DIY radio with PODcasting | Doc Searls’ IT Garage
That’s do-it-yourself radio by creating MP3 audio files
that folks can listen to on their iPods and other music/audio players!
Thanks to Dan Gillmor
No Joke: Daily Show Viewers Follow Presidential Race
According to a study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Daily Show viewers are “more likely to know the issue positions and backgrounds of presidential candidates than people who do not watch late-night comedy.” The data can be found in their Sept. 21, 2004 press release.
The blog, On Lisa Rein’s Radar has a nice archive of Daily show clips to get you up to speed on the political process.
Governor Schwarzenegger signed executive order S-16-04 last week charging the state CIO, Clark Kelso, with setting up a policy on statewide use of P2P technologies. While the order mentions legitimate uses of P2P, it looks to me like the RIAA and MPAA have his ear. P2P is already being used for legitimate purposes across the UCs and the state. LOCKSS relies on P2P as do many other projects. IT departments everywhere rely on bit torrent to download critical patches and updates to webservers and OS’s.
Concerned? Write early and often to the Governor and CIO Kelso. Kelso mentions in the article that he’d like to have a policy in place by the end of the year. They need to hear how the technology is already being used and that any limitation on legitimate use would adversely (and economically!) affect organizations across the state.
File this under “whimsy”. This library is touring around England and Scotland in 2004/05, interviewing folks about the books that they would write.
The collection is evidence of the common desire to write a book and is an ongoing survey of this literary phenomenon.
[Thanks Librarian.net]
Literary Reading in Dramatic Decline, According to National Endowment for the Arts Survey
National Endowment for the Arts, July 8, 2004.
(press release)
Literary reading is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature, according to a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) survey released today.
Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America reports drops in all groups studied, with the steepest rate of decline - 28 percent - occurring in the youngest age groups….Reading at Risk presents the results from the literature segment of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, conducted by the Census Bureau in 2002 at the NEA’ s request.
Also see, Fewer Noses Stuck in Books in America, Survey Finds
By BRUCE WEBER
New York Times,
July 8, 2004
Ashcroft Attempting to Silence Former FBI Translator
In a rare maneuver, Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered that information about the Edmonds case be retroactively classified, even basic facts that have been posted on websites and discussed openly in meetings with members of Congress for two years. The Department of Justice also invoked the seldom-used “state secrets” privilege to silence Edmonds in court.
Memoryhole has the text of Leahy’s original 2002 letters.
Leahy’s 2004 letter to Ashcroft and Mueller:
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Here’s some more background in a March 31, 2004 article on worldnetdaily.
One thing’s for sure, there’s some serious cover-up going on. On an aside, with this post, a new category has been added called “fugitives”. We’ll attempt to keep track of those nasty fugitive government documents that don’t seem to flow into depository libraries as they should. Stay tuned!
Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor’s eJournal - Opinion Laundering Thrives
Gillmor comments on Tim Lambert’s interesting piece, When Think Tanks Attack (23 Jun 2004), which posits that the many think tanks that oppose open source are funded by Microsoft. Gillmor calls this general trend of interest groups hiding behind others “opinion laundering.”
Hey everyone. This is LAZ’ 500th post! That must be some sort of milestone right? So let us know how we’re doing. Drop an email to Jim and/or James with your comments, ideas, complaints and diatribes (those’ll be filed accordingly 
). Thanks for tuning in!
International > Middle East > From the Editors: The Times and Iraq” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/international/middleeast/26FTE_NOTE.html”>The Times and Iraq (registration required)
Amazing! The New York Times, paper of record, has done the unthinkable. They’ve gone back and reviewed their entire coverage of Iraq and found some disturbing evidence:
“But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged.”
What, you expected them to flaggelate themselves? This is evidence that the wheels are starting to fall off of the Bush Administration’s little red wagon (he says with much hope!). Journalists all over the political spectrum are starting to ask the hard questions of the Administration — anyone remember the April 13 press conference where Bush stumbled when asked if he had made any mistakes after 9/11?
Read more criticism from the public editor’s column “Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction?”
A list of NYT stories can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/critique.
GPO hunts fugitives. I’ve got an idea: convince the various agencies to add RSS feeds to their websites. Then GPO catalogers could simply open their favorite aggregator and catalog/index/capture everything that comes through. OR…they could give $$$ to a private vendor to come up with some highly technical solution that doesn’t answer the problem.
As more federal agencies publish government information on Web sites without notifying GPO, important documents that should be indexed, catalogued and preserved for public access in the Federal Depository Library Program have instead become “fugitive” documents, according to GPO officials.
Their answer to the problem is to use Web crawler and data-mining technologies to find them. GPO officials request that companies with those technologies submit proposals by June 2 for services they describe as “Web harvesting” in a recent solicitation for bids.
[Thanks LISnews]
