Conservatives on Twitter: A Beautiful Thing to Watch

This is an awesome essay, from John Nolte at Big Journalism, "Why Conservatives Must Join the Battle for America On Twitter."

RELATED: William Jacobson is a huge champion of Twitter, and he's got a must-see post up on #TwitterGulag: "Emergency Broadcast System activated – #FreeSGLawrence."

Sign up for Twitter here. If you're already a member, get tweeting!

Regulators to Investigate Facebook IPO

Could be insider trading.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Facebook IPO flop drawing increased scrutiny."

Plus, at the Wall Street Journal, "Investors Pummel Facebook: Stock Falls 11% in First Full Day of Trading; Complaints of Too Many Shares":

Criticism of the Facebook Inc. FB -8.90% stock deal grew as the shares dropped below their offering price in their first full day of trading Monday, wiping $11.5 billion off the social network's market value.

The company, its investment bankers and the Nasdaq Stock Market came under fire for failing to ensure a smooth debut for one of the most anticipated deals in recent memory. Facebook shares, which began trading Friday at $38 and managed to add just 23 cents by the end of that day, fell 11% Monday to $34.03.

The selloff came partly because some investors who were allotted more Facebook shares than they expected moved to pare their holdings, said people familiar with the matter. Retail, or individual, investors usually are allocated up to 20% of the total shares allotted in an IPO, but in Facebook's case, retail allocation was around 25%, the people said.

Days before the initial public offering, Facebook, whose executives played an active role in the IPO process, according to people familiar with the matter, increased both the price and the number of shares being offered. As a result, many retail investors weren't hungry for more shares once trading began, according to the people.

A representative for Facebook declined to comment. The company raised $16 billion in the offering.

George Brady, a 66-year-old recruiter in North Carolina, bought 1,000 shares of Facebook a few minutes after it opened for trading Friday. He said by Monday morning, he sold his holding, taking a $2,770 loss.

Mr. Brady said he tried not to purchase the shares in the first place, but was unable to withdraw his order on his Charles Schwab account, calling the situation "ridiculous." Technical problems on the Nasdaq Stock Market prevented some investors from confirming their trades or trade cancellations.

"I was stuck for six hours trying to figure out whether I owned this dog or not," said Mr. Brady. He said he has been in touch with Schwab. Schwab didn't return a call requesting comment.

Facebook's offering, one of the biggest U.S. IPOs, was supposed to burnish the reputations of Morgan Stanley, MS +0.91% the deal's lead banker, as an underwriter, and Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. NDAQ -2.02% as the listing exchange of choice for hot technology companies.

"This has been a train wreck," said one hedge fund manager, whose fund also decided to sell some of its shares Monday. He said his fund was allotted 500,000 more Facebook shares than he expected.

BONUS: From Henry Blodgett, at Business Insider, "EXCLUSIVE: Here's The Inside Story of What Happened on the Facebook IPO" (via Techmeme).

Joshua Micah Marshall: Talking Points Memo 'Is Not a Website'

This is an interesting report, from Nieman Journalism Lab, "When is a website not a website? For Talking Points Memo, the turning point was in 2012":

As of late March, mobile — smartphones and tablets — accounted for 19 percent of TPM traffic. By early May, when I sat down with Marshall in his New York office, mobile traffic to TPM had passed the 20 percent mark.

“I don’t have much doubt that that number will be 30 or 40 percent in the next year or two,” Marshall said. “My only question is at what point tablets overtake smartphones.”

So what does this realization mean, from a practical standpoint, for TPM?

“More than anything else we had to shift our own thinking, because that was constraining with how you do things on mobile,” Marshall said. “Realizing that TPM is not a website — it’s a bundle of knowledge and expertise and ongoing coverage that exists inherently on no particular platform, and we are consitently trying to find ways to make it adaptable on as many platforms as possible.”

But the rethinking process also means rejecting the idea that TPM content can be one-size-fits-all, which deputy publisher Callie Schweitzer calls “a game-changer for all publishers.”

“We’re giving a lot of thought to three different kinds of consumption: Active consumption being at the desktop, on-the-go consumption being on your mobile phone, and passive consumption being in your bed, on your tablet, something like that,” Schweitzer said. “For me, it’s literally about the physical way you’re doing it. You can certainly actively consume at all of those different places but when you’re reclining, looking at a beautiful visual on an iPad, it’s very different than being on a mobile phone or sitting at a desktop.”

I've noticed some folks have been reading American Power on their mobile devices. If you haven't yet, but are thinking about it, here's the mobile URL: http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/?m=1. Looking at that link, most of the photos and embedded videos are showing up just fine. So bookmark the blog on your devices and you'll be good to go.

P.S. While I don't agree politically with Josh Marshall, I think they're doing a pretty good job over there --- and you may have noticed that I use their videos a lot.

Facebook's Faceplant: Social Networking IPO Falls Short of the Hype

I was watching CNN yesterday during all the coverage. The caption headlines were cracking me up. "Facebook faceplant" is putting it mildly. I can't remember a more disastrous public stock debut. I was picking up my son from Disneyland last night and on the way home I mentioned to him that Facebook's IPO flopped. He says, "Dad, would you speak English I don't know what you're talking about." I told him that the initial stock offering was hyped all out of proportion, that this was a major fail for Facebook. And my son responds, "Facebook ruins your life. I hate Facebook," or something like that. He recently temporarily deleted his account ("suspend" is one of the options if you hit the delete button). My son was getting burned by all these fake "friends" he has --- people who were making dates and appointments and plans and not following through. I think high school was like that without Facebook, if I recall. But you go through your teen your with the technology you have.

In any case, I personally don't love Facebook that much. (Twitter is so much better it's ridiculous.) I mostly just spam my posts up there and get a few hits out of it. I have connected with some great old friends, although that mostly shows me that my life's moved on from my own high school days.

The Wall Street Journal has the big report, "Facebook's IPO Sputters: Underwriters Forced to Prop Up IPO of Social Network; Only a 23-Cent Rise" (via Techmeme):

Facebook Inc. took eight years to stage one of the most anticipated initial public offerings ever. The anticlimax came Friday, as Wall Street bankers struggled to prevent the newly minted stock from ending its first day with a loss.

The stock had been widely predicted to soar on its first day. Instead, up until the closing moments of the trading session, Facebook's underwriters battled to keep the stock from slipping below its offering price of $38 a share. Such a stumble would have been a significant embarrassment, particularly for a prominent new issue like Facebook, the most heavily traded IPO of all time.

In the end, the bankers succeeded. When trading on Nasdaq ended at 4 p.m., the social network's stock was up just a hair, 0.6%, at $38.23.

The roller-coaster day—Facebook's shares started out jumping roughly 11%, before cooling off—was also beset by trading glitches and a 30-minute delay in the opening of trading. Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. didn't respond to requests for comment.

Facebook was also hurt by investors' high expectations of a healthy first-day pop in the price, according to people familiar with the matter. When that pop didn't happen, it prompted a selloff, these people said.

That's when Facebook's underwriters had to step in to support the company's share price, people familiar with the matter said. In particular, lead underwriter Morgan Stanley was assigned to be the deal's "stabilization agent"—meaning it was the firm's job to keep the shares above the offering price, these people said. In that role, Morgan Stanley was forced to buy Facebook shares as the price slid toward $38 in order to prevent the price from crossing into negative territory, according to these people.

Morgan Stanley, which led the platoon of 11 Wall Street banks that arranged the listing, had to dip into an emergency reserve of around 63 million Facebook shares—worth more than $2.3 billion at the offer price—to boost the price and create a floor around $38 a share, according to people close to the situation. In successful IPOs, the reserve, known as the "overallotment" or "green shoe," is used by underwriters to meet soaring demand but in this case, it was used to prop up Facebook's ailing share price.

The process is common in IPOs and works like this: The underwriters have the extra shares available to either sell or buy for a period after the IPO. If demand is strong, they sell them like all the other shares. But if the stock price falls, they can buy them back, effectively creating a floor for the price.

Facebook's price began falling almost immediately after shares began trading. It is unclear exactly when Morgan Stanley stepped in, but traders said that the price movements throughout the day, with the shares occasionally touching the IPO price but never crossing below it, suggested the firm was active throughout much of the session.

Facebook's opening-day travails suggested how tough it can be to live up to high expectations in the market. "There's been way, way too much hype, so it may be impossible not to have it be anticlimactic," said Peter Falvey, managing director of the Boston-based investment bank Falvey Partners LLC.

See also GigaOM, "Facebook IPO: Here is the best of the web" (via Techmeme).

#NewSpikeLeeMovies

Yesterday saw a hilarious hashtag game break out on Twitter: "#NewSpikeLeeMovies."

And I found Em Dee Bee and was seriously cracking up reading her timeline.

Click that link and give her a follow!

Dharun Ravi Found Guilty of Hate Crimes in Rutgers Spying Trial

Actually, I don't recall this being a "hate crimes" trial. But that's the headline at the New York Times, "Defendant in Rutgers Spying Case Guilty of Hate Crimes."

And CNN has this:

"New Jersey enacted a law that said if you secretly record (someone engaged in an intimate act) with a webcam or any other kind of video and you broadcast that without their permission, that is a crime," Callan said. "Every place else in America up until this law was enacted, you could sue somebody for civil damages for the embarrassment, but you weren't going to go to jail. New Jersey said it's criminal."

And because prosecutors were able to prove that Ravi's actions were born of a gay bias, the possible sentence doubles from up to five years to 10 years behind bars.

Clementi's death stirred discussion about bullying, with President Barack Obama releasing a videotaped message condemning it. A few months later, New Jersey legislators enacted stricter laws to protect against bullying in schools.
"This haunting and awful case shows how much society has changed," said CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin of Friday's verdict. "Even though he was not charged directly in connection with Clementi's suicide, that tragedy hung over the trial and undoubtedly played a major part in every aspect of the case."

After the verdict, Rutgers University released a statement saying, "This sad incident should make us all pause to recognize the importance of civility and mutual respect in the way we live, work and communicate with others."
Prosecutors had argued that Ravi, who sat expressionless in the courtroom Friday, had tried to embarrass Clementi because he was gay and that his actions were motivated by a desire to intimidate the Ridgewood, New Jersey, native expressly because of his sexual orientation.

"These acts were purposeful, they were intentional, and they were planned," prosecutor Julia L. McClure told the jury on the first day of the trial. Ravi "was bothered by Tyler Clementi's sexual orientation," she later said more bluntly.

Also at USA Today, "Lesson of Rutgers case: Online actions carry consequences."

Added: From London's Daily Mail, "Tears for Tyler: Mother of gay suicide teen cries in court as jury finds Rutgers student guilty of hate crime and spying on his tragic roommate."

Minnesota Girl Sues Minnewaska Area Middle School in Facebook Case Alleging Invasion of Privacy

This sucks.

At Telegraph UK, "12-year-old US girl suing school over Facebook comments row":

A 12-year-old girl is suing her school in Minnesota after being forced to hand over her Facebook password and punished for posts she made on the social networking site.

The case has been brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and comes amid growing concern in the United States about individuals' ability to keep their email and other online accounts secret from their school, employer and government authorities.

A number of prospective employees have complained that they were forced to hand over their passwords to Facebook and Twitter when applying for jobs.

In the Minnesota case, the 12-year-old girl, known only as RS, is said to have been punished by teachers at Minnewaska Area Middle School for things she wrote on Facebook while at home, and using her own computer.

The ACLU is arguing that her First and Fourth Amendment rights, which protect freedom of speech and freedom from illegal searches respectively, were violated.

She is said to have been punished with detention after using Facebook to criticise a school hall monitor, and again after a fellow student told teachers that she had discussed sex online.

Another case of public school system totalitarianism.

BBC Tracks Down Notorious Internet Troll

Sometimes you just gotta smack down these f-kers.

Via Althouse:

Google Faces Backlash Over Privacy Changes

The report's at the Washington Post.

And see, "How to close your Google Account."

I'm not all that worried about it. I use Google products extensively, so there's a price to pay, it turns out.

See Google's explanation, in any case, "Updating our privacy policies and terms of service."

Michelle Fields C-SPAN Interview

I watched it.

The Dailly Caller has a write-up, "TheDC’s Michelle Fields discusses journalism in the new media age."

And Dan Riehl steps up with a post defending Michelle from yet another deranged progressive attack from the Betsy Rothstein gang: "FishBowlDC's Ignorant, Inaccurate Sexist Attack on Michelle Fields." The FishBowl piece is a rank hit-job that completely decontextualizes Michelle's comments, even deliberately distorting some of her more significant and substantive points --- points that might elude someone not hip with the game-changing political role of social media communications. Dan has the bingo quote here:

Read the FBDC item, then take time to watch the full hour and decide for yourself which is supercilious and not much worth one's time, as opposed to what appears to be a very substantive young woman well on her way to saying something important enough that many people will want to hear it via New Media.

I found the interview particularly useful from the perspective of a professor of political science who teaches a large number of young people with very limited skills in information technology. A light went off when Michelle explained how she gets her morning news. She just logs on to Facebook and Twitter and checks out what her friends are reading and linking. That's actually not uncommon for people in the industry (in spite of FishBowl's attacks). I'm old fashioned and still get the hard copy Los Angeles Times delivered to the door. It's only a small part of my news diet, and mostly superfluous, but old habits die hard. Michelle, on the other hand, personifies the way today's consumers get their news and how today's reporters cover it. The FishBowl idiots ridicule the idea of citizen journalism as if the very notion itself is a joke. I'm not sure if that's just plain hubris or just a really lame opening shot at Michelle. Probably a little of both. For us old-timers, the laughs come when Michelle admits she has no clue about folks like Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry! That said, Michelle evinces a savvy sophistication about human nature (her discussion of Washington, D.C., for example) and the importance of family in the preservation and regeneration of traditional values. She goes off track a bit with a kind of grade-school crush for Ron Paul, but that's fine in the context of a well developed sense of libertarianism. She was an activist in college and Ron Paul's been hip with young people for the last couple of electoral cycles. Other than that, it's an impressive interview with a very intelligent young woman who's obviously got a bright future in cutting-edge social media-driven reporting.

P.S. This just came to me before posting, more thoughts on Michelle's comments about "biased" news. The point needs to be developed more analytically. That is, we've moved into an era of a "partisan press," one that resembles the kind of journalism that thrived during the early party system of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Technology brought changes back then, ultimately towards a national media market and professionalized, mostly objective news reporting. That era's long gone. Michelle understands this intuitively and may well turn out to be a key player in the new journalism that evolves with increasingly overt partisanship in the years ahead.

How Social Media Fuels Social Unrest

The funniest thing about this piece at Wired is that I read it over a week ago in hard copy while out shopping for Christmas presents at Barnes and Noble. I came home that night and logged on looking for it, but the Wired homepage hadn't updated with the January magazine information. It's the holidays, so what the heck? I still thought it strange for a tech-driven magazine to basically make a social media report available in dead-tree media and not online.

In any case, the essay, by Bill Wasik, offers pretty compelling explanation for how social media enable radicals and inflame protests. See "#Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You." This passage was particularly interesting:

In trying to understand how and why crowds go wrong, you can have no better guide than Clifford Stott, senior lecturer in social psychology at the University of Liverpool. Stott has risked his life researching his subject. Specifically, he has spent most of his career—more than 20 years so far—conducting a firsthand study of violence among soccer fans. On one particularly dicey trip to Marseilles in 1998, Stott and a small crowd of Englishmen ran away from a cloud of tear gas only to find themselves facing a gang of 50 French toughs, some of them wielding bottles and driftwood. “If you are on your own,” a philosophical fellow Brit remarked to Stott at that moment, “you’re going to get fucked.” This, in a sense, is the fundamental wisdom at the heart of Stott’s work—though he does couch it in somewhat more respectable language.

To Stott, members of a crowd are never really “on their own.” Based on a set of ideas that he and other social psychologists call ESIM (Elaborated Social Identity Model), Stott believes crowds form what are essentially shared identities, which evolve as the situation changes. We might see a crowd doing something that appears to us to be just mindless violence, but to those in the throng, the actions make perfect sense. With this notion, Stott and his colleagues are trying to rebut an influential line of thinking on crowd violence that stretches from Gustave Le Bon, whose 1895 treatise, The Crowd, launched the field of crowd psychology, up to Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. To explain group disorder, Zimbardo and other mid-20th-century psychologists blamed a process they called deindividuation, by which a crowd frees its members to carry out their baser impulses. Through anonymity, in Zimbardo’s view, the strictures of society were lifted from crowds, pushing them toward a state of anarchy and thereby toward senseless violence.

By contrast, Stott sees crowds as the opposite of ruleless, and crowd violence as the opposite of senseless: What seems like anarchic behavior is in fact governed by a shared self-conception and thus a shared set of grievances. Stott’s response to the riots has been unpopular with many of his countrymen. Unlike Zimbardo, who would respond—and indeed has responded over the years—to incidents of group misbehavior by speaking darkly of moral breakdown, Stott brings the focus back to the long history of societal slights, usually by police, that primed so many young people to riot in the first place.

Meeting Stott in person, one can see how he’s been able to blend in with soccer fans over the years. He’s a stocky guy, with a likably craggy face and a nose that looks suspiciously like it’s been broken a few times. When asked why the recent riots happened, his answers always come back to poor policing—particularly in Tottenham, where questions over the death of a young man went unaddressed by police for days and where the subsequent protest was met with arbitrary violence. Stott singles out one moment when police seemed to handle a young woman roughly and an image of that mistreatment was tweeted (and BBMed) throughout London’s black community and beyond. It was around then that the identity of the crowd shifted, decisively, to outright combat against the police.

Stott boils down the violent potential of a crowd to two basic factors. The first is what he and other social psychologists call legitimacy—the extent to which the crowd feels that the police and the whole social order still deserve to be obeyed. In combustible situations, the shared identity of a crowd is really about legitimacy, since individuals usually start out with different attitudes toward the police but then are steered toward greater unanimity by what they see and hear. Paul Torrens, a University of Maryland professor who builds 3-D computer models of riots and other crowd events, imbues each agent in his simulations with an initial Legitimacy score on a scale from 0 (total disrespect for police authority) to 1 (absolute deference). Then he allows the agents to influence one another. It’s a crude model, but it’s useful in seeing the importance of a crowd’s initial perception of legitimacy. A crowd where every member has a low L will be predisposed to rebel from the outset; a more varied crowd, by contrast, will take significantly longer to turn ugly, if it ever does.

It’s easy to see how technology can significantly change this starting position. When that tweet or text or BBM blast goes out declaring, as the Enfield message did, that “police can’t stop it,” the eventual crowd will be preselected for a very low L indeed. As Stott puts it, flash-mob-style gatherings are special because they “create the identity of a crowd prior to the event itself,” thereby front-loading what he calls the “complex process of norm construction,” which usually takes a substantial amount of time. He hastens to add that crowd identity can be pre-formed through other means, too, and that such gatherings also have to draw from a huge group of willing (and determined) participants. But the technology allows a group of like-minded people to gather with unprecedented speed and scale. “You’ve only got to write one message,” Stott says, “and it can reach 50, or 500, or even 5,000 people with the touch of a button.” If only a tiny fraction of this quickly multiplying audience gets the message and already has prepared itself for disorder, then disorder is what they are likely to create.

"BBM" is BlackBerry Messenger, the main device that helped set off the rioting in Enfield, near London, earlier this year.

But check the whole piece, at the link.

Google Chrome Overtakes Internet Explorer 8

I like Chrome, but it freezes way too much, no matter which machine I use at home or the office.

See Los Angeles Times, "Google's Chrome browser overtakes Internet Explorer 8":

Did Google's Chrome browser just become the globe's most popular?

That's what StatCounter is reporting.

It says Chrome topped Internet Explorer 8 in the last week of November, when Chrome took 23.6% of the global market and IE8 took 23.5%.

Of course, if you combine all of the versions of Internet Explorer, it's still the browser champ. And in the United States, Internet Explorer is still on top, with 27% of the market.

So what's driving the growth? Aodhan Cullen, chief executive of StatCounter, says businesses as well as consumers are adopting Chrome.

Microsoft, which includes Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system, used to have a lock on the browser market. Google didn't even enter the market until 2008.

But Chrome recently surpassed Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser, which it used to support. Firefox launched in 2004 and drove innovation in the market, which was dominated by Internet Explorer since IE overtook Netscape's browser in the late 1990s.

RTWT.

Right Wing News: 'The 40 Best Conservative Blogs For 2011'

John Hawkins has released his list of hot blogs for 4th Quarter 2011, and American Power made the cut at #38: "40 Best Conservative Blogs For 4th Quarter of 2011."

What's interesting is how many on John's list are either unfamiliar to me or infrequently visited. Frankly, it's hard keeping up with the 10 or 15 blogs on the top of my list --- and I don't even have a list! I guess that's the problem. I should really have a definitive list. I've started one over on my sidebar, although I'm still making additions. As usual, I tend to read and link to a lot of blogs that link here, and that generates some FMJRA action, or it at least it should. (And I read a lot of blogs not listed at John's, so others might consider writing up their own top blog lists.)

So, to get an early start a New Year's Resolution, here's the blogs on John's top 40 that I'm unfamiliar with (in alphabetical order). I'll try to read more widely going forward:

* Creative Minority Report.

* The Mellow Jihadi.

* Naked DC.

* Vox Popoli.

* Wintery Knight.

Twitter and the Campaign

From the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, "HOW THE DISCUSSION ON TWITTER VARIES FROM BLOGS AND NEWS COVERAGE AND RON PAUL'S TWITTER TRIUMPH."

A detailed examination of more than 20 million Tweets about the race for president finds that the political discussion on Twitter is measurably different than the one found in the blogosphere-more voluminous, more fluid and even less neutral.

No surprise there, but RTWT.

Hat Tip: John Pitney.

The Political Blogging A-List

From the new book by Rutgers Speech Communications Professor Tanni Haas, Making It In the Political Blogosphere: The World's Top Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success:

While more than a million people have political blogs, a select few wield enormous inl uence within the political blogosphere and in politics. Variously referred to as the “political blogging A-list,” the “influentials,” or even the “kings and queens of blogland,” these bloggers attract the majority of political blog readers, set the agenda for the many smaller blogs, are widely read by mainstream journalists and, as I describe in the next section, exert a strong impact on politics.

Political blog readership isn’t evenly distributed as the top blogs attract most of the readers. One study revealed that the top 10 blogs account for 48% of readers.

The 20 bloggers featured in this book, all of whom belong to the political blogging A-list, have a combined daily audience of 2–3 million readers. The top blogs aren’t only read by a large and ever growing audience; they also inl uence what the rest of the political blogosphere blogs about. This becomes clear when one considers how political bloggers link to one another. If there were no agenda-setters in the political blogosphere, all political blogs would have roughly the same number of incoming links from other blogs. Yet, research shows, a few top blogs receive the bulk of incoming links. A study of more than 400 political blogs found that, while the top 12 blogs attracted 20% of all incoming blog links, the top 50 blogs attracted 50% of all such links.

h e inl uence of the top blogs goes beyond the mass of smaller blogs. Mainstream journalists — political reporters and columnists in particular — regularly read political blogs, often several blogs daily. h ey do so to gather ideas for future stories, hear what’s being said in the political blogosphere about their reporting, and to gauge public reactions to major news events.

But journalists don’t just read any political blog they happen to encounter. Like political blog readers, their reading is also focused on a few top blogs. A study of 140 journalists employed by national and local news organizations in the U.S. found that the ten most widely read blogs accounted for 54% of those mentioned. Among journalists working for national news organizations, this bias was even more pronounced: the ten most widely read blogs accounted for almost 75% of those mentioned.

Journalists’ blog reading behavior is quite logical. Since the top blogs attract the majority of political blog readers, and set the agenda for countless smaller blogs, journalists only need to read these blogs to get a relatively accurate impression of public (and blogger) opinion with respect to certain issues.

Haas interviewed 20 bloggers for the book. Here's this, from the e-mail she sent to me:

Dear Donald,

I am writing to let you know that my book, “Making it in the Political Blogosphere,” has just been released by Lutterworth Press. For your information, I have attached an electronic version of it.

The book features profiles of and interviews with 20 of world’s top political bloggers. These include (in alphabetical order) Rogers Cadenhead, Steve Clemons, Juan Cole, Cheryl Contee, Tyler Cowen, Kevin Drum, Eric Garris, Nick Gillespie, Taegan Goddard, Jane Hamsher, John Hawkins, Jim Hoft, Arianna Huffington, Thomas Lifson, Andrew Malcolm, Eric Olsen, Heather Parton, Lew Rockwell, Ben Smith, and Mathew Yglesias.

The book focuses on two central questions: what these bloggers have done to become so successful, and what others can do to achieve similar blogging success.

A book such as this one – aimed at political blog readers and writers – can best reach its targeted audience with your help. I hope you will publicize it on your blog and encourage as many of your fellow political bloggers as possible to do the same.

I'm more than happy to.

The Amazon link is here, and friends can email me for more information.

'The Internet Creates a Misinformed Electorate'

I don't think so, but interesting discussion, in any case.

At Business Week:

Inaccuracies, lies, and innuendoes racing throughout the cyberworld give voters a false sense of knowledge about political candidates. Pro or con?

24-Year-Old Cincinnati Man Dies of Toothache After Brilliantly Filling His Pain Medication Prescription Instead of Antibiotics

Folks should probably be clear about something first: A tooth extraction is not an expensive dental procedure. Indeed, as the ABC News report indicates, "a routine tooth extraction" costs about $80.00. And while it's a horribly needless waste of life, it's no one's fault but the man's himself, 24-year-old Kyle Willis, the father of a young girl. Willis decided to ride out the pain. When he was overcome by swelling he checked into the emergency room and the doctors gave him prescriptions for antibiotics and pain medication. Willis, apparently because he was "uninsured," bought the pain killers and blew off the antibiotics. Big mistake. Rudimentary health knowledge says buy the antibiotics and take some (cheap) generic ibuprofen for the pain and inflammation. To make matters worse, Willis had family members in the area. His aunt [...] is married to a successful local musician. Perhaps he could have borrowed a little money from loved ones. That's called individual responsibility. You always take care of your own, and when you need a hand you fall back on loved ones. When all else fails, there's charity. Of course, under our socialist welfare state, the historical culture of personal responsibility and self-sufficiency has been destroyed by the patrimonial socialist handout regime. Big government assumes that people are too stupid and weak to save for a rainy day, or to plan ahead for emergencies. Tucking away a few Jacksons wouldn't have killed this man. His ignorance and lack of discipline did. So dumb is this case that even über-socialist Matthew Yglesias has to begin his essay with a disclaimer, conceding that supreme stupidity is not a rationale for increasing the size and scope of government:

Now, clearly, this man made some sub-optimal choices here he’s not purely a victim of lack of health insurance. At the same time you have right before you a no-longer-living, no-longer-breathing example of the “push the patient to the edge of financial desperation” theory of health care cost controls. It turns out that the quality of a frightened, pain-wracked young man asked to make technical medical decisions under severe financial constraints is not very high. The social cost of 24 year-old fathers dying of eminently treatable tooth infections, by contrast, is gigantic.

Oh, give me a freakin' break! "Technical medical decisions"? Doctors gave Willis all he needed to get better. It's not a "technical medical decision" to choose pain killers over antibiotics --- it's gambling with your life and the future of your child. Oh, and the man was black --- so now I'm going to be attacked as RAAAAACIST for pointing out that stupidity knows no color.

Freakin' progressive "compassion" is killing society's least well prepared for success. And that's what's really sad about this case.

More imbecilic progressive "compassion" at The Reaction: "Reconciling Conservative "Logic" Is Like Pulling Teeth."

UPDATE: Lonely Conservative links: "Walmart Sells $4 Prescriptions." Also, at Scared Monkeys, "Cincinnati Man Dies of Tooth Infection … Liberal MSM Blames No Insurance."

Althouse links. Thanks!

And Dustbury!

Man Accused of Stalking via Twitter Claims Free Speech

At NYT, "Case of 8,000 Menacing Posts Tests Limits of Twitter Speech" (via Memeorandum).

Even the Buddha of compassion might have been distressed to be on the receiving end of the diatribes that William Lawrence Cassidy is accused of posting on Twitter.

They certainly rattled Alyce Zeoli, a Buddhist leader based in Maryland. Using an ever-changing series of pseudonyms, the authorities say, Mr. Cassidy published thousands of Twitter posts about Ms. Zeoli. Some were weird horror-movie descriptions of what would befall her; others were more along these lines: “Do the world a favor and go kill yourself. P.S. Have a nice day.”

Those relentless tweets landed Mr. Cassidy in jail on charges of online stalking and placed him at the center of an unusual federal case that asks the question: Is posting a public message on Twitter akin to speaking from an old-fashioned soapbox, or can it also be regarded as a means of direct personal communication, like a letter or phone call?

Twitter posts have fueled defamation suits in civil courts worldwide. But this is a criminal case, invoking a somewhat rarely used law on cyberstalking. And it straddles a new, thin line between online communications that can be upsetting — even frightening — and constitutional safeguards on freedom of expression.

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The stalking is not just on Twitter, but includes blog posts as well. The federal prosecutor handling the case likens the tweets, which are direct communications, and unsolicited, as "handwritten notes." These in turn may be found to constitute criminal harassment. Still, most folks see the prosecution as a stretch. See Doug Mataconis, "Is “Twitter Stalking” Free Speech?" Basically, the harassment has to be demonstrably threatening. In this case, clearly the lady's being stalked, and bad. But short of actually contact or evidence of some kind of violent plotting, it's better to stand up for speech. The solution is more speech. And as we've seen around here, progressives can't handle the truth, and when it's directed at them they blow past acceptable boundaries and engage in stalking behaviors that cross the line. Indeed, many a blogger has been forced offline from such trolling, and progressives count on the mob to destroy political enemies all while protected by the First Amendment. Just stand up to these idiots. They melt when faced with facts and logic, and they resort to lies, libel and destruction. ASFLs.

Social Media Consumer Report

If I was on the job market I wouldn't do what I do online. And I know certain progressive academic bloggers who ought to be more careful, and they know it, although I can't name names at the moment.

See: "I Flunked My Social Media Background Check. Will You?" (via Kathy Shaidle).

FLASHBACK: "Academic Tenure and the 'Damascus Conversion to Unpopular Views'."

An End to Internet Anonymity?

Actually, it's a terrible idea, because ending anonymity online would empower governments. Not everyone who writes anonymously is a stalking douchnozzle progressive nihilist. Although folks should think twice about using their real names, especially if they have strong moral standards. The progressive left won't stop until you're destroyed. (And sometimes you've gotta fight back.)

The topic's in the news, at London's Daily Mail, "'It has to go away': Facebook director calls for an end to internet anonymity."

Critics complain that the forced introduction of some kind of 'on-line passport' would damage the freedom of speech and blunt the internet as a tool for dissidents to speak up against oppressive governments.

Also, at AdWeek, "Erin Andrews, Randi Zuckerberg Dish on Digital Dilemmas While Chelsea Clinton details 'survival skill'."