This is really well done: "Before and after images of various San Francisco locations used in Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece."

Vertigo...Then and Now

] LONDON (Reuters) - Last week's daring midnight rescue of
] 19-year-old American soldier Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi
] hospital has become one of the few feel-good stories of
] the war for Western media outlets.
]
] For George Paine, a technology consultant-turned-amateur
] war correspondent, it was a headache. Before the dramatic
] rescue of the injured young woman, Paine wrote a short
] update for his Web site http://www.warblogging.com/
] mistakenly reporting that Lynch was among the soldiers
] presumed dead.
]
] Paine, part of a growing community of online diarists
] called "bloggers," awoke the next morning to irate
] e-mails from readers and fellow bloggers.
]
] "I was exhausted. I didn't make clear Jessica was only
] MIA," the New York-based war watcher said afterwards.
]
] In the annals of journalism, Paine's mistake had minimal
] impact. The responses led him to quickly correct the
] error and move on.

LiveWire: for Bloggers, War Is No Cakewalk

] Pound for pound, who's the biggest, richest media mogul
] on the Web? Terry Semel? Nope. Sumner Redstone? Not
] exactly. Try Matt Drudge. Years after his big "scoop" --
] leaking that Newsweek was sitting on a story about the
] tryst between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky --
] Drudge's website is bigger than ever. Run on a
] shoestring, the Drudge Report, a plain-Jane page of news
] links and occasional scoops, clears, by our
] back-of-the-envelope estimate, a cool $800,000 a year.
]
] While other news sites make money, they don't mint it
] Drudge-style. New York Times Digital scored an operating
] profit of $8.3 million last year. But it has 237
] full-time employees, meaning that each worker accounts
] for about $35,000 in profit. (And that doesn't take into
] consideration the fact that the site's reports are
] actually generated by the newspaper staff, a cost
] allocated to the paper side only.) By any calculus,
] Drudge's site might be the most efficiently run on the
] Web; it makes the Times site look bloated. Drudge's is a
] two-person operation (although he never mentions his
] right-hand man); that means it makes $400,000 per
] employee. And he never has to leave the comfort of his
] Miami condo.

Business 2.0 - Magazine Article - Printable Version - The Secrets of Drudge Inc.

] This site is a coalition effort of bloodthirsty hawks and
] ineffectual doves united in admiration for Mohammed Saeed
] al-Sahaf, Iraqi Minister of Information (currently on
] administrative leave).

Wasn't sure whether to put this in the humor or current events topic ;)

We Love the Iraqi (Mis)Information Minister

Here's an interesting resource on the "Four-Pronged Fair Use Test". Evidently there's no clear "this is fair use" vs. "this is plagiarism" litmus test, but instead there are four factors that are taken into consideration, with sort of a sliding scale on each of the four factors. This webpage is good reading, but for a real quick and dirty summary, the four factors are:

 (1) What is the character of the use? (commercial, commentary/criticism, educational, nonprofit, etc.)

 (2) What is the nature of the work to be used? (factual article, fictional story, or a combination, with using somebody's factual reporting more likely to be considered fair use, whereas copying someone's fictional story to be more likely to be considered plagiarism)

 (3) How much of the work will be used? (all of it, or just parts)

 (4) What effect would this use have on the market for the original or for permissions if the use were widespread? (is quoting something going to mean that whoever wrote it makes less money or loses control of their own work?)

So, in terms of Memestreams (and I have to preface this with IANAL: I Am Not A Lawyer):

Mostly good things to do:
- Quote a small amount of text rather than an entire article
- Quote factual articles
- Add your own commentary or thoughts on what you quote
- Always link back or attribute the source

Sometimes bad things to do:
- Quoting large amounts of a webpage
- Quoting someone's original fictional story
- Quoting from inside a "subscription only" site
- Saying words are yours, when instead they're copy/pasted from somewhere else
- Posting just a copy/paste, without any kind of added original commentary

And again, none of the above items are an instant "good" or "bad" determination. They're just recommended guidelines, that are probably worth mentioning in a Memestreams help file somewhere. :)

My $0.02,

Elonka :)

Memestreams and 'Fair Use' Guidelines

] This article looks chiefly at completely free (both
] personal and commercial use allowed) or shareware open
] source products. An excellent starting point, and one
] Ward calls canonical, for wiki clone software is at
] WikiWikiWeb WikiEngines [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines].
]
] Built around object-oriented programming, wikis are
] extremely popular within the software development
] community, especially among those that practice the
] principles of Extreme Programming (XP, not to be confused
] with Windows XP). (For definitions of some of the wiki
] and Web content management system terminology I use, see
] the sidebar "Wiki Words Glossary" on page 39.)

I was the initial proponent of using Wiki software for our documentation process at Simutronics. It has since become a way of life for many.

Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars

] A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that a lot of people
] seemed to be pretty unhappy with the BBC's coverage of
] the war, and I linked the BBC's attitudes - odd, I
] thought, for the national network of a nation at war - to
] the shared prejudices of the "New Class" of
] state-supported bureaucrats and their ilk.
]
]
] Since then, things have only gotten worse for the Beeb.
] Andrew Sullivan has kept up the pressure. The BBC has
] even been forced to respond, taking the absurd position
] that:
]
]
] The BBC is not state-funded. We are publicly funded
] through a license fee paid by every household in the
] United Kingdom. The British public, not the government of
] the day, owns the BBC, and it is to the British public we
] are accountable.
]
]
] Get that? They're not state-funded, they're just paid for
] by a mandatory tax that the government collects, and
] about which the taxpayers have no choice. Now if the
] British television viewers got to choose whether their
] "license fee" went to the BBC, or to some competing
] service, things might be different - and so might the
] BBC. But that's not how it works, and quite a few people
] - by no means all of them on the right - are unhappy with
] the BBC's slant....

TCS: Tech - New Class Crackup

] With a blast of X-rays compressing a capsule of hydrogen
] to conditions approaching those at the center of the Sun,
] scientists from Sandia National Laboratories reported
] today that they had achieved thermonuclear fusion, in
] essence detonating a tiny hydrogen bomb.
]
] Such controlled explosions would not be large enough to
] be dangerous and might offer an alternative way of
] generating electricity by harnessing fusion, the process
] that powers the Sun. Fusion combines hydrogen atoms into
] helium, producing bountiful energy as a byproduct.

Yay. Alternative sources of power are a good thing.

New Fusion Method Offers Hope of New Energy Source

] Forget Moore's law, because it is unhealthy," Michael S.
] Malone, a longtime member of the valley's technology
] community and an eBay founder, wrote recently in a trade
] publication. Forget Moore's law, "because it has become
] our obsession," Mr. Malone wrote. "Because high tech has
] become fixated on it at the expense of everything else
] %u2014 especially business strategy."

Is There Life After Silicon Valley's Fast Lane?

I will be at Interz0ne this weekend.

Decius informed me last night that he may not be able to make it, so I may be doing the MemeStreams panel alone. Lets hope he makes it, because I don't have as much prepared as I'd like to (as usual), and will likely wind up roughing most of my talk. Users, come armed with questions and comments.. This is a good opportunity to get some feedback, discuss ways to use the system, etc.. Expect the answer for a number of things to be "its on the way, but we gotta do a bunch of stuff first"...

There may be another update to the Social Network portion of the site for the con, but I'm not entirely sure yet if I'm going to have enough time to finish it.. Time is tight and this week turned out to be more chaotic then expected.

The MemeStreams panel is going to be on Saturday in room A1 at 3PM CST, directly after Randal Schwartz's panel on "Learning Perl". I learned perl from his books, and MemeStreams is in perl, so I'm in awe of this..

I'm also booked for a panel in the same room on Saturday at 8PM CST. Its tentative title is "RANT!". I have no idea what I'm expected to talk about at this one. I'm pretty sure I'm being setup for something. Judging from the title picked for me, I'm just expected to stand there and rant. Fine, I can do that. Done it in the past.. Infact, I'm pretty much expected to do it at these.. Its shocking.. Based on con history, this panel will go on for about 30 minutes before I completely lose control of it.. 8PM on Satuday night a con like Interz0ne means one thing, most people who show up to the panel will be consuming large amounts of booze.. I expect people to be mixing things in buckets and such madness.. The slot after me is something about girls and webcams. This is clearly the point in the night where it has been determined that madness will decend, and its been handed to me.. Yum yum.

I'll be available for private consulting sessions and drunken debauchery all weekend.

MemeStreams at Interz0ne