Joi Ito's Web

Joi Ito's conversation with the living web.

The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today report NBC News fires Arnett Over Iraqi TV Interview. Via The Command Post, here is the official word from National Geographic which co-fired him.

Update from The Command Post: "Peter Arnett, the American reporter fired by MSNBC and National Geographic earlier today has reportedly (Fox News) been hired by the Daily Mirror."

Short flash animation about the liberation of Afghanistan. Turn up the sound an take a look at this link.

Via Tom Hammer

Interesting message on Politech about the freedom of speech issue of the recent banning of Mr. Irwin Schiff's book on how not to pay taxes.

Politech
Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2003 02:29:56 -0500
From:Texas Spitfire
To: Declan McCullagh
Subject: Since you brought up the Freedom of speech issue

Mr. McCullagh,

I do not know whether you have been following the Irwin Schiff saga or whether you personally support his position in the IRS/Income Tax issue so I would like to bring this subject to your attention.

I believe that regardless of whether Mr. Schiff is telling lies or truth, he should be allowed to have his viewpoint. If what he is putting forth is false, word will quickly spread and he'll be out of business. The fact that the IRS is going to such great lengths to censor him only makes his position more creditable. In fact, I don't think a person can be found, who has put his procedures into action, who will say that "it didn't work".

At any rate, I just thought you might like to check it out. http://www.paynoincometax.com

BTW, a copy of his "banned" book, "The Federal Mafia: How the Government Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully Collects Income Tax" was auctioned on eBay recently for $117.75....the regular price is only $38!

Sherry Hightower

I blogged earlier that I thought that CNN telling Kevin Sites to stop blogging sucked. I recently talked to a friend of mine who works at a major US TV Network and was presented a more balanced view on the issue. I have received permission to quote the following from an email exchange.

All U.S. TV networks have a script approval process and frankly I think overall it leads to better, more focused, and more accurate reporting, not the opposite. We have script approval for the same reasons newspapers and magazines have editors. If you're going to call script approval censorship then you'll have to call the whole editing process censorship.

Its also standard that a news organization has legal rights by contract to all "works" produced by its journalists. this is a basic market reality. Why should we expect a news company to pay us a decent amount of money and then not retain the rights to our news related "works"?  If we want total "freedom of speech" to write or say anything, anywhere at any time - especially on the same subjects that we cover as journalists - then we should expect to work for free.

Went to see President Ando of Sony. He is second in command under Chairman Idei and is more and more in charge of representing Sony in the US. He gave the speech at CES this year and said some some very interesting things. First he pushed open standards.

Ando said Sony will also work to use open standards in future products to make it easier for consumers to more widely access content on devices and urged other companies to help to establish these standards to help the industry progress.
Then he complained about the difficulty of the current record label business.
Steven Levy
After the keynote, Ando unwound at a dinner for a few journalists, where talk turned to the knotty problem of digital rights. He startled everyone by speculating that in the long term, given the nature of Internet copying, record labels may not have a future. "When you have a problem like this," he says, sighing, "I really wish we were a simple hardware company."
My kind of guy. We talked about blogs (of course), open standards and how cool it would be for Sony to really embrace open standards and let the blog tools and services talk to Sony products through open standards that we worked on together.

Mitch Kapor blogs about documentation coming for the 0.1 release of Chandler by the Open Source Applications Foundation. They are using a Wiki for the collaborative development environment. Great example of how Wiki's are cool.

Is UN politics getting in the way of best practices?

AP
Taiwanese accuse U.N. health agency of ignoring them; say it could aggravate spread of mystery illness

By William Foreman, Associated Press, 3/30/2003 01:44

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) When a deadly flu-like virus began spreading through Asia earlier this month, a group of Taiwanese doctors sent an e-mail to the World Health Organization asking for help in investigating the mysterious bug.

No one responded. No investigators from the U.N. agency visited. And the requests for assistance continue to go unanswered a policy inspired by China's rivalry with Taiwan, and the island's struggle for recognition by the United Nations.

via Technorati Hot Links.

Also, Karuna Shinsho, former CNN and NHK anchorwoman now living in Hong Kong, has written a first hand report on Chanpon.org.

Tim Oren also seems to think that the buzz is back and that we've hit a bottom.

Listed on BlogSharesBlogshares just went beta. It is a site where you can trade shares of blogs using fake money. The price is based on trading and a valuation of sorts is derived from links weighted by how valuable the links are. (Kind of like google page rank.) This price/value spread is sort of a P/E. Obviously, this fuels the "popularity content" aspect of blogging. Having said that, it's fun. I wish I could short sell blogs. ;-) It will be interesting to see whether the blog prices predict new popular blogs accurately since people should buy blogs that are new and cool but people don't know about yet.
koizumi.jpg

The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) is a club for scientists who have, or believe they have, luxuriant flowing hair. The project was first announced in mini-AIR 2001-02.

I wonder if there is a Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Politicians? I would nominate Koizumi-san.

Via Xeni on Boing Boing