Scripting News for 9/20/2006

Mary Jo Foley: “Blogging is the future of journalism.” 

Okay, I got cable installed at the new house today and got the HD option. Watching a random baseball game, it’s awesome. 

Every day on the NewsHour they have an American general saying the plan is to get the Iraqi army up and running. Sure it’s difficult now, but soon, in six to nine months (he knows that’s optimistic, but he’s an optimist) they can start moving the American troops out and that’s the plan, it’s not great, but it’s the best they can do. This has been going on since mid-2004 or so and there’s no end in sight. Aren’t the interviewers aware that we’ve been hearing this for two years and it just keeps getting worse, not better? You’d think they’d ask a question based on this simple observation, but they don’t. Every day it’s as if there had never been an American general on the show making excuses that no one believes. 

Could someone please tell NPR that their podcast directory is empty. I’m getting errors on all their non-podcast feeds as well. I hope it’s just a wire-trip. 😦 

NY Times: Some Hot Recorders for Those Cooool Podcasts. 

BBC: Chavez tells UN Bush is devil. 

A few months ago I started noticing that, walking down the street, I’d have to veer to avoid walking into people. They weren’t paying attention, if I didn’t want to have a collision, I had to adjust my path. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, did this just start happening, or did I just start noticing it, or what? I thought maybe it was the age difference, I’d always heard that when you get older you become more invisible, and in Berkeley, the average age is pretty young. But younger than Cambridge? Then, a couple of weeks ago, walking in San Francisco, I hit on what may be the answer. Cell phones and iPods. Perhaps people aren’t as conscious walking on the street as they used to be? Listening to a really interesting podcast, engaged in an engaging conversation with a friend on a Bluetooth headset. If it’s true, are people also walking into buildings more? Getting hit by cars? What’s happening with the mortality rate of pedestrians? 

Monkey Bites: How Buggy is iTunes 7? 

Joseph Pisani at BusinessWeek needs a high resolution picture of me for an article he’s writing. I don’t have one, but people are always taking pictures at parties. Maybe someone has one. If so, send Joseph an email at bweekpic at gmail dot com. 

Wired lists Web 2.0 winners and losers. Winners: Flickr, Odeo, Writely, del.icio.us, NetVibes. 

According to Valleywag, TechCrunch will launch an enterprise weblog today, edited by Nik Cubrilovic. 

Two years ago today we took a walk on the Seattle waterfront. 

On last night’s Countdown, a constitutional law expert asks if the reason that the redefining of the Geneva Convention is being debated in the Senate is that news is about to break that the President has been ordering US military personnel to torture prisoners. If that’s what’s coming, we must act to remove the President from office. He is acting in our name, and we will have to deal with the consequences long after he’s out of office. We can’t support this for another two years. If the Democrats won’t stand up to Bush, we must form a new political structure in which we can, without the Democrats. 

Important note — the dissenting Republicans are not opposing torture, they are proposing a different definition for torture. The Geneva Convention doesn’t need redefining. Imagine of some other country were debating about this, how would we interpret it? 

BBC: Free anonymising browser debuts. 

Glenn Fleishman reports that in-flight wifi may not be dead after all. 

Transcript of NBC interview with Iranian president Ahmadinejad.  

From Jay Rosen comes news that Reuters has given $100K to his NewAssignment.net to “underwrite the costs of hiring our first editor, which is going to be a fun job.”