In this Gawker report on the hijacked e-mails, Davis is quoted:

“The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them.”

Oy! Perhaps they still use typewriters over at McCain campaign HQ. Davis must be thinking we still live back in the day when the news media could be persuaded to squelch something like this. If the media decided to hold back (because, after all, this was an illegal act committed by someone, and old media probably wouldn’t touch a story that’s so ethically and legally challenged), then the public wouldn’t see the e-mails.

Sorry, Mr. Davis, but we don’t live in that era anymore. Even if your lawyers convinced Gawker to take them down (unlikely), there are copies popping up on websites all over the place, and all over the world. Any attempt at playing digital whack-a-mole with Palin’s personal e-mails would be fruitless. Many Internet users will take it as a challenge to spread the e-mails even further if you try to (pointlessly) tamp this down.

I’m not saying that I condone someone breaking into Palin’s Yahoo account. What I am saying is that now that this has happened, the McCain camp is basically screwed.

My advice to the campaign: You’ll look foolish and demonstrate your lack of understanding of the Internet if you try to get everyone to take down those purloined e-mails. You’re in a lousy place, so put your focus on dealing with the content of the e-mails, and explaining why it was OK (if you can) that Palin was conducting official business using Yahoo.

The other dilemma here is for traditional news organizations. Will they publish the e-mails? I doubt it, and I certainly wouldn’t encourage them to. But they should report on the brouhaha taking place online about Palin’s e-mail account, and can address the personal account used for official business controversy.

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How Do You Use Twitter? from biz stone on Vimeo.

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OK, perhaps the second sentence is paraphrased, but I really like it. “‘Dog bites man’ is newsworthy if you know the man, or dog,” so nicely sums up what I’ve been thinking for some time about what many have termed “hyper-local” journalism.

Yes, dog bites man, or 5th-grader hits winning home run, or woman wins teacher of the year award at Smith Elementary are boring items to nearly everyone — but not to the people involved and the people who know them. For the latter group, it’s important stuff.

We now have the technology available online (and for mobile devices) to deliver that boring-to-everyone-but-me stuff to the right people. We don’t need to produce a weekly give-away print product filled with boring dog-bites-man stuff, because we can deliver it to the people for whom it’s important, interesting, and vital — and not bore everyone else.

To critics of hyper-local news or “citizen journalism,” I will argue that it can be powerful stuff when and only when it’s targeted well. I can envision a future — and I look forward to it — when services are available to send me news on my smartphone letting me know that the guy down the street got bit by a dog.

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Fascinating story from NY Times today: “For New Journalists, All Bets, but Not Mikes, Are Off.” The short version is that a “citizen journalist” working for Huffington Post’s Off The Bus was talking to Bill Clinton at a campaign rally, and the ex-prez blurted out some unsavory words thinking that he was just talking to an ordinary person, and not expecting his comments to be recorded and broadcast out to the world.

The Times piece has much navel gazing, including journalists bemoaning the “bad form” of a non-professional journalist in “breaking the rules” that reporters have for so long operated under by recording Clinton with a digital recorder without his knowledge. (Though he was in a public place at a public event, so he should have known better.)

Get over it, journalists! In a world where any and everybody can publish what they hear or experience (or record with a camera phone), lots of people are not going to follow old “rules” that they don’t understand or even know about. Bemoaning bad behavior by ordinary folks suddenly thrust into the role of “citizen journalist” shows lack of understanding of what’s happening here.

Politicians, especially, have got to understand that in this new broadband world of ours, everything that they say to anyone is potentially on the record. They can’t know if the person they’re chatting with informally at a campaign event has a blog that will get used to share off-the-cuff remarks, or if they’ll post to Twitter and the politician’s remarks get amplified from there.

Traditionalists in politics and the media can bemoan this “unseemly” situation, but it does nothing to change the reality. Everyone in the public eye needs to be more careful about the words they utter all the time, now that everyone else in the room has a digital megaphone.

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Used to be that whenever a stray thought or insight came into my head, I’d blog about it. But now I’m more likely to condense said thought/insight into 140 characters and tweet it. If it can’t be boiled down to that, then it becomes a blog item.

How is this working out for you? Are you blogging less now that micro-blogging services like Twitter are gaining in popularity?

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Now, I don’t mind at all that Willis used my tweet. But it did get me thinking about my postings to micro-blogging sites like Twitter. I need to start thinking before I post something that it could show up anywhere, and get much wider distribution than just the couple hundred people currently following me on Twitter. I suggest that you start thinking likewise.

Today’s tweet went beyond my Twitter followers; will yours?

I remember many instances in recent years where people naively posted something to their blogs and expected that to be private conversation between the few friends who follow their blogs. By now, I sense that most folks have figured out that when they post to their blogs, it’s anything but “private.”

Twitter posts aren’t private or even semi-private, either.

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For lack of a better term, Examiner.com’s Examiners program and the Mail & Guardian’s Thought Leader initiative might be described as “Citizen Journalism 2.0.” Thought Leader’s developer also uses the term “By Invitation 2.0.”

The key point is to leverage citizen media and blogging intelligently by integrating it with traditional journalism practices like (what a shock!) editing and gatekeeping. I’d like to hear your opinions on these innovations.

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California artist Steve Kearsley (a colleague from my long-ago San Francisco Chronicle days) and I have been working on this for a while now, and today took the wraps off the site. We’re working toward “reinventing the comic strip,” applying social networking and social media concepts to the conventional comic, and developing other innovations.

This is an “alpha” release, so I make no guarantees that everything on the website is working yet. We’d love some feedback, and let me know if you spot any glitches, please.

As I write this we’ve got 5 comic strips live. Each comic has an accompanying blog item written by the main character, Lexi. Short term, we’ll be producing 2 new comics each week; we’ll ramp that up as we can. (This isn’t a full-time thing for either Steve or me.) Multimedia we’ll get to in time. For now there’s just the website; presence on other platforms will come soon.

Lots of stuff is planned, but this is as far as we’ve gotten so far. A key theme in what we’re doing is reader/user interaction with the comic strip and its characters. Readers can potentially become characters themselves, and can send messages to the characters (and get a response).

We’re really early into this, so we’d appreciate feedback and reaction. Thanks!

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Intense Debate is a new company based here in Boulder, and I know its recently appointed CEO, Tom Keller. What they’re doing definitely looks interesting. The idea is to take the vanilla user commenting system that’s typical of most blogs and supercharge it.

I actually tried this a couple months ago on another Wordpress project of mine and had trouble, then uninstalled it. But I gave it another chance on this blog and found that it’s been improved, apparently. Installing and importing old comments went off without a hitch.

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Anyway, a bunch of legit comments had stacked up in the approval queue and I just published them. … I thought it had been awfully quiet lately! Sorry about this.

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