Rob Cannon

 http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=ADBL&script=412&layout=-6&item_id=617618

If you are a commuter, you need to check out Audible.  It is a great way to get downloadable audio books that you can play through most MP3 players.  It’s a great way to pass the driving hours.  The best deal is the premium plan where you get two books a month for a fixed price.  The link above is a new bundling deal with Sprint where you will be able to play these books through your SmartPhone.  I would love to combine my book reader (right now the old Audible Otis) with my SmartPhone, but I can’t imagine how short the battery life would be!

One great feature of Audible is that once you purchase a book, you can download it again whenever you want.  They keep track of the books that you own.  It’s the missing feature that keeps me from checking out the various music download services.  Those downloaded songs just don’t seem permanent to me.  Either your hard drive crashes and you loose all of your purchased music or you can never find what you want on all of those backup CD’s shoved in a drawer somewhere (plus you have to manage those backups). 

It would be a great value-added feature for a download service to promise eternal ownership of the song that you purchase from them and you don’t have to worry about the backup.  Plus, it would pretty much kill any possibility of customer churn as a customer would have a big incentive to stay with one download service.

  http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-vppin143966771sep14,0,5921308.column?coll=ny-news-columnists

“Sept. 9, 2004, will be remembered as a paradigm-shifting day in media history. That was the day the "blogosphere" took down CBS News.”

I guess other people are picking up the significance of what I posted a few days ago.  For the longest time, Freedom of the Press was meant as a safeguard against a government that has gone haywire.  The press is there to challenge the government when it is trying to abuse its power.  But what happens when the press tries to abuse its power?

Over my lifetime, there has been a shift in the broadcast news from a institution that delivered facts and checked them (do you remember when the editorializing was confined to an editorial segment at the end of the news?) to one that tries to deliver sensationalized stories or tries to tailor the news it reports to a specific agenda.  But until very recently, there has not been any widespread power to keep the press in check.  Sure there have been a few watchdog organizations such as the Media Research Center and Times Watch, but their exposure has been fairly limited.

You would think that competitive pressure between news outlets would serve as correcting mechanism, but it seems that the Press has a herd mentality when it comes to new stories.  If one outlet reports on something, they all flock to it.  How else do you explain why the Ramsey and Peterson murders are huge headline stories when hundreds of other murders (some even more sensational) just get ignored.  Any time a big story breaks, it doesn’t take long for the collective press to come to a consensus on how to report the story.

But now, there is the blogshere.  Millions of people are reading various blogs that deal with all kinds of topics and this has developed into a new channel to deliver news and ideas.  When something fishy appears in the Press, that can get challenged and the idea (if it is worthy) will spread like wildfire through the blogsphere.  Suddenly there is a practical means to keep the Press in check.  And it seems to be working.

Now I don’t expect the blogsphere to replace the Press as a means of delivering news, but it will server as a reminder to the Press that its job is to report FACTS and not push sensation or political agenda.

Now back to more technical discussions….

 CBS has been trumpeting new documents (from 1972 and 1973) that purport to show that President Bush was given preferential treatment during his days in the National Guard.  The problem is that the documents where created with Microsoft Word!

Typography experts were suspicious when they noted that the letters and memos used proportional fonts and superscripts, features that were very uncommon in the early 70’s.  In all likelihood, these documents would have been produced on a typewriter and not a word processor.  So some bloggers started their own investigating and found that when they retyped the documents into Microsoft Word, the spacing and line breaks EXACTLY matched these “30 year old” documents.

What I find interesting here is that bloggers are able to get on this news much faster than the professional news organizations.  CBS, with all of their experience and experts, were not able to notice that these documents were faked.  I wonder how long it will take for CBS to fess up? 

UPDATE 1:
I did not make this post as a political comment.  You will note that I did not comment anything one way or another about Bush or his service.  My interest in posting this was for two reasons (both technically related as this is a technical blog).  The first reason was that Microsoft Word was (allegedly) used to fake these documents and I find it interesting that whoever produced these documents did not notice that there was anything about them that would not pass for a document created in the early 70's.  The second reason was the involvement of blogging in uncovering this foregery.  It took one blogger to notice the use of new type setting techniques and another blogger took it even further by comparing the output of MS Word to the documents posted by CBS.  I find the speed at which a key portion of a major news outlet's big story was shown to be false by the blogsphere to be a telling sign of the changes that are coming in how we get news.

Short answer, please don't make comments about Bush and Iraq and Kerry, etc...  That is not what this is about.

UPDATE 2: Debunking of the debunking being debunked...
I followed the link about the debunking and I saw this update “you might have noted that the White House did not release those records, they merely passed along without comment copies that had been sent to them by CBS“.  So, it looks like Boing Boing was just plain wrong.