contentious.com

Ill-informed, poorly supported anti-blogger tirade by Paul Mulshine published recently in the WSJ.

"Paul Mulshine's whole WSJ column is essentially a rewrite of the hundreds [of anti-blogger diatribes] that came before and would not be worth noting except the hear-say quote is from a blogger who actually [provides original reporting and analysis]

"The quoted but un-named blogger used to reinforce his points is none other than me–JD Johannes.

"Most recently I produced, shot and edited video reports for TIME Magazine's website and my video was aired on WCBS-TV New York, KWTV-TV Oklahoma City and KOTV-TV Tulsa. I've made TV shows, dozens of customized "sweeps pieces" for local TV and produced five documentaries.

"I do not know why Mr. Mulshine did not give my name. If he had, it would undercut many of his statements. (Or perhaps he did google me and for some reason thought I was not the type to read the Wall Street Journal.) Mr. Mulshine's use of a misleading hear-say quote explains well the demise of his beloved newspaper.

Document management software for mac: iTunes for pdfs. Cool. I might try this.

"The makers describe Papers software as iTunes for .pdf files, and that’s broadly right. The idea is that, when you download an article, it goes into your Papers library. The bibliographic information immediately appears; so does, if you’re lucky, the “metadata” — like the abstract and the list of subjects that the authors thought their article touches on. (I say “if you’re lucky” because this doesn’t always happen automatically.) The document itself gets neatly filed in a folder on your hard drive, and renamed by authors and year.

"Not only can you read the papers, annotate them, find them and create folders of papers on related subjects, you can also use the software to search the big scientific databases like PubMed and the Web of Science. It doesn’t (yet) replace bibliographic software such as Endnote; but it can be used with it quite neatly."

"We have an incredible opportunity, now we have to figure out what to make of it. I hope to begin a conversation about what we want to accomplish with BarCamp NewsInnovation.

"The plan so far is to hold regional BarCamps in Chicago, Portland and Washington, D.C. sometime in January. I have proposed other sites but have not had volunteers step forward just yet and roll with it. If you are interested contact me.

"I also am proposing we hold national BarCamp NewsInnovation in Philadelphia, spearheaded by ideas floated by Sean Blanda, sometime in April."

From Steve Yelvington: Interactive timeline showing when papers ditch their print editions. Created with a bunch of Drupal modules.

Want to help shape WordPress 2.8, or just learn more about how WP developers think and how open-source software communities make decisions? Take this survey.

Here's the Festivus episode. And now, the airing of the grievances…..

the coolest festival ever! In Nederland, CO

Chocolates store I plan to visit in the Bay area, when I' visiting there Jan-Mar

What do Carol Browner & Dick Cheney have in common besides running energy policy? (albeit with opposite agendas):

"Don't bother looking for any electronic records of Carol Browner's first stint as a federal government executive. The soon-to-be Obama administration climate czar intentionally didn't keep many.

"In sworn testimony obtained by The Washington Times, Ms. Browner disclosed that she refused to use e-mail when she served as President Clinton's Environmental Protection Agency chief in the 1990s for fear of leaving a digital trail. She also ordered her government computer hard drive wiped clean of records just before leaving office.

"'It was a conscious decision not to use a piece of equipment or to learn how to use a piece of equipment because I didn't want to be in a situation similar to what I had been in FL,' she testified about government computers. The testimony referred to her days as an envl regulator in FL, where an e-mail message sent to her surfaced in litigation."

"Six Los Angeles media outlets united this week to form LA Beez–a platform built to create the "first-ever online network of ethnic citizen journalists."

"Supported by Arab American, Asian American and Latino publications, the project aims to involve new communities in the struggling world of print publications. It's a model that publishers could follow when reaching out to local communities with new books. As book review outlets dry up, these new kinds of sites will become more important."

"Speaking of plane crashes, I'm currently reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest, Outliers, which I'm finding quite interesting. It delves into what makes people successful, and amazingly it has a lengthy chapter on plane crashes, and how culture affects crash rates."

Great new GEO-feature from NYTtimes.com:

"Represent shows you your address in relation to each of the political districts that contain it. To draw the maps of your districts, we used GEOS, a C++ port of the Java Topology Suite, an API for modeling and manipulating 2-dimensional linear geometry, via GeoDjango’s GEOS API. GEOS allows for the conversion of a geometry to KML, which can then be consumed by Google Maps.

"But to do all that, we need an address: yours, hopefully, if you live in New York City. To turn that address into coordinates, we built a geocoding service based on Geo-Coder-US, the perl library that powers geocoder.us."

A lot of people are out of work right now, just as a news US administration is gearing up and staffing up. This tells you how to look for federal jobs in the new admin.

"President-elect Obama has championed the creation of a more open, transparent, and participatory government. To that end, Change.gov adopted a new copyright policy this weekend. In an effort to create a vibrant and open public conversation about the Obama-Biden Transition Project, all website content now falls under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License"

"More than 3,500 reader comments later, we’re excited to report on the success of our recent community discussion on health care, the first open conversation of its kind on Change.gov. Members of our Health care Transition team, including former Senator Tom Daschle, were eager to dig in to the comments and find out more about the issues and concerns that drove the community conversation online. Here's a look at what they had to say."

"For years, government web sites have avoided comments and third-party Web 2.0 tools for fear of confusing user contributed content with official content and violating various policy and compliance rules. What if a user comment posted dropped the f-bomb or stated inaccurate information about a government program? What if an embedded visualization did not conform to section 508 accessibility requirements?

"Yesterday, in one small blog post for a web site, but one giant web page for .gov web sites, Change.gov demonstrated how government sites could begin to join the rest of Web 2.0-kind."