Is the media responsible for having turned an obscure Florida pastor with a flock of no more than 50 people into an international figure by publicising his threat to burn the Qur'an? Up to a point, Lord Copper. To blame the media for the message is easy enough. It was certainly the view of many callers from across the globe to a BBC World Service phone-in yesterday evening. But once we see how the story emerged, bit by bit, it becomes less tenable - and much sillier – to accuse "the ..   show all text

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I hate these long gaps between posts as much as you do. I’ve been busy over at TBD, but I haven’t forgotten about the old ZJ. I have a couple of other posts in the works, but a bit of a recap. Last Wednesday, Sept. 1, was a big day for TBD – and for me personally. When a gunman burst into the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring and took three hostages, we sprang into action and, in turn, were propelled into the spotlight for the first time since our launch. It was ..   show all text

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I've had a lot of requests from friends in the old country wanting to use OpenHeatMap to display data about areas in the United Kingdom. After quite some time wrestling with the Ordnance Survey's recent release of open data I'm pleased to announce that you can now visualize everything from counties to constituencies to council districts! To celebrate, I've created a visualization of the recent election, showing the percentage of the vote that each party received in every constituency: To go ..   show all text

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Fun with bears and less fun on a cruise in this week's web clip roundup Watch this before you read on. That's is the most fun I've ever had with a) Tippex or b) a viral video. I tried tickles, cuddles (this is a bit like Blankety Blank), kisses, eats, licks, sucks (that got a disapproving tut from The Bear) and lastly circumcises, which finally got a #404. See you in about an hour. Elsewhere we've got babies eating lemons and some fabulous, other wordly, ethereal beach bubbles. And there's this..   show all text

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Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has hired Stephen Elop, the well-respected president of Microsoft’s business division, which includes the Office franchise, as its new president and CEO. Elop is replacing Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, who was appointed Nokia’s CEO four years ago. In a release, included in full below, Nokia Chairman Jorma Ollila says “the time is right to accelerate the company’s renewal” and “to bring in new executive leadership with different skills and strengths...   show all text

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There’s been plenty of debate lately about whether Twitter has become “mainstream” or not, but examples continue to pile up of how the social network/microblogging platform has worked its way into our lives, to the point where it has become a form of media unto itself. Whether it will ever become mainstream in the sense that it gets used by your aunt or grandmother is almost irrelevant — the reality is that, for all its flaws, Twitter is a publishing tool, and an increas..   show all text

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Terry Jones put himself at the center of a controversy by using the news lull of summer and a 24-hour news cycle to promote his anti-Islam cause.

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In a Boing Boing comment thread around the launch of Google's new "Google Instant" search feature, BB reader Robert compiled a little alphabet ditty based on what typing in each letter of the alphabet yields in the way of suggestions. The results vary by country, and it seems also by state or region, and other more personal factors: say, cookies stored for your prior Google searches. Robert is in the USA. Enjoy. A is for Amazon, to get all your books. B is for Bank of America, which h..   show all text

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Two Latino gang members were convicted Thursday of first-degree murder in a hate crime trial surrounding the deaths of a 14-year-old black girl and a potential witness in the Harbor Gateway area of Los Angeles. The panel also found to be true the allegation that the girl's killing was a hate crime. The jury deliberated for less than two days in the case of Jonathan Fajardo, 22, and Daniel Aguilar, 23, both members of the 204th street gang. Fajardo was found guilty of killing Cheryl Green becaus..   show all text

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After a year’s worth of work, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur just announced the launch of Seesmic Desktop 2 (SD2), a desktop client that goes beyond Twitter; “We want to be the first platform for platforms,” says Le Meur. Running on Silverlight (to install go here), the desktop app now has plugin architecture that supports a multitude of content streams including but not limited to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare, Flicker, Klout, Formspring, Myspace, Google ..   show all text

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At last year's Microsoft PDC, Seesmic announced that it was working on a major Silverlight-based rewrite of its desktop clients for Windows and Mac. After almost a year of development, the company just launched the final version of Seesmic Desktop 2. While it was still possible to describe Seesmic Desktop as a social networking client until today, the new version clearly aims to be far more than that. Thanks to a new plugin architecture and marketplace, you can now also use the application to t..   show all text

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Seesmic, the social-networking startup founded by French entrepreneur Loic LeMeur, today launched a new version of its Seesmic Desktop application that allows users to log in to more accounts from the app’s single dashboard, and also allows them to customize their activity streams by adding plugins from an open marketplace. Plugins that support more than 40 other related social applications and services are available at launch, including Topsy, Klout, MySpace, Formspring, Google Reader an..   show all text

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A federal judge in Riverside declared the U.S. military’s ban on openly gay service members unconstitutional Thursday, saying the “don't ask, don't tell” policy violates the 1st Amendment rights of lesbians and gay men. U.S. District Court Judge Virginia A. Phillips said the policy banning gays did not preserve military readiness, contrary to what many supporters have argued, saying evidence shows that the policy in fact had a “direct and deleterious effect’’..   show all text

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Officials are attempting to buy and destroy copies of an Afghan war memoir they say holds intelligence secrets.

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Contrary to popular opinion, the reason Yahoo’s metrics have been stagnant and its stock has lost half its value in the last two-and-a-half years isn’t because Google did search better than Yahoo. It’s because Yahoo turned its back on what it did well: Building the first online mass media content superstore. In doing so, it let the younger, sexier, faster-growing Google define what Yahoo wasn’t. It’s precisely the mistake that Jeff Bezos and Amazon didn’t mak..   show all text

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A blog devoted to literature in a digital age takes a look at the story behind every Wikipedia entry and the writers' opinions and creative process.

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A massive cache of previously unpublished classified U.S. military documents from the Iraq War is being readied for publication by WikiLeaks, a new report has confirmed. The documents constitute the “biggest leak of military intelligence” that has ever occurred, according to Iain Overton, editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit British organization that is working with WikiLeaks on the documents. The documents are expected to be published in several weeks. Over..   show all text

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On July 28 2009, a pair of iPhone applications that offered support for Google Voice were unceremoniously, and without warning, removed from Apple’s App Store. We then learned that Apple had blocked the official Google Voice application as well, which eventually led to an FCC inquiry. A year later, Google Voice was still missing from the App Store. Now it looks like there may be a glimmer of hope for getting Google Voice on your iPhone. This morning Apple released guidelines explicitly sp..   show all text

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Betaworks, a technology incubator in New York, is teaming up with The New York Times to introduce a social news service.

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