A good companion read to Gary Kamiya’s excellent cri de couer in today’s Salon:

Tony Judt, in the New York Review, writes of the current low ebb of the United States’ moral standing in the world and sees, as he puts it in his conclusion, a “bad moon rising.” It is a tough analysis to read, and a hard one to argue with. (Link via Rafe Colburn.)

This bit is beyond maddening:

At first I simply could not believe that the official document of our nation’s military strategy would lump “judicial processes” and “international fora” in with “terrorism”, sneering at them all as equally contemptible “strategies of the weak.” But here it is.

Looks like we’re in for nasty weather, indeed.

I have been away and offline, and so I missed the excitement around the LA Times wikitorial experiment imploding. I’m sorry to see it; I think newspapers need to be bolder about figuring out how the Web works, and good for Michael Kinsley for giving this a try. It’s too bad that a little bout of inevitable pranking (someone apparently incorporated an indecent image on the page) persuaded the Times to pull the plug. Sheesh, you’d think it would’ve taken a software developer (the LA Times must have a few, right?) just a little bit of work to block image tags in whichever open-source wiki software the paper had adopted.

I didn’t get to see the editorial in either its pre- or post-defacement state, so I can’t really comment on how the project evolved in its brief life. But I think that Kinsley & co. may have picked the wrong tool for the job. I’ve had the pleasure of exploring the origins of the wiki phenomenon as part of my book research; one of the things made clear by Ward Cunningham, who invented the wiki a decade ago (with the Portland Pattern Repository) because he wanted to help programmers share experiences and tell stories, is that wikis work best when they present contributors with a half-finished canvas and an open invitation to fill in the blanks by adding new pages. So putting up a finished piece of writing in the form of a single editorial and then asking readers to edit it is a stiflingly constricted application of the format.

The other point is that wikis work by forming communities that care about what’s in them, and that serve as stewards or gardeners of the content. You can’t go from zero to 60 in a day; building such a community takes time, care and love. You can’t just throw up a text and expect it to stand on its own — if you want to tap into the collective ideas and energy of an online crowd, you’d better have built some personal relationships with some of its members. Otherwise, that crowd will turn into a mob before you know it.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. “

Steve Jobs’ recent commencement speech is really worth reading in full. It gets about as close to the bone, and the truth, as we could expect from a technology CEO, or anyone else.

I find it very hard to reconcile the awareness contained in these words with the reality of the executive pettiness that Jobs’ Apple keeps displaying (suing bloggers, banning publishers from its stores, and so on). But then smart and creative people are inevitably complicated, and the more successful they are, the less pressure there is on them to resolve those complications.

Two only vaguely related gripes:

(1) I’m left-handed, and I’m proud to be part of the sinister 10 percent, but I’m still waiting for my left-handed digital camera. I’m tired of either holding the camera in my unsteady right hand or having to shoot two-handed. There appears to be a left-handed film camera available, here, but I’m not looking for a retro novelty. In this discussion, somebody suggests holding the camera upside down. Maybe. But look, you manufacturers, there’s a market here! We’re ten percent of the population! That’s millions of potential customers — a big fat bulge near the front of the Long Tail, waiting to be served.

(2) I’ve always bought Thinkpad laptops, in part because they’ve been hugely reliable in the years I’ve had them, but also because I vastly prefer the Trackpoint device to the much more common — and, to me, clumsy — trackpad. Recently I realized that I actually think the Trackpoint is far superior to the mouse as well. As usability experts have long maintained, the big problem with mousing is that you’re constantly switching modes and losing efficiency as you move the hand from the keyboard to the mouse and back. Wasted energy, wasted concentration. With the Trackpoint, you don’t have to do that at all — the “mouse” (pointer control) is right where your typing fingers already are. (Keyboard shortcuts are even better for those apps that support them, but they never give you 100 percent of what you need — unless, I guess, you’re a programming ace who lives and breathes emacs.)

So why aren’t desktop keyboards with integrated Trackpoint more common? I know IBM has made them over the years — I bought an old used one on Ebay — but they seem to be a hugely neglected market niche. Or is my Trackpoint preference even more of an eccentricity than my left-handedness?

I was amused recently by an ironic juxtaposition of two blog posts.

First, there was Jason Calacanis complaining that CNET had failed to credit Om Malik for “breaking” the story that the RSS aggregator FeedDemon had been bought by Newsgator. Business 2.0’s Malik had posted the news at 5:31 PM on Monday, May 16. CNet ran a story at 9:27 AM on Tuesday, May 17.

A few weeks later, the esteemed Dan Gillmor complained about how the Wall Street Journal, in its coverage of the Apple/Intel deal, self-servingly quoted a line from Steve Jobs implying that the Journal had the story first, when, in fact, CNET had it well before the Journal.

There’s no older complaint in the world of journalism than a reporter (or publication) that believes it broke a story feeling “ripped off” by another reporter (or publication) that follows on. Inevitably, this sort of complaint flows up the journalism food chain. CNET gets carped at for failing to credit a blog; the Journal gets carped at for failing to credit CNET.

Big fish eat little fishes’ stories — stop the presses!

I’ve seen this in action for a good 25 years now, ever since my days on the Harvard Crimson, where we believed we “owned” the university beat, and resented how national papers and magazines would swoop in to gather the fruits of our reporting labors — almost never giving us striplings credit.

Maybe I’ve mellowed, or maybe I’m just callused, but I’ve come to view this species of complaint as a waste of time. I can’t count the number of times over the past decade that Salon has broken real news and not been credited. Ultimately, so what? Whining doesn’t get you very far, and if you’re doing your job, you should be onto the next story anyway.

The type of story matters, too. If you invest the time and energy to do a long-term investigation of some scandal or underreported problem or issue, and emerge with something extraordinary that’s never been reported before and that wouldn’t be known if you hadn’t chosen to pursue it, it’s reasonable to expect some credit. But if you get wind of a business deal a handful of hours ahead of the competition, and the news is about to break wide anyway, well, okay, you’ve served your readers well, good work — but don’t expect a Pulitzer, or think you “own” the story.

I’ve got a big backlog of posts that have languished as I concentrate on my 1000-words-a-day march toward meeting my book deadline. I’m going to try to upload a bunch before leaving this weekend for a family trip to the ancestral homeland (NYC).

Once upon a time there was a tech-industry boom. And the boom begat many follies. And among the most insane of those follies was a thing called the Cuecat. The idea was that actually typing in a URL from a print magazine ad was so laborious that, instead, you’d happily plug in a free (but ridiculously complicated to install) bar-code scanner to your PC and run that scanner over the magazine page to take you to a URL. (Of course this would limit your magazine reading to within a yard of your computer, but…never mind.) Absurd as this scheme was, its promoter somehow managed to raise tens of millions of dollars from respectable corporations that should have known much better.

I reviewed this misbegotten gizmo back in fall of 2000 when Wired magazine sent one to each of its subscribers. I predicted a future of filling landfills for the ill-fated devices, and assumed that they had long ago added their mass to some forlorn waste zone. But it seems that even the dumps would not take the Cuecats, and now two million of them are being auctioned off by a surplus house.

Help save the abandoned Cuecats! It wasn’t their fault that their creators were digital con artists. Don’t abandon them to a fate of disuse! You can help save these Cuecats — or you can turn the page. Why, they’re only 30 cents each!

Oops, there’s a 500K minimum order. Forget it.

In comments below, Scott Butki asked, “Does it seem odd – or hypocritical to you – that the mantra at news organizations in recent weeks has switched from ‘anonymous sources are bad to use’ to ‘Deep Throat was good for doing what he did and Woodstein good to use him,’ ignoring the contradiction between the two?”

Good question, and I’m sure one that many people are scratching their heads over. What’s going on here? Are anonymous sources really the big problem they seem to be in the wake of the Dan Rather and Newsweek/Koran controversies? On the other hand, if news organizations get too gun-shy about anonymous sources, how will anyone ever be able to keep reporting on the buttoned-tight Bush White House?

It’s funny to watch people try to get their heads around the apparent contradictions between “anonymous sources — good!” and “anonymous sources — bad!” Really, they’re only contradictions if you treat the issue as a matter of journalistic technique (the use of unnamed sources) rather than one about the end to which the technique is employed. The distinction that really matters isn’t between “anonymous source” and “named source”; it’s between “good source” and “bad source.” Good sources can be anonymous; bad sources can be on-the-record. What experienced journalists and editors do is assess, assess, assess. Make sure you’re not being used. Double-check your info. Use your sense of smell. The theory is that an on-the-record statement is more reliable than an anonymous statement, since the person quoted has to defend his words in public. That’s a good theory, and it often applies. But it doesn’t seem to stop most public officials from mouthing the most absurd lies, damned lies and statistics on the record. And despite the rule-of-thumb that on-the-record is more reliable, there are some circumstances where unnamed sourcing is the only way to get the truth out.

One reason people are getting confused is that Woodward and Bernstein’s use of Deep Throat was a fundamentally different kind of anonymous sourcing than we typically see in today’s Beltway. Mark Felt/Deep Throat fed information to Bob Woodward because (a) there were profound dangers to the nation in play — we had a president who was, among many other outrages, ordering his political opponents burglarized — and (b) going to the press was the only option, because the idea of “going to the authorities” is laughable when the authorities are the wrongdoers and they’ve corrupted the system from the top.

I’m not belittling the complexity of Felt’s choice; and obviously the man was conflicted for the rest of his life. It’s never easy to be a whistleblower, and if you’re an unconventional whistleblower stuck in a duel with All the President’s Men, you’ve got to be careful as well as right. Felt is certainly no pure hero, but the derision he’s received from the surviving coterie of Nixon loyalists is beneath contempt. This old guard of die-hard Nixonians still haven’t gotten it through their heads that their former boss actually stole an election (if it weren’t for all the dirty tricks employed against Democrats in 1972, who knows where the vote would have gone?) and, left unchecked, might well have destroyed the American system of government. Their complaints against Felt today only demonstrate how lucky we were that there was at least one “disloyal” Deep Throat willing to say, this nonsense stops here.

Today’s anonymous sources are, for the most part, different. They’re not risking anything by speaking up. Generally, they are choosing to be anonymous to avoid taking a risk. They want to float a trial balloon but don’t want their name attached. They want to undermine a political rival. They want to state something a little politically inconvenient without leaving it on the record.

Anonymous sourcing evolved in the years since Watergate from an extraordinary tactic for an extraordinary time into a depressingly routine way of doing business for the political elite. The Bush administration itself has been extravagantly dependent on the opaque cloak of anonymity — the “highly placed White House official” who assures us that the war is going better, or the economy’s on the mend. This is the sort of anonymous sourcing that ombudsmen and editorial editors and journalism pundits are right to say should be banned. There’s no need for it.

As for the Watergate tradition of anonymous sourcing: every time there’s a president who’s illegally abusing power, let’s hope there’s a Deep Throat ready to talk, a Woodward ready to take notes, and a Ben Bradlee ready to run the stories. Oh, yeah — it also helps if the opposition party controls at least one house of Congress. Otherwise, you could catch the President himself robbing a hotel room — or starting a war under false pretenses — and it wouldn’t matter.