wrote a piece before Bush’s “press conference” last night trying to figure out just what he was doing, and then did a followup after the event. Very interesting stuff. From NYU J-School’s Pressthink: A Prime Time News Conference Before a Special Interest – Make Sense to You?

there’s always someone who hasn’t been NDA’d properly who can pierce the illusion. In the case of Trump’s show, it’s Keith Hollihan, who wrote Reality’s Apprentice for The Morning News.

I like the “X Idol” shows. I’m not a fanatic, but I watch when I remember and keep track of who I like and don’t like. For the most part it’s fluff: a karaoke contest on steroids, masquerading as a something we should take seriously (but not that seriously).

This season, though, one of the rejects on American Idol has somehow become a phenomenon. A phenomenon that makes me very uncomfortable. They have taken this radically bad singer and seemingly convinced him he has potential, to the guffaws of accepting crowds everywhere.

Emil Guillermo of the SFGate has more: William Hung – Racism, Or Magic?.

Newsmap is a visual representation of Google News that was published yesterday. “Newsmap’s objective takes that goal [i.e., to visualize a huge amount of information] a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”