From Micah:

Personal Democracy Forum, a new online resource focusing on the intersection of technology and politics, is seeking contributors for its website, blog and newsletter. We’re looking for seasoned journalists versed, ideally, in both the political and technology industries who are interested in covering a wide range of subjects, including: how the Internet is moving votes, money and perceptions; the digital political industry; tools and techniques of clued-in campaigns; and emergent technology-enabled democracy. Political or business journalism background a plus but not required. We’re looking for 800- to 1500-word features as well as shorter blog entries on ongoing beats. Will pay competitive freelance rates. Send resume, clips, blog info, etc to Micah L. Sifry at [email protected].

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From
The Center for Media Research….

BuzzMetrics, a company specializing in word of mouth research and planning, released a new report revealing how word of mouth and online discussion forums shaped a food-industry crises. When a leading consumer advocacy group filed a lawsuit against food giant Kraft over its use of partially-hydrogenated oils in Oreo cookies, a frenzy erupted across thousands of consumer online discussion platforms.

According to BuzzMetrics’ analysis of over 2.6 million comments from over 120,000 consumers, the Ban Trans Fats legal assault on Oreo caused the total volume of online discussions on trans fats to increase more than eightfold in the same month.

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The name says it all…which is good because I’m at a conference and haven’t actually browsed through the site. (Thanks to Judy Clark for the link.)

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Dan has written a thoughtful essay that tries to help us learn from accidents and extreme, intentional accidents (= terrorism). He looks at Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents and the 9/11 Commission Report (which he has excerpted helpfully here). Dan draws too many insights to summarize, but the need for providing flexible, two-way communication systems so that non-officials can act effectively leaps out at me.

(By coincidence, Dewayne Hendricks today talked about how a couple of strategically positioned repeaters were able to provide a forest fire command center with wifi communications access.)

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I may have grown not just to hate but actually to fear the Quicken user interface – which used to be its strongest feature – but I will say that when they chnaged the internals of their bill pay system, they treated their customers right: They sent us a free copy of Quicken Premier 2005.

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Please don’t tell me that we got the identity wrong of a person named Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. Do you know what this means? Puns have supplanted irony as the chief law of the universe.

At least it can’t get much worse.

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Here’s how yesterday’s front-page NY Times article about Bill Clinton’s heart surgery ends before the leap to page 15:

“My husband is doing very well, ” she [Hillary] said, noting that he had beaten her

After the jump, we get the rest of the sentence:

and their daughter, Chelsea, at card games.

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Bill Clinton is “a little scared, but not much” of bypass surgery. Good for him. We need to make it safe to admit to honest fear. If that makes me a girlie man, then I take it as an accolade.

Besides, while only 1-2% of bypass patients die, that’s a lot higher risk than I’m facing today (knock wood, salt over the shoulder, and plant a smacker on Arnold’s muscular lips).

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Found another wifi hotspot in town, so now I can post the table of contents of the new issue of my newsletter, JOHO…if my anonymous benefactor doesn’t decide to pull the plug and call it day.

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I’ve published a new issue of my newsletter, which you can read here. It’s got an article about why the Dewey Decimal System is prejudiced and why small talk (chit chat, not the programming language) is so important. Plus some other stuff. But I’m almost out of time here on the public library’s computer…

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