everyone. If more men in uniform had video cameras and posted their wartime footage to YouTube, it might not be so easy to ignore that fact.

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin on unpublishing the Violet Blue posts

BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin  (Photo: Robert Sachs)

Myself and L.A. Times blog editor Tony Pierce spoke earlier Wednesday to BoingBoing bloggers Xeni Jardin and David Pescovitz, as well as BoingBoing Gadgets' Joel Johnson and John Battelle, the chief executive of Federated Media and BoingBoing's business manager. It was a long conversation, so I'm going to split it up into a couple of issues-centered posts. This one touches on when and, to a lesser extent, why the Violet Blue-related posts were unpublished.

What can you say about why the posts disappeared?

Xeni Jardin: When I decided to unpublish these posts -- and I did that -- it wasn’t like there was a policy or practice in place where we would all confer with each other before we posted something, so I didn’t confer with all of my editors before taking it down.

Did you think people wouldn't notice, or if they did notice, that they wouldn't care?

XJ: God, I don’t know if I really thought through all of that. I just really didn’t. It’s hard for me to articulate exactly how weird this is. Suddenly it became this big huge thing with all this public scrutiny and all this speculation. But at the time I just wanted to take this material down for a host of reasons that I don’t want to talk about in public because I don’t think it would do this person any good. We don’t blog in detail about every minute decision we make about what to publish and what not to. 

 ...There wasn’t an attempt to hide it. And I didn’t bring it up again in part because it involved some personal, private stuff that I don’t tend to get into. Like whether someone’s character is this or that, or whatever kind of personal dirty laundry was involved.

Regarding the decision to remove:

XJ: My biological father who died when I was a kid was a painter and a print maker.  He went through different phases in his creative work. A lot of what he did was paint very beautiful photorealistic portraits of nude women. Sometimes he went off into experimental territory that he was embarrassed about... sometimes he would just grab batches of the stuff that was crappy as years went on, and go to the backyard and burn it. And it wasn’t that he was censoring himself, and God knows nobody else was censoring him. It was that this was his creative work. This was art. And he felt like some of it wasn’t representative of who he was anymore and he didn’t want it to be available to the world to see.

That’s how I felt with this situation. (I mean, there were other reasons for removing the posts.) But –- it was my work. And I felt like: This is my work, this is my blog. This is not the same thing as Wikipedia or the paper of record. It’s BoingBoing. And I have the right to take these things down while I think about whether I want them out there or not.

And on factors that influenced the decision not to broadcast it:

XJ: Please try to bear in mind, a year and a half ago when I unpublished this stuff, it was a time when there were a couple of hate web sites specifically about me.  Kooky, creepy Internet guys were posting all sorts of grotesque, sexually explicit stuff about me, and trying to find photos of my house and information of my family.  Really gross stuff that frightened me.  When you’re at the receiving end of that kind of attention, would you voluntarily go out with private information in something that just felt sensitive and felt like your private editorial prerogative?  It would be the last thing you’d do in that situation. 

More here about the what this means for BoingBoing's posting policy and its future.

Previously:

BoingBoing and Violet Blue: Game Frakkin' Over
Violet Blue still in the dark about her 'behavior'
Regarding BoingBoing's factual dispute on Monday's Violet Blue post
Violet Blue scratches her head over BoingBoing purge

 

In the first episode of an innovative documentary series “In Their Boots,” the sister of a wounded soldier explains why the family cooperated with the filmmakers.

"I think it’s important to educate America,” said Christy Babin, whose brother Alan, an Army medic, was gravely wounded during the assault on Baghdad in 2003 and still must cope with the debilitating effects of traumatic brain injury and a stroke.

The story of the Babin family, particularly Alan’s mother, Rosie, is altogether heart-wrenching. Much of the footage was shot by Rosie Babin, who is remarkably resilient and determined.

What makes “In Their Boots” different from other documentaries is its manner of presentation: A different episode will be shown each week on www.intheirboots.com, followed by an interactive discussion with viewers via webcams and instant messaging. The Babin family episode is set for 4 p.m. Wednesday.

Each episode will tell a different tale of service personnel and their families. The effort was backed by a $4-million grant to the liberal Brave New Foundation from the Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund to raise the awareness of a public that, without a draft, is largely insulated from the grim realities of war and its aftermath.

The Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund is supported by the California Community Foundation, one of the oldest, most esteemed philanthropic groups in the nation. For three years the filmmakers fanned out across the country.

They decided that showing their work online was in keeping with how the generation that is fighting the two wars gets its information. This is the YouTube, Facebook, etc. generation and so how better than online to tell their stories?

Brave New Foundation President Robert Greenwald is known for his activist documentaries, with targets including Wal-Mart, Rupert Murdoch and various aspects of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war. But the first episode of “In Their Boots” has no evident political agenda.

Instead, the Babin family is shown at work and play, as Rosie and her husband, Alain, help their son with his daily needs and then on a ski holiday. The emotional high point may be when Rosie ponders what happens to Alan when she and her husband are gone.

Alan Babin was wounded while dashing to help a downed colleague. For his bravery, he was awarded the Bronze Star.

On camera at least, the Babin family neither condemns the foreign policy that sent their son to war nor do they support it. If there is a journalistic hole in the story it involves the unanswered question of how much medical and financial help Alan receives from the Veterans Affairs Department.

But that’s a quibble. This first try of “In Their Boots” is powerful and goes a long way toward fulfilling Christy Babin’s desire that Americans be educated about the uncomfortable truth behind the service and sacrifice required of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

-- Tony Perry

Photo of Alan Babin courtesy of "In their Boots"

Having looked into this teapot tempest and spoken to both Violet Blue and Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing, I can say three things with confidence:

1) BoingBoing messed up, not in taking down Violet Blue's posts, but in taking them down under cover of night and then, when caught, trying to skirt the issue rather than owning the mistake.  This is a business and a major media outlet, not a page on LiveJournal.  If you're going to be transparent, be transparent and keep your readers informed about what you're giving them, and what you're taking away.  There are no transparency exceptions for "personal issues."

It appears Jardin now understands this:  "Some of the things that were natural to do when it was four people just doing it as a hobby," she began when we spoke on the phone, then finished on a different track:  "We rearrange things as we go along and realize the volume of any small actions you take will be a lot louder. We’d never handle it the same way again."

2) The reasons behind the mistake of number one are indeed rooted in personal dynamics between Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue.  What little I know of those dynamics I decided quickly was none of my business. When I realized this was a private matter and not some kind of baseless, mean-spirited ostracism, or legal dispute, or vendetta, I began to feel the story's importance shrinking, even while attention to it was ballooning. Problem was, the people involved didn't come clean until way too late, after it had already morphed into a sleazy gossip yarn.  Maybe a little quicker with the sunlight next time.

3) Bloggers are weird.  (c.f. this)

image courtesy flickr user borkurdotnet

I spoke to Violet Blue again this afternoon. My second and third requests to talk to a BoingBoing blogger were not accepted. I don't like writing stories with only one side represented, but if the other side won't talk to me, there's not a lot I can do. Here's some of what Violet Blue said:

-- "I still have no idea what they're talking about. I've been racking my brain to try to figure out what happened a year ago that might’ve made me public enemy No. 1 with BoingBoing. What did I do that was so rotten and bad that made them feel like they needed to remove all my posts?"

-- "I really want them to explain what I did."

-- "I'm thinking too, OK, could there be something embarrassing? But there isn't anything I've done that's secret or weird or anything like that."   

-- "I've been getting e-mails all morning asking me what the event was -– and I just have no idea."

-- "I was really close to Xeni," she said of Xeni Jardin, blogger and long-time BoingBoing contributer.

-- "I haven't incited anything, I haven't kept it on the top of my blog."

-- "They basically used the nuclear option for a personal grievance."

-- "I have nothing to hide because I really don't think I've done anything wrong."

-- "I haven't e-mailed them because I don't know what I'd say, and it's too embarrassing."

-- "They should've said something to me."

-- "It would be like going to your old house and finding your old yearbook and finding names crossed out of it and pictures ripped out."

In its explanation of the Blue purge, BoingBoing cited what it called an "erroneous" claim that it had removed 100 Violet Blue-related posts. They did not name the allegedly erroneous post as mine or even bother to link to it, so let me name the post: it was mine, and I linked to it earlier in the sentence. Notably, BoingBoing did not offer the correct number of purged posts (saying only that they had "unpublished some posts relating to her"). Also, someone from BoingBoing refused to tell me how far off my count of 100 was.

Let me correct the record. With some help from Violet Blue herself, and her boyfriend, who stayed up late last night writing a script to scan the WayBack Machine for Blue BB posts, I can present this spreadsheet. 

It contains 72 BoingBoing posts containing the name of Violet Blue. I found one duplicate in the 40 or so that I spot checked. This was not a high duplication rate, and Violet's boyfriend, she said, had written a second script to eliminate duplicates. Maybe it missed one or two.  So maybe 72 is slightly high.

In any case, let's say that more than just "some" posts were removed. And let's also note that this search only went from January 2005 to August 2007, when the archive ends. Further, BoingBoing's Internet archive has many different gaps in it where other Blue posts might have been sitting.

In sum, I was remiss to take at face value Violet Blue's number of 100. I should have said at least 70.

I apologize for the imprecision.

Another Big Bang for the Internet
Image courtesy woodleywonderworks

In a story with the excellent headline "Internet body approves domain name big bang," Agence France-Press reports that ICANN, the Internet naming authority, will now allow an essentially unlimited number of Internet addresses to be created and registered.

This seems likely to herald the end of ".com" as we know it -- why append that silly and now mostly meaningless suffix when you could have a nice, specific site address, instead?  Home.ebay, or Mandalay.casino or BofA.bank.  How about Graumans.chinese, or taqueria.chihuahua or disney.land? Scout.blog, wherecanIbuy.a.hummer? 

Maybe people will even create new URLs just for one-time news events: BillGates.later, Guns.R.Legal, HolyCrap.They.Caught.A.GreatWhite. 

Feel free to leave some suggestions in the comments.

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

Last week, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan appeared on Comedy Central to blast U.S. coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying "if I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States, I would blow my brains out."

Logan has repeatedly argued with the idea that the U.S. press is putting a negative spin on Iraq, saying that if anything, the picture Americans get consistently fails to convey the gravity and horror she has seen on the ground.

Then yesterday, CBS extended Logan's contract and broadened her beat to include international security issues and matters of U.S. policy, making her one of the top international affairs journalists in the U.S.

And now today, strange timing, Logan has fallen into the gossip world's unflattering cross-hairs, with The New York Post and National Enquirer (with major amplification from The Huffington Post) spreading an anonymously sourced, partly contradictory story about Logan's sex life.

I won't stoop to repeat the "details" here, save to say that the Post's story leads with information -- such as that two men "brawled" over Logan -- that is disputed by more "sources" quoted later in the same story.

There can't be anything surprising about how Logan's personal business can sell more tabloids and rake in more cheap hits than her ascent into the top tier of journalism. Or that more people would click on a headline with the word "steamy" in it than would be interested in the astonishing way Logan called out her own media establishment for whitewashing the war.

Harry Shearer, host of Le Show (and soon to be a Walk of Famer) will talk to L.A. politiblogtrix  Arianna Huffington on today's "Politics of Culture" on KCRW. The two friends have become fixtures of the blogoshere, of course, with Huffington heading the Huffington Post (to which Shearer contributes), and now with Shearer's quirky stylings at My Damn Channel. 

Huffington will no doubt talk about her new book, "Right is Wrong," and hopefully Shearer will imitate Larry King.  He's really good at it.

2:30-3:00pm on 89.9

Image via Huffpost

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

From the Digg files: In the "Daily Show" clip below, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan says she'd "blow [her] brains out" if all she had to watch was the U.S. media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication being that this nation's war coverage is highly whitewashed.

Viacom, which has a $1B lawsuit against YouTube, is -- not surprisingly -- one of the top 5 takers-down (at least recently) of unlicensed clips from the site.  Whether they knock off this clip will be an interesting test of Viacom's tolerance for news-related use of their footage. I'm no fair use expert, but I think a length of 1:42 is riding the perimeter of what's acceptable for an excerpt of copyrighted content, so there's probably some gray area about whether this is actually a fair usage.

The poster, FreePress.net, has the licensed (Comedy Central) version embedded in their own story about Logan's appearance, but they clearly wanted to give this powerful clip more exposure. And that means YouTube.

I for one was struck by Logan's candor. What she says about the sanitizing of war coverage borders on media sacrilege. You rarely hear that kind of opinion from a major media representative, let alone on a major television station. Impressive.

The WSJ, TechCrunch-WaPo, CNET, TechSpot, PCWorld and the rest of the peanut gallery are chuckling at Mozilla today after the company had trouble keeping up with all the demand for FireFox 3.0 on its self-proclaimed worldwide "Download Day," the object of which is to set a Guinness record for the largest number of downloads in one 24-hour period.

Well, I'm here to tell you that, after only two tries, I got my shiny fresh copy of the 'Fox, and my download took only about 10 seconds. Rumors of Mozilla's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I wonder why the temptation to jump on Mozilla's back for a couple of minor technical glitches in what is, after all, a commendably ambitious and successful publicity campaign. Have we bloggers forgotten that Mozilla has been giving us a top-notch browser for years now -- for free? Considering all that, you'd think the blogosphere could return the favor and give these guys a 45-minute grace period to figure out a server tweak or two before we pilloried them. 

From all the jeering, you'd think it was a piece of cake to rig up enough servers to support tens of thousands of simultaneous downloads, when even the biggest online retailers in the world can't do it.  I can't say my hands are clean when it comes to shamelessly bashing the good-faith efforts of others, but it's nice to have a reminder about how easy it is to win a sword fight with a chainsaw.

The Technology blog has it...

As Agence France-Presse reports, Lance Corp. David Motari, who everyone thought was the guy who'd tossed the puppy, actually was. Motari and another Marine are being disciplined, and a Marine press release says that Motari is being "processed for separation."

Why it took three months to "investigate" whether Motari was responsible for the video (his name was used in it, after all) is not clear. You'd think they could have closed the case in one day and saved the Marine's family a world of terror and harassment. But when it comes to unflattering situations involving personnel, the Armed Forces are not generally known for their speed or transparency.

Now that the facts are all in, we can wonder about what it would take not just to commit such a brutal act but to record it, and then to let the tape get posted online. The Marines like to invoke support-our-troops-type rhetoric to insulate themselves from criticism ("The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud"), but what they're really doing is calling Motari an isolated sicko and sweeping the bigger issue under the carpet. 

All you have to do is look around for 10 minutes and you can find a dozen videos of wartime cruelty to animals, so to pretend this is a one-in-a-million situation is disingenuous. Let's be honest: Terrible things happen in a war -- to humans, to animals, to everyone. If more men in uniform had video cameras and posted their wartime footage to YouTube, it might not be so easy to ignore that fact.

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

'In Their Boots' a revealing look at wounded soldiers

 

In the first episode of an innovative documentary series “In Their Boots,” the sister of a wounded soldier explains why the family cooperated with the filmmakers.

"I think it’s important to educate America,” said Christy Babin, whose brother Alan, an Army medic, was gravely wounded during the assault on Baghdad in 2003 and still must cope with the debilitating effects of traumatic brain injury and a stroke.

The story of the Babin family, particularly Alan’s mother, Rosie, is altogether heart-wrenching. Much of the footage was shot by Rosie Babin, who is remarkably resilient and determined.

What makes “In Their Boots” different from other documentaries is its manner of presentation: A different episode will be shown each week on www.intheirboots.com, followed by an interactive discussion with viewers via webcams and instant messaging. The Babin family episode is set for 4 p.m. Wednesday.

Each episode will tell a different tale of service personnel and their families. The effort was backed by a $4-million grant to the liberal Brave New Foundation from the Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund to raise the awareness of a public that, without a draft, is largely insulated from the grim realities of war and its aftermath.

The Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund is supported by the California Community Foundation, one of the oldest, most esteemed philanthropic groups in the nation. For three years the filmmakers fanned out across the country.

They decided that showing their work online was in keeping with how the generation that is fighting the two wars gets its information. This is the YouTube, Facebook, etc. generation and so how better than online to tell their stories?

Brave New Foundation President Robert Greenwald is known for his activist documentaries, with targets including Wal-Mart, Rupert Murdoch and various aspects of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war. But the first episode of “In Their Boots” has no evident political agenda.

Instead, the Babin family is shown at work and play, as Rosie and her husband, Alain, help their son with his daily needs and then on a ski holiday. The emotional high point may be when Rosie ponders what happens to Alan when she and her husband are gone.

Alan Babin was wounded while dashing to help a downed colleague. For his bravery, he was awarded the Bronze Star.

On camera at least, the Babin family neither condemns the foreign policy that sent their son to war nor do they support it. If there is a journalistic hole in the story it involves the unanswered question of how much medical and financial help Alan receives from the Veterans Affairs Department.

But that’s a quibble. This first try of “In Their Boots” is powerful and goes a long way toward fulfilling Christy Babin’s desire that Americans be educated about the uncomfortable truth behind the service and sacrifice required of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

-- Tony Perry

Photo of Alan Babin courtesy of "In their Boots"

Having looked into this teapot tempest and spoken to both Violet Blue and Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing, I can say three things with confidence:

1) BoingBoing messed up, not in taking down Violet Blue's posts, but in taking them down under cover of night and then, when caught, trying to skirt the issue rather than owning the mistake.  This is a business and a major media outlet, not a page on LiveJournal.  If you're going to be transparent, be transparent and keep your readers informed about what you're giving them, and what you're taking away.  There are no transparency exceptions for "personal issues."

It appears Jardin now understands this:  "Some of the things that were natural to do when it was four people just doing it as a hobby," she began when we spoke on the phone, then finished on a different track:  "We rearrange things as we go along and realize the volume of any small actions you take will be a lot louder. We’d never handle it the same way again."

2) The reasons behind the mistake of number one are indeed rooted in personal dynamics between Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue.  What little I know of those dynamics I decided quickly was none of my business. When I realized this was a private matter and not some kind of baseless, mean-spirited ostracism, or legal dispute, or vendetta, I began to feel the story's importance shrinking, even while attention to it was ballooning. Problem was, the people involved didn't come clean until way too late, after it had already morphed into a sleazy gossip yarn.  Maybe a little quicker with the sunlight next time.

3) Bloggers are weird.  (c.f. this)

image courtesy flickr user borkurdotnet

I spoke to Violet Blue again this afternoon. My second and third requests to talk to a BoingBoing blogger were not accepted. I don't like writing stories with only one side represented, but if the other side won't talk to me, there's not a lot I can do. Here's some of what Violet Blue said:

-- "I still have no idea what they're talking about. I've been racking my brain to try to figure out what happened a year ago that might’ve made me public enemy No. 1 with BoingBoing. What did I do that was so rotten and bad that made them feel like they needed to remove all my posts?"

-- "I really want them to explain what I did."

-- "I'm thinking too, OK, could there be something embarrassing? But there isn't anything I've done that's secret or weird or anything like that."   

-- "I've been getting e-mails all morning asking me what the event was -– and I just have no idea."

-- "I was really close to Xeni," she said of Xeni Jardin, blogger and long-time BoingBoing contributer.

-- "I haven't incited anything, I haven't kept it on the top of my blog."

-- "They basically used the nuclear option for a personal grievance."

-- "I have nothing to hide because I really don't think I've done anything wrong."

-- "I haven't e-mailed them because I don't know what I'd say, and it's too embarrassing."

-- "They should've said something to me."

-- "It would be like going to your old house and finding your old yearbook and finding names crossed out of it and pictures ripped out."

In its explanation of the Blue purge, BoingBoing cited what it called an "erroneous" claim that it had removed 100 Violet Blue-related posts. They did not name the allegedly erroneous post as mine or even bother to link to it, so let me name the post: it was mine, and I linked to it earlier in the sentence. Notably, BoingBoing did not offer the correct number of purged posts (saying only that they had "unpublished some posts relating to her"). Also, someone from BoingBoing refused to tell me how far off my count of 100 was.

Let me correct the record. With some help from Violet Blue herself, and her boyfriend, who stayed up late last night writing a script to scan the WayBack Machine for Blue BB posts, I can present this spreadsheet. 

It contains 72 BoingBoing posts containing the name of Violet Blue. I found one duplicate in the 40 or so that I spot checked. This was not a high duplication rate, and Violet's boyfriend, she said, had written a second script to eliminate duplicates. Maybe it missed one or two.  So maybe 72 is slightly high.

In any case, let's say that more than just "some" posts were removed. And let's also note that this search only went from January 2005 to August 2007, when the archive ends. Further, BoingBoing's Internet archive has many different gaps in it where other Blue posts might have been sitting.

In sum, I was remiss to take at face value Violet Blue's number of 100. I should have said at least 70.

I apologize for the imprecision.

Another Big Bang for the Internet
Image courtesy woodleywonderworks

In a story with the excellent headline "Internet body approves domain name big bang," Agence France-Press reports that ICANN, the Internet naming authority, will now allow an essentially unlimited number of Internet addresses to be created and registered.

This seems likely to herald the end of ".com" as we know it -- why append that silly and now mostly meaningless suffix when you could have a nice, specific site address, instead?  Home.ebay, or Mandalay.casino or BofA.bank.  How about Graumans.chinese, or taqueria.chihuahua or disney.land? Scout.blog, wherecanIbuy.a.hummer? 

Maybe people will even create new URLs just for one-time news events: BillGates.later, Guns.R.Legal, HolyCrap.They.Caught.A.GreatWhite. 

Feel free to leave some suggestions in the comments.

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

Last week, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan appeared on Comedy Central to blast U.S. coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying "if I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States, I would blow my brains out."

Logan has repeatedly argued with the idea that the U.S. press is putting a negative spin on Iraq, saying that if anything, the picture Americans get consistently fails to convey the gravity and horror she has seen on the ground.

Then yesterday, CBS extended Logan's contract and broadened her beat to include international security issues and matters of U.S. policy, making her one of the top international affairs journalists in the U.S.

And now today, strange timing, Logan has fallen into the gossip world's unflattering cross-hairs, with The New York Post and National Enquirer (with major amplification from The Huffington Post) spreading an anonymously sourced, partly contradictory story about Logan's sex life.

I won't stoop to repeat the "details" here, save to say that the Post's story leads with information -- such as that two men "brawled" over Logan -- that is disputed by more "sources" quoted later in the same story.

There can't be anything surprising about how Logan's personal business can sell more tabloids and rake in more cheap hits than her ascent into the top tier of journalism. Or that more people would click on a headline with the word "steamy" in it than would be interested in the astonishing way Logan called out her own media establishment for whitewashing the war.

Harry Shearer, host of Le Show (and soon to be a Walk of Famer) will talk to L.A. politiblogtrix  Arianna Huffington on today's "Politics of Culture" on KCRW. The two friends have become fixtures of the blogoshere, of course, with Huffington heading the Huffington Post (to which Shearer contributes), and now with Shearer's quirky stylings at My Damn Channel. 

Huffington will no doubt talk about her new book, "Right is Wrong," and hopefully Shearer will imitate Larry King.  He's really good at it.

2:30-3:00pm on 89.9

Image via Huffpost

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

From the Digg files: In the "Daily Show" clip below, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan says she'd "blow [her] brains out" if all she had to watch was the U.S. media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication being that this nation's war coverage is highly whitewashed.

Viacom, which has a $1B lawsuit against YouTube, is -- not surprisingly -- one of the top 5 takers-down (at least recently) of unlicensed clips from the site.  Whether they knock off this clip will be an interesting test of Viacom's tolerance for news-related use of their footage. I'm no fair use expert, but I think a length of 1:42 is riding the perimeter of what's acceptable for an excerpt of copyrighted content, so there's probably some gray area about whether this is actually a fair usage.

The poster, FreePress.net, has the licensed (Comedy Central) version embedded in their own story about Logan's appearance, but they clearly wanted to give this powerful clip more exposure. And that means YouTube.

I for one was struck by Logan's candor. What she says about the sanitizing of war coverage borders on media sacrilege. You rarely hear that kind of opinion from a major media representative, let alone on a major television station. Impressive.

The WSJ, TechCrunch-WaPo, CNET, TechSpot, PCWorld and the rest of the peanut gallery are chuckling at Mozilla today after the company had trouble keeping up with all the demand for FireFox 3.0 on its self-proclaimed worldwide "Download Day," the object of which is to set a Guinness record for the largest number of downloads in one 24-hour period.

Well, I'm here to tell you that, after only two tries, I got my shiny fresh copy of the 'Fox, and my download took only about 10 seconds. Rumors of Mozilla's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I wonder why the temptation to jump on Mozilla's back for a couple of minor technical glitches in what is, after all, a commendably ambitious and successful publicity campaign. Have we bloggers forgotten that Mozilla has been giving us a top-notch browser for years now -- for free? Considering all that, you'd think the blogosphere could return the favor and give these guys a 45-minute grace period to figure out a server tweak or two before we pilloried them. 

From all the jeering, you'd think it was a piece of cake to rig up enough servers to support tens of thousands of simultaneous downloads, when even the biggest online retailers in the world can't do it.  I can't say my hands are clean when it comes to shamelessly bashing the good-faith efforts of others, but it's nice to have a reminder about how easy it is to win a sword fight with a chainsaw.

The Technology blog has it...

As Agence France-Presse reports, Lance Corp. David Motari, who everyone thought was the guy who'd tossed the puppy, actually was. Motari and another Marine are being disciplined, and a Marine press release says that Motari is being "processed for separation."

Why it took three months to "investigate" whether Motari was responsible for the video (his name was used in it, after all) is not clear. You'd think they could have closed the case in one day and saved the Marine's family a world of terror and harassment. But when it comes to unflattering situations involving personnel, the Armed Forces are not generally known for their speed or transparency.

Now that the facts are all in, we can wonder about what it would take not just to commit such a brutal act but to record it, and then to let the tape get posted online. The Marines like to invoke support-our-troops-type rhetoric to insulate themselves from criticism ("The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud"), but what they're really doing is calling Motari an isolated sicko and sweeping the bigger issue under the carpet. 

All you have to do is look around for 10 minutes and you can find a dozen videos of wartime cruelty to animals, so to pretend this is a one-in-a-million situation is disingenuous. Let's be honest: Terrible things happen in a war -- to humans, to animals, to everyone. If more men in uniform had video cameras and posted their wartime footage to YouTube, it might not be so easy to ignore that fact.

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

BoingBoing and Violet Blue: Game Frakkin' Over

Having looked into this teapot tempest and spoken to both Violet Blue and Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing, I can say three things with confidence:

1) BoingBoing messed up, not in taking down Violet Blue's posts, but in taking them down under cover of night and then, when caught, trying to skirt the issue rather than owning the mistake.  This is a business and a major media outlet, not a page on LiveJournal.  If you're going to be transparent, be transparent and keep your readers informed about what you're giving them, and what you're taking away.  There are no transparency exceptions for "personal issues."

It appears Jardin now understands this:  "Some of the things that were natural to do when it was four people just doing it as a hobby," she began when we spoke on the phone, then finished on a different track:  "We rearrange things as we go along and realize the volume of any small actions you take will be a lot louder. We’d never handle it the same way again."

2) The reasons behind the mistake of number one are indeed rooted in personal dynamics between Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue.  What little I know of those dynamics I decided quickly was none of my business. When I realized this was a private matter and not some kind of baseless, mean-spirited ostracism, or legal dispute, or vendetta, I began to feel the story's importance shrinking, even while attention to it was ballooning. Problem was, the people involved didn't come clean until way too late, after it had already morphed into a sleazy gossip yarn.  Maybe a little quicker with the sunlight next time.

3) Bloggers are weird.  (c.f. this)

image courtesy flickr user borkurdotnet

I spoke to Violet Blue again this afternoon. My second and third requests to talk to a BoingBoing blogger were not accepted. I don't like writing stories with only one side represented, but if the other side won't talk to me, there's not a lot I can do. Here's some of what Violet Blue said:

-- "I still have no idea what they're talking about. I've been racking my brain to try to figure out what happened a year ago that might’ve made me public enemy No. 1 with BoingBoing. What did I do that was so rotten and bad that made them feel like they needed to remove all my posts?"

-- "I really want them to explain what I did."

-- "I'm thinking too, OK, could there be something embarrassing? But there isn't anything I've done that's secret or weird or anything like that."   

-- "I've been getting e-mails all morning asking me what the event was -– and I just have no idea."

-- "I was really close to Xeni," she said of Xeni Jardin, blogger and long-time BoingBoing contributer.

-- "I haven't incited anything, I haven't kept it on the top of my blog."

-- "They basically used the nuclear option for a personal grievance."

-- "I have nothing to hide because I really don't think I've done anything wrong."

-- "I haven't e-mailed them because I don't know what I'd say, and it's too embarrassing."

-- "They should've said something to me."

-- "It would be like going to your old house and finding your old yearbook and finding names crossed out of it and pictures ripped out."

In its explanation of the Blue purge, BoingBoing cited what it called an "erroneous" claim that it had removed 100 Violet Blue-related posts. They did not name the allegedly erroneous post as mine or even bother to link to it, so let me name the post: it was mine, and I linked to it earlier in the sentence. Notably, BoingBoing did not offer the correct number of purged posts (saying only that they had "unpublished some posts relating to her"). Also, someone from BoingBoing refused to tell me how far off my count of 100 was.

Let me correct the record. With some help from Violet Blue herself, and her boyfriend, who stayed up late last night writing a script to scan the WayBack Machine for Blue BB posts, I can present this spreadsheet. 

It contains 72 BoingBoing posts containing the name of Violet Blue. I found one duplicate in the 40 or so that I spot checked. This was not a high duplication rate, and Violet's boyfriend, she said, had written a second script to eliminate duplicates. Maybe it missed one or two.  So maybe 72 is slightly high.

In any case, let's say that more than just "some" posts were removed. And let's also note that this search only went from January 2005 to August 2007, when the archive ends. Further, BoingBoing's Internet archive has many different gaps in it where other Blue posts might have been sitting.

In sum, I was remiss to take at face value Violet Blue's number of 100. I should have said at least 70.

I apologize for the imprecision.

Another Big Bang for the Internet
Image courtesy woodleywonderworks

In a story with the excellent headline "Internet body approves domain name big bang," Agence France-Press reports that ICANN, the Internet naming authority, will now allow an essentially unlimited number of Internet addresses to be created and registered.

This seems likely to herald the end of ".com" as we know it -- why append that silly and now mostly meaningless suffix when you could have a nice, specific site address, instead?  Home.ebay, or Mandalay.casino or BofA.bank.  How about Graumans.chinese, or taqueria.chihuahua or disney.land? Scout.blog, wherecanIbuy.a.hummer? 

Maybe people will even create new URLs just for one-time news events: BillGates.later, Guns.R.Legal, HolyCrap.They.Caught.A.GreatWhite. 

Feel free to leave some suggestions in the comments.

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

Last week, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan appeared on Comedy Central to blast U.S. coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying "if I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States, I would blow my brains out."

Logan has repeatedly argued with the idea that the U.S. press is putting a negative spin on Iraq, saying that if anything, the picture Americans get consistently fails to convey the gravity and horror she has seen on the ground.

Then yesterday, CBS extended Logan's contract and broadened her beat to include international security issues and matters of U.S. policy, making her one of the top international affairs journalists in the U.S.

And now today, strange timing, Logan has fallen into the gossip world's unflattering cross-hairs, with The New York Post and National Enquirer (with major amplification from The Huffington Post) spreading an anonymously sourced, partly contradictory story about Logan's sex life.

I won't stoop to repeat the "details" here, save to say that the Post's story leads with information -- such as that two men "brawled" over Logan -- that is disputed by more "sources" quoted later in the same story.

There can't be anything surprising about how Logan's personal business can sell more tabloids and rake in more cheap hits than her ascent into the top tier of journalism. Or that more people would click on a headline with the word "steamy" in it than would be interested in the astonishing way Logan called out her own media establishment for whitewashing the war.

Harry Shearer, host of Le Show (and soon to be a Walk of Famer) will talk to L.A. politiblogtrix  Arianna Huffington on today's "Politics of Culture" on KCRW. The two friends have become fixtures of the blogoshere, of course, with Huffington heading the Huffington Post (to which Shearer contributes), and now with Shearer's quirky stylings at My Damn Channel. 

Huffington will no doubt talk about her new book, "Right is Wrong," and hopefully Shearer will imitate Larry King.  He's really good at it.

2:30-3:00pm on 89.9

Image via Huffpost

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

From the Digg files: In the "Daily Show" clip below, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan says she'd "blow [her] brains out" if all she had to watch was the U.S. media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication being that this nation's war coverage is highly whitewashed.

Viacom, which has a $1B lawsuit against YouTube, is -- not surprisingly -- one of the top 5 takers-down (at least recently) of unlicensed clips from the site.  Whether they knock off this clip will be an interesting test of Viacom's tolerance for news-related use of their footage. I'm no fair use expert, but I think a length of 1:42 is riding the perimeter of what's acceptable for an excerpt of copyrighted content, so there's probably some gray area about whether this is actually a fair usage.

The poster, FreePress.net, has the licensed (Comedy Central) version embedded in their own story about Logan's appearance, but they clearly wanted to give this powerful clip more exposure. And that means YouTube.

I for one was struck by Logan's candor. What she says about the sanitizing of war coverage borders on media sacrilege. You rarely hear that kind of opinion from a major media representative, let alone on a major television station. Impressive.

The WSJ, TechCrunch-WaPo, CNET, TechSpot, PCWorld and the rest of the peanut gallery are chuckling at Mozilla today after the company had trouble keeping up with all the demand for FireFox 3.0 on its self-proclaimed worldwide "Download Day," the object of which is to set a Guinness record for the largest number of downloads in one 24-hour period.

Well, I'm here to tell you that, after only two tries, I got my shiny fresh copy of the 'Fox, and my download took only about 10 seconds. Rumors of Mozilla's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I wonder why the temptation to jump on Mozilla's back for a couple of minor technical glitches in what is, after all, a commendably ambitious and successful publicity campaign. Have we bloggers forgotten that Mozilla has been giving us a top-notch browser for years now -- for free? Considering all that, you'd think the blogosphere could return the favor and give these guys a 45-minute grace period to figure out a server tweak or two before we pilloried them. 

From all the jeering, you'd think it was a piece of cake to rig up enough servers to support tens of thousands of simultaneous downloads, when even the biggest online retailers in the world can't do it.  I can't say my hands are clean when it comes to shamelessly bashing the good-faith efforts of others, but it's nice to have a reminder about how easy it is to win a sword fight with a chainsaw.

The Technology blog has it...

As Agence France-Presse reports, Lance Corp. David Motari, who everyone thought was the guy who'd tossed the puppy, actually was. Motari and another Marine are being disciplined, and a Marine press release says that Motari is being "processed for separation."

Why it took three months to "investigate" whether Motari was responsible for the video (his name was used in it, after all) is not clear. You'd think they could have closed the case in one day and saved the Marine's family a world of terror and harassment. But when it comes to unflattering situations involving personnel, the Armed Forces are not generally known for their speed or transparency.

Now that the facts are all in, we can wonder about what it would take not just to commit such a brutal act but to record it, and then to let the tape get posted online. The Marines like to invoke support-our-troops-type rhetoric to insulate themselves from criticism ("The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud"), but what they're really doing is calling Motari an isolated sicko and sweeping the bigger issue under the carpet. 

All you have to do is look around for 10 minutes and you can find a dozen videos of wartime cruelty to animals, so to pretend this is a one-in-a-million situation is disingenuous. Let's be honest: Terrible things happen in a war -- to humans, to animals, to everyone. If more men in uniform had video cameras and posted their wartime footage to YouTube, it might not be so easy to ignore that fact.

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Violet Blue still in the dark about her 'behavior'

I spoke to Violet Blue again this afternoon. My second and third requests to talk to a BoingBoing blogger were not accepted. I don't like writing stories with only one side represented, but if the other side won't talk to me, there's not a lot I can do. Here's some of what Violet Blue said:

-- "I still have no idea what they're talking about. I've been racking my brain to try to figure out what happened a year ago that might’ve made me public enemy No. 1 with BoingBoing. What did I do that was so rotten and bad that made them feel like they needed to remove all my posts?"

-- "I really want them to explain what I did."

-- "I'm thinking too, OK, could there be something embarrassing? But there isn't anything I've done that's secret or weird or anything like that."   

-- "I've been getting e-mails all morning asking me what the event was -– and I just have no idea."

-- "I was really close to Xeni," she said of Xeni Jardin, blogger and long-time BoingBoing contributer.

-- "I haven't incited anything, I haven't kept it on the top of my blog."

-- "They basically used the nuclear option for a personal grievance."

-- "I have nothing to hide because I really don't think I've done anything wrong."

-- "I haven't e-mailed them because I don't know what I'd say, and it's too embarrassing."

-- "They should've said something to me."

-- "It would be like going to your old house and finding your old yearbook and finding names crossed out of it and pictures ripped out."

In its explanation of the Blue purge, BoingBoing cited what it called an "erroneous" claim that it had removed 100 Violet Blue-related posts. They did not name the allegedly erroneous post as mine or even bother to link to it, so let me name the post: it was mine, and I linked to it earlier in the sentence. Notably, BoingBoing did not offer the correct number of purged posts (saying only that they had "unpublished some posts relating to her"). Also, someone from BoingBoing refused to tell me how far off my count of 100 was.

Let me correct the record. With some help from Violet Blue herself, and her boyfriend, who stayed up late last night writing a script to scan the WayBack Machine for Blue BB posts, I can present this spreadsheet. 

It contains 72 BoingBoing posts containing the name of Violet Blue. I found one duplicate in the 40 or so that I spot checked. This was not a high duplication rate, and Violet's boyfriend, she said, had written a second script to eliminate duplicates. Maybe it missed one or two.  So maybe 72 is slightly high.

In any case, let's say that more than just "some" posts were removed. And let's also note that this search only went from January 2005 to August 2007, when the archive ends. Further, BoingBoing's Internet archive has many different gaps in it where other Blue posts might have been sitting.

In sum, I was remiss to take at face value Violet Blue's number of 100. I should have said at least 70.

I apologize for the imprecision.

Another Big Bang for the Internet
Image courtesy woodleywonderworks

In a story with the excellent headline "Internet body approves domain name big bang," Agence France-Press reports that ICANN, the Internet naming authority, will now allow an essentially unlimited number of Internet addresses to be created and registered.

This seems likely to herald the end of ".com" as we know it -- why append that silly and now mostly meaningless suffix when you could have a nice, specific site address, instead?  Home.ebay, or Mandalay.casino or BofA.bank.  How about Graumans.chinese, or taqueria.chihuahua or disney.land? Scout.blog, wherecanIbuy.a.hummer? 

Maybe people will even create new URLs just for one-time news events: BillGates.later, Guns.R.Legal, HolyCrap.They.Caught.A.GreatWhite. 

Feel free to leave some suggestions in the comments.

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

Last week, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan appeared on Comedy Central to blast U.S. coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying "if I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States, I would blow my brains out."

Logan has repeatedly argued with the idea that the U.S. press is putting a negative spin on Iraq, saying that if anything, the picture Americans get consistently fails to convey the gravity and horror she has seen on the ground.

Then yesterday, CBS extended Logan's contract and broadened her beat to include international security issues and matters of U.S. policy, making her one of the top international affairs journalists in the U.S.

And now today, strange timing, Logan has fallen into the gossip world's unflattering cross-hairs, with The New York Post and National Enquirer (with major amplification from The Huffington Post) spreading an anonymously sourced, partly contradictory story about Logan's sex life.

I won't stoop to repeat the "details" here, save to say that the Post's story leads with information -- such as that two men "brawled" over Logan -- that is disputed by more "sources" quoted later in the same story.

There can't be anything surprising about how Logan's personal business can sell more tabloids and rake in more cheap hits than her ascent into the top tier of journalism. Or that more people would click on a headline with the word "steamy" in it than would be interested in the astonishing way Logan called out her own media establishment for whitewashing the war.

Harry Shearer, host of Le Show (and soon to be a Walk of Famer) will talk to L.A. politiblogtrix  Arianna Huffington on today's "Politics of Culture" on KCRW. The two friends have become fixtures of the blogoshere, of course, with Huffington heading the Huffington Post (to which Shearer contributes), and now with Shearer's quirky stylings at My Damn Channel. 

Huffington will no doubt talk about her new book, "Right is Wrong," and hopefully Shearer will imitate Larry King.  He's really good at it.

2:30-3:00pm on 89.9

Image via Huffpost

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

From the Digg files: In the "Daily Show" clip below, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan says she'd "blow [her] brains out" if all she had to watch was the U.S. media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication being that this nation's war coverage is highly whitewashed.

Viacom, which has a $1B lawsuit against YouTube, is -- not surprisingly -- one of the top 5 takers-down (at least recently) of unlicensed clips from the site.  Whether they knock off this clip will be an interesting test of Viacom's tolerance for news-related use of their footage. I'm no fair use expert, but I think a length of 1:42 is riding the perimeter of what's acceptable for an excerpt of copyrighted content, so there's probably some gray area about whether this is actually a fair usage.

The poster, FreePress.net, has the licensed (Comedy Central) version embedded in their own story about Logan's appearance, but they clearly wanted to give this powerful clip more exposure. And that means YouTube.

I for one was struck by Logan's candor. What she says about the sanitizing of war coverage borders on media sacrilege. You rarely hear that kind of opinion from a major media representative, let alone on a major television station. Impressive.

The WSJ, TechCrunch-WaPo, CNET, TechSpot, PCWorld and the rest of the peanut gallery are chuckling at Mozilla today after the company had trouble keeping up with all the demand for FireFox 3.0 on its self-proclaimed worldwide "Download Day," the object of which is to set a Guinness record for the largest number of downloads in one 24-hour period.

Well, I'm here to tell you that, after only two tries, I got my shiny fresh copy of the 'Fox, and my download took only about 10 seconds. Rumors of Mozilla's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I wonder why the temptation to jump on Mozilla's back for a couple of minor technical glitches in what is, after all, a commendably ambitious and successful publicity campaign. Have we bloggers forgotten that Mozilla has been giving us a top-notch browser for years now -- for free? Considering all that, you'd think the blogosphere could return the favor and give these guys a 45-minute grace period to figure out a server tweak or two before we pilloried them. 

From all the jeering, you'd think it was a piece of cake to rig up enough servers to support tens of thousands of simultaneous downloads, when even the biggest online retailers in the world can't do it.  I can't say my hands are clean when it comes to shamelessly bashing the good-faith efforts of others, but it's nice to have a reminder about how easy it is to win a sword fight with a chainsaw.

The Technology blog has it...

As Agence France-Presse reports, Lance Corp. David Motari, who everyone thought was the guy who'd tossed the puppy, actually was. Motari and another Marine are being disciplined, and a Marine press release says that Motari is being "processed for separation."

Why it took three months to "investigate" whether Motari was responsible for the video (his name was used in it, after all) is not clear. You'd think they could have closed the case in one day and saved the Marine's family a world of terror and harassment. But when it comes to unflattering situations involving personnel, the Armed Forces are not generally known for their speed or transparency.

Now that the facts are all in, we can wonder about what it would take not just to commit such a brutal act but to record it, and then to let the tape get posted online. The Marines like to invoke support-our-troops-type rhetoric to insulate themselves from criticism ("The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud"), but what they're really doing is calling Motari an isolated sicko and sweeping the bigger issue under the carpet. 

All you have to do is look around for 10 minutes and you can find a dozen videos of wartime cruelty to animals, so to pretend this is a one-in-a-million situation is disingenuous. Let's be honest: Terrible things happen in a war -- to humans, to animals, to everyone. If more men in uniform had video cameras and posted their wartime footage to YouTube, it might not be so easy to ignore that fact.

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Regarding BoingBoing's factual dispute on Monday's Violet Blue post

In its explanation of the Blue purge, BoingBoing cited what it called an "erroneous" claim that it had removed 100 Violet Blue-related posts. They did not name the allegedly erroneous post as mine or even bother to link to it, so let me name the post: it was mine, and I linked to it earlier in the sentence. Notably, BoingBoing did not offer the correct number of purged posts (saying only that they had "unpublished some posts relating to her"). Also, someone from BoingBoing refused to tell me how far off my count of 100 was.

Let me correct the record. With some help from Violet Blue herself, and her boyfriend, who stayed up late last night writing a script to scan the WayBack Machine for Blue BB posts, I can present this spreadsheet. 

It contains 72 BoingBoing posts containing the name of Violet Blue. I found one duplicate in the 40 or so that I spot checked. This was not a high duplication rate, and Violet's boyfriend, she said, had written a second script to eliminate duplicates. Maybe it missed one or two.  So maybe 72 is slightly high.

In any case, let's say that more than just "some" posts were removed. And let's also note that this search only went from January 2005 to August 2007, when the archive ends. Further, BoingBoing's Internet archive has many different gaps in it where other Blue posts might have been sitting.

In sum, I was remiss to take at face value Violet Blue's number of 100. I should have said at least 70.

I apologize for the imprecision.

Another Big Bang for the Internet
Image courtesy woodleywonderworks

In a story with the excellent headline "Internet body approves domain name big bang," Agence France-Press reports that ICANN, the Internet naming authority, will now allow an essentially unlimited number of Internet addresses to be created and registered.

This seems likely to herald the end of ".com" as we know it -- why append that silly and now mostly meaningless suffix when you could have a nice, specific site address, instead?  Home.ebay, or Mandalay.casino or BofA.bank.  How about Graumans.chinese, or taqueria.chihuahua or disney.land? Scout.blog, wherecanIbuy.a.hummer? 

Maybe people will even create new URLs just for one-time news events: BillGates.later, Guns.R.Legal, HolyCrap.They.Caught.A.GreatWhite. 

Feel free to leave some suggestions in the comments.

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

Last week, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan appeared on Comedy Central to blast U.S. coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying "if I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States, I would blow my brains out."

Logan has repeatedly argued with the idea that the U.S. press is putting a negative spin on Iraq, saying that if anything, the picture Americans get consistently fails to convey the gravity and horror she has seen on the ground.

Then yesterday, CBS extended Logan's contract and broadened her beat to include international security issues and matters of U.S. policy, making her one of the top international affairs journalists in the U.S.

And now today, strange timing, Logan has fallen into the gossip world's unflattering cross-hairs, with The New York Post and National Enquirer (with major amplification from The Huffington Post) spreading an anonymously sourced, partly contradictory story about Logan's sex life.

I won't stoop to repeat the "details" here, save to say that the Post's story leads with information -- such as that two men "brawled" over Logan -- that is disputed by more "sources" quoted later in the same story.

There can't be anything surprising about how Logan's personal business can sell more tabloids and rake in more cheap hits than her ascent into the top tier of journalism. Or that more people would click on a headline with the word "steamy" in it than would be interested in the astonishing way Logan called out her own media establishment for whitewashing the war.

Harry Shearer, host of Le Show (and soon to be a Walk of Famer) will talk to L.A. politiblogtrix  Arianna Huffington on today's "Politics of Culture" on KCRW. The two friends have become fixtures of the blogoshere, of course, with Huffington heading the Huffington Post (to which Shearer contributes), and now with Shearer's quirky stylings at My Damn Channel. 

Huffington will no doubt talk about her new book, "Right is Wrong," and hopefully Shearer will imitate Larry King.  He's really good at it.

2:30-3:00pm on 89.9

Image via Huffpost

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

From the Digg files: In the "Daily Show" clip below, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan says she'd "blow [her] brains out" if all she had to watch was the U.S. media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication being that this nation's war coverage is highly whitewashed.

Viacom, which has a $1B lawsuit against YouTube, is -- not surprisingly -- one of the top 5 takers-down (at least recently) of unlicensed clips from the site.  Whether they knock off this clip will be an interesting test of Viacom's tolerance for news-related use of their footage. I'm no fair use expert, but I think a length of 1:42 is riding the perimeter of what's acceptable for an excerpt of copyrighted content, so there's probably some gray area about whether this is actually a fair usage.

The poster, FreePress.net, has the licensed (Comedy Central) version embedded in their own story about Logan's appearance, but they clearly wanted to give this powerful clip more exposure. And that means YouTube.

I for one was struck by Logan's candor. What she says about the sanitizing of war coverage borders on media sacrilege. You rarely hear that kind of opinion from a major media representative, let alone on a major television station. Impressive.

The WSJ, TechCrunch-WaPo, CNET, TechSpot, PCWorld and the rest of the peanut gallery are chuckling at Mozilla today after the company had trouble keeping up with all the demand for FireFox 3.0 on its self-proclaimed worldwide "Download Day," the object of which is to set a Guinness record for the largest number of downloads in one 24-hour period.

Well, I'm here to tell you that, after only two tries, I got my shiny fresh copy of the 'Fox, and my download took only about 10 seconds. Rumors of Mozilla's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I wonder why the temptation to jump on Mozilla's back for a couple of minor technical glitches in what is, after all, a commendably ambitious and successful publicity campaign. Have we bloggers forgotten that Mozilla has been giving us a top-notch browser for years now -- for free? Considering all that, you'd think the blogosphere could return the favor and give these guys a 45-minute grace period to figure out a server tweak or two before we pilloried them. 

From all the jeering, you'd think it was a piece of cake to rig up enough servers to support tens of thousands of simultaneous downloads, when even the biggest online retailers in the world can't do it.  I can't say my hands are clean when it comes to shamelessly bashing the good-faith efforts of others, but it's nice to have a reminder about how easy it is to win a sword fight with a chainsaw.

The Technology blog has it...

As Agence France-Presse reports, Lance Corp. David Motari, who everyone thought was the guy who'd tossed the puppy, actually was. Motari and another Marine are being disciplined, and a Marine press release says that Motari is being "processed for separation."

Why it took three months to "investigate" whether Motari was responsible for the video (his name was used in it, after all) is not clear. You'd think they could have closed the case in one day and saved the Marine's family a world of terror and harassment. But when it comes to unflattering situations involving personnel, the Armed Forces are not generally known for their speed or transparency.

Now that the facts are all in, we can wonder about what it would take not just to commit such a brutal act but to record it, and then to let the tape get posted online. The Marines like to invoke support-our-troops-type rhetoric to insulate themselves from criticism ("The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud"), but what they're really doing is calling Motari an isolated sicko and sweeping the bigger issue under the carpet. 

All you have to do is look around for 10 minutes and you can find a dozen videos of wartime cruelty to animals, so to pretend this is a one-in-a-million situation is disingenuous. Let's be honest: Terrible things happen in a war -- to humans, to animals, to everyone. If more men in uniform had video cameras and posted their wartime footage to YouTube, it might not be so easy to ignore that fact.

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Let the domain name games begin

Another Big Bang for the Internet
Image courtesy woodleywonderworks

In a story with the excellent headline "Internet body approves domain name big bang," Agence France-Press reports that ICANN, the Internet naming authority, will now allow an essentially unlimited number of Internet addresses to be created and registered.

This seems likely to herald the end of ".com" as we know it -- why append that silly and now mostly meaningless suffix when you could have a nice, specific site address, instead?  Home.ebay, or Mandalay.casino or BofA.bank.  How about Graumans.chinese, or taqueria.chihuahua or disney.land? Scout.blog, wherecanIbuy.a.hummer? 

Maybe people will even create new URLs just for one-time news events: BillGates.later, Guns.R.Legal, HolyCrap.They.Caught.A.GreatWhite. 

Feel free to leave some suggestions in the comments.

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

Last week, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan appeared on Comedy Central to blast U.S. coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying "if I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States, I would blow my brains out."

Logan has repeatedly argued with the idea that the U.S. press is putting a negative spin on Iraq, saying that if anything, the picture Americans get consistently fails to convey the gravity and horror she has seen on the ground.

Then yesterday, CBS extended Logan's contract and broadened her beat to include international security issues and matters of U.S. policy, making her one of the top international affairs journalists in the U.S.

And now today, strange timing, Logan has fallen into the gossip world's unflattering cross-hairs, with The New York Post and National Enquirer (with major amplification from The Huffington Post) spreading an anonymously sourced, partly contradictory story about Logan's sex life.

I won't stoop to repeat the "details" here, save to say that the Post's story leads with information -- such as that two men "brawled" over Logan -- that is disputed by more "sources" quoted later in the same story.

There can't be anything surprising about how Logan's personal business can sell more tabloids and rake in more cheap hits than her ascent into the top tier of journalism. Or that more people would click on a headline with the word "steamy" in it than would be interested in the astonishing way Logan called out her own media establishment for whitewashing the war.

Harry Shearer, host of Le Show (and soon to be a Walk of Famer) will talk to L.A. politiblogtrix  Arianna Huffington on today's "Politics of Culture" on KCRW. The two friends have become fixtures of the blogoshere, of course, with Huffington heading the Huffington Post (to which Shearer contributes), and now with Shearer's quirky stylings at My Damn Channel. 

Huffington will no doubt talk about her new book, "Right is Wrong," and hopefully Shearer will imitate Larry King.  He's really good at it.

2:30-3:00pm on 89.9

Image via Huffpost

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

From the Digg files: In the "Daily Show" clip below, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan says she'd "blow [her] brains out" if all she had to watch was the U.S. media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication being that this nation's war coverage is highly whitewashed.

Viacom, which has a $1B lawsuit against YouTube, is -- not surprisingly -- one of the top 5 takers-down (at least recently) of unlicensed clips from the site.  Whether they knock off this clip will be an interesting test of Viacom's tolerance for news-related use of their footage. I'm no fair use expert, but I think a length of 1:42 is riding the perimeter of what's acceptable for an excerpt of copyrighted content, so there's probably some gray area about whether this is actually a fair usage.

The poster, FreePress.net, has the licensed (Comedy Central) version embedded in their own story about Logan's appearance, but they clearly wanted to give this powerful clip more exposure. And that means YouTube.

I for one was struck by Logan's candor. What she says about the sanitizing of war coverage borders on media sacrilege. You rarely hear that kind of opinion from a major media representative, let alone on a major television station. Impressive.

The WSJ, TechCrunch-WaPo, CNET, TechSpot, PCWorld and the rest of the peanut gallery are chuckling at Mozilla today after the company had trouble keeping up with all the demand for FireFox 3.0 on its self-proclaimed worldwide "Download Day," the object of which is to set a Guinness record for the largest number of downloads in one 24-hour period.

Well, I'm here to tell you that, after only two tries, I got my shiny fresh copy of the 'Fox, and my download took only about 10 seconds. Rumors of Mozilla's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I wonder why the temptation to jump on Mozilla's back for a couple of minor technical glitches in what is, after all, a commendably ambitious and successful publicity campaign. Have we bloggers forgotten that Mozilla has been giving us a top-notch browser for years now -- for free? Considering all that, you'd think the blogosphere could return the favor and give these guys a 45-minute grace period to figure out a server tweak or two before we pilloried them. 

From all the jeering, you'd think it was a piece of cake to rig up enough servers to support tens of thousands of simultaneous downloads, when even the biggest online retailers in the world can't do it.  I can't say my hands are clean when it comes to shamelessly bashing the good-faith efforts of others, but it's nice to have a reminder about how easy it is to win a sword fight with a chainsaw.

The Technology blog has it...

As Agence France-Presse reports, Lance Corp. David Motari, who everyone thought was the guy who'd tossed the puppy, actually was. Motari and another Marine are being disciplined, and a Marine press release says that Motari is being "processed for separation."

Why it took three months to "investigate" whether Motari was responsible for the video (his name was used in it, after all) is not clear. You'd think they could have closed the case in one day and saved the Marine's family a world of terror and harassment. But when it comes to unflattering situations involving personnel, the Armed Forces are not generally known for their speed or transparency.

Now that the facts are all in, we can wonder about what it would take not just to commit such a brutal act but to record it, and then to let the tape get posted online. The Marines like to invoke support-our-troops-type rhetoric to insulate themselves from criticism ("The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud"), but what they're really doing is calling Motari an isolated sicko and sweeping the bigger issue under the carpet. 

All you have to do is look around for 10 minutes and you can find a dozen videos of wartime cruelty to animals, so to pretend this is a one-in-a-million situation is disingenuous. Let's be honest: Terrible things happen in a war -- to humans, to animals, to everyone. If more men in uniform had video cameras and posted their wartime footage to YouTube, it might not be so easy to ignore that fact.

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Lara Logan speaks out, lands promotion, ends up in tabloids

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

Last week, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan appeared on Comedy Central to blast U.S. coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying "if I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States, I would blow my brains out."

Logan has repeatedly argued with the idea that the U.S. press is putting a negative spin on Iraq, saying that if anything, the picture Americans get consistently fails to convey the gravity and horror she has seen on the ground.

Then yesterday, CBS extended Logan's contract and broadened her beat to include international security issues and matters of U.S. policy, making her one of the top international affairs journalists in the U.S.

And now today, strange timing, Logan has fallen into the gossip world's unflattering cross-hairs, with The New York Post and National Enquirer (with major amplification from The Huffington Post) spreading an anonymously sourced, partly contradictory story about Logan's sex life.

I won't stoop to repeat the "details" here, save to say that the Post's story leads with information -- such as that two men "brawled" over Logan -- that is disputed by more "sources" quoted later in the same story.

There can't be anything surprising about how Logan's personal business can sell more tabloids and rake in more cheap hits than her ascent into the top tier of journalism. Or that more people would click on a headline with the word "steamy" in it than would be interested in the astonishing way Logan called out her own media establishment for whitewashing the war.

Harry Shearer, host of Le Show (and soon to be a Walk of Famer) will talk to L.A. politiblogtrix  Arianna Huffington on today's "Politics of Culture" on KCRW. The two friends have become fixtures of the blogoshere, of course, with Huffington heading the Huffington Post (to which Shearer contributes), and now with Shearer's quirky stylings at My Damn Channel. 

Huffington will no doubt talk about her new book, "Right is Wrong," and hopefully Shearer will imitate Larry King.  He's really good at it.

2:30-3:00pm on 89.9

Image via Huffpost

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

From the Digg files: In the "Daily Show" clip below, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan says she'd "blow [her] brains out" if all she had to watch was the U.S. media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication being that this nation's war coverage is highly whitewashed.

Viacom, which has a $1B lawsuit against YouTube, is -- not surprisingly -- one of the top 5 takers-down (at least recently) of unlicensed clips from the site.  Whether they knock off this clip will be an interesting test of Viacom's tolerance for news-related use of their footage. I'm no fair use expert, but I think a length of 1:42 is riding the perimeter of what's acceptable for an excerpt of copyrighted content, so there's probably some gray area about whether this is actually a fair usage.

The poster, FreePress.net, has the licensed (Comedy Central) version embedded in their own story about Logan's appearance, but they clearly wanted to give this powerful clip more exposure. And that means YouTube.

I for one was struck by Logan's candor. What she says about the sanitizing of war coverage borders on media sacrilege. You rarely hear that kind of opinion from a major media representative, let alone on a major television station. Impressive.

The WSJ, TechCrunch-WaPo, CNET, TechSpot, PCWorld and the rest of the peanut gallery are chuckling at Mozilla today after the company had trouble keeping up with all the demand for FireFox 3.0 on its self-proclaimed worldwide "Download Day," the object of which is to set a Guinness record for the largest number of downloads in one 24-hour period.

Well, I'm here to tell you that, after only two tries, I got my shiny fresh copy of the 'Fox, and my download took only about 10 seconds. Rumors of Mozilla's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I wonder why the temptation to jump on Mozilla's back for a couple of minor technical glitches in what is, after all, a commendably ambitious and successful publicity campaign. Have we bloggers forgotten that Mozilla has been giving us a top-notch browser for years now -- for free? Considering all that, you'd think the blogosphere could return the favor and give these guys a 45-minute grace period to figure out a server tweak or two before we pilloried them. 

From all the jeering, you'd think it was a piece of cake to rig up enough servers to support tens of thousands of simultaneous downloads, when even the biggest online retailers in the world can't do it.  I can't say my hands are clean when it comes to shamelessly bashing the good-faith efforts of others, but it's nice to have a reminder about how easy it is to win a sword fight with a chainsaw.

The Technology blog has it...

As Agence France-Presse reports, Lance Corp. David Motari, who everyone thought was the guy who'd tossed the puppy, actually was. Motari and another Marine are being disciplined, and a Marine press release says that Motari is being "processed for separation."

Why it took three months to "investigate" whether Motari was responsible for the video (his name was used in it, after all) is not clear. You'd think they could have closed the case in one day and saved the Marine's family a world of terror and harassment. But when it comes to unflattering situations involving personnel, the Armed Forces are not generally known for their speed or transparency.

Now that the facts are all in, we can wonder about what it would take not just to commit such a brutal act but to record it, and then to let the tape get posted online. The Marines like to invoke support-our-troops-type rhetoric to insulate themselves from criticism ("The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud"), but what they're really doing is calling Motari an isolated sicko and sweeping the bigger issue under the carpet. 

All you have to do is look around for 10 minutes and you can find a dozen videos of wartime cruelty to animals, so to pretend this is a one-in-a-million situation is disingenuous. Let's be honest: Terrible things happen in a war -- to humans, to animals, to everyone. If more men in uniform had video cameras and posted their wartime footage to YouTube, it might not be so easy to ignore that fact.

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Harry Shearer to play hardball with Arianna Huffington on KCRW

Harry Shearer, host of Le Show (and soon to be a Walk of Famer) will talk to L.A. politiblogtrix  Arianna Huffington on today's "Politics of Culture" on KCRW. The two friends have become fixtures of the blogoshere, of course, with Huffington heading the Huffington Post (to which Shearer contributes), and now with Shearer's quirky stylings at My Damn Channel. 

Huffington will no doubt talk about her new book, "Right is Wrong," and hopefully Shearer will imitate Larry King.  He's really good at it.

2:30-3:00pm on 89.9

Image via Huffpost

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

From the Digg files: In the "Daily Show" clip below, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan says she'd "blow [her] brains out" if all she had to watch was the U.S. media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication being that this nation's war coverage is highly whitewashed.

Viacom, which has a $1B lawsuit against YouTube, is -- not surprisingly -- one of the top 5 takers-down (at least recently) of unlicensed clips from the site.  Whether they knock off this clip will be an interesting test of Viacom's tolerance for news-related use of their footage. I'm no fair use expert, but I think a length of 1:42 is riding the perimeter of what's acceptable for an excerpt of copyrighted content, so there's probably some gray area about whether this is actually a fair usage.

The poster, FreePress.net, has the licensed (Comedy Central) version embedded in their own story about Logan's appearance, but they clearly wanted to give this powerful clip more exposure. And that means YouTube.

I for one was struck by Logan's candor. What she says about the sanitizing of war coverage borders on media sacrilege. You rarely hear that kind of opinion from a major media representative, let alone on a major television station. Impressive.

The WSJ, TechCrunch-WaPo, CNET, TechSpot, PCWorld and the rest of the peanut gallery are chuckling at Mozilla today after the company had trouble keeping up with all the demand for FireFox 3.0 on its self-proclaimed worldwide "Download Day," the object of which is to set a Guinness record for the largest number of downloads in one 24-hour period.

Well, I'm here to tell you that, after only two tries, I got my shiny fresh copy of the 'Fox, and my download took only about 10 seconds. Rumors of Mozilla's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I wonder why the temptation to jump on Mozilla's back for a couple of minor technical glitches in what is, after all, a commendably ambitious and successful publicity campaign. Have we bloggers forgotten that Mozilla has been giving us a top-notch browser for years now -- for free? Considering all that, you'd think the blogosphere could return the favor and give these guys a 45-minute grace period to figure out a server tweak or two before we pilloried them. 

From all the jeering, you'd think it was a piece of cake to rig up enough servers to support tens of thousands of simultaneous downloads, when even the biggest online retailers in the world can't do it.  I can't say my hands are clean when it comes to shamelessly bashing the good-faith efforts of others, but it's nice to have a reminder about how easy it is to win a sword fight with a chainsaw.

The Technology blog has it...

As Agence France-Presse reports, Lance Corp. David Motari, who everyone thought was the guy who'd tossed the puppy, actually was. Motari and another Marine are being disciplined, and a Marine press release says that Motari is being "processed for separation."

Why it took three months to "investigate" whether Motari was responsible for the video (his name was used in it, after all) is not clear. You'd think they could have closed the case in one day and saved the Marine's family a world of terror and harassment. But when it comes to unflattering situations involving personnel, the Armed Forces are not generally known for their speed or transparency.

Now that the facts are all in, we can wonder about what it would take not just to commit such a brutal act but to record it, and then to let the tape get posted online. The Marines like to invoke support-our-troops-type rhetoric to insulate themselves from criticism ("The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud"), but what they're really doing is calling Motari an isolated sicko and sweeping the bigger issue under the carpet. 

All you have to do is look around for 10 minutes and you can find a dozen videos of wartime cruelty to animals, so to pretend this is a one-in-a-million situation is disingenuous. Let's be honest: Terrible things happen in a war -- to humans, to animals, to everyone. If more men in uniform had video cameras and posted their wartime footage to YouTube, it might not be so easy to ignore that fact.

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Will Viacom nuke the YouTube clip of CBS' Lara Logan?

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

From the Digg files: In the "Daily Show" clip below, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan says she'd "blow [her] brains out" if all she had to watch was the U.S. media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication being that this nation's war coverage is highly whitewashed.

Viacom, which has a $1B lawsuit against YouTube, is -- not surprisingly -- one of the top 5 takers-down (at least recently) of unlicensed clips from the site.  Whether they knock off this clip will be an interesting test of Viacom's tolerance for news-related use of their footage. I'm no fair use expert, but I think a length of 1:42 is riding the perimeter of what's acceptable for an excerpt of copyrighted content, so there's probably some gray area about whether this is actually a fair usage.

The poster, FreePress.net, has the licensed (Comedy Central) version embedded in their own story about Logan's appearance, but they clearly wanted to give this powerful clip more exposure. And that means YouTube.

I for one was struck by Logan's candor. What she says about the sanitizing of war coverage borders on media sacrilege. You rarely hear that kind of opinion from a major media representative, let alone on a major television station. Impressive.

The WSJ, TechCrunch-WaPo, CNET, TechSpot, PCWorld and the rest of the peanut gallery are chuckling at Mozilla today after the company had trouble keeping up with all the demand for FireFox 3.0 on its self-proclaimed worldwide "Download Day," the object of which is to set a Guinness record for the largest number of downloads in one 24-hour period.

Well, I'm here to tell you that, after only two tries, I got my shiny fresh copy of the 'Fox, and my download took only about 10 seconds. Rumors of Mozilla's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I wonder why the temptation to jump on Mozilla's back for a couple of minor technical glitches in what is, after all, a commendably ambitious and successful publicity campaign. Have we bloggers forgotten that Mozilla has been giving us a top-notch browser for years now -- for free? Considering all that, you'd think the blogosphere could return the favor and give these guys a 45-minute grace period to figure out a server tweak or two before we pilloried them. 

From all the jeering, you'd think it was a piece of cake to rig up enough servers to support tens of thousands of simultaneous downloads, when even the biggest online retailers in the world can't do it.  I can't say my hands are clean when it comes to shamelessly bashing the good-faith efforts of others, but it's nice to have a reminder about how easy it is to win a sword fight with a chainsaw.

The Technology blog has it...

As Agence France-Presse reports, Lance Corp. David Motari, who everyone thought was the guy who'd tossed the puppy, actually was. Motari and another Marine are being disciplined, and a Marine press release says that Motari is being "processed for separation."

Why it took three months to "investigate" whether Motari was responsible for the video (his name was used in it, after all) is not clear. You'd think they could have closed the case in one day and saved the Marine's family a world of terror and harassment. But when it comes to unflattering situations involving personnel, the Armed Forces are not generally known for their speed or transparency.

Now that the facts are all in, we can wonder about what it would take not just to commit such a brutal act but to record it, and then to let the tape get posted online. The Marines like to invoke support-our-troops-type rhetoric to insulate themselves from criticism ("The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud"), but what they're really doing is calling Motari an isolated sicko and sweeping the bigger issue under the carpet. 

All you have to do is look around for 10 minutes and you can find a dozen videos of wartime cruelty to animals, so to pretend this is a one-in-a-million situation is disingenuous. Let's be honest: Terrible things happen in a war -- to humans, to animals, to everyone. If more men in uniform had video cameras and posted their wartime footage to YouTube, it might not be so easy to ignore that fact.

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Bloggers: Why throw a wet blanket on FireFox?

The WSJ, TechCrunch-WaPo, CNET, TechSpot, PCWorld and the rest of the peanut gallery are chuckling at Mozilla today after the company had trouble keeping up with all the demand for FireFox 3.0 on its self-proclaimed worldwide "Download Day," the object of which is to set a Guinness record for the largest number of downloads in one 24-hour period.

Well, I'm here to tell you that, after only two tries, I got my shiny fresh copy of the 'Fox, and my download took only about 10 seconds. Rumors of Mozilla's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I wonder why the temptation to jump on Mozilla's back for a couple of minor technical glitches in what is, after all, a commendably ambitious and successful publicity campaign. Have we bloggers forgotten that Mozilla has been giving us a top-notch browser for years now -- for free? Considering all that, you'd think the blogosphere could return the favor and give these guys a 45-minute grace period to figure out a server tweak or two before we pilloried them. 

From all the jeering, you'd think it was a piece of cake to rig up enough servers to support tens of thousands of simultaneous downloads, when even the biggest online retailers in the world can't do it.  I can't say my hands are clean when it comes to shamelessly bashing the good-faith efforts of others, but it's nice to have a reminder about how easy it is to win a sword fight with a chainsaw.

The Technology blog has it...

As Agence France-Presse reports, Lance Corp. David Motari, who everyone thought was the guy who'd tossed the puppy, actually was. Motari and another Marine are being disciplined, and a Marine press release says that Motari is being "processed for separation."

Why it took three months to "investigate" whether Motari was responsible for the video (his name was used in it, after all) is not clear. You'd think they could have closed the case in one day and saved the Marine's family a world of terror and harassment. But when it comes to unflattering situations involving personnel, the Armed Forces are not generally known for their speed or transparency.

Now that the facts are all in, we can wonder about what it would take not just to commit such a brutal act but to record it, and then to let the tape get posted online. The Marines like to invoke support-our-troops-type rhetoric to insulate themselves from criticism ("The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud"), but what they're really doing is calling Motari an isolated sicko and sweeping the bigger issue under the carpet. 

All you have to do is look around for 10 minutes and you can find a dozen videos of wartime cruelty to animals, so to pretend this is a one-in-a-million situation is disingenuous. Let's be honest: Terrible things happen in a war -- to humans, to animals, to everyone. If more men in uniform had video cameras and posted their wartime footage to YouTube, it might not be so easy to ignore that fact.

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Googoo: Google and Yahoo collabing on search

The Technology blog has it...

As Agence France-Presse reports, Lance Corp. David Motari, who everyone thought was the guy who'd tossed the puppy, actually was. Motari and another Marine are being disciplined, and a Marine press release says that Motari is being "processed for separation."

Why it took three months to "investigate" whether Motari was responsible for the video (his name was used in it, after all) is not clear. You'd think they could have closed the case in one day and saved the Marine's family a world of terror and harassment. But when it comes to unflattering situations involving personnel, the Armed Forces are not generally known for their speed or transparency.

Now that the facts are all in, we can wonder about what it would take not just to commit such a brutal act but to record it, and then to let the tape get posted online. The Marines like to invoke support-our-troops-type rhetoric to insulate themselves from criticism ("The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud"), but what they're really doing is calling Motari an isolated sicko and sweeping the bigger issue under the carpet. 

All you have to do is look around for 10 minutes and you can find a dozen videos of wartime cruelty to animals, so to pretend this is a one-in-a-million situation is disingenuous. Let's be honest: Terrible things happen in a war -- to humans, to animals, to everyone. If more men in uniform had video cameras and posted their wartime footage to YouTube, it might not be so easy to ignore that fact.

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Marine given the boot for puppy toss video

As Agence France-Presse reports, Lance Corp. David Motari, who everyone thought was the guy who'd tossed the puppy, actually was. Motari and another Marine are being disciplined, and a Marine press release says that Motari is being "processed for separation."

Why it took three months to "investigate" whether Motari was responsible for the video (his name was used in it, after all) is not clear. You'd think they could have closed the case in one day and saved the Marine's family a world of terror and harassment. But when it comes to unflattering situations involving personnel, the Armed Forces are not generally known for their speed or transparency.

Now that the facts are all in, we can wonder about what it would take not just to commit such a brutal act but to record it, and then to let the tape get posted online. The Marines like to invoke support-our-troops-type rhetoric to insulate themselves from criticism ("The vast majority of Marines conduct their duties with honor and compassion that makes American people proud"), but what they're really doing is calling Motari an isolated sicko and sweeping the bigger issue under the carpet. 

All you have to do is look around for 10 minutes and you can find a dozen videos of wartime cruelty to animals, so to pretend this is a one-in-a-million situation is disingenuous. Let's be honest: Terrible things happen in a war -- to humans, to animals, to everyone. If more men in uniform had video cameras and posted their wartime footage to YouTube, it might not be so easy to ignore that fact.

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Barack Obama campaign sets up 'Fight the Smears'

Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmears.com*, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online. 

Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.

Topping Fight the Smears' four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." 

This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity. 
 
* I originally had the name of the site spelled without a final 's'. 

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

The Obama campaign deleted my blog post!

A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, the official campaign web site, and added a post.  As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.

As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners.  By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.

At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site.  So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved.  It did.  Here's the Google cache of my post, which got 6 comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.

But today I saw that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why.  If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.  Here's what I wrote:

Obama is DEFINITELY a Martian, and therefore DEFINITELY NOT an American citizen.  I know because I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who said they were almost positive they'd heard someone say so.

Confused about their reason for taking it down without notice or warning, I consulted the Obama site's Terms of Service. The relevant passage is here (my emphasis):

We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including, but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.

So my Martian joke was objectionable?  Or was it defamatory?  Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.

image by David Sarno

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Barack Obama vs. the Internet rumor machine

Rumors have always traveled fast, but when it comes to politics, the whispering campaigns and defamatory leaflets of yesteryear don't hold a candle to the button that beats them all.

"Forward": the marvelous technology that allows truths and untruths alike to be propagated widely, instantly, and at no cost to the sender.

Thanks to Forward-thinking citizens, the online rumors are flying in this campaign like no campaign season before. Dozens and even hundreds of different e-mail chain letters -- most targeting Sen. Barack Obama -- are being circulated in the Internet's muggy back channels, where context suffers and falsehoods flourish. Add in the parts of the political blogosphere that survive on speculation and unsourced hearsay, and you have a petri dish capable of growing such vivid rumors that the best of them actually make it into the mouths of the Washington press corps -- without so much as a factoid to back them up.

At Snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse run by a couple in the San Fernando Valley, Barack Obama's page has 18 entries, only one of which Snopes determined to be true. Of the rest, Snopes rated 11 false, four partly true and two undetermined. The same pattern holds true at PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In its "Chain Emails" section, 21 of the 25 e-mails they've reviewed are marked "Barely True," "False" or "Pants on Fire." Of those, 2 out of 3 were aimed at Obama, and the remainder at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why Obama is such a magnet for outlandish Web allegations, while Clinton and especially Sen. John McCain have gotten off easier, invites some tricky questions. No one I talked to for this story wanted to say that the candidate's race, an area that can bring out all kinds of rumor-fueling fears and resentments, is the primary factor. And maybe it isn't: The number of Americans online has grown plenty since 2004, and astronomically since 2000 -- there are a lot more great-aunts sending around e-mail petitions in big, colorful fonts. The Internet is now without a doubt the most effective rumor mill mankind has ever devised. But it's hard to ignore that the rumors about Obama tend to have something to do with his being black.

A glance at the Obama-related canards reveals that they mostly fall into three categories, which sometimes overlap: race, religion and patriotism. Part of the odd nature of Internet rumors which holds true here is that even after they've been debunked in multiple places and for some time, they continue to make the rounds.

Bill Adair, PolitiFact's editor, likened the chain e-mails to virus-like "organisms," calling them "a resilient form of communication that resists scrutiny" and is essentially unfiltered.

"It's not like Hotmail is going to say, 'Well, were not going to deliver that message because it's wrong,' " Adair said. "That message is going to get through, and it's going to be up to the reader to determine if it's true or not."

Obama's campaign has set up a rumor-busting task force that maintains a Web page at Factcheck.barackobama.com, to address some of these stubborn allegations. One section, entitled "Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim," collates several articles from national media outlets, including two from The Times, that weigh against the claim. Another section, "Obama Is a Patriot Who Loves His Flag and His Country," has an even larger collection of supporting excerpts.

When asked about the churn of questionable rumors, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor was not shy about noting that "disinformation campaigns are the hallmark of some of the most vicious campaigns on the Republican side. It's not something that's new to this campaign, but it may be getting particular attention this round.

"It's frankly disconcerting when the press corps start asking about rumors that have no basis in fact," he added, "but it's something that we realized early on would be a problem."

Last week one such dubious story made the rounds online -- but this time it was the blogosphere that was cultivating it. Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and national security analyst, wrote several times on his NoQuarter blog about the existence of a videotape that purportedly showed Michelle Obama using the word "whitey."

But, as Reason Magazine's David Weigel pointed out in multiple critiques of Johnson's information, Johnson had no direct evidence of the video. He had not seen actually seen it, he wrote, but rather had "heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

As Weigel told me over the phone, in the world of professional journalism, "No one who didn't want to just get fired would source a story like that."

Weigel also noted in his post that Johnson's account of the tape's key details -- where it took place and which famous personages were in it -- changed over the course of several days, but Johnson's insistence on the tape's existence did not. (I couldn't reach Johnson for a comment.)

Still, the rumor made its way onto more than a few blogs, most of which were conservative. And on June 3, Democratic pundit Bob Beckel alluded to the tape on FOX News, again as hearsay and without naming sources. The videotape of the Beckel segment was passed around in various incarnations on YouTube, adding to the speculation but not the evidence. Finally, a McClatchy reporter asked Obama for his thoughts on the rumor.

"We have seen this before," Obama replied, according to Politico.com's Ben Smith. "There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it.

"That gives legs to the story," Obama said.

And that's precisely the dilemma in reporting on rumors. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, explained: "The problem is that if the mainstream media address" a particular rumor, "they run the risk that they're actually going to reinforce it. "

On the other hand, she said, in a medium such as e-mail that's largely hidden from public view and for which "there isn't any natural way to make a rebuttal, a whole lot of people are potentially exposed to information that's untrue, and they don't have any way of knowing it."

Jamieson and PolitiFact's Adair agreed that peoples' tendency to buy into forwarded information depends largely on who sent it.

"When you get the e-mail from a friend of yours, you're more likely to believe it than if you get it from a stranger." Only problem with that, Jamieson said, is that, if you consider its origin, "the stuff you're getting from a friend is from a stranger."

This is a campaign in which candidates have been all over YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and the Web's connective power has awakened a generation of youthful voters. It figures then that e-mail — one of the Internet's oldest technologies — is also the one that's moving the political conversation backwards instead of forward.

Top Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / European Pressphoto Agency

Lower Photo: viral image that's circulating online.  Click on it to be taken to the debunk page.

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Super-grandpa designs custom browser for his autistic grandchild

This is how to be a grandpa. 

When John LeSieur saw his 6-year-old grandson Zackary, who is autistic, getting frustrated when he tried to use a computer, LeSieur decided to take some initiative. He built the boy a custom-made browser. 

The Zac, or "Zone for Autistic Children," provides a window onto the Web that is trimmed of excessive motion and complexity, allowing children with the condition to navigate certain sites without becoming overwhelmed by noisy stimuli. 

Zackary, who doesn't speak much, has begun using the browser and is able to start it by himself. "He enjoys listening to music through the program and trying puzzles," his mother told AP tech writer Brian Bergstein,"things he always liked before but hadn't been able to explore online."

(image from zacbrowser.com)

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

YouTube enshrines Universal Studios' lost attractions

Several of Universal Studios' workhorse sets and rides went up in smoke Sunday, but their images live on -- online.

In one of its curious and vaguely morbid capacities, YouTube now functions as a de facto memorial to Universal Studios' lost rides and buildings. Shaky tourist videos from the theme park that would otherwise be of little interest have been transformed into (still shaky) historical artifacts.

Since some or most of the areas burned in the fire are unlikely to be rebuilt exactly as they were before (and when you see the cheesy but beloved old King Kong ride below, you'll see why), these videos are the closest we're likely to come to riding them again.

"King Kong" (1986)

Here's some cellphone footage of the Hill Valley Courthouse from "Back to the Future," now firmly part of the past. The building also appeared in "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War of the Worlds," and "Bye Bye Birdie," among others.

The New York Street area was used, as the tour guide in the (very shaky) video says, for "Spider Man 2," the "Transformers," "Ghost Whisperer," "Crossing Jordan" and many more.

As a bonus, here's a little amateur video I shot of the fire.

Around midday Sunday I climbed up on the roof of a building across the Cahuenga Pass from the Universal Studios fire and recorded a few seconds of the main smoke plume. You can see in the foreground that traffic on the 101 was mostly unaffected. At restaurants in the area, you had the strange sight of people talking and eating lunch as the blaze burned outside the windows.

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

McCain campaign giving talking points to the masses

Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda. 

I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Worldwide day of film to be held Saturday

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Barack gets the dirt off his shoulders

You've got to wonder--if John Kerry had hordes of YouTubers mashing up his speeches with Jay-Z songs, or Madonna singles, or even Hall and Oates--maybe things would've gone differently for him. (Kerry does  have a few mashups under his belt--including a cameo in the triple-platinum "Don't Taze Me Bro" remix)--but none of that was in time for the '04 election. What might have been?

I only ask because everything Sen. Obama says somehow gets set to music and special effects. Have a look at this one:

THIS JUST IN!: August at sister blog SoundBoard has the even better Stephanopolous /Soulja Boy mashup.  Yaaah!

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Twitter to the rescue, Egypt edition

Twitter, the micro-blogging medium that allows networks of friends to easily broadcast short messages, has often been derided as frivolous and self-indulgent.  But here's a case where a real use of the service has been found.

According to the Mercury News, a UC Berkeley student who was arrested in Egypt for taking pictures of a political demonstration used the service to "tweet" a call for help. 

"ARRESTED,"  he wrote. When 29-year-old James Karl Buck pressed "send," the message was instantly conveyed to a large group of friends and allies, including, said the Mercury News story, a bunch of lefty Egyptian anti-government bloggers.

Buck's Twitter "followers"--the network of people who receive short messages a user sends on the services -- alerted the U.S. Embassy and international media, and he was released the next day. (His interpreter and friend is apparently still being held, incommunicado, by Egyptian authorities.)

Twitter's fundamental strength--the ability to quickly disseminate bits of information to a wide and interested audience--makes perfect sense for political activity and demonstrations, where situations and danger levels can change instantly. Might this be why, as  ZDNET  reports, the service is blocked in Dubai?

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Wikileaks, LiveLeak, and the slippery slope of leaker culture

Lately, the world is springing a lot of leaks.

Ask Julius Baer Bank of Zurich, or the Church of Scientology. Ask the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ask any agency or entity listed on Wikileaks.org's "Analysis Requested" page, a long list of "fresh" documents the site has received from leakers and whistleblowers around the globe.

Baer Bank -- or its lawyers -- might tell you that in February sheaves of the bank's internal documents ended up on Wikileaks, along with allegations by the site that the information suggested Baer was "supporting [the] ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance." Guantanamo commanders might admit that the site got ahold of restricted documents detailing the base's operational details and guidelines for the treatment of prisoners. Scientology members would pass along that more than 600 pages of their most sacred (and secret) religious documents had been posted there too.

Baer sought an injunction against Wikileaks but quickly learned how hard it is to sue what you can't see. (In the court papers, Wikileaks is listed as "an entity of unknown form.")

Jeffrey S. White, the California judge who'd initially ordered the site dismantled, reversed himself two weeks later when he realized that, in the wake of his widely publicized first ruling, the Baer documents had spread all over the Internet, rendering his injunction pointless. He also acknowledged  that an order to bury the documents could amount to an infringement of the 1st Amendment, which, the court noted, affords the public "the right to receive information and ideas."

Wikileaks calls itself a "transparency group" and is just one member of an emerging movement of self-styled justice seekers who are harnessing the Internet to douse sensitive information in sunlight.

But all is not transparent. Wikileaks' founders have kept their identites a secret to protect themselves, they say, and to avoid being barred from the countries in which they operate, clouding the moral equation slightly. For what do you say of a group that exposes the dirty secrets of others but can't be held accountable themselves? It's just one of the slippery questions that the leaking game raises.

 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Arrington vs. Cashmore: Tech titans clash in Hollywood

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Al Gore is back with global warming slide show 2.0

The folks at TED have posted a new video of Al Gore debuting his latest climate-change slide show, updated from the one he toured with in 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth." (He said he presented the old slide show about 2,000 times.)

"In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis," he says, before restating his point from "Truth" that all the technology and know-how necessary to solve the climate crisis is already available. 

Gore's slide show, as before, features sobering images and analysis. How about the fact that the part of Antarctica that's melting is the size of California? Or that in 2005, we blew 6.2 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- as an animation in the video illustrates, that's the weight of 1.2 billion elephants.

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Are YouTube, MySpace causing teen girls to attack?

In yet another headline-grabbing muddle of cause and effect, just about everyone (including this website) is trumpeting a story about eight Florida teens who've been charged with beating up a 16-year-old girl "so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube."  The girl lost part of her sight and hearing.

The girl's father is quoted saying the alleged assailants lured his daughter into a trap "for express purpose [sic] of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet."

And, of course, the attack was apparently a retaliation for mean comments the victim had posted on her MySpace profile.

And now, local groups are apparently calling on video hosting sites to prohibit videos that depict fighting.

There are many, many high school-age fight videos on YouTube. Just search "school fight" and order the results by date.  Kids of all genders, colors, ages and nationalities are fighting, all over the world. And obviously, there's often a kid with a cellphone present to record it.

But here's a moment to be wary of hasty conclusions.  Before we turn into a society of cart-drawn horses that blames everything on the proliferation of digital and the consequent extinction of morality, let's wait until we get some science happening. 

In this case, you'd want to start with the question: Are kids fighting more frequently now? 

If yes, are a significant portion of those fights instigated so that they can be recorded? Or would those fights have happened anyway?

And perhaps just as importantly, if you prevented kids from uploading fight videos to YouTube, would it decrease the number of fights happening in the first place?

And if you shut down MySpace and erased all the hurtful comments posted thereon, same question.

Why are YouTube and MySpace the primary suspects here?  Why not the makers of the video camera the kids were using, or the electric company that supplied the power to charge it?  If there were no electricity, would we see the number of schoolyard fights decrease?  Not likely.

Connecting new technology to violence is always a good way to make waves. Comic books, TV, movies and video games have all been put on trial -- and now it's the Web's turn.  Trouble is, the more of those connections we make, the less convincing each one gets.

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi

Why Obama and Clinton are YouTube stars

(Robert Greenwald and the crew at Brave New Films. Photo by Bob Chamberlin / LAT)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes,

... the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Hillary Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street’s Martian Yip Yip puppets, and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mashups online too. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red phone ad ("In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters"). And last week, John McCain gave the genre a try; same ringing phone, but "this time, it’s an economi