Center for Citizen Media

It’s a big download — they should use BitTorrent — but it’s worth a look: “No-Spy Video” is a clever and trenchant look at President Bush’s notion that warrantless spying on American citizens is a natural right of government.

I’ve done a column for PR Week about Apple Computer’s PR control freakery. You can read it here.

American Journalism Review: Blogging on the Hustings. The end of the campaign brought a sense of wistfulness to many Virginia bloggers. Several said they didn’t expect the blogosphere to be quite as open and free the next time around. Candidates, corporations, advocacy groups and paid bloggers – operatives hired by interest groups to blog as if they were ordinary voters – threaten to dominate the landscape next campaign season. Bloggers still cheer whenever one of their online brethren pokes a hole in a story from the MSM. But increasingly, bloggers turned away from the question of who’s a journalist to focus more on whose voices will be heard.

UPDATED I’ll participating in a live online “Journalism Leaders’ Forum” at 10:30 Pacific time this morning — here’s the webcast site — sponsored by the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom. I’m in Doha, Qatar, doing video from my Mac using the iSight camera, and it all seems to be working. Then again, one of Murphy’s laws is that Murphy attends webcasts… (I’ll try to update the picture when the session starts…)

UPDATE: The panel is over and was enjoyable. Good questions…

I’ll be on the road for roughly the next 24 hours. Postings will resume Monday night or Tuesday.

Two items in current news are raising questions of how to preserve historical truths in a digital age.

The Lowell Sun in Massachusetts reports that the staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan “wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat” on Wikipedia.

It’s worth noting that the references in question — Meehan’s breaking of his pledge not to run for more than four terms — have been restored to the page. There are likely to be a lot more Wikipedians who are willing to keep this up to date than congressional staff members who want to alter history.

Meanwhile, as political blogger Josh Marshall has reported, photos of President Bush and lobbying criminal Jack Abramoff have been expunged from public availability by a company that does “grip and grin” photo shoots for Republican politicians. If anyone has one of these pictures, he or she should make them public.

(Disclosure: I am an investor in a new company founded by Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder. He is a member of the Center for Citizen Media’s board of advisors.)

From Dave Farber’s Interesting People mail list:

Here’s what censorship does.

Compare

Google China:
http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen

Google the rest of the world:
http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

Timothy Noah (Slate): Did Nan Talese Lie To Oprah? – What did James Frey’s publisher know and when did she know it? Yes, Talese learned about the particular fabrications exposed by The Smoking Gun (there were more than two) “at the same time” that Winfrey did. But Talese had reason to believe Frey hadn’t told the truth in his memoir well before that.

The behavior of Talese is becoming as much of a scandal as Frey’s own lies. As Noah explains in this piece, Talese knew long ago about the likelihood that Frey had made up a great deal of his so-called “memoir” — yet she kept pretending that there was no issue here.

Individuals deceive. This is life. But when big institutions aid and abet the deceptions — especially institutions like major (supposedly) nonfiction book publishers, where some effort in service of truth is supposed to be part of the bargain with the readers — they sink lower than the offending author.

Talese still has her high-profile and no doubt high-paid job. That is, in itself, a commentary on her employer, Random House, which in turn is owned by German media giant Bertelsmann AG.

Meanwhile, the Random House page about Frey’s book continues to call it an “uncommonly genuine account of a life destroyed and a life reconstructed.” And Slate leads the list of Talese’s favorite websites — we’ll see for how long.

Jeff Jarvis: Interaction vs. reaction: But enough about you…. Interactivity is about more than reaction. It is about creation. It is not about controlled authority. It is about sharing authority.

Beltway Blogroll: A Luxurious Junket For Bloggers. Bloggers no doubt will justify the trip by highlighting the transparency of the junket. For one year, they must link to the Bloggers in Amsterdam disclosure statement, which itself notes the transparency “mantra.” But curiously, the bloggers just started talking about the trip yesterday — and not all of them are doing so yet. If they really wanted to be transparent, why didn’t the bloggers tell their readers about the trip when the invitation was extended?

I’m not sure they needed to disclose it so early. But disclosure does seem necessary in this kind of situation, which amounts to paid advertising.

Transparency is a complex issue, and we’ll all be working through it as time goes on.