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The NYTimes OPEN blog talks about their TimesMachine implementation, and how they used EC2 to convert the archive information into something usable on the web. TimesMachine, by the way, is an archive of Times pages going all the way back to issue number one (18 September 1851).

via Amazon Web Services Blog

Virgin Mobile’s neighborhood campaign was the subject of some conversation a week or so ago. Today, New York Times gets into it with a short article about the ads.

If you read the Times article, you will see a quote from someone familiar.

Podlinez will play the most recent episode of any podcast on any phone. Each podcast is assigned a phone number. When it is dialed, the podcast starts playing after a short announcement. Nice work, if anyone from Podlinez happens to be reading, here are a few unsolicited feature requests:

• A searchable directory. 15 pages of podcasts are a lot to sort through. One should not have to enter the full feed URL of the podcast on the home page to see if it is already listed either.
• A mobile accessible directory. Podlinz will really shine when one has some time to kill while not near a computer. An optimized site for mobile browsers, some form of search that uses SMS or even a audio directory would be great.
• Keep more than just the last episode of a podcast on hand.

Good luck!

via Lifehacker

Fox is suing Al Franken and the publisher of his forthcoming book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. According to Fox, they trademarked the term “Fair and Balanced” back in 1998 and object to its use in the book’s title. Fox, oozing Balance and Fairness, refers to Franken as a “C-level commentator” who is “unstable” and “shrill”. Who filed this suit? Bill O’Reilly?

One might ask why Fox would be so concerned about a book written by a gentleman who they have absolutely no respect for? Apparently they are concerned that their viewers might mistake the book for one endorsed by the Fox News Channel, you know, with all that “Fair and Balanced” stuff printed on the front. If Fox isn’t spewing it, it can’t be “Fair and Balanced” right? After all, we wouldn’t want someone to pick up Franken’s book thinking they were going to get 250 pages of “Fair and Balanced” from a Fox sanctioned source only to be surprised by (gasp!) a differing opinion.

This suit probably doesn’t have any legs anyway. If Fox’s viewers can’t tell who wrote the book by looking at its cover (hint: the author’s last name is NOT O’Reilly) how could they ever be expected to read that which is between covers? At worst, Fox is wasting the court’s time. On the upside, Al Franken receives some excellent publicity for his new book. Don’t forget to place your advance order!

Well, some people believe it. Doc Searls is pointing at an interesting and somewhat scary Philadelphia Inquirer article:

A third of the American public believes U.S. forces have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll.

For those of you not paying attention the alleged weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq.

Thanks to Bill Hobbs for pointing out MediaMap’s announcement about including blogs in their media directory. Hobbs takes exception to the fact that they will be including blogs only from “accredited journalists”.

Previous entries: The PR industry and blogging

First the New York Times runs not one, but two blog related articles on the same day. Then Dan Gillmor predicts that Bush will work “weblog” into a speech before the end of his term. Now John Dvorak tells us that blogs are in fact “the next big thing“. Dvorak even offers up the four parallels to dot.com mania and CD-ROMs that will make blogging a “super-fad”.

So, we’ve got a super-fad on our hands? I actually prefer the term überfad, but that’s neither here nor there. The momentum behind this has been building for some time now. I think you’d be pretty hard pressed to find anyone that was remotely close to the tech industry in the past three or four years that as not heard of slashdot. Even if they don’t know exactly what it is, they have probably heard of being “slashdotted“.

The mainstream media has been turning some of their attention toward the blogging community, there has also been much self promotion. Not surprising since one of the most exciting concepts in blogging is the reality that the web is in fact a read/write medium. People have the ability to easily publish their work, they are excited that they can easily publish their work, so they write about how exciting it is to be able to publish their work so effortlessly. There are some really great sites out there today (see my blogroll for a partial list) and there will be many more to come.

Being a technophile (geek) I tend to find the technology that has sprung up to support this phenomenon very interesting. Much of it built on people’s own time and made freely available to others. I see the technology underlying today’s blogging phenomenon in much the same way I saw Napster: High concept, not so high tech. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not trying to belittle anyone’s technical prowess or the power of this new thing that has been created. But, as with Napster, all the pieces were there waiting to be assembled. It just took the right people to come along and put them together. Not surprisingly, the sum is worth much more than its individual parts. Not so surprising right? Progress is in fact a very incremental undertaking. Very few inventions are all that whiz-bang, most are quite mundane. Yet, without all those mundane things such as TCP/IP and HTTP, we wouldn’t even have the system to deliver all the great new blogs that are coming our way.

Why am I so impressed with this technology? Here’s an example: Remember when XML became this huge buzzword? OK, it’s still a buzzword along with all the other MLs that were spawned by the overuse of the term Markup Language, but I digress. Everybody’s application was going to be XML compatible even if their sales team couldn’t tell you what XML compatible really meant or what it could do for you. Well, now thousands of individuals are publishing XML content on the Internet daily. The technology has matured enough so that XML content is easily published, but how many major commercial news sites offer an RSS or other easily consumable format to their regular subscribers? I’m willing to bet the percentage of personal blogs that publish an RSS feed is much higher than that of commercial news sites. Part of that might have to do with copyright concerns on the part of the major outlets, but don’t discount the role of individuals and small groups on the other side. They took what was available to them, and made it work, partially out of necessity, partially because it would be cool.

Hopefully the mainstreaming of blogs will not stifle the creative energy we have seen so far in terms of both the creative content and the technology underlying it. Many times mainstream equals potential profit, and the quest to add to the bottom line does not always lead in the same direction as the quest for progress.

Not much of a surprise, but the FCC has voted in favor of more relaxed media ownership regulations.

Past articles on FCC Deregulation: FCC Loosening Ownership Regulations

I have to agree with Dan Gillmor, there has not been much in the way of coverage on this. The New York Times has had several wire articles about it (here, here, and here [2007-08-02: wire links are dead, removing them]) but, oddly enough, a search for “FCC” at CNN.com yields nothing on the subject.

The FCC is scheduled to vote on this June 2nd. If you feel strongly about this, contact your Congressperson. MoveOn.org has an excellent tool for doing this, they have even written the letter for you.

via Dan Gillmor’s eJournal