CIA given brush-off by Bush and Rice

Think Progress » “The CIA’S top counterterrorism officials

I think this is worthy of a sequel to ABC’s “Path to 9/11″ mini-series, don’t you?

Christianity on the Sunset Strip

Why Christians should love Studio 60 – TV Squad

I just put up a post on TV Squad about how Christians should be embracing “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and its portrayal of a Christian character.

The President just became The King

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall September 28, 2006 12:32 PM

Even if I didn’t so completely disagree with this particular President, the Constitution was setup to guard against just this type of system. The President is not supposed to have the power to deny people access to due process of law. This bill just granted him that power. He now officially live in a dictatorship.

Congratulations to all the fine Congressmen and women who just eliminated the role of the courts as well as gutted their power to keep the Executive branch – designed to be the weakest of the three – in check.

LOTD: September 27

• Nope, you’re not the only one who believes that email may be the bane of your existence
• If you hadn’t noticed the sponsorship news at Techmeme, clearly you’re living under a rock. In any case, check out what the fine folks at Socialtext had to say about getting on that train early.
• BuzzLogic has released a $500/month web-based application that uses a variety of metrics such as inbound links and others to track conversations online, including among bloggers. It’s being sold as a product that will make online influencer research by big companies easier by identifying the most influential members of any given niche so that they can be more finely targeted.
• At the DEMOfall 2006 tech conference, companies are showcasing software and hardware that extend the functionality of cell phones significantly. Not only can users take pictures, but some services will take those pictures and turn them into web-accessible documents that can be emailed or faxed. Other services are offering their own ways of manipulating pictures before sending them to friends, services that go well beyond today’s snap/email process. A company called FonPonds is letting customers subscribe to podcasts that are automatically delivered to the user’s phone. That could up listener number significantly without going through the sometimes painful education process.
• Is Google good for your brand? It can be, depending on whether or not the company has and actively cultivates a good online reputation. Basically your brand reputation what people say it is so it’s important that that be focus of a company’s efforts. Google – and other search engines – are how a good many people are going to begin their interaction with a brand name so, as I’m fond of saying, your reputation is only as good as Google says it is.
• To promote the new budget transparency act just signed by the White House, the Office of Management and Budget has reached out to bloggers of all political stripes to promote the bill, which creates a searchable database of spending appropriations. This is kind of huge since it was bloggers who got the bill, which had been on an anonymous hold by a couple members of Congress, out into the open and eventually passed.

There’s a difference

Daimnation!: The theocracy trap

I left the following as a comment on the above post.

As a Christian I welcome the inclusion of religious principles in public policy. But that’s as far as it should go. The government should in no way be involved in setting religious guidelines. If people are so eager to become subject to theocratic rule I suggest they convert to Catholicism and pay homage to the Pope. I’ll be over here using Scripture as the source of my belief (a very Lutheran philosophy) and realizing that God rules all while men rule for a fraction of time.

My main problem with the idea of a theocracy is this: Who decides which religious principles become the law of the land? Are they going to be strictly Episcopalian? Strictly Catholic? Or will the laws be drawn from a variety of faiths and homogenized until their unrecognizable? I would prefer a government that fights to make sure I can worship as I prefer instead of one that decides how I should worship. That’s kind of what the First Amendment says the government should be doing and not setting up some quasi-religious group that uses God as cover for all its bad decision making.

Theocracys seem to be based on the idea that man can – on any level – divine God’s thoughts. That’s a faulty premise and anyone who claims to do so immediately becomes suspect. It means they’re trying to make their ideas bulletproof and completely unavailable for questioning or debate. Man is faulty because, as the Bible teaches us, we live in a fallen and sinful world.

I have no problem with government using religious principles to guide their decision making. But the institutionalization of religion by government is a process that’s tailor made for abuse and suppression. I’ll let God, through the Word He’s given us in the Bible, show me how to live my life and would like government to not try and interpret that in a way that’s motivated solely by their selfish interests.

LOTD: September 26

• Nick Bradbury explains how to use the YouTube search tools in FeedDemon 2.
• Bloglines has added package tracking for DHL to its stable of services
• If you were wondering how to pay attention to things while using your BlackBerry, it turns out that Dilbert, err Dogbert has just the tip you need. [via Joël Céré]
• Wondering why your AdSense account is suspended? Well, maybe someone did that to you on purpose. Jennifer Slegg got some scoop in an interview with a blackhat spammer on how all that works.
• The Arizona Republic’s Erica Sagon is writing about where consumers are “flocking” to online to discuss where they will be getting the best deals this holiday season. Are the retailers paying attention to the fact that this is happening?
• Yahoo! is taking a page out of factory and ad agency worlds, choosing to close its U.S. offices in the final week of 2006.
• Enough already. You thought Web 2.0 was bad, now we’ve got C&Ds going to companies with “pod” in their names or URLs, from you guessed it, Apple.

Social bookmarking X two

I present to you, without further comment, the “Meta of the Day.”

Chicago blogger meet-up

Wednesday night I had the distinct pleasure to meet up with some of the best and brightest in the blogging community. Some are native Chicagoans and others were in town for a Ragen Communications conference. Despite the fact that the original location I had chosen, which was just down the street from the hotel many of them were staying at, wound up being closed we found an alternate location. It was a lot of fun to sit around a table with a stuffed pizza and geek out with others who are on the forefront of the new media landscape. It’s always nice to meet some of the people who I have gotten to know virtually via blog comments, links and emails. Kevin Dugan, Robert Scoble, David Armano; Jeremiah Owyang, Jeffrey Treem, Joe Thornley and others came in and out over the course of a couple hours. As Jeremiah says in his write-up of the get together, you could tell this was a solid bunch of guys because there was far more money left by those of us who had to duck out early than was needed for the check. It’s also exposed me to a bunch of new blogs to subscribe to in order to follow what these guys are talking about. Absolutely a great time.

More than just cats and lunch menus

Some of what’s out there in terms of consumer-generated content does, I agree, fit in with the stereotype forwarded by Robert Samuelson of being “exhibitionist” in nature. But like all such statements, it doesn’t apply to all members of a community. He conveniently ignores all the good journalism being done and valuable input being contributed by bloggers and others in favor of yet another story about how everyone thinks their life is just so interesting it has to be shared.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: These articles are all about scaring people away from taking blogs seriously. They’re motivated by a sense of self-preservation by mainstream journalists who see themselves being marginalized as people find voices that previously had no outlet due to the laws of limited production facilities. And these stories sound more and more desperate each time a new one comes out.

Marketing in a savvy world

Fast Company has a post up on the topic of “post-modern marketing.” Their definition of that is marketing in a world where not only is the audience hip to the marketing communities moves but the marketing community knows that the audience is hip to it. It’s all very meta. The point is that marketers must continue to find new and innovative ways to not just hard sell people but get them to care about the marketing efforts.

That’s why, if you ask me (and I know you did), companies need to embrace consumer-generated-content, but in its authentic and pure form. Don’t just give people a couple of video clips and sound effects that they can play with and arrange. That’s a corporately sanitized version of CGC. No, they need to really get down and dirty and engage with the bloggers talking about their products, the video makers creating their own commercials and others like this.

To my mind “post-modern marketing” means doing something that’s extraordinarily scary to most companies: letting go of complete control. Companies can no longer hope to control the conversation that’s going on regarding their brands, products and corporate entities. They can participate in that conversation in meaningful ways, sure. But control? Forget it. Those corporately-endorsed CGC sites can be fun and be a valuable way to spur the conversation along, but that can’t be the extent of the entry into it. It just can’t be. If it is, or if the company decides to sit out the conversation entirely, they’re going to find themselves behind the eight-ball in a very real way.