Since June 1, the Montreal Gazette has moved to a mostly-pay model in which stories are reserved for paper-version subscribers. When will they ever learn? They have just lost any shred of currency they might have otherwise had. I can’t believe publishers remain so clueless about electronic media.
Nick Denton,
founder of Gawker Media, announces Contract Publications, aka special advertising sections or supplements. I think this is a great use for weblogs, and in other areas of the web it has been done for years without much controversy.
Kevin Drum is on the Tenet
resignation story, and is the first (AFAIK) to suggest the obvious truth that Tenet’s resignation is the result of a lost pissing match between he and the administration.
I imagine it went something like this: Chalabi and other Iraqi expats had been discredited in the CIA for years, though there was a continued relationship. They worked with them, but the CIA likely had a very low confidence in what came from these folks. (Coincidentally, this would explain why information about WMD would not have provoked stronger action previously as well – it would have been irresponsible to “move” based on the information through discredited sources). When Bush and in particular Cheney, Perle, and Wolfowitz came to town, Chalabi gained a new status and all of a sudden information that was floating around but not enough to justify a US committment became the gold standard. The world also got a lot more binary at that time, and it is likely that the adminstration forced Tenet’s hand on this by saying “but he still works for you, right?” rather than understanding that in intelligence, you can have people you don’t trust on the payroll. This was probably always a source of tension between the CIA and the Bush admistration, and Tenet probably tried to put things right (according to the CIA point of view) now that it’s becoming clear that Chalabi’s interests have not been concurrent with US interests for some time. He lost.
“Social Networking”
is such a mess. LinkedIn makes it almost impossible to find anyone you know or to contact them when you have. Orkut is a toy with amateurish online forum offerings. But Ryze is by far the worst of them all. It is no more than the Classmates.com of the space, with endless pitches (luckily you can control the email you receive), but with no ability to browse people. They’re basically trying to force users to upload their Outlook address book, which is a joke. And the users themselves – it’s a bunch of Herbalife and other pseudo-pyramid losers trying to hook people into a scam. Screw that.
Here’s the NY Times
on the gas-leak thing that Ashcroft’s minions have bought from Padilla:
