Michiko Kakutani reviews Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, in the Sunday NY Times: A Portrait of Bush as a Victim of His Own Certitude.

Matt Bai in the Sunday NY Times Magazine: The Inside Agitator. Is Howard Dean willing to destroy the Democratic Party in order to save it?

Just got back from the California First Amendment Coalition event at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where I met Milo Radulovich (pictured above), who rose to fame in the 1950s after Edward R. Murrow called out Joseph McCarthy. Radulovich's story was the centerpiece of the 2005 George Clooney film "Good Night, and Good Luck."

Also met Daniel Ellsberg, who authored and released the Pentagon Papers — about 30 years after the last time I met him at Rutgers.

Here are nine photos from the event.

Participated on the panel "Blogging and Citizen Journalism" with Daniel Weintraub, Lisa Stone, Kevin Bankston and moderator Dan Gillmor, talking about the rise of participatory media.

Mark Cuban had this the other day: The Coming Dramatic Decline of Youtube.

What is it about youtube.com that has made it so successful so quickly ? Is it the amazing quality of user generated content ? Is it a broadband fueled obsession with watching short videos ?

No & No.

Youtube's rapid ascension to the top of the traffic ranks can be attributed to two and only two reasons:

1. Free Hosting from any 3rd Party site
Hey, why pay for bandwidth for a video if you dont have to ? A blog, a myspace page, an email, any website. Just throw in some html in Youtube.com foots the bill for bandwidth. Sure you are limited by size of file, but so what. Just chop it up into parts 1 through N. Its fast, easy and free.

Come to our website and use our video hosting services, we can party like its 1999 all over again !

2. Copyrighted music and video. ...

This so reminds me of the early days of Napster. They were the first to tell you it wasnt illegal. They didnt host anything but an index to link to all the illegal downloaders. Youtube doesnt upload anything illegal and will take down whatever you ask them to. Sounds legit right ? ...

And the New York Times follows up Saturday with this: YouTube’s Video Poker.

YouTube has also become a vast repository of video taken without permission from television shows and movies, not to mention home movies constructed — with nary a cent paid in royalties — from commercial music and imagery.

Mr. Hurley was surrounded by curious media executives at Allen & Company’s annual Sun Valley mogulfest in July. They wondered: friend or foe? Is he earnestly working to make YouTube and its exuberant users conform to the existing standards of copyright law and contractual obligations? Or is he cynically flouting the law to enable YouTube to grow rapidly, calculating that he will be able to cut a more advantageous deal later, or perhaps sell the company to someone else who will be able to sort through the mess of liabilities?

Here's a note I've been sending out to colleagues, which was reprinted on Poynter's E-Media Tidbits today:

I'm working with Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media on a Knight Foundation project laying out the principles of citizen journalism.

One of the articles we're working on is a roundup of journalistic screw-ups -- perhaps the most embarrassing factual mistake you've made in your career, or a funny doozie of a reporting or editing error, or a real humdinger by someone else.

Anything come to mind? If so, let us know if we can publish it, and if you'd prefer your name used or not. The idea is to point out that even the best professional journalists are human, too. This could help citizen journalists avoid some of the mistakes we've made along the way.

This could certainly apply to bloggers as well. So email me if you want to pass along an anecdote about a notable gaffe.

Reblogged from Jonny Goldstein's new Reinventing Television blog

Jason Calacanis announced new video upload and playback on the Netscape social-news portal that AOL owns. It transcodes video to Flash, and it also lets you link to the original format, and it transcodes your video to an iPod-ready video format. It’s still in alpha, but it’s an exciting development.

San Jose Mercury News:

A Manhattan-based software company thinks it has an idea for stealing market share from YouTube. They distribute free software that lets anyone -- even a bumbling, bloated Hollywood studio -- create an online video-sharing community.

To see the KickApps concept in action, check out National Lampoon's Knucklehead video. Users can submit videos in three categories: ``x sports,'' ``drinkie party vids'' and ``show us your butt.''

Doc Searls has a Flickr photo set and Tabblo photo set of the protest rally in front of the Santa Barbara News-Press headquarters.

Here's how you can submit a nomination to the Vloggies (videoblogging awards), to be handed out Nov. 4 in San Francisco.