Clay has posted the clearest, sober-est explanation of why it’s time to regulate spectrum as a public good and not as property. It’s a brilliant piece of writing in which every sentence tells.

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eBay’s bought 25% of CraigsList.org. Craig blogs about it here, and set up a forum to talk about it here.

I love CraigsList both as a service that I use and as an example of what’s so damn right with the Web. And I have complete faith in Craig Newmark as someone who has put years of labor on the line to build a place that benefits the community.

I have slightly mixed feelings about eBay. It, too, is a service I use all the time, and they’ve innovated in some really useful ways, especially with regard to reputation systems. I do, however, still hold against them their lawsuit against BiddersEdge, an auction aggregation site. But, then I balance that one assaholic legal crusade against the good that Pierre Omidyar, its founder and chairman, has done.

Craig says in his blog and repeatedly in the forum that things are not going to change. There is a tone in his blog posting that the eBay relationship was forced on him, although he’s ambiguous on the point. And that actually makes me feel a bit less worried about Craiglist’s future: If it was against his will, we have Craig’s will — and his 75% ownership — working in our favor.

Plus, I’m really happy that Craig will make some money out of this. There’s no reason heroes of the Web can’t earn a buck, too.

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I did what seemed like a pointless driver upgrade for my ATI Radeon card to get rid of the Doom III dandruff (a swarm of bright specks) that was making the game difficult to play. But what really seemed to have done the trick was upgrading to DirectX 9.0C. Of course, that (or perhaps the Radeon driver upgrade) mysteriously locked all the icons on my desktop. No, “Lock icons” wasn’t checked, and setting it and unsetting it only made my icons blink angrily (truly). For some bizarre reason, going into Display Properties > Desktop > Customize Desktop > Web and clicking “Lock desktop icons,” applying, and then unclicking it worked.

XP. Go figure.

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Dan Gillmor‘s We the Media arrived in the mail today — ah, the lovely sound of organized atoms hitting the carpet. This got me thinking about the artificiality of “articles” as a rhetorical form for newspapers. They are a result of a scarcity that no longer exists. Reporters often have beats they cover, producing articles when something happens of sufficient importance to warrant taking over some of the limited real estate of the newspaper. Online, there’s no scarcity of real estate, so we can publish more than the occasional article. In fact, blogs are more like beats than like articles. They provide context and continuity, as well as voice.

A quick google reveals that Matt Welch said this a year ago in the Columbia Journalism Review (and I’m sure there are prior attributions as well because on the Internet, everything has already been said once):

Beat reporting is a natural fit for a blog — reporters can collect standing links to sites of interest, dribble out stories and anecdotes that don’t necessarily belong in the paper, and attract a specific like-minded readership. One of the best such sites going is the recently created California Insider blog by the Sacramento Bee’s excellent political columnist, Daniel Weintraub, who has been covering the state’s wacky recall news like a blanket. Blogs also make sense for opinion publications, such as the National Review, The American Prospect, and my employer, Reason, all of which have lively sites.

Yup.

New journalism: The presentation of the world through the lens of a life. New bloggy journalism: The discovery of the world through unending conversation.

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You know what sucks about James McGreevey resigning as governor? Him blaming it on being a gay adulterer. Since when do adulterers have to resign? Since when do gay men who come out of the closet have to resign? No, obviously he’s resigning because there’s some real dirt that’s going to come to light, rumored to be about sexual harrassment. Resigning because he’s gay would be like Madeline Albright resigning because she discovered that she’s a Jew. Sheesh!

(Note: I am aware that the analogy is not perfect.)

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It has arrived. I’ve played 10 minutes of it so far. Incredible graphics and scary use of light and darkness. Mainly darkness. Looong load times. Very amusing to see the old Doom characters re-rendered. (Also, there’s a game within a game that’s no fun except it uses an old Doom texture and the face of the original Doom Space Marine.) Also, with a Radeon 9800XT, I’m getting bothersome white speckles in many of the scenes; they come and go in the darkest areas depending on the slightest variation in viewing angle. I thought I had the latest driver installed…

The dynamic lighting is fantastic, and used to great advantage.

Must stop blogging so I can play more…

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I just heard Shimon Rura give a highly informal talk about frassle, an open source project he’s working on. Fascinating. It’s a blogging platform, but also an aggregator, community blogger, and publishing system. It’s able to pull together blogthreads across multiple feeds, and lets you build blogs out of queries across feeds. Very cool. (It’s in alpha and “built out of duct tape and drinking straws,” as one of its tag lines says, so don’t bang on it too hard.)

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MoveOn.org has posted the winners of its “pick the ad” contest. They each feature a different talking head who happens to be a Republican voting for Kerry.

I don’t find them very effective, but I also thought Mondale walloped Reagan in the debates. I’d love to be wrong about these ads.

BTW, I’m pretty sure that in one of them I noticed the weave in someone’s tie spelling out “Bush = Hitler.” Yeah, I’m sure of it.

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Dan Gillmor lists the ways his book is making its way into our intellectual bloodstream. Go Dan! Go We the Media!

Here‘s an interview of Dan by Xeni Jardin.

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According to an interview with International Crisis Group’s John Prendergast, via EthanZ’s blog, we will care. Just not in time:

In Somalia, there were stick-thin figures on our nightly television when former President Bush decided to send in American troops [in December 1992]. In Darfur, the pictures aren’t as graphic yet… What’s going to start killing them in large numbers, which will then create the dramatic graphics that will – three months from now – instill the kind of emotion necessary for sufficiently robust action, are the diseases that are going to rip through these camps. I think that there will eventually be some form of action, but it just may happen after a couple hundred thousand people who could have been saved will have died.

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