Following up on my post about good, balanced reporting from Reuters, here's an article on the same topic from the New York Times (via Jeff Jarvis). The title, "Some Iraqis Optimistic About Sovereignty," is encouraging. But then we begin to read:

Paragraph 1:

"When [an Iraqi butcher was] asked what he thought about life in Iraq . . . he responded with a blast of invective as heated as the sunbaked sidewalks [of] Baghdad."

Paragraph 2:

"What sovereignty are you talking about? How can you even call it sovereignty? We have thousands of occupation troops in this country and you talk about sovereignty? Enough! Iraq is nothing but an American base."

Paragraph 4:

"Both of those governments have been rubbish. How can you call them governments when they were imposed from abroad? Those governments and their ministers are just puppets. They are all spies, for Iran and the Kurds. I tell you, Saddam did the right thing when he used chemical weapons against the Kurds."

Paragraph 7:

"[A New York Times survey] turned up plenty of people who bridled over the issues that have eroded support for the American presence in Iraq, from the relentless violence to doubts about the degree of authority vested in Iraqi ministers to faltering supplies of electricity and water and woeful inadequacies in hospitals and schools. There were many, too, especially among Sunni Arabs, who favored a withdrawal of American troops and the resumption of authority by an Iraqi government that is not dependent on foreign troops."

Perhaps they had the wrong title? Ah wait, here it is. In Paragraph 8:

"But perhaps more striking, considering the huge gap between the hopes stirred when American troops captured Baghdad in April 2003 and the grim realities now, were the number of Iraqis who expressed a more patient view. Among those people, the disappointments and privations have been offset by an appreciation of both the progress toward supplanting the dictatorship of Mr. Hussein with a nascent democratic system and the need for American troops to remain here in sufficient numbers to allow the system to mature."

The article goes on to quote several folks who strike a very similar tone to those in the Reuters article - we want the Americans to leave, but we're grateful for what they did and understand why they're still here. Things aren't perfect, but they're improving. etc.

It's a lesson in strawmen:
Step 1: Take a survey and get surprising results.
Step 2: Interview a somewhat hysterical person (Saddam did the right thing when he gassed the Kurds? Please...) to imply that he represents the norm.
Step 3: Give the results of the survey, and characterize them as a gap between the picture you just painted and what the survey actually shows.

I guess it's better than just lying about it.

But not much...

Running through my Junk Mail box, I noticed this piece of spam from Reunion.com:




Gulp! I was hoping for more than 12! Do you think that constitutes a threat?

I was impressed by this Reuters article on the President's speech last night:

Many Iraqis in the capital, weary after more than two years of bloodshed and economic dislocation, view U.S. troops with a degree of mistrust but also as a bulwark against sectarian violence they fear might trigger civil war if they left.

Grateful, in the main, for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, many are dismayed by what they see as heavy-handed tactics and a failure by the U.S. occupiers to prevent Iraq becoming a new haven for foreign Islamists in the chaos that followed Saddam.

It goes on to quote several Iraqi citizens, all of whom have either rational criticisms of the U.S. ("They didn't come to Iraq for the sake of the Iraqi people. Their aim was to deflect terrorism from their own country.") or show a degree of understanding about our purpose there ("Bush and America decided to help the Iraqi people and that is in our interest.")

It also discusses the insurgency in terms of the violence it's causing ("Violence has worsened sharply in Iraq since the Shi'ite- and Kurd-led government took power two months ago"), as well as the political effect it's having ("[A] Sunni leader. . . launched a new political movement, saying he aimed to give a voice to figures from the 'legitimate Iraqi resistance.').

All of the hysteria I've read on both sides ("The war is a total failure" vs. "the media doesn't cover things fairly") lead me to believe that this article probably reflects the actual tone of what's going on out there, and suggests that the author has no personal or political axe to grind.

I hope to see more like it...

For those of you who don't read every single word of every single article in CFO magazine, here's a link to What, Where, and How Much? by John Verity, which features a quote from yours truly near the bottom of the page.

This goes in my collection along with Running IT Like a Business Isn't So Easy, Execs Say from Computerworld, which ran last March, after I spoke at an IT Financial Management Conference in Miami.

Funnily enough, in Googling for the CFO article, I also came across this, which is a 30 second interview they did with me in Miami about what I thought of the conference.

Now, if you'll excuse me, the alarm on my 15-minute clock just went off and I need to go shut it...

Yahoo has shut down their chat rooms due to complaints from some of their advertisers that they were being used for promote sex with minors. Privacy advocates have jumped all over it:

"This is a real overreaction on the part of Yahoo," Annalee Newitz, policy analyst for the EFF, said. "To just unilaterally shut down chat rooms is really chilling to free speech."

I wonder how, exactly, not having access to Yahoo chat rooms limits your right to free speech. Yahoo is a corporation providing a service, not a public utility. If they choose to stop offering that service (for whatever reason), don't they have the right to do that? Or are Yahoo chat rooms now essential to our right to express ourselves? Were we living in a fascist state before Yahoo was created and just didn't know it? What about the hundreds of other chat room services that still exist on the Internet? Don't they take up the slack?

Many folks, particularly those who have branded themselves "professional advocates," seem very willing to blur the line between rights and privileges. A right is guaranteed by law and cannot be taken away without prosecution (or at the very least, public outcry). A privilege is guaranteed only by a contract between two parties (express or implied) and can be taken away based on the terms of that contract. When you use Yahoo's services, you agree to a "Terms of Service" contract. You are granted the privilege of using Yahoo's service (in this case, free of charge) in exchange for granting them the privilege of showing you their advertisers' messages. Yahoo takes a risk that everyone will suddenly stop using the service and they'll have to return their advertisers money. You take a risk that Yahoo will decide to get out of the chat room business, leaving you with no place to discuss Tom Cruise's love life (sorry, cheap shot).

We have the right to free speech. We do not have the right to Yahoo Chat Rooms. Claiming that we do only decreases the signal-to-noise ratio in this area, making it less likely that an actual rights violation will be taken seriously.

UPDATE: Other advocacy groups are praising Yahoo's decision:

``The specific reason for the closure not withstanding, this is a positive a step in the online fight against child exploitation,'' said Michelle Collins, director of the exploited children unit at The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, based in Alexandria, Va.

Ms. Collins makes a good point. I wonder which Ms. Newitz of the EFF (see above) would consider more important: chilling the right to free speech or preventing child exploitation? Tough call, I guess, especially when you make your living defending free speech...

OK, the combinations are coming in faster than a hyperactive craps table:

Michael Dell says he'd be willing to offer the Mac OS on Dell machines, even though their attempt at selling Linux laptops has already failed. Apple had no official comment, but has said that they won't allow the Mac OS to run on anything but an Apple Mac (motto: "trying hard not to sell too much software...")

Apple's also said they won't sell or support Windows on Apple hardware (motto: "it used to be we couldn't run the most popular OS in the world, now we just don't want to...")

I agree with Jeff Porten on this one - it'll be the hackers who get it working first, and the relative success of their hacks that determine whether the company "decides" to support it in the future (motto: "don't look free beta-testers in the mouth...")

It ain't every day you type your name into Google News and see yourself as the first hit:

Business Engine Customer, Lehman Brothers, Speaks on IT Alignment at Gartner Project & Portfolio Management Summit; IT Cost Transparency in Focus at Conference for Senior IT Executives

Jeff Porten writes about the Apple/Intel alliance (twice!).

I respond here.

Remember back in April of last year, when the EU successfully defended customer choice by crushing the big, bad monopoly power of Microsoft?

Well, as predicted, it turns out that a whole lot of time & effort has gone into defending a choice that no one wants:

PC makers snub Windows sans media player

"Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Fujitsu Siemens all said they have no firm plans to install Windows XP N, citing a lack of customer demand. A Dell representative added Tuesday that customers expect to have a media player included. . . 'Customers purchase computers expecting them to come equipped with the capability of playing back digital media files, and it's our obligation to meet this need. ' "

As I said in my original essay on the topic, Windows is not number one because of its quality; it's number one because of its ubiquity. It's only through the twisted logic of government-think that making the product less functional is somehow a good thing for consumers.

Cleaning out my junk mail box today, I noticed quite a few spam e-mails addressed to me and cc:'ing my wife.

Kudos to the spammers, whose technology has advanced to the point where they can figure out that my wife & I are related (same domain? Same personal webpage? Whatever). I'm always impressed with new, effective technologies.

Of course, that doesn't mean I won't happily delete it after my automatic spam filter captures it & files it away...

Internetweek is complaining once again about Google News:

When America Online announced this week that it would give IM users free email, Google News was all over the story.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with a link to InformationWeek.com were such lesser-known technology news sites as Techtree.com, Netimperative, and Kashar News from Pakistan. At one point in the coverage of IBM's attempt to simulate a brain, gossip site TheBosh.com got the lead spot over articles from News.com and Forbes. In a real puzzler, Google ran verbatim copies of a "puppy" Linux from five different sources, including in Singapore and Australia, without linking to the original story file on TechWeb.com.

All in a typical day's work at Google News. The company--so beloved as a search engine for its wide range and knack for always knowing the most relevant Web pages--often does just the opposite when it comes to selecting stories for its news pages. Sources that would be considered authoritative brush up against stories from Web sites most people have never heard of, with no clue about which one is a higher quality than another, or a so-called "expert" site, which Google is so fond of making much of in the pure search-engine side of its business.

Right tool for the job, guys. Right tool for the job.

Google News is not where you go when you want authoritative sources for news. It's where you go when you want to see a wide variety of sources with a wide variety of opinions. The goal of algorithm-based editing is to eliminate the advantage of the big guys, and show the user the most relevant stories based on content, rather than reputation.

I turn to it when the mainstream media seems to have reached an opinion about a story, and I'm not sure the opinion is universally shared. For instance, reading about Michael Jackson's recent acquittal in the MSM, one gets the sense that he was really guilty, but got away with it due to incompetence on the prosecutor's part and/or his status as a celebrity. Turning to Google News (with sources such as Toronto's Fashion Monitor, AZ Central.com, the London Mirror, and Workers World), I learn that most of the world is focusing on the fact that he's sworn off sleeping with children, that the prosecutor is having a hard time dealing with the defeat, that the accuser's family is rumored to be considering a civil suit (where the real money is, I guess - cf. the O.J. Simpson trial), and a discussion about whether MJ can resurrect his music career after the trial.

All of this adds a certain texture to the story that you won't find on Reuters.com or nytimes.com. I'd encourage you to check out the recent Newsweek hubbub, and the war in Iraq on Google News as well. A lot of the stories/opinions are the same, of course, but there's definitely a diversity there that you don't see elsewhere.

Bottom line: most of us are smart enough to look at the article and the source before determining what to believe. And depending on the subject matter, a reporter at the Wyoming News might be more interesting to read than the editor of the Washington Post.

Sorry I've been away so long. Believe it or not, I actually was sleeping. But there's no way that's gonna last...

Yet another sign of the world converging upon itself:

Apple said it will begin delivering Macintosh products using Intel microprocessors, the number-crunching nerve centers of PCs, by this time next year and will have all of its Macintosh computers using Intel processors by the end of 2007.

This is fantastic news:

Some 23 percent of children in nursery school — kids age 3, 4 or 5 — have gone online, according to the Education Department. By kindergarten, 32 percent have used the Internet, typically under adult supervision.

My kids use many of the websites mentioned in the article, but their favorite by far is Wheel of Fortune.

Brandon knows the whole alphabet now, but the first six letters he learned were R, S, T, L, N, and E.

James Lileks claims he coined the phrase, "In the Future, Everyone will be Hitler." I, for one, am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But this page is just a beautiful proof of how right he is...

We all should have seen this coming:

Users of TiVo's personal video recorders will be able to transfer recorded television content to [Intel] Centrino notebooks using pre-installed software. Notebook users will then to take the programming with them while traveling.

So as long as I told my Tivo to record something, I can watch it whenever I want and wherever I am. Being in the same room with the TV becomes as unimportant as being there when the program starts. Heck - the TV isn't even required anymore - just the laptop and one of those ridiculously huge flatscreen monitors.

If they make it simple enough to use, this could be huge...

A couple of weeks ago, our family made our annual pilgrimage to Philadelphia for the University of Pennsylvania's Alumni Day festivities. Ever since we bought the kids toy trumpets, one of the University's hired photographers has been a big Avery fan, and this year is no different.

Avery's the short one in blue. And trust me - he was having more fun than the picture suggests...