Following W. David Stephenson’s advice, I wandered over to the Department of Homeland Security’s web site to see how they’re failing to update their page during this emergency. It’s worse than I thought:

Click to see full page

Makes you feel all secure in your homeland, doesn’t it? [Tags: homelandSecurity WDavidStephenson HurricaneKatrina]

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Brian Oberkirch lambasts Tim Russert for doing gotcha journalism on Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish in Lousiana. Russert replayed a tape of Broussard’s appearance on Russert’s show on three weeks ago and interrogated him about the precise dates on which a friend called his mother’s nursing home and whether the 92-year-old woman drowned on August 29 or Sept 2. Part of Broussard’s response:

Listen, sir, somebody wants to nitpick a man’s tragic loss of a mother because she was abandoned in a nursing home? Are you kidding? What kind of sick mind, what kind of black-hearted people want to nitpick a man’s mother’s death? They just buried Eva last week. I was there at the wake. Are you kidding me? That wasn’t a box of Cheerios they buried last week. That was a man’s mother whose story, if it is entirely broadcast, will be the epitome of abandonment.

Here’s some of what Brian says:

Here’s a new way to think about blogging and all forms of consumer generated media: forget fact checking [your] ass. That’s a parlor game for grad students and professional cynics. Yes, you caught some high-profile folks screwing up. Good on you. We’re frying bigger fish now, and you can’t play with us if you haven’t got the emotional heft. I’ve seen do-it-yourself media help us reconnect as human beings. Help one another as individuals in need. Answer a calling to the better parts of ourselves. That’s where I’m putting my energy. My hope is that whenever someone like Aaron Broussard utters a lamentation that has to be heard, that we’ll broadcast it to the four corners and find someone who can help, right away.

In this case, it was worse than a parlor game. It was an ambush. It was an attempt to discredit the story’s teller in order to deny the story’s meaning. It was contemptible. And, Brian points out, it didn’t help that Russert consistently mispronounced the drowned woman’s name. [Tags: media katrina HurricaneKatrina TimRussert AaronBroussard]

September 28: The story is more complex than I knew, and Broussard was less likely telling the truth than I thought.

It’s still embarrassing that Russert is still as close as mainstream TV news gets to a reporter who asks “hard questions.”

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Tom Evslin has begun serializing his murder mystery at Hackoff.com setting during The Bubble. You can read it for free. You can get it as a feed. You can comment on it. You can visit the faux company web site. Beginning next year you can buy a hard copy version. You can even win prizes.

Is this what Dickens would have done? Well, only if he got paid ahead of time. Per word. Tom’s more generous than that. [Tags: TomEvslin books mysteries blogs]

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Timothy Spalding has put together this really interesting site, called LibraryThing, that lets you list your books, tag them, and share the list with others. You can search by bibliographic info, user or tags. And Tim does some useful listing of the top 25 books by author, tags, etc.

One of the cool things: You enter a book into your list by typing in sloppy information. For example, if you want to enter The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking, you can type in “social construction hacking” and LibraryThing will search the Library of Congress and Amazon. Sure enough, it finds the right one. Click and all the bibliographic info, plus the cover graphic, are added to your list.

It’s basically free, although to add more than 200 books to your list, Tim asks for a one-time fee of $10, which seems pretty reasonable to me…especially once Tim adds RSS feeds so we can subscribe to a tag, reader, etc., and discover the new books the wise crowd is reading. [Tags: LibraryThing taxonomy delicious tagging tags]

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For Everything is Miscellaneous, I’m looking for examples of dumb labels. For example, fire starter logs warn us that the contents are flammable.

Any others?

Thanks in advance… [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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When it’s not too dorky or disruptive, I like to use the phrase “our Internet” instead of “the Internet,” because I think it makes the right political point. Unfortunately, it’s almost always dorky and disruptive.

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Jeff Jarvis has been flogging an excellent idea for a couple of weeks: Recovery 2.0. Lots of people did lots of great things on the Net to help victims of Katrina. In fact, so many sites went up, particularly ones to help people find lost relatives, that there were too many places to look, which spurred a round of consolidation efforts. This is stuff the Web should be proud of. But Jeff’s point is that the distributed nature of the Web, so crucial to its strength, can also be a weakness. Recovery 2.0 — which is more a call to action than a plan of action — is his name for the need to better coordinate ahead of time.

How you think that coordination should happen says a lot about your view of the Web.

A Semantic Web approach would create an ontology of victims, relatives, disasters, relief efforts, locations, threats, supplies, routes, relief agencies, medical records, doctor appointment books, local bus schedules, and stock market data.

A Web 2.0 approach would create APIs among recovery services offered on the Web and wait for hackers to build something useful. Whatever the hackers create would include plotting something on Google Maps, a requirement for all Web 2.0 apps.

A microformats approach would spend a weekend coming up with a quick-and-dirty set of useful metadata, preferably modeled on Amazon.

The regulatory approach would ask the pharmaceutical, transportation and recording industries to come up with a set of guidelines for the distribution of relief supplies with the primary objective of making sure that they do not fall into the hands of terrorists.

(I kid but I think Recovery 2.0 is a terrific idea.) [Tags: recovery JeffJarvis semanticweb microformats]

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I’m in St. Louis for the annual PRPD meeting. Jeff Jarvis, Jennifer Ferro (KCRW) and I are on a panel in 45 minutes on “Technology, Culture and Public Radio.” For me, the interesting question is: Given that the Net is disaggregating radio stations and networks — the content chunks are being ripped out of their play schedules, the listeners are now producers — how should public radio stations respond? They won’t and shouldn’t just fold up shop. What will the transition period look like?

I think I also want to talk about trust, which public radio stations take as their main asset. Maybe trust is going to move from something listeners give to stations to what grows among connections among listeners. It seems to be a lesson of the Net that you build trust with your users/readers/listeners by getting out of their way. I only wish I knew what I was talking about.

Anyway, this morning I got to hang out with Jake Shapiro of PRX and then had a three-hour conversation with Jeff Jarvis (which at Jarvis speeds equates to 4.5 hours with anyone else) in which we settled all issues, solved all problems, bought a house, raised a family, and then split up because we couldn’t agree on how to respond to terrorism.

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I’m in St. Louis for a Public Radio conference. The hotel charges$10 to connect to the Net, even though it’s free to jump into the much more expensive-to-maintain pool. So, I got to my room and checked out the available hotspots. Here are a couple of the un-WEPed SSID’s:

Suck my left nut
Get your own damn router
My other ride is yo mama Even so, I’m blogging to you now courtesy of My other ride is yo mama. [Tags: wifi]

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Logan Airport has forced the American Airlines lounge to turn off its over-priced T-Mobile wirelessness so the Airport can sell its own overpriced wirelessness without competition.

Sucks big time.

And while I’m on the topic of Logan sucking: The re-done Terminal A opened a few months ago. It cost tons of money and it shows. Yet travelers still have to hunt out the rare power outlets. Didn’t Logan ask a single traveler what we want in a terminal? We would not have said overpriced, single-sourced wifi and no power outlets. Jeez!

And while I’m on the topic of T-Mobile sucking: AA has a nice promotion to give one day of free ethernet-cabled connectivity from T-M. Thank you. But to take advantage of this, you have to proceed through screen after screen, filling in your personal details, creating an account, creating both a password and an access code, specifying a security question… Note to T-Mobile: If Logan would get out of the way, then we could maybe get some competitive wifi in here that understands that we just want to turn on our computeres and connect, not fill out mortgage applications. Jeez!

Aaarrrrggghhh.

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