Money mag­a­zine via Mar­ket­Watch via the San Jose Merc: Six ways  to keep  mar­keters  at bay.

   • Make your inten­tions known.
Cut back sales calls to your home by sign­ing up for the National Do Not
Call Reg­istry. Stanch the inflow of junk mail by
reg­is­ter­ing your name with the Direct Mar­ket­ing Asso­ci­a­tion. These two sim­ple actions will go a long way in
staving off aggres­sive marketers. …

   • Beware of “pri­vacy poli­cies.“
Any time you buy a prod­uct that includes a so-called “pri­vacy pol­icy,“
watch out: If you ignore it, you may be clear­ing the way for the
com­pany to sell your name and address to other vendors. …

   • Stop the cas­cade of cat­a­logs.
Most com­pa­nies that ped­dle their prod­ucts via cat­a­log get con­sumers’
names from a data­base called Aba­cus, says Mangla. To get your name off
their lists, just e-mail optoutabacus.us.com.

   • Block credit card offers. Save your­self the trou­ble of shred­ding pre­screened credit card offers by vis­it­ing Optoutprescreen.com., a joint ven­ture of the credit-reporting agen­cies Equifax, Tran­sUnion and Experian.

   • Switch accounts to cur­tail spam.
If your in-box is clogged with dis­count travel offers and “per­sonal
enhance­ment” prod­ucts, you may want to switch e-mail accounts [or use spam-blocking software].

   • Talk to tele­mar­keters.
It’s tempt­ing to hang up in the face of tele­mar­keters who assail you
with offers, but but the bet­ter strat­egy is to inform them as politely
as you can that if they con­tinue to call your home, the com­pany they’re
rep­re­sent­ing won’t get a dime of your money.

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Man, this has been the worst sea­son for Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO by far. Not a lot that’s been funny, poor guest selec­tion, almost no one on the con­ser­v­a­tive side of the aisle appar­ently will­ing to appear, and the syco­phan­tic guests who do appear laugh­ing at Bill’s not ter­ri­bly clever New Rules. Sad to see.

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Mike Arring­ton at TechCrunch: Face­book To Launch Friend Grouping.

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Thomas Fried­man in today’s New York Times: 9/11 is over. Excerpt:

Not long ago, the satir­i­cal news­pa­per The Onion ran a fake news story that began like this:

“At a well-attended rally in front of his new ground zero
head­quar­ters Mon­day, for­mer New York City Mayor Rudy Giu­liani
offi­cially announced his plan to run for pres­i­dent of 9/11. ‘My fel­low
cit­i­zens of 9/11, today I will make you a promise,’ said Giu­liani
dur­ing his 18-minute announce­ment speech in front of a charred and torn
Amer­i­can flag. ‘As pres­i­dent of 9/11, I will usher in a bold new 9/11
for all.’ If elected, Giu­liani would inherit the duties of cur­rent 9/11
Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, includ­ing mak­ing grim facial expres­sions,
see­ing the world’s con­flicts in terms of good and evil, and car­ry­ing a
bull­horn at all state functions.”

Like all good satire, the story
made me both laugh and cry, because it reflected some­thing so true —
how much, since 9/11, we’ve become “The United States of Fight­ing
Ter­ror­ism.” Times colum­nists are not allowed to endorse can­di­dates, but
there’s no rule against say­ing who will not get my vote: I will not
vote for any can­di­date run­ning on 9/11. We don’t need another pres­i­dent
of 9/11. We need a pres­i­dent for 9/12. I will only vote for the 9/12
candidate.

What does that mean? This: 9/11 has made us stu­pid.
I honor, and weep for, all those mur­dered on that day. But our reac­tion
to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked Amer­ica com­pletely out of
bal­ance, and it is time to get things right again. …

We need a pres­i­dent who will unite us around a com­mon pur­pose, not a com­mon enemy. …

Damn straight. Six years in, it’s obvi­ous even to the pun­di­toc­racy how far we’ve slid off the skids.

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Wag­ner James Au at Gigaom: Face­book Games: Scrab­u­lous Is Fab­u­lous. “Which Face­book game is show­ing the most active users and the high­est reten­tion rates, and how did it get so sticky?”

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A Face­book group set up 10 days ago to protest the mil­i­tary crack­down in Myan­mar, Sup­port the Monks’ Protest in Burma, is up to 176,069 members.

And another Face­book group call­ing itself Red Shirt for Burma has 2,180 members.

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Photo Dis­trict News:

News­pa­pers won two of the four new Emmy Awards for
broad­band, while mul­ti­me­dia photo pro­duc­tion com­pany Medi­aS­torm won a
third. The nods from the TV-centered Emmys are an impor­tant val­i­da­tion
of print out­lets that have invested in multimedia

The win­ners were announced Mon­day night in New York as part of the 28th Annual News & Doc­u­men­tary Emmy Awards.

This was the first year the National Acad­emy of
Tele­vi­sion Arts & Sci­ences gave awards for broadband. …

Freep.com, the web site of the Detroit Free Press, won the award for Out­stand­ing Cur­rent News Cov­er­age for Broad­band. The news­pa­per was rec­og­nized for its series Michi­gan Marines: Band of Broth­ers. …

Photographer/videographer Olivier Jobard’s project “Kingsley’s Cross­ing” for Medi­aS­torm won Out­stand­ing Documentary/Nonfiction Pro­gram­ming for Broadband.

The San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle’s sfgate.com won Out­stand­ing Regional News Cov­er­age for Broad­band for a video report “Pris­on­ers Guide Teens on Tour of San Quentin.” The video was pro­duced by James Irwin, the Chron­i­cle’s direc­tor of video journalism.

PBS’s “Front­line” won Out­stand­ing Arts, Lifestyle &  Cul­ture Pro­gram­ming for Broad­band for “Libya: Out of The Shadow,” part of the World Rough Cut series.

Some really amaz­ing mul­ti­me­dia work here. Check it out.

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Josh Catone at Read/Write Web: Tip: Gmail Can Be a Social Net­work Aggregator.

So we remain split
on whether to call it a “social graph,” but one thing I think we can
all agree on, is that many of us are suf­fer­ing from social net­work
over­load. Face­book, and MySpace, and LinkedIn, and Twit­ter, and Digg,
and del.icio.us, and… oh my. We each only have so much atten­tion to
give and it can be hard to keep up with all our of social net­work­ing –
espe­cially when our net­work of friends is spread across a num­ber of
dupli­cate services.

Blog­ger and PR guy Steve Rubel has a solu­tion: use Gmail.
In a post yes­ter­day Steve out­lined how to turn Gmail into what he calls
a “Social Net­work Hub” which aggre­gates activ­ity from friends across
mul­ti­ple net­works and even lets him post sta­tus mes­sages via email.

Steve
focuses on Gmail and Face­book in his post but writes that his tips will
gen­er­ally work with any social net­work that pro­vides alerts via RSS,
SMS, or email, and with basi­cally any email ser­vice. He goes over how
to receive sta­tus updates from Twit­ter and Face­book via email, how to
post sta­tus updates via email, how to use fil­ters to cre­ate indi­vid­ual
records for each of your friends, and even how to weed out your best
friends from all the noise. …

Photo credit: wiseacre

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Big Bad Book Blog: Adding wid­gets to dress up your web page.

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Steve Rosen­baum at AlwaysOn: With Quar­ter­life, Fox tries to put big media back together again.

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