Dave Winer has provided seven simple tips regarding weblogs for political candidates. I think his first point is the most important: “Run a real weblog. Embrace the key feature of the Web, linking — which means you must link to all articles about your candidate, not just favorable ones. You should also link to articles about your opponents.”
Read the full seven points.
Richard Gayle provides an instructive statistical analysis on how useless facial recognition systems are. The conclusion: “This is one reason why biometrics is such a lousy idea. Add in the inability to work around a disguise and you end up with thousands of people being inconvenienced. The large number of false positives will serve to screen the real positives through tedious drugery. No Thanks.”
I’m not always comfortable with Tom Friedman’s exuberance about American-style globalisation. But he does spot unlikely but important connections, such as his column today about the significance of the Arab world version of Pop Idol.
Jordanian singer Diana Karzoun won 52%-48% in a contest in which 4.5 million people voted. Tom quotes Rami Khouri of The Beirut Daily Star: “I do not recall in my happy adult life a national vote that resulted in a 52 to 48 percent victory. Most of the `referenda’ or `elections’ that take place in our region usually result in fantastic pre-fixed victories.Â… So a 52 to 48 percent outcome — even for just a song contest — is a breath of fresh air.”
At long last, the US is approaching the UN for greater help in Iraq. If you want to understand some of the thinking behind it, Talking Points Memo has an excellent analysis.
“In real life we have a word for this sort of situation: a jam. We’ve managed to leverage our mammoth strength into an improbable weakness. And so much of it was not only predictable, but predicted.”