baratunde’s internet scratch pad

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Baratunde Thurston, and John C. Dvorak

Modern Warfare 2 is the biggest media launch of all time but PC gamers are hopping mad, how come usability expert Jakob Nielsen's site looks so bad, and so long Geocities...

I've loved listening to this show for years, and now I can say I love being on this show. Geekfest and lots of fun, silly and occasionally substantive conversation. Make sure you get to the end when I rant against the "convenient oppression" of Apple.

Show is available in every format imaginable at http://twit.tv/221

Lou Dobbs, the longtime CNN anchor whose anti-immigration views have made him a TV lightning rod, plans to announce Wednesday that he is leaving the network, two network employees said.

A CNN executive confirmed that Mr. Dobbs will announce his resignation plans on his 7 p.m. program. His resignation is effective immediately; tonight’s program will be his last on CNN. His contract was not set to expire until the end of 2011.

This information just came out, and there's no word on Dobbs's future. I'm guessing he'll end up at Fox along with former CNN personality and resident conspiracy/hate-peddler Glenn Beck.

I'm sure the folks at http://bastadobbs.com/ are ecstatic, and I'm glad we could play a small role in amplifying their calls for CNN to dump Dobbs the race-bater and Latino hater.

Woo friggin hoo!

Worse, RTs can actually be easily faked, which has become a form of spam, wherein well-known people are shown to be promoting something they never twittered about.

I like the thinking behind the new retweet feature, and Ev acknowledges that my much-valued ability to add snark to retweets is something they're considering for future release.

I just wanna point out two remaining problems I have with this post.

1) Ev talks about the redundancy problem of the current retweet method wherein you see the same tweet retweeted by multiple people you follow. The new Twitter solution is that you will only see a retweeted tweet once, regardless of how many times the people you follow subsequently retweet.

This has a potentially significant downside. I see twitter as a stream, and if I'm not looking, the tweets I miss effectively don't happen. Also, part of the way I know something is truly interesting is to see it show up in my stream multiple times. This works in an ego-stroking way (e.g. if I keep seeing one of my tweets retweeted, I know I've struck a nerve) but it also just raises the visibility of the original tweet because in a stream environment, redundancy is not a big problem. Sure the original tweet may have been retweeted 10 times by people I follow, but I probably only see it two or three times.

By "solving" what Twitter sees as the redundancy problem, they've also removed weight from a retweeted tweet. How will I know if something has been retweeted 20 times or just once. Ideally, there'd be a way for me to see the following

1. The original tweet
2. The number of times it has been retweeted by people I follow
3. The number of times it has been retweeted by anyone on Twitter

helping you discover the information that matters most to you as quickly as possible

2) more important than all that though, Ev has bad Twitter grammar. in the sentence I quote at the top of this post, Ev says, "never twittered about."

For shame, Twitter co-founder. The correct form is "never tweeted about." The verb is tweet, my man. The verb is tweet.

But what about an imperfect bill? Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) told TPMDC Clinton warned the conference not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. "Recognize that you're going to have to deal with an imperfect situation and take this as the guideline--as a start--with an understanding that if you look back at history, that the laws that were written were not always--that were not perfect had opportunities to be fixed along the was."

Lautenberg added that Clinton is "encouraging the passage of the bill," and telling Democrats "not forget that [Congress will] have a chance to amend these things as time passes."

Clinton also touched on other issues, including education and energy, all with the explicit understanding that Democrats can and must also succeed at creating jobs and healing the economy with the reforms they pass.

"The main message as I heard it was pass a bill for all the reasons that we could articulate on health care but also, and importantly, pass a bill to help the economy, long term especially, in terms of debt, and in terms of being able to have businesses be competitive," both domestically and internationally, Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) told TPMDC.

Nice move by our last Democratic president, and who better to stress the urgency of passing healthcare reform (even if imperfect) than the guy who couldn't get it done the last time around?

I especially like the point that some of the great legislation of the past wasn't perfect when it was passed either. The main point is that the American people voted for this. Now it's time to deliver. Bam.

Tomorrow afternoon at 3:00pm EST, Special Envoy Scott Gration and Samantha Power, NSC Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs, are going to sit down at the White House with the leaders of the largest, most vocal advocacy groups on Darfur issue, Jerry Fowler of Save Darfur, and Layla Amjadi, the student director of STAND (the student-led division of the Genocide Intervention Network). Ho-hum, you might say, yet another behind-the-scenes meeting between administration officials and NGOs, what's new about that?

Well, two things. First, the meeting is going to be streamed live onto the web on not only the White House and State Department websites (in the latter case on their Facebook page, where viewers can comment along in real-time), but also on the Save Darfur and STAND's sites. So the conversation is hardly going to be behind-the-scenes. And second, since last week both groups have been canvassing their memberships to submit and/or select questions to ask Gration and Power since last week when Gration announced the event on the State Department's blog. He wrote:

I've been impressed and excited with how the administration is offering new methods (and a higher frequency) of public engagement. I think it began with the online town halls the president did last Spring, but it seems now that rarely a week goes by without some sort of live chat from a major executive branch office.

I don't think I can make the Darfur chat, but I hope many of you can. Active citizenship, yall.

Rolando Ruiz is the man featured in yet another taser video making the rounds on Youtube. Ruiz was in police custody after being arrested by a Minneapolis police officer for reportedly throwing a brick at an officer’s vehicle.

Ruiz, who is 18-years-old, is seen in the video with his hands on the car before the officer appears to hold the taser to the back of Ruiz’s neck for 15 seconds.

Chief Tim Dolan called the video “very disturbing” and has asked the FBI to review it.

We’re always told tasers are the “safe” alternative to deadly force, and that police officers need to carry electric guns for purposes of self-defense only. This video appears to shatter the self-defense myth as does this recent story about a 51-year-old man, who was shot dead by officers after trying to escape his tasering.

Keep reading and watch the video on the clickthrough. The author is on point as usual.

Now, after that, please head over to http://taserhearings.blogspot.com/

It's a site and movement started by many Afrospear members. And for those in Fort Worth, TX please check out this rally tomorrow (Saturday Nov 7) http://bit.ly/2JABK4