Happy New Year, everyone! We've invited some friends over for a wild night of board games while the kids watch videos.

A bittersweet end of an era arrived today for those of us who recall the salad days of the CyberWire Dispatch, a periodic no-holds-barred, occasionally gonzo-journalism-style email missive that took aim at the political establishment and corporate powers that be. The muckraking CWD reached its zenith in the mid- to late '90s, accumulating a readership in the hundreds of thousands. The writer (a friend), Brock Meeks, a veteran investigative reporter who now works at MSNBC, dispatched his last CyberWire today. The CWD website hasn't published any dispatches since 1998, so I'll publish its swan song below.

Copyright © 2003 // CyberWire Dispatch // December 31, 2003

Jacking in from "Fond Farewell" Port:

WASHINGTON-New York's Times Square today looks and feels like the war ravaged capital of some third world country after a coup d'état; the FBI is telling local cops to be leery of any hinky acting, middle-eastern looking males that happen to be carry around dog-eared almanacs (no, I'm not making this stuff up); the U.S. Justice Department, with Congress acting as unindicted co-conspirators, have pencil whipped the Bill of Rights so as to make it unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers; Paris Hilton's sex tape is all over the Internet and CyberWire Dispatch is closing the doors on its publication.

Thank God for Paris, at least some sanity remains out there.

Continue reading »

The Christian Science Monitor serves up the most interesting websites of 2003.

And for the ultimate aggregation of 2003 lists, Fimoculous.com has gathered more than 300 year-enders into 23 categories and placed them all on a single page. Entries include:

• Independent Press Awards from Utne Reader

• The P.U.-Litzer Prizes for 2003 from AlterNet.org

• Dave Barry's Year in Review

• 25 Censored Media Stories from Project Censored (as usual, they really mean "underplayed" rather than censored)

• Yahoo's Top Searches of 2003

• Six coolest inventions of 2003 from Time.

But where's the year-end Zeitgeist from Google, like last year?

Penguin Group USA has a Q&A with the profoundly wise Ken Auletta, author of the new book Backstory: Inside the Business of News. He says, "Increasingly, journalistic divisions are part of giant companies who demand profit margins ... that often war with good journalism." He's right.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Glenn F. looks back at the highlights of 2003 and offers some predictions for the new year in his Wi-Fi Networking News blog, which I've finally blogrolled (under Tech) at the left. "What will 2004 bring? More security, higher cell data rates, and the final blossoming of hotspots in public spaces."

Paul Boutin offers 101 ways to save the Internet in the January 2004 issue of Wired magazine.

Wired News offers a review of satellite radio services and concludes, when it comes to variety and sound quality, Sirius and XM deliver the goods. Once you've heard it, you might never listen to FM or AM radio again.

Susan also reports on BlogPulse, a site (still in beta) that mines the data from 93,000 weblogs for phrases and person names, then presents the information via a blog site and XML feeds. No search function, though, so fairly limited usefulness, as far as I can see.

Susan Mernit points to Greg Elin's Duh Blog pointing to a Dec. 21 New York Times interactive feature called When Workers Die as a sterling example of digital storytelling. Except, nine days later, when you click on it you get an Abstract story page that states:

Please Note: Archive articles do not include photos, charts or graphics.

So this means that all New York Times multimedia features disappear into the ether?