Politics

Let me be up front. I have never been a fan of Jesse Jackson. I appreciated the movement he tried to create, but always was leery of the man himself. I was viewed with some suspicion by some of my white liberal friends because I didn't jump on the Jesse Jackson bandwagon, but the truth is he creeped me out.

The first chance I had to directly observe Jesse Jackson in action was when then bishop Desmond Tutu came to speak at UC San Diego where I was a student. This was back when Tutu had to be very careful what he said or he might join Mandela in prison. His speech was amazing, and had the main message that too often America put itself on the wrong side...and for once we should do the right thing, back the right horse.

Through the entire event, Jesse Jackson was there, often pushing himself to the forefront and hogging the spotlight. I found his presence irritated me, and this despite all the good things I had heard about him from fellow liberals. And it seemed to me, though I may have just been projecting, that Tutu himself seemed to look a bit askance at Jackson.

Years later I had the opportunity to hear Nelson Mandela, newly released from prison, speak to a full house at the LA Coliseum. The standing ovation he received moved him, and many of us, to tears.

You can find them at http://youtube.com/user/blogdiva

They're not the bestest quality but you can get a good sense of the excellent presentations by the likes of Van Jones, Mark Pesce (who I've already written about), Brian Behlendorf, Craig Newmark and others.

If you don't know who is Mark Pesce and/or have never heard of HyperPolitics, go read the whole lecture on his blog RIGHT NOW!.

Then come back and watch the videos that, albeit incomplete and a bit jerky, really give you a good idea of how incredibly important is Mark's framing of community development as it happens through mobile technology and the web.

I have to admit that I don't go to a lot of technology conferences. It's not that I am not interested, on the contrary, I'd love to be able to attend each and every one of them. The problem is that I am in the situation that many other bloggers (especially women and people of color) are trapped in : We don't make enough money out of blogging to be able to afford a conference budget.

It's not just the airfare and hotel and the conference fee. As a working mother who is self-employed and has 2 children, traveling to conferences is not only absolutely prohibitive if I do so out of pocket. It's the emotionally draining logistics of who's going to take care of my children while am away. Unfortunately, in a city like New York not having family available or a nanny on payroll is a HUGE child-care liability.

So the few conferences I get to go am either paid to go because I am on a panel or I get to go to them because they're local enough (meaning a train ride away).

Outside of RootsCamp NYC (which happened 2 years ago) and this year's PodCamp NYC, there's not much for free or affordable the techie and geeky at heart here in NYC. Well, at least not much new to me because if I were to include some of the stuff happening at Eyebeam, well, yeah, that's geeky enough.

Which is why going to PDF is such a joy.

The whole backstory to the AP vs. Rogers Cadenhead fiasco is already posted at the Media Bloggers Association site. Go read it. And here's Rogers version, by the way.

In discussing all the whisper campaign unleashed by the enemies of Barack Obama, I mentioned once to some fellow bloggers that The Rumor is The Smear. You don't have to have evidence of a tape of Michelle Obama backing cookies in the shape of a sickle and hammer. The Rumor is the Smear.

With The Rumor alone you can destroy an opponent with never having to demonstrate a shred of supporting evidence. The Rumor calls the rather strong heard-instinct in Americans. The Rumor is like a Siren-song and whomever creates the strongest Rumor, will be able to command the attention and control the point of view of the majority of the herd around them.

The Rumor taps into this country's collective need and penchant for psychopathic collective hysteria. Remember the Salem Witch Trials. Enough said.

So Kos uses his blog, just like Michelle Malkin, to parachute on the AP controversy and call himself a hero. In the post not only does he quote an AP article (something I had done earlier that day for fisking purposes), but proceeds to dump on both Rogers Cadenhead, Bob Cox and Ron Coleman for having the temerity to talk with the AP about guidelines :

"The dumbasses at the Media Bloggers Association, of course, are walking right into that meeting because they crave nothing more than creating the impression that they, you know, represent bloggers (they don't)."

This, mind you, after the fact that Rogers had asked for those guidelines. Here's the back story :

Yesterday was intense day that I think was made worse by an article written by Scott Hansell over at The New York Times. Not only did he describe bloggers as "free wheeling", but Hansell made it look like the boycott started by netroots bloggers that spread through the blogosphere was going to be over once the Associated Press had discussions "with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association" that would produce "guidelines" to impose on bloggers.

We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Mr. Kennedy said the company was going to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association, a trade group, and others. He said he hopes that these discussions can all occur this week so that guidelines can be released soon.

Still, Mr. Kennedy said that the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items. And he said that he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones.

“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”

Even if The A.P. sets standards, bloggers could choose to use more content than its standards permit, and then The A.P. would have to decide whether to take legal action against them.

The last paragraph is not only the other (after the free wheeling adjective) offending point of this article. It gets picked up by none other than The Associate Press, which goes on to "report" (and here I am breaking to boycott in order to fisk them)

NEW YORK - The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers' group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.

Jim Kennedy, the AP's director of strategic planning, said Monday that he planned to meet Thursday with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, as part of an effort to create standards for online use of AP stories by bloggers that would protect AP content without discouraging bloggers from legitimately quoting from it.

The meeting comes after AP sent a legal notice last week to Rogers Cadenhead, the author of a blog called the Drudge Retort, a news community site whose name is a parody of the prominent blog the Drudge Report.

The notice called for the blog to remove several postings that AP believed was an improper use of its stories. Other bloggers subsequently lambasted AP for going after a small blogger whom they thought appeared to be engaging in a legally permissible and widely practiced activity protected under "fair use" provisions of copyright law.

In response, the AP indicated it would seek to create guidelines, though even that idea triggered further protests. Michael Arrington wrote on his TechCrunch blog Monday that AP "doesn't get to make its own rules about how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows."
FULL ARTICLE AND SOURCE

It is outrageous that the AP, with the help of one of it's members (The New York Times), is spinning this Thursday as some sort of workshop that they will use, with the help of the Media Bloggers Association, to tell bloggers what is Fair Use.

And it is what I was twittering about with Jay Rosen last night. Jay and I reckoned there was what it seemed a "diffusing" element to the way the news were being report from Hansell down. He picked up on it as "the journalists' attempt to calm things down". I described as "there's an interesting diffusing dynamic going on, starting @ NYT" that had been preceded by the following twitts :

blogdiva: @jayrosen_nyu what a lot of your media peeps fail to mention is that no matter what AP says about use of their content there'll be a boycott
about 10 hours later · Reply · View Tweet

blogdiva: @jayrosen_nyu the boycott is not going to end after Ap meets the MBA because the issue here is that they don't get to say what is fair use
less than a minute later · Reply · View Tweet

It wasn't until after I spoke with Robert Cox that it hit me : Yes, indeed, people are reading these as "appeasement" quotes from AP. It does look like the article are meant to diffuse the issue and they're doing so by using Robert Cox's meeting as part of their damage control.

We will deal here with the first part of the discussion which is about Rogers' C&D, the agreement he brokered with the AP and the Thursday meeting. The second part, which is about the reorganization of the Media Bloggers Association and how to become a member will be posted separately.

I just got an email from a fellow blogger saying that he saw NBC report that the newscaster died today of a heart attack.

Wow!

CONFIRMED!

Tim Russert, host of NBC's "Meet the Press" and a political analyst for "NBC Nightly News" and the "Today" program, has died.

Tom Brokaw, the former anchor of NBC Nightly News, came on air during a special report Friday afternoon and said Russert collapsed and died while at work in the NBC news bureau in Washington, D.C.

"This news division will not be the same without his strong, clear voice," Brokaw said. "He'll be missed as he was loved greatly."

Russert, 58, joined NBC News in 1984. He took over the helm of "Meet the Press" in December 1991, according to his biography on the show's Web site. Russert has interviewed every major figure on the American political scene, his biography said.

Earlier this year, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

I came in just in time to watch Hillary Clinton give her endorsement to Barack Obama. It was an interesting speech. She never talked about losing, she talked about the disappointment of not getting the nomination. She also didn't talk about Obama's legitimate win, she only mentioned his victory.

I was on Twitter writing about the speech and I have to say I am relieved she finally said the words a lot of us wanted to hear 2 months ago : that is time to come together and support Obama.

I thought it was gracious and I also noticed that she kept on repeating at the end "we need to help elect barack obama our president" , almost as if she repeated it seven times herself she would truly and honestly embrace it.

I was also taken aback by her late realization that she became a woman who ran for president as opposed to being a candidate who happened to be a woman. I've always said that Hillary Clinton never struck me as a feminist, but as one of the millions of middle class white women who benefitted from the equal opportunity policies that came after the Civil Rights and Women's Rights movements.

Yet this campaign seems to have made her a born-again feminist :