Candace and her mother looking otherwordly elegant at the Oscars. Candace, always admired your classy Mum.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/86/211170983_6c8d93dca7.jpg 

It’s always so thrilling to go nuts over the Oscars….thanks for your interesting words.

Hollywood! How lucky we are and how dull it would be without that fairytale machine in the world. 

" One example is Wikipedia.  How many times has Wikipedia been presented as an information source when we know it is written by anyone, anyone at all, and entirely undependable, unreliable. "

That just is not true. Of their Top 20 essential sites, Time Magazine chose Wikipedia as #1. And one of the top business books of 2007, recommended by The Economist, Business Week, Amazon, Financial Times, etc used Wikipedia as a case study of a successful collaborative ventures and included all the quality control measures that are built-in…surprised me…quite interesting. "Wikinomics.’

We are no longer a vertical culture, but a horizontal one. And as in the Industrial Revolution some institutions will adapt, others will pass away. 

Salon has tinkered around with different formats over the last four years. Paid, not paid, now premium paid and open with the preminum subscriptions and adverts supporting the sites. HuffPo is popular, but not yet profitable.

It’s called Blowback. Save Al Franken, Vanity Fair, Buzzflash, Truthout. Alternet, Peace and Justice and a few key bloggers during the run-up to Bush’s phony criminal war; the rightwing propaganda machine branded everyone who dared tell the truth, ‘terrorist loving America haters who needed to have a fist full of Freedom Fries crammed down their throats before they were shipped off to a CIA Black Site.’

The NYT quaked in it’s designer boots. And the Left realized it had no analogue to the Fox/NeoCon propaganda machine.  

Little by little MoveOn, HuffPo, et al gathered steam. Lefties learned to love it in Cyberspace. And the NYT and others who failed the US by not doing their job to be a counterweight to the WDC war machine, not screaming about the dangers of deregulated derivatives in 2001, are now dealing with the seachanges they set in motion. Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, were a couple of the few at the NYT who stayed true. Tom Friedman was pandering and wrong and even mocked his wife in his column, when she was right. Friedman was a cheerleader for the bloody phony mess he would soon decry, and then cry some more that we are so gone on the environment with all the time and $$ wasted even the Pentagon predicts catastrophic abrubt climate change.  Thanks to all the flatlanders, myopics, cowards and imbeciles that put us in this position. 

And now they wonder how they can get us to pay?

A little authenticity, guts and truth in 2002 would have gone a long way.

Payback’s a b*tch. Everything’s online including Le Monde diplomatique, the Toronto Sun, The Economist, der Spiegel. I too, used to love to go out for a cappuccino, croissant and NYT in the AM. The NYT’s betrayed me….haven’t read it since.

Should they charge? Sure if they want to lose their audience disappear. They need to hustle and get ad $$$. New Media boys and girls. Some will make some won’t….maybe even the Grey Lady.

I didn’t watch as was busy working on a project nonstop from early this morning to now at 1AM, didn’t even stop to eat. Checked out Oscar info on a related website, was glad to see all my favorites won. Esp ‘Slumdog’, think that is hopeful for now. Love Sean Penn, glad he won.