Mark Glaser in OJR has a Q&A with the founders of lead­ing Inter­net hoax busters Snopes.com. David and Bar­bara Mikkelson’s site got a big boost after 9/11, and their suc­cess at unmask­ing the lie about hunters shoot­ing naked women in the Las Vegas desert (Hunt­ing for Bambi) has now made them even more well known. Excerpt:

MG: So what made you think “Hunt­ing for Bambi” was a hoax?

DM: Part of it is that we start off with the thought that extra­or­di­nary claims require extra­or­di­nary proof. Our approach is going to be that some­thing out­ra­geous is going to be a hoax. But that’s unfor­tu­nately not what a lot of peo­ple in the media do. They say, “This is real, and we’ll see if there’s proof it isn’t.”

MG: So you start off with the assump­tion that everything’s a hoax until proven real?

DM: In a gen­eral sense. I can’t say that applies to every­thing. We start out by say­ing, is there any­thing that proves this to be true. Absolutely the worst approach you can take — and unfor­tu­nately the approach that most peo­ple in the media take — is sim­ply to con­tact the hoaxer and ask, “Are you on the level?” No one will put the time and effort into per­pe­trat­ing a hoax sim­ply to say, “Oh, you got me.” Sim­ply by approach­ing him, you’ve both alerted him that you’re on his trail, and you quite pos­si­bly have given him clues as to what peo­ple might be look­ing for to ver­ify that it’s phony and will give him ideas on how to improve the hoax. …

Reporters should take a page from their play­book. I wish the Chicago Tri­bune had inter­viewed them for its story on Bambi and Inter­net hoaxes, which I wrote about on Monday.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

Paul Boutin in Slate asks: Could a hacker steal next year’s election?

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

The other day Dan G. wrote about Copy­Paste from Script Soft­ware, an appli­ca­tion that’s appar­ently been kick­ing around since the mid’-90s but one that I’d never heard of. (Howard R. pointed him to the software.)

Twenty-two years ago, when I moved to Cal­i­for­nia for a news­pa­per edit­ing posi­tion, we had macro mem­ory keys on our low-tech VDT key­boards that let you copy char­ac­ters, sen­tences or com­mands to about three dozen dif­fer­ent keys.

So it has always amazed me at how incred­i­bly lim­ited the Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem is in this regard — key­strokes that lets you select, copy and paste, but only one item at a time.

Copy­Paste frees you from those lim­i­ta­tions. I’ve just been using it for the past 24 hours, but already I can see how handy it will come in. You can copy and paste on up to 99 dif­fer­ent sets of keys — plus other good­ies under the hood that I haven’t inspected yet.

It’s cross-platform, so I’ll be down­load­ing it for my Mac as well as my PC. Cost: $20.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

John C. Dvo­rak in PC mag­a­zine tack­les free phone calls, aka voice over IP. Buzz tells me I ought to look into it, given all the time I spend on the phone. Excerpt:

Any­one who would use Von­age in a hotel has long since stopped using the hotel phone any­way. Most peo­ple use mobile phones when they travel. Even with the prici­est roam­ing charges, mobile call­ing is cheaper than the hor­rid hotel phone rates. Only dum­mies use hotel phones.

I won­der what the Park South folks would think if they knew peo­ple could com­pletely bypass the hotel’s phone for all calls. I’m cer­tain that both telco exec­u­tives and hote­liers are going to be pass­ing this col­umn around with notes of con­cern scrib­bled in the mar­gin. But smart hotel oper­a­tors will see this as an oppor­tu­nity. I’m a reg­u­lar at the Park South because of the T1 con­nec­tion. What’s more impor­tant than a reg­u­lar customer? …

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

Lots of good stuff, per usual, on Gary Price’s Resource Shelf, includ­ing this:

More and more spo­ken word mate­r­ial is becom­ing search­able. The Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing Ser­vice not only offers tele­vi­sion pro­gram­ming through­out the U.S. but also has a web­site that pro­vides addi­tional resources for each pro­gram. Included on the PBS site are sev­eral data­bases of archived video. Every word spo­ken in these video seg­ments can be searched by key­word. Sim­ply enter your terms, use some of the lim­it­ing options, and click search. Once you the mate­r­ial that inter­ests you, click and watch the sec­tion of the pro­gram where your search terms are spo­ken or the entire seg­ment. You’ll need a RealAudio/Video player. That’s it! There is no charge to access and use these tools. These data­bases were cre­ated using voice recog­ni­tion tech­nol­ogy, no human inter­ven­tion. Next to every entry on a results page you can also read a text tran­script of the video segment. …

• PBS New­sHour Video Search
Search seg­ments of the pro­gram begin­ning in Feb­ru­ary, 2002.

• Wash­ing­ton Week Video Archive
This archive dates back to July 21, 2000.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

Lots of good stuff in Lost Remote:

• A Cory Bergman essay:

Start scoop­ing your own news­casts on the web. The Inter­net won’t make more money than TV any­time soon, but the extra cash will mean more TV reporters and pho­tog­ra­phers will get to keep their jobs.

• Get your ESPN cell phone

Walt Dis­ney Co. is in early talks with sev­eral wire­less tele­phone com­pa­nies over plans to offer cell phones under the enter­tain­ment company’s var­i­ous brand names, includ­ing ESPN, The Wall Street Jour­nal reports.

• Slate gets into radio

• Mer­rill Brown, for­mer edi­tor of MSNBC.com, will leave Real Networks.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

Steve Outing’s lat­est in E&P: Blogs Have a Place on News Web Sites.

It’s hard to believe this fun­da­men­tal point still needs to be ham­mered home, but such is the way of the news­pa­per pub­lish­ing world.

Steve tack­les both blogs and moblogs in his col­umn. Excerpt:

Last year, I wrote a col­umn for Edi­tor & Pub­lisher Online sug­gest­ing that many reporters, cor­re­spon­dents, edi­tors, and colum­nists at news­pa­pers should pro­duce Weblogs. I stand by that advice, but these days I place equal impor­tance on non-staff mem­bers pro­duc­ing the con­tent for blogs at news companies.

Con­tinue reading »

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

Sioux Falls Argus Leader:

Tom Daschle is com­ing soon to a blog near you.

The Sen­ate minor­ity leader and South Dakota Demo­c­rat will post a daily diary on his offi­cial Web site as he dri­ves around the state next month dur­ing Con­gress’ annual August recess, he said Wednes­day. The diary is mod­eled on the grow­ing phe­nom­e­non of the online jour­nals known as Weblogs, or blogs for short.

“At the end of the day, wher­ever I am, I can just type up some thoughts and tell sto­ries about things that hap­pened,” Daschle said. “I’m always up for try­ing some­thing new.” …

The first post­ing in Daschle’s blog — which will be called “Trav­els with Tom” and will be linked to the front of his offi­cial Sen­ate Web site — should go up Thurs­day [pre­sum­ably today], spokesman Dan Pfeif­fer said.

Um, no men­tion in the news­pa­per about what the blog address is.

Thanks to kpaul for the pointer.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

Here’s a Cal­i­for­nia voter ini­tia­tive done right: Back­ers of a finan­cial pri­vacy ini­tia­tive say they’ve col­lected enough sig­na­tures to qual­ify it for the bal­lot. But in a sur­prise move, they promised to hold the sig­na­tures for three weeks to give state law­mak­ers a final chance to ham­mer out a bill instead.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post

In OJR: News­pa­per Web Sites Strug­gle to Attract Younger Read­ers. Sur­veys show that about half of 20 to 29 year olds read the news­pa­per every day in 1972; by 1998, just 20 per­cent of twenty some­things read the paper every day.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post