Funk Babblings

I've mentioned a few times that I enjoy the writing of Amanda Marcotte (pandagon_amanda) at Pandagon (pandagon_net). She's an outspoken Texan feminist, liberal, music fan, atheist (yet leader and prophet of the Church of the Mouse and Disco Ball), heavily inspired in her writing by the late Molly Ivins.

A couple weeks ago she announced that she'd been hired as blogmistress for the John Edwards presidential campaign, and would (sadly) be reducing her Pandagon blogging in order to focus on this great new opportunity. She said she strongly supported his candidacy and his positions on the issues, and was looking forward to helping him win.

( Then the knives came out. )

So it was little surprise to me when I read Amanda's announcement today that she's resigned from the Edwards campaign. She said she had become a target that risked the Edwards campaign "every time [she] coughed", so she couldn't effectively do the job she was hired to do. And of course, being part of the campaign meant that she couldn't respond the the attacks herself, while being outside the campaign allows her to respond as only she can.

(Selfishly, I'm happy that I'll get to read the unfiltered Amanda again.)

This whole episode is relevant to all of us who live our lives partially online. If we're smart, we don't make public anything that we think could hurt us in our future careers, but it can sometimes be difficult to make that prediction. Maybe our future employers, like the Edwards campaign, will have no problem with (or awareness of) what we've written. But what about their rivals and competitors? Will some third party use our past personal writings to attack us and our employers?

As one blogger put it, "Blogger pelt season is now open."

This sort of thing will only get worse as more people put more of their lives online in various ways. Not just blogs, but other sorts of social networking sites, web forums, Flickr photos, all may make us vulnerable in some way we may not anticipate. Knowledge of this prompts many people to try to hide under varying levels of pseudonymity (complete anonymity online is nearly impossible without a lot of work), but a determined effort will eventually be able to break through that veil. Others of us just hope that being ourselves will be good enough, and that anyone who objects to that can be ignored; circumstances don't always play out that well though.

Luckily, most situations aren't nearly as cutthroat as political campaigns.

Updates:

1. Pandagon seems to be back up and running now.
2. Melissa McEwan, the other blogger involved in this controversy, has also resigned.
3. Neither Edwards nor the other candidates have distinguished themselves in this mess.
4. "We Are All Melissa and Amanda."
5. Amanda has written her side of the story, "Why I had to quit the Edwards campaign", over at Salon. (Linking to the article through Pandagon avoids having to watch an ad.)
   

When I was listening to "On The Media" early this evening, I noticed yet another instance of something that has become a pet peeve of mine. That is people trumpeting the "power of the blogs" based on the takedown of Dan Rather and CBS news over the allegedly-forged documents about Bush skipping out on the Texas Air National Guard. By now that event seems to have seeped into the national consciousness as "Rather and CBS used forged documents" and "the [right-wing] blogs proved it". The claim was that the documents looked more like something out of Microsoft Word than out of an early-70s typewriter.

The problem is that the right-wing blogs were wrong about the whole thing.

At the time, one guy over at Daily Kos posted a six-part analysis of the documents based on high-resolution scans and actual research into the capabilities of typewriters of the time. (Go read at least part of it: part I, II, III, IV, V, VI) I had some interest in it because I have some knowledge of and interest in typography. But nobody paid attention to the actual typographical facts, and this guy finally got sick of the whole thing and wrote an outlandishly speculative (but highly plausible) article suggesting Karl Rove orchestrated the whole thing.

Now he's posted a quick review of the whole episode, with a link to a Columbia Journalism Review story about it. CJR seems to agree that the resulting conventional wisdom is simply wrong, even if nobody really knows for sure what's up with those memos.

But the whole episode accomplished a number of things. First it discredited Dan Rather and CBS news, putting them alongside Jayson Blair and the New York Times in the journalism hall of shame. This overshadowed the larger truths about Bush's Air National Guard service (and lack thereof), which are proven by other documents not in question, and managed to get rid of that story entirely. Finally, discrediting CBS cast a shadow over the other high-quality reporting they'd been doing on questionable actions by Bush and his administration.

In fact, this stupid thing may have even been enough to turn the election to Bush. If so I almost have to admire the judo of it. Almost.

Wired has a great article about BitTorrent. Besides interviewing the author and briefly explaining how BitTorrent works, I like that the article spends a lot of time on the issue of using BitTorrent for TV show timeshifting -- "the Internet becomes a giant TiVo." That's the most interesting aspect of BitTorrent for me, but it's one that normally gets ignored in the press because the movie and record industries draw so much attention.


BTW, thanks to the Blogdex RSS feed (aka blogdex on LJ, though that's not how I read it) for pointing this article out to me. Blogdex is great for keeping up with what stories are making the rounds of the "blogosphere". (The right-wing warblogs do hold a bit too much sway in the index for my taste, but then the rest of us probably hold too much sway for their taste, so it's fair.)

Found at Daily Kos:

jiveturky tells the hilarious story of getting flipped off by the president yesterday.

Unfortunately the photo doesn't reveal much.

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Update:
Just to make this entry slightly more substantive...

I may have mentioned before that a friend of mine here in Canton is running for Congress. The AP (and USA Today) now has a story about his and other Ohio candidates' use of blogs, including Jeff's use of Daily Kos. Unfortunately, while the local paper printed the story, they only printed about a third of it, and they buried it on page A-5.

First I introduced her to reading email at home, and life was never the same.

Next I introduced her to newsgroups, and she got sucked in.

Now after wanting a web site for a long time, she's set up two accounts here. So go say hi to nontacitare and kateryndraper.

Luckily it's summer so she has more time for this sort of thing now.