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Internet Media Rolls On

Internet media rolls on - affecting Big Media and how it is produced, distributed and consumed. It's a trend that has affected every aspect of communications from from radio, to publishing to movies. With announcements of declining CD sales and TV viewership, the momentum continues.

According to Hollywoodreporter.com: "Primetime television viewing dropped significantly compared with last season. The steepest decline was in live viewership, which fell 10% year-over-year among the four major broadcast networks. Adding in DVR viewership, which can boost shows' ratings by as much as 25% or more, the Big Four were still down 5%. Things turned for the worse in the spring when many of TV's best and brightest fell to season or even series lows. That list includes Desperate Housewives, Lost, Grey's Anatomy, CSI: Miami and ER, among others. Even Idol wasn't immune though it hasn't seen a year-over-year decline.

As regards muisc, Breitbart.com quotes Gartner Research's digital musical analyst Michael McGuire: "Consumers are sending a message to artists that "'while you may have put a lot of thought into the sequence of the album, I only like these three songs.' It comes back to consumers being in complete control of their media experience, and that is not going backwards."

Breitbart.com concludes: "Music industry statistics show that CD sales have declined steadily for more than five years but still account for 90 percent of album purchases. According to McGuire, "The relentless popularity of digital music downloads on the Internet is taking the legs out from under CD sales and leaving studios with nothing to stand on if they fail to adapt to online distribution."

The power of the forums?

The Gazette forums made news last weekend when it was revealed that Union-Scioto board member Chad Cunningham had proferred his resignation, only to pull it days later, after claims that he was threatened with an ethics charge because of comments he made there.

There was a lot of debate right before the May 8 election when the Waverly school levy threads got a little out of hand, but this is an entirely new playing field.

As far as we're concerned, any public official that wants to answer - whether anonymously or under their own name - questions or comments from our readers/posters can do so. Cunningham's choice was to use part of his e-mail address in an effort to prove that it was him. He deserves credit for reaching out to a whole new audience - one that can be unforgivingly candid and sometimes cruel.

Thanks to technology, government has another way to reach out to its residents (or our readers) to answer questions, squash bad information and further the openness of government. Chats and forums are just a few of the ways to do this.

In fact, we'll open a forum thread to any school district - particularly those who have ballot issues coming up - who wants to engage in a controlled chat about the district and its finances or any other issue. This type of chat can help the districts (or any other governmental body) keep people involved and informed.

DON'T PANIC

We are currently performing important upgrades to our main database server.
This work began on Tuesday June 5th at 8:00am ET and could take anywhere from four to 16 hours to complete.

Yes, we know - Scooter Libby's sentence is handed down today: is he going to end up in the slammer? And the Republican debate is tonight: which crusty old white guy is going to out-dodder the others?

Hopefully we'll be up and running in no time, so check back later. We really, truly, apologize for the inconvenience.

While you are waiting, please enjoy this photograph of a pro-war protester holding an ironically misspelled sign.

Protect Your Blog With a Solid Password

I’m not going to name names, but I heard recently of some WordPress bloggers who had their blog’s “broken into” not because of a vulnerability in the WordPress code, but because their passwords were easily guessed and used.

Is yours?

I vaguely remember a television court drama from a few years ago against a gun safe company, won because a locked gun safe was easily broken into by a child. The combination was very simple like a phone number, 123456 or 654321. For one of these bloggers, their password was their name spelled backwards. The other used the password “wordpress”. Is the password on your blog just as simple?

The most common passwords are:

• Middle names
• Names spelled backwards
• Phone numbers
• The word “password”
• Birthdays
• Single or combination uses of love, god, sex, and money, such as lovemoney or sexgod
• qwerty
• abc123
• password1
• asdf
• car license
• letmein
• yourname1
• default

According to Wikipedia’s explanation of Password Cracking, “Repeated research over some 40 years has demonstrated that around 40% of user-chosen passwords are readily guessable by programs.”

With all of the hype over security vulnerabilities and patches, virus scanning programs, firewalls, and protecting passwords and usernames, people are still really stupid when it comes to choosing and disclosing their usernames and passwords. Wired reported on a MySpace phishing attempt to gain access to usernames and passwords with these results: “MySpace estimates that more than 100,000 people fell for the attack before it was shut down.”

They also reported that “while 65 percent of passwords contain eight characters or less, 17 percent are made up of six characters or less. The average password is eight characters long.” The eight character limit has been trained into us as that was the longest the earliest software programs could handle. It’s not true anymore, but it’s a habit. Is your password eight or less characters long?

MySpace password exploit: Crunching the numbers">Roger Grimes of InfoWorld got some of the information on the MySpace debacle and reported:

*Almost 1 percent of users had the word “password” as, or as part of, their password. Not real clever.

*Words, colors, years, names, sports, hobbies, and music groups were very popular. FYI, your girlfriend or boyfriend’s name isn’t that uncommon in most cases. I, too, luv Brandi, Bob, or Joe.

*The color red was twice as likely to be used in a password as blue. No other colors came close in popularity percentage-wise. I guess “chartreuse” is a relatively safe password choice.

*Other popular words include: angel, baby, boy, girl, big, monkey, me, and the.

*Cuss words were very popular. Boy, there’s a lot of aggression out there.

*I was surprised about how many Christian-sounding — for example, “Ilovejesus” — log-on names were associated with the worst cuss words.

*Names of sports — golf, football, soccer, and so on — were as popular as professional sports teams and college team nicknames.

The strongest passwords are created with letters and numbers, or even with characters such as !@#$%*(). There are also a variety of free online programs that will help you create a complex and not easily broken password. Unfortunately, remembering such passwords is more challenging.

Remembering such passwords for every password need you have, such as with your blog, email, web host, social networking services, social bookmarking services, blog registrations, software registrations, forums, chats, discussion groups…I don’t know about you, but I’m overwhelmed with passwords. I have a clipboard with 12 pages of all the passwords I’ve had with all the various online password accessed services for over the years! How can we remember all of these?

We can’t. Yes, there are now software and browser programs which will “remember” for us, but hit the road, borrow a computer away from home or office and that password program won’t help you then. Still, the passwords we use the most need a method to make them complex but memorable.

A popular technique is to work with acronyms based upon a favorite phrase of music, poetry, or quote, or a simple sentence. For example, “Oh, I just can’t wait to be king” from the Lion King could be abbreviated as:

• OIJCWTBK
• OiJcWtBk
• OeyeJcW82bK
• Oheyejustc8ntw82bking
• kbtwcjio
• 01j(W2bk
• hiuaaoei (using the second letter of each word)
• 01j(\/\/7B|Leet Speak Converter)

It also helps to not use the same password for everything you access. Some suggest using the name of the program or service within the password, spelled forwards or backwards or the first or last three or four letters, within their password.

Examples from above for a WordPress (WP) blog might be:

• OIJCWPWTBK
• WPOIJCWTBK
• OIJCWTBKWP
• OIJCWWordPressTBK
• OIJCWTBKWordPress

You could easily replace WordPress or WP with ebay, myspace, flickr, or whatever title you need to remember which is which.

Years ago, a security expert told me that if any part of your password is in the dictionary, it can be hacked. The two keys to protecting your password is making it difficult for others to figure out, and don’t tell others. No matter how “honest” their request may appear. According to Yahoo’s Security Password Tips: A password is like a toothbrush: Choose a good one and don’t share it.

Some articles with good tips on creating respectable and fairly foolproof passwords are:

• Strong passwords: How to create and use them
• Yahoo Security - How to Choose a Password
• Schneier on Security - Choose Secure Passwords
• Lockdown - Password Guide
• Bergen County Technology Center - A guide to passwords and password security
• Neomeme - Generating the Perfect Password
• LifeHacker - Get high security passwords from Perfect Passwords
• Redmond Mag - 9 Perfect Password Pointers
• Geek to Live: Choose (and remember) great passwords

iChat AV - The best unusable video and voice chat program

Apple has a little product called iChat AV which is only available on Mac OS X systems. I remember watching the keynote when Steve Jobs first announced the video conferencing solution and I was blown away. h.264 as the primary CODEC, great quality, multi-party chats! It's got some amazingly cool features that many other solutions don't have. There's only one problem: it doesn't work.

At this point some readers will be up in arms telling me how they were able to connect to their cousin in Utah just fine, or did a test from 2 computers in their home just fine. "IT WORKS" you'll say. In home to home situations iChat seems to work 75% of the time. The problem I'm encountering is a bit larger. We use video conferencing software (VVoIP or Video/Voice over IP) to do our video interviews from anywhere in the world. I need the highest quality solution I can find with the least amount of technical jargon to throw at the interviewee. iChat has great quality, but it has a horrible time break through firewalls and NATs. No ability to route through a NAT means no ability to actually work. Most companies have their employees on an enterprise grade NAT so when we want to interview the CEO of a company, well, with iChat we can't.



VVoIP programs such as Skype and SightSpeed are able to work on just about any network we try. Here at the Technology Evangelist office we have a Cisco NAT and iChat won't even begin to try and crawl through that. It's not a fault of our NAT as both Skype and SightSpeed work fine here. On home routers UPnP needs to be enabled and even then maybe it will connect if the firewall settings are correct. Of four different business networks I tried it on, not one worked with iChat. I thought that maybe it was just the company blocking VVoIP traffic. Nope, both SightSpeed and Skype work great on all four networks. The only app that won't work is iChat.

I brought my MacBook Pro home and tried iChat on my home network with a test Apple account. IT WORKED! Oh, and it was beautiful too. By far the best quality VVoIP I have ever seen, it's up there with pro grade video conferencing units. I was ecstatic! I then tried it again to show off iChat and... it failed with an error -8. I was able to get iChat to work on one computer, not a second computer at all and on the computer it did work on it would only work 2 out of 3 times. At this point I was pulling out my hair.

For us this is a huge bummer. Apple is introducing some amazingly cool features into the next version of iChat that include desktop sharing and automatic keying. I really hope that Apple focuses on networking first and foremost. A quick glance at the support forums will show that I am by far not the only person with this issue. For a company that makes computers and products for mere mortals, iChat AV seems to be set up for only the elite few who can get a public IP address with no firewall on both computers they want to connect to.

If you are disappointed in iChat's NAT/Firewall performance or network performance in general I would suggest sending Apple as much data as you can about the errors you are getting in iChat. When a conference fails you get a 'Communications Error' dialog. Make sure to send the details of that to Apple every single time by hitting 'Send to Apple' when this pops up. Hopefully with enough error reports pointing to bad NAT transversal, they will be able to fix it in the next version. If you simply don't use iChat anymore then sending Apple some feedback on their product may be a good idea. Let them know exactly where the issues are. I'm still an idealist so I hope and believe that Apple cares and with enough people sending constructive feedback, they will make a change for the better.

PA approves a 10-point truce plan

Palestinian Information Minister, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, stated on Monday that the Palestinian Unity Government approved a 10-point truce plan after discussing it at a government session on Monday, and agreed to defend the national unity and to call on all factions to adopt the plan.

Palestinian National Authority

Dr. Barghouthi welcomed the report which was published by AMNESTY International which slams the illegal Israeli attacks in the Palestinian occupied territories, the illegal annexation Wall, roadblocks, and Israeli violations to the international law.

He added that the government finalized the means needed to implement the signed agreements, and the efforts to bar any further internal clashes between the gunmen in the Gaza Strip.

The government welcomed the efforts carried out by several Arab countries in order to bar any future internal clashes, and to implement the security plan which was presented by the ministry of interior.

Dr. Barghouthi also stated that the government will carry all needed efforts to uncover the groups that carries attacks and internal violence in order to prosecute the assailants and to follow-up every step in implementing the security plan.

The ten-point ceasefire plan, which is conditioned with Israel commitment to the truce, consists of the following points;

1. All factions will stop firing homemade shells into Israeli areas.

2. Israel should stop all of its aerial, ground and naval attacks.

3. The truce should also be implemented in the West Bank.

4. The truce will be implemented directly after all parties approve it.

5. Israel should end its assassinations, arrests and invasions into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

6. The issue of wanted fighters, deportees and detainees should be resolved through a specific agreement.

7. Israel should release all detained legislators, ministers, mayors and officials.

8. Israel should withdraw to from the Palestinian control areas which were re-invaded after September 28, 2000.

9. Israel should remove all roadblocks and checkpoints, and should ease movement on border crossings.

10. After the first and second articles of this agreement are implemented, the Palestinian Authority will gradually deploy its forces on the North-eastern borders of the Gaza Strip.

Moreover, Dr. Barghouthi stated that the government decided to allocate the needed financial issues to ensure the implementation of the plan.

He also stated that the Israeli decision which rejects the American security plan proves that Israel does not want to be a peace partner and rejects the truce.

The Palestinian government repeated its condemnation to the continued arrest of the Palestinian legislators and officials, and slammed the Israeli decision to prosecute the Minister of Information Nasser Ed Deen Al Sha’er, and the Israeli decision to transfer the previous legislator Abdul-Rahman Zeidan to administrative detention for six months.

Dr. Barghouthi said that the Israeli decisions are considered direct attacks against the Palestinian legitimacy and democracy.

He added that the confinement of hundreds of detainees, including officials, under administrative detention orders without charges or trial is another direct violations to the international law since the administrative detention was used by the British occupation to the country, and that Israel adopted this illegal procedure as part of its so-called emergency law which was used by the British mandate in 1945.

Moreover, senior Egyptian sources reported on Monday that Egypt will host later this month internal Palestinian talks on a ceasefire agreement which is being prepared by Egyptian officials.

Egypt already held talks with representatives of Hamas and Fateh, and is now holding talks with representatives of the Islamic Jihad. Talks with other factions will be held at a later stage.

The Culture of Citizenship: A Conversation With Zephyr Teachout

As we lead into the conference, I am running a series of features on the blog which foreground the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy. In today’s post, I offer an interview with another of the conference’s speakers, Zephyr Teachout. The Director of Internet Organizing for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, Teachout has emerged as a leading thinker about the role of new media in fostering what she describes here as a “culture of citizenship.” After the presidential campaign ended, she worked at America Coming Together and Current TV and was a fellow at the Berkman Center. In 2006, Teachout became the national director of the Sunlight Foundation as the group’s national director. According to Wikipedia, “The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. At the core of all of the Foundation’s work is a focus on the power of technology and the Internet to transform the relationship between citizen’s and their government.”

In the conversation that follows, Teachout shares her perspective on politics and popular culture, Second Life and Wikipedia, all focused on helping us to better understand what elements in the new media landscape might be deployed to intensify civic engagement and insure a more transparent government.

Let’s start with the core conference theme. Many media reformers have attacked the “bread and circus” aspects of popular culture as distracting voters from serious aspects of politics. Yet, this conference’s theme, “From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy” invites us to imagine a different relationship between popular culture and grassroots politics. What do you see as the relationship between the two?

Both of these seem right to me — the possibility and the threat. In the last four years, I’ve met thousands of people whose political creativity, public thinking, and public activity has vastly increased directly because of the internet. I’ve met people who I think you can fairly say have switched from never thinking of being a citizen as one of their central roles, to thinking of citizenship as being an integral part of their identity, the way being a mother or employee or sister or cousin is part of an identity. The internet has enabled that switch — for some, its been a gradual shift, from reading arguments on blogs to contributing to arguments on blogs to joining groups making political statements to holding community fora. For others, its been an instant jump — a Meetup-enabled political meeting has led to a leadership role. For still others (and here I’m thinking mostly of geeks and internet artists), a habit of creativity and responsibility in one arena has led to taking the same attitude in a political arena.

There are millions who have participated in political life because of the internet, first by ventriloquism (an email along the lines of “hey, I thought this political article was interesting”) then by speaking (an email along the lines of “hey, I thought this article is interesting because x, but they got it wrong because…”) who then become more comfortable in their other communications, on and offline, in speaking about political issues.

And then there are those extraordinary people, like those we’ve seen at the Sunlight Foundation, who take citizenship to a whole new level. Simply by being asked, “help us investigate this question about earmarks,” a handful of people not only responded to that question but have becomes intrepid, creative citizen watchdogs, digging up information about our politics and sharing it broadly, all on their own time.

There are still more who have participated in a one-dimensional way, the way one “participates” in the coca cola industry by drinking coke (and an increasing greed on the part of candidates to increase this kind of participation — big lists, assigned tasks), where neither personal responsibility nor creativity are engaged. But even this flat kind of participation leads a handful to taking the role of citizen seriously.

The internet breaks down some barriers to creativity, to public expression, to information, to public conversation, and to collective action.

That said, our human hunger for humor, connection, games, entertainment, gossip, is nearly limitless, and when the supply is nearly limitless it is hard to avoid. When I go to the airport, I can’t tear my eyes away from celebrity gossip magazines, even though there is no barrier to my reading the Economist — when I’m online, the celebrity gossip, the games, and the political gossip constantly beckon. There is now no barrier to instant dopamine hits from playing games, from reading gossip, from emailing and instant messaging friends. I can’t generalize from my experience, but I know I’m not completely alone when I say that the internet has diminished many of my other experiences — I cook less, read fewer books, plan fewer parties, and wander the streets aimlessly less frequently because I can always trust in some small comfort online when I would have to risk much more by taking on the streets. As applied to politics, its an open question — will we, as a culture, choose the limitless entertainment because its there, and will our civic culture continue to decline (with a small percentage the exception?). Or will the new possibilities lead to a new culture of citizenship?

I happen to think the culture of citizenship is possible, but it will take real vigilance, care, cultivation, and a collective choice to make it a priority. It may also take some serious thinking about whether we want something like the fairness doctrine for the internet — whether, looking at ourselves in the mirror, we decide we want some structural supports for our civic selves — it will take a choice. The internet — no matter all the joyful possibilities of political engagement it enables — will not make us citizens, we will have to do that ourselves.

You were The Director of Internet Organizing for the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. Given those experiences, what advice would you offer the current crop of Democratic candidates about the potential use of new media in the forthcoming campaign? Do you have any predictions about which campaigns seem to best understand this current era of web 2.0?

I am far more interested in who will make the best President than in who uses the best tools, and a clumsy use of email, youtube, and blogs wouldn’t dissuade me from supporting a candidate who I largely support. The only way they really relate is that part of any support for me is necessarily a commitment to citizenship and to transparent government.

If you were advising a candidate in this election cycle, would you recommend that they adopt an avatar and go into Second Life?

Yes, I would have a full time staffer, with three interns at least, who were
responsible for gaming outreach.

For the past 40 years or so, there have been basically three ways a citizen can reliably interact with a Presidential candidate:

1) She can join a group (like a labor union) and engage in that group’s decision-making, which is then communicated to the candidate through an intermediary.

2) She can watch the candidate on TV in a debate, on a news story, or in an ad

3) She can live in New Hampshire or be lucky.

Other forms of interaction were possible, but there were not that many, and they were not scalable. Suddenly there is Second Life, listservs, email, games that a candidate can play with and against others, a dizzy mess of kinds of interactions that are possible. The only real limitations on these new kinds of interactions are scale, creativity, and political will.

I once saw an interesting talk by a Microsoft sociologist, in which he talked about the kinds of characters that show up in list-servs. Its easy to be inauthentic in one forum, one time or a few times, he said, but over time, its pretty clear who isn’t acting like a human - there are certain personality types we all recognize (including the trolls) and those that don’t quite seem right we shy away from, picking up subtle signals that suggest that “this person is sort of lying.” This is finally a positive conclusion for internet communities - it sugests that guerrilla marketers may be able to strike once, but astroturf will reveal itself in the end. Language, used unrelentingly over weeks and months, will out the shill.

This thesis is also interesting when reflecting on the efforts candidates make to engage people in completely new forms of interaction - a chat room, say, or in Second Life. While candidates won’t necessarily lie, inasmuch as they do not sound like humans sound and bring prefabricated phrases, or phrases of others, it can undermine their credibility - and certainly undermine their interest. (The cookie cutter emails that so many campaigns now send have growing lists but idle members, who do not believe that the emails carry any authentic connection to them.) Likewise, even if thousands of people show up to watch candidate y “chat” or “blog”, the interest will only remain so long as there is some reason to think they are getting something more than a press release or scripted notes. And the fashionable time-delayed “chat” in which questions are submitted before hand is not a new form - is similar to having a guest on talk radio, except leaves the candidate more control.

But back to your question — a real time chat, or a conversation in Second Life, is a new form. That, as it develops, will be fascinating for politicians, who have so much more on the line in every word than the reporters who regularly do this. Would I recommend it? Yes. Presidential
candidates should be outreaching in gaming forums, including game-of-life forums, actively. But it will take some innovation and looseness to work well.

We had some very fruitful real time chats during the Dean campaign, when they were used for policy experts from the staff to answer basic policy questions by chatters. It was a narrow enough context that policy experts were quite forthcoming, and the discussions were fruitful from both sides - the chats we had with Dean involved were more chaotic and less likely to be fruitful. In both cases, much of the interesting conversations that I had were the side-chats, carried on in groups of two and three who pinged me, seeing the name of a staffer. In Second Life, with new dimensions added (and the possibility for visual demonstrations), I can imagine these lecture-like moments being even more valuable - a candidate could have a forum on net neutrality, for example, in which he presents not only himself but his policy experts, creating a new kind of conversation, but one more likely to inform a citizen both about the issues and about the way in which a candidate makes decisions.

Second Life, chat rooms, and social networking tools makes it easier to both create groups and be creative — so instead of having to speak to a candidate through a large community years in the making, 30,000 people with shared interests can get together and ask for a town-hall meeting from each of the candidates, and invite tough questioners to attend.

The forms and format of the meetings can go beyond the classic candidate forum, because of the low cost of bringing people together - and it may be that in these liminal forms we learn more than we thought possible, even if the candidate does not step on his tongue.

What lessons do you think political leaders should take from the Wikipedia movement?

I think there are two key lessons:

1) Small groups of people who feel responsible are highly competent to manage difficult and boring and very important tasks. I think this is one of the most under-told stories, especially in politics — politicians are eager for mass numbers, big email lists, big readerships, big donations, and thousands of people door-knocking for them. This is all fine — but to truly be a democrat (small d) they must also believe that citizens are competent at decision-making and governing, and express that belief through their campaign structures and their governing structures. Any politician you ask will gush about the possibility of the internet to enable citizens to give her good ideas, but most are wary of actually distributing roles, not tasks, to groups of people that are not on the payroll. Wikipedia should help change that story — self-governance is possible.

2) Millions of people want to engage as creative, intelligent adults in political life. Wikipedia, for all its neutral point of view, is a profoundly political project, and evidences, along with hundreds of other examples, the hunger of people to be meaningful contributors to political society.

What connection do you see between the ideals of citizen journalism and the kinds of voter participation and government reform efforts being promoted by the Sunlight Foundation?

Sunlight Foundation is committed to using technology to strengthen the relationship between citizens and Congress. Our grants support people who are making amazing transparency tools, and other parts of our work is more explicitly political, lobbying (with facebook groups and an open, distributed attititude) for Congress to open up its processes and join the 21st century. We beleive that a transparent budgetary process, once impossible, is now possible because of the internet, and the more citizens engage in that process, the closer we are to achieving ideals of self-governance.

I don’t personally have an ideal of citizen journalism, but an ideal of citizenship — which is to say that people actually take responsibility for their government. They can discharge that responsibility in infinite ways — much as one can discharge the responsibility of motherhood or owning a pet in infinite ways. But we all know the difference between someone who owns a pet and takes responsibility for it, and one who does not — what I seek is a culture in which most of us take responsibility. One of those ways is to research and write and mashup and make videos and generally engage others in Congress, and we are working to enable those (a quickly growing community) that are interested in this. There are some amazing people who work with Congresspedia and our Senior Researcher, Bill Allison, doing the hard investigative work it takes to actually understand how Congress works, and they are doing all of us an extraordinary service.

Enough media news for one day? Not quite.

At what point do you start calling a few quiet defections over a change in management a mass exodus? Yesterday, longtime staff writer Mike Mosedale announced he's quitting his job at City Pages, joining a growing number of high-profile writers and editors who have departed after the New Times bought the paper's parent company and installed Kevin Hoffman as its new editor.

Mosedale has done it all at City Pages: cover stories on dog fighting and "mad scientist" bloggers, almost weekly "Viewmaster" photos capturing quirky details of Twin Cities life, blog posts about everything from the x-rated photos readers send him to the story of a vegan Art-a-Whirler who mistook his fishing bait -- chicken livers baked in the sun three days -- for a tray of hors d'oeuvres set out for hungry gallery hoppers. But yesterday, he told management it was coming to an end after nine years.

His exit follows that of senior editor Beth Hawkins last week, and earlier departures by writers Britt Robson and Chuck Terhark, columnist Jim Walsh (who was fired), and former editor Steve Perry.

"I was unhappy with Hoffman's editing approach (in my view, too heavy-handed) and I feared becoming one of those bitter gasbags who can't stop complaining about how much better things used to be in the old days," he said via e-mail last night. "For the record, I *do* think things were better in the old days. It's just not productive or healthy to dwell on."

A realignment in the local media?

In chat rooms I always caution fellow travelers that the big dogs in the Twin Cities media market are still the Strib, PiPress and City Pages, in that order. Their circulations dwarf that of online challengers like The Rake, Twin Cities Daily Planet and Minnesota Monitor.

But there has been a noticeable shift in personnel lately, and not surprisingly some of the Strib's discarded talent is ending up online.

Just days after he announced he'll be taking a Star Tribune buyout, veteran reporter and blogger Eric Black can answer a big question about his future -- what he'll be doing next. He's been hired to blog for Minnesota Monitor and other sites run by its parent organization, the Center for Independent Media, and he'll be launching his own blog in July.

Black, a 30-year Star Tribune reporter, launched the blog The Big Question in December 2005 and quickly gained a strong following, at one point generating more than 200,000 page views in a single day. In February, he brought on Doug Tice, Star Tribune team leader for politics and government, to blog from a conservative perspective. In an interview Monday, Tice called the blog "a great success" and said that "in terms of bread-and-butter public affairs journalism, it's by far the most advanced success the paper has in its online service."

Now Black will be bringing his insights and reporting talent to Minnesota Monitor and its sister sites, Colorado Confidential and the just-launched Iowa Independent. Like Minnesota Monitor's other bloggers, he'll operate his own site as well, cross-posting to both.

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CIM President David Bennahum sees Black's hiring as part of a larger trend in journalism -- as mainstream papers cut staff, online reporting continues to grow. "Online journalism will be the place that traditional print reporters naturally move to over the course of the next few decades," he said. "We're on the cutting edge of this change. Bringing Eric on board is exciting news for the Center for Independent Media and its sites. While there are national blogs who have hired 'mainstream media' reporters to write on national issues for its online journalism sites, we believe that our model of local coverage is a first of its kind in the United States."

Wii hard drive rumors, or how the news media only repeat each other

If, like me, you have a Google News alert for “wii”, yesterday and today you’ve surely been inundated with rumors about a forthcoming announcement at E3 for a hard drive for the Nintendo Wii. Its main use would be for Virtual Console games, since the Wii only has 512 MB of flash memory for them (you can move some to an SD card, but they aren’t directly playable from there).

Their justification? The fact that some time ago it was announced that Neo Geo games would be coming to the Wii, and, as they keep saying, “Neo Geo games can use up to 330 MB”.

Really?

I’m betting they’re taking that number from the Neo Geo common intro screen (you can see it using MAME, on older games), which says “MAX 330 MEGA”.

However, those are not megabytes, but megaBITS. 330 megabits = about 41 megabytes. Still bigger than all current virtual console games, but not more than half of the Wii’s flash memory.

Amazingly, I’ve seen about a dozen news sites repeating that mistake. It seems that nobody researches anything these days; “news reporting” is simply repeating what others already said, using different words so that it looks “original”.

Incidentally, the 330 megabits Neo Geo limit was passed some years ago. The biggest Neo Geo game I have on MAME (King of Fighters 2003) is about 100 megabytes (or 800 megabits).

Iran: Past the paranoia

In the great square at Esfahan, I talked to a group of teenage girls about to graduate from high school — one strictly veiled, one less so, one whose scarf was subversively far back on her head. They all thought war was coming, all believed that the U.S. was not a truly free country and that Iranians and Muslims were persecuted and mistreated there. These opinions arose from state-sponsored ignorance and were fanned by our own militant hostility. The students were not in themselves hostile to the West — like almost all Iranians, they yearned to live there. They were personally friendly and open to me. But they warned that an attack on Iran would drive them closer to their government. And this was not just their view. I heard the same from many far more liberal-minded and skeptical. Before the Iraq War, many such people were all but wishing for an American invasion to free them from the ayatollahs. But having seen what American liberation has done for Iraq and Afghanistan, they have turned away from any such thoughts. The Islamic leadership knows this and is glad of the threats and grumbling coming from Washington...

DVANCED MEDIA INC. BRINGS CERTIFIED RIDATA BRAND HD DVD-R AND RW TO THE NORTH AMERICAN MARKET

Diamond Bar, CA -- June 4, 2007 -- Advanced Media, Inc. is the manufacturer and marketer of the popular RIDATA brand of recordable DVD media, electronic storage products, and digital media accessories. Today, the company announced that parent company RITEK is the only Taiwan-based optical disc manufacturer to offer certified HD-DVD-R (recordable, write once) and HD DVD-RW (rewritable) media. Advanced Media will provide marketing, sales and distribution of the discs to the United States.

ÒWhat the certification means to consumers is that they can be assured that certified RIDATA HDDVDÕs are a compatible, high quality HDDVD to purchase. Taiwan is a large supplier of DVD media to the U.S. Through our parent company RITEK and its enormous production capacity, Advanced Media can quickly respond to market demands in the shortest time possible.ÊWe will continue to leverage our competitive manufacturing advantages to provide U.S. consumers both Blu Ray and HDDVD discs at affordable prices,Ó stated Harvey Liu, president of Advanced Media Inc.

Because of the quick progression of formats and speeds in optical media, Ritek developed an internal manufacturing process named a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS). RITEK's manufacturing capability for CD, DVD+R/-R/RW/ DL (single-sided double-layer) discs was helpful in quickly expanding current high end production lines to produce high quality recordable HDDVDÕs and obtaining the certification.

The certified RIDATA brand HDDVD-R or RW discs are available for purchase now.
Volume production will begin in the second half of this year as more HDDVD drives enter the market and increase the demand for media.

The RIDATA HD DVD-R medium supports Advanced Access Content System (AACS) state-of-the-art AES cryptography. It was developed to overcome the shortcomings of the Content Scrambling System (CSS) found in DVD video. AACS enables authorized use, prohibits unauthorized copying and distribution, and repairs holes in copy protection.

Compared to current DVD technology, HD DVD offers state-of-the-art picture quality as well as superior features and functionality. Multiple audio and video streams, up to 7.1 channel surround sound, and more user-friendly graphical interfaces are just a few of these advancements.

The RIDATA HD DVD-R or RW optical discs are packaged in a single jewel case, and will be available through selected retailers, RIDATA distributors, and at various online outlets. As with all RIDATA products, both new blue laser media formats are competitively priced.

About Advanced Media (RITEK USA)
Advanced Media, Inc. is a subsidiary of RITEK Corporation, the world's largest optical media manufacturer. Advanced Media is the sole North and South American marketer and distributor of the RIDATA brand of recordable CD and DVD media as well as other types of electronic storage media.

The RIDATA brand currently includes: CD-R/RW, DVD+/-R/RW, DL DVD+R/R, and DVD-RAM optical discs; Flash Memory Cards; USB drives; and MP3 players. Since its formation in 2001, Advanced Media has experienced phenomenal annual growth and is already a leading marketer of electronic storage products in the American market.

RITEK for years has been defining and redefining the optical storage market. Around the world, its name is synonymous with innovation, quality, and unparalleled consistency. Its QS 9000, ISO 14001, ISO 9001, ISO 9002, and Six Sigma certifications prove RITEK's commitment to quality control.

Advanced Media is headquartered in Diamond Bar, California. For further information, call (909) 861-2269 or e-mail: info@ritekusa.com. The Advanced Media web site is located at: www.ritekusa.com.

NBC’s new head honcho says “more product placement, please”

Hot shot Hollywood producer Ben Silverman (he who brought the reality TV show “Big Brother” to CBS) has just been hired as cochairman of NBC’s entertainment division and studio, where he’ll head programming with fellow cochair Marc Graboff on the business side.
As an interview between Silverman and TV Guide’s Stephen Battaglio promises, Silverman’s new […]

AUSTRALIA: Packer continues move out of media

ames Packer will remain a director of PBL Media, owner of the Nine Network and ACP Magazines, but his days as the country's most prominent media mogul are over.

Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd confirmed yesterday the sale of a further 25 per cent in PBL Media to joint-venture partner CVC Capital Partners for $515 million.

PBL also sold ticketing agency Ticketek to its media offshoot for $210 million.

Mr Packer and PBL chief executive John Alexander will remain on the PBL Media board, but the company will be 75 per cent owned and controlled by private equity firm CVC.

A dispassionate Mr Packer described the move as "part of a broader reallocation of capital within PBL."

In the 18 months since Kerry Packer died, James Packer has raised more than $5 billion selling PBL's media assets, spending most of the proceeds so far on casinos.

PBL no longer controls any of the country's big media companies. Instead it owns a 25 per cent stake in PBL Media, a quarter stake in Foxtel, half of Fox Sports and 27 per cent of job advertisements website Seek.

Those investments will be bundled into a new company, Consolidated Media Holdings, as part of a PBL break-up this year. Another company, Crown, will hold its growing casinos business. The sell-down in PBL Media had been well flagged. But investors were left wondering what PBL would spend its cash on now that talks between pay TV operators Foxtel and Austar had fallen through.

PBL had been expected to use some of the money raised to help fund a Foxtel acquisition of Austar, but the regional pay TV player confirmed on Friday the talks had collapsed.

Some investors said the cash might be used to fund reasonably high dividend payments for Consolidated Media Holdings in a bid to attract investors.

PBL might also invest in other online or new-media businesses or shift the money to its casinos business.

On Thursday PBL announced plans to build a casino on the Las Vegas strip.

CVC's local head, Adrian MacKenzie, said yesterday that PBL Media had a proven management team, indicating that Ian Law would remain chief executive.

Mr Law told staff in a written announcement that he believed "business will continue as usual."

Industry sources said former Nine boss Eddie McGuire, who was appointed by Mr Packer, resigned last week in anticipation of the ownership changes. PBL shares dropped 35¢ to $21.35.

"PBL is now a higher-return, higher-risk proposition," said Atul Lele of White Funds Management.

"If you look down a few years, PBL Gaming is up for a lot of development costs, and people will be wary of any blow-outs," he said.