The New York Times has released its internal report and review of the Jayson Blair affair and related issues that recently rocked 43rd St. and toppled Howell Raines. It’s 92 pages long and I haven’t read it all yet. The big news seems to be that the paper is finally appointing an ombudsman. But perhaps in an effort to show some deference to the paper’s many statements over the years that it didn’t need an ombudsman, didn’t want an ombudsman, and indeed sneered all over the concept of an ombudsman — that’s only for weenie papers! — it will label this new position “public editor.”

Which just leaves me thinking, public editor? Wouldn’t that be someone who edits the public? If this person is the public editor, does that mean all the other editors at the Times are “private” editors? Couldn’t the entire collective editorial brain of the Times come up with a better title?

The news that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA) — the agency whose predecessors were responsible for the primordial development of the Internet — has planned to open an anonymous global futures market or gambling parlor in which participants can bet on future terrorist acts has elicited understandable perplexity and consternation. Sen. Byron Dorgan tells the New York Times he has had trouble persuading people it’s not a hoax.

But the project does not seem quite so outlandish if you are versed in the latest trendy theories of the market and emergent behavior. The Web is full of these operations, play markets in celebrity and reputation, most of them relatively frivolous or fun, like blogshares or the Hollywood Stock Exchange. Why not harness the collective wisdom of the market to save terror victims’ lives? Why not let the invisible hand stop the terrorist’s hand?

Here’s why.

Markets depend on good information. The DARPA plan is based on the theory that an open market will draw out the best information from multiple sources. That’s fine if, in fact, the incentive of making money in the market is strong enough to overcome other motivations of participants. If you were a terrorist planning an attack, would you try to make a little money on the side by using your insider knowledge to place a winning bet? Or would you allocate a little extra money in your operating budget to placing decoy bets to delude those who you knew were turning to the U.S. military-funded terror market for intelligence? Or would you simply stay away, distrusting the market’s anonymity mechanism on the assumption that its American designers will have built in some sort of back door? It’s nearly impossible to imagine any set of circumstances in which this market would provide untainted information.

Which leads us to the other problem, which just exploded in the face of the Bush administration: How could the folks at DARPA not understand that they had created an unbelievable PR gaffe? What tone-deaf idiot there couldn’t see that the relatives of victims of terror attacks or the families of soldiers risking their lives ostensibly to fight terrorism might find it a wee bit disturbing that the government was funding an operation which, if it worked properly, would allow terrorists to profit from their knowledge of their plans?

Here it is useful to remember that today’s version of DARPA is the same outfit that brought us the infamous Total Information Awareness program. And all these brilliant efforts have been spearheaded by Admiral John Poindexter– who apparently learned nothing from his years fending off conspiracy charges relating to his last bout of foreign policy innovation in the Iran-contra scandal.

If there were a futures market in Poindexter’s career it would just have cratered.

POSTCRIPT Apparently this project has already met a swift end. Think of it as a sort of anaerobic-bacteria idea — hatched in the darkness of an agency, unable to survive once exposed to the oxygen of public awareness.

Mark Hoback and a couple of other people have asked that I take the one-year mark for Salon Blogs as a chance to offer some state-of-the-project notes, since I originally described it as an “experiment.” “Experiments have results, positive, negative, or ambiguous,” Mark wrote in the comments below.

True. On the other hand this is not a lab experiment with a fixed time and the goal of proving or disproving a hypothesis. Like so much else on the Web, it’s more like an ongoing improvisation.

So the first thing to get out of the way is the business stuff. Salon Blogs has not resulted in vast numbers of people using the service, nor has revenue from the service (which we share with UserLand Software) had any significant impact on Salon’s bottom line. That’s no huge surprise to me; I’d have been (very happily) surprised if the opposite had happened, and such huge throngs of people signed up for blogs that it added major new revenue for our company.

What this means, though, is that Salon Blogs for now has to remain what it has been from the start: a labor of love. We don’t have spare bucks to spend on marketing it or revamping it. Our partner company, UserLand, is currently in transition after the departure of its president, John Robb. My hope is that over the next year, if the economy actually improves and Salon manages to end up in a better place financially, we might look at structural improvements to the Salon Blogs service. For now, it is what it is.

And what that is, for me, is still great, and utterly worth the energy we’ve put into it. Blogging is a vast terrain these days — and with AOL about to step into the fray, bound to get vaster. From where I sit, our little piece of the blogosphere has more creativity, personality and quality per URL than any other comparable community of weblogs. Aside from the business side, the other “result” of the experiment that does not surprise me in the least is that the greater Salon community would turn out to harbor so many great bloggers — and so many new ideas about what to do with a blog.

The only thing I could reasonably predict, going into this project, was how thoroughly unpredictable the range of bloggers and blogging would be. I had no clue that Julie was out there somewhere, ready to dig into thousands of Julia Child recipes… or that the Real Live Preacher was looking for a virtual pulpit for his stories… or that the Reverse Cowgirl was about to begin a new trend in “sex blogging”… or that Mark Hoback was going to plug the collective talents of the Salon bloggers into a weekly anthology on a whole ‘nother site… That we would have blog novels and stuff about software development and teenagers’ international correspondence from the early ’70s and an in-depth discourse on Why Your Wife Won’t Have Sex With You and so much else that I’m sure I’ve missed or failed to recall.

All is flux, and so we have lost some great blogs, too (I miss The Raven, and just saw that No Code has moved on too, and I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting).

One of the things I’m disappointed about is that the exigencies of my own life (including being the parent of two wonderful and all-consuming boys approaching four years old) and job (including the ever-changing challenges of keeping an independent original-content Web site afloat and up-to-snuff) mean that there’s only so much reading and blogging I can fit in. But that’s a good kind of problem to have.

Since in the coming year it is unlikely that peace, love and understanding will conquer all, and more likely that the flow of news and events will continue to provide us with too much to talk about and to be disturbed by — including more than one election! — I can’t think of a better group of cantankerous, contrary, eloquently individual people to be posting with. Thanks to all you bloggers, past, present and future.

Bruce Umbaugh reminds us that today marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of Salon Blogs. (Here’s a link to my first day’s posts from a year ago.) Thanks to everyone who has chosen to pitch their blog-tents on our virtual turf!

John Dean: “It appears that not only the Niger uranium hoax, but most everything else that Bush said about Saddam Hussein’s weapons was false, fabricated, exaggerated, or phony…
So egregious and serious are Bush’s misrepresentations that they appear to be a deliberate effort to mislead Congress and the public. So arrogant and secretive is the Bush White House that only a special prosecutor can effectively answer and address these troubling matters.”

Dave Weinberger: Why we know that’s really Howard Dean writing over on Lessig’s blog.

Dave Cullen takes apart the new “Million for Marriage” campaign and taps into his own anger: “If I can’t marry a woman I don’t see why I can’t be allowed to marry at all.”

Tim Bray sees a new browser war on the horizon.

The Preacher gets spooked by a catalog of mass-produced church paraphernalia, has a dialogue with the devil, and sets off to sort out his soul with Hugh Elliott.

Mark Hoback is holding a “Google Cutups” contest.

So now when a reporter does something the White House doesn’t like — such as accurately report the dissatisfaction of American troops in Iraq who feel they have been misled by secretary of defense Rumsfeld — we can expect the Bush team to start leaking ostensible dirt about the reporter to the likes of Matt Drudge. Only the best the clowns now running the White House press office could come up with about ABC reporter Jeffrey Kofman is that he is (a) gay and (b) Canadian.

Shock! Horror! Surely we cannot trust the news as reported by these limpwristed Canucks! Surely if those servicemen had only known that they were dealing with a perfidious Molson-swiller of suspect sexual leanings, they would never have talked to him!

It’s getting positively Nixonian out there.

Pay no attention to that president behind the curtain, says Weinberger
Meanwhile, speaking of Nixonian, Caspar Weinberger showed up on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page today, arguing that the Niger yellowcake scandal is no big deal. After recycling the “British have learned” literalist defense one more time, he goes on to say, “The real unanswered questions are these: Did anyone seriously believe we went to war because we had a British report that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger?”

Well, no, Cap. A lot of us didn’t believe that at the time: We believed that the President and Dick Cheney had already made up their minds to launch a war for a bunch of other reasons. But it was the president who got up in front of the nation and told us all that the Niger connection was one of the key pieces of evidence driving us to invade Iraq.

So I guess what you’re saying, Mr. former Secretary of Defense and former chief of Bechtel, is that we were right to distrust the president, we should never have taken the president seriously, and those who did so are fools worthy only of contempt. Thanks for clearing that up.

I am a proud reader of Slate. So what if Salon and Slate have had their spats through the years? Any publication that offers both David Edelstein’s movie reviews and Steven Johnson’s technology commentaries — along with lots of other fine reading — is going to be a permanent bookmark of mine.

But may I humbly suggest to the good people at Slate that they have taken a big step backward in their recent home page redesign? (And yes, I’m well aware that there are plenty of things about Salon’s own site organization that could be improved.)

For many years now Slate has had a highly sensible home page design, one that paralleled the essential good sense of blog organization: Newly posted articles appeared at the top of a long scrolling list, and older articles sank to the bottom. Subheaders divided this list by day. Like a blog, Slate’s design let you load up the page and scroll down steadily, picking what to read, until you started recognizing stuff that you’d already seen on your last visit. And a big “display block” at the top of the page allowed Slate’s editors to call out the articles they thought were hottest or best or most deserving of our attention.

For reasons that I cannot fathom, Slate has now changed over to a two-column format. The list is substantially similar (though harder to read thanks to some font tweaks), but it wraps down one column and then starts over at the top again. This is an incredible pain; you scroll down and scan headlines, then you have to scroll back up and then scroll back down… There’s no scarcity of vertical space in a browser, the way there is on a paper page. A two-column format only makes sense if you are making editorial choices about what to put at the top of each column, so that you crowd more of the stuff you think is important onto the “top screen.” What point is a two-column format when the list is still ordered chronologically?

In other changes, Slate now lets you click on linked days of the week to see what the previous days’ “display blocks” looked like. That’s a nice touch.

Today’s news about the ballooning federal deficit should come as no surprise to anyone. If you cut taxes and increase spending, what else could possibly happen? The brazenness of the Bush administration’s number-fudging has been obvious ever since it took power: today the pattern of outrageously lowballing the deficit figures continues, as the Bush budget office refuses to consider future costs of operations and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan in its forecasts, ostensibly because “it’s impossible to know.” (C’mon, guys, you can take a guess! Any guess is likely to be closer to the truth than “zero.”)

Between the deficit forecast, the continuing doubletalk on WMD and the worsening situation on the ground in Iraq, shouldn’t Bush and his team begin to be held accountable for their deceptions? You’d think so. Those of us who were appalled at the partisan exploitation of Bill Clinton’s stupid but fundamentally insignificant lies about his sex life keep wondering why lies about war and peace and the future of the economy don’t seem to generate much outrage.

I’m beginning to think that it is the very significance of Bush’s lies — the fact that he is lying about things that are genuinely important, that are matters of state, that involve our livelihoods and our servicepeople’s lives — that protects him. There is no taint of tawdriness to Bush’s lies, the way there were to Clinton’s, with their prurient scent, or to Nixon’s, with their late-night skulduggery. Bush’s lies — like those of his predecessor Ronald Reagan — live in the rarefied realm of macroeconomics and global strategy rather than in the gutter of personal misbehavior, and that seems to place them in a kind of realpolitik “get out of jail free” zone. Whatever forbearance Bush fails to earn on these grounds, he wins — again, as Reagan did — on the basis of our assumption of his incompetence, his out-of-the-loopiness. (Is there any other way to explain the way Bush has gotten away with claiming, absurdly, contrary to all fact, that Saddam Hussein didn’t allow the arms inspectors back in?)

If things keep getting worse, though — if the economy continues to refuse to budge on the basis of Bush’s half-baked economic plan, if the soldiers continue to be picked off one by one in Iraq, if it finally dawns on the American public that this administration is driving the nation into a ditch — maybe the public will come to its senses. We can certainly hope.

Found on Lambda the Ultimate: Some fascinating notes on a Neal Stephenson lecture about his approach to writing, with parallels to programming:

“A good writer (and a good programmer) does not work by distilling good ideas from a large pool of bad and good ones, but by producing few if any bad ideas in the first place. It is important to give ideas time to mature [in the subconsciousness] so only good ideas percolate to the conscious level.”

The open source browser gets a new institutional framework, with initial funding from AOL. Press release is here. Mitch Kapor of OSAF will be the chairman. This can only be a positive thing for the long-term growth of a healthier software ecology not dependent on closed methodologies and closed markets.