It appears that a slew of Hillary Clinton supporters’ blogs (which are now more anti-Obama) are seeing themselves tagged as spam by Blogspot. Seems the process is pretty simple and requires just a bit of cut and paste. Enough of these and a blogger can be locked from posting onto their own site until a real live person can review the site and clear it as non-spam.

Sneaky.

As a former Blogger user who hosted via Blogspot, I really find that the service is behind the curve these days. WordPress’s features allow site administrators to really do more with their sites, from usability to tracking spam and dirty IPs from abusive commenters. I can’t say that their Terms Of Service would make it harder for such a lockdown to occur, but this certainly doesn’t make Blogspot very appealing for someone looking to enter the blogging arena.

7/1 UPDATE: The NYT chimes in and includes this tidbit from Google, who owns Blogger and BlogSpot:

On its Web page explaining the “flag” feature, Google says that “it can’t be manipulated by angry mobs. Political dissent? Incendiary opinions? Just plain crazy? Bring it on.” On Monday, Google would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere. “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in a statement. “While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam. We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.”

A SPCA petition says Richmond Fox affiliate WRLH opted to bulldoze feral cats and kittens instead of letting the SPCA come in and clear them out.  If true, that’s just horrible.

Justin said he was “Justine” and he and Antonio were married as husband and husband.  To be honest, I’m not sure what bothers me more: that they were able to pull this off with no one paying attention or the fact that Antonio is 31 and Justin is only 18.  That kind of age difference would bother me were it a dude and gal.  Creepy…

A lot of folks are having a field day with a video from this year’s PDF where it comes out that “John McCain is aware of the Internet” despite not owning a computer.  To hear the former John Edwards advisor say it, McCain’s lack of hands on use of the Internets puts this country in grave danger.

Does the same apply for her or Barack Obama’s lack of hands on military experience?

The Internet is a fantastic tool and has opened up politics and governing in ways one would have had trouble imagining just ten or more years ago.  Yet to expect everyone to have full intimate knowledge of how every facet of it works (Facebook, Twitter, Google - to use her examples) is to fail to understand how not just politics but the world works.  I seriously doubt that John Edwards or Barack Obama personal Twitter or update their Facebook pages or, heck, even have the means to do so.  That’s what they pay staffers to do.

But to assume or demand that people know every bit of every tool at their disposal, whether virtual or physical (does Barack Obama read every mailing that’s sent out on his campaign’s behalf?) shows more naivete on the part of the speaker than it does on John McCain.

The Death of Garfield

See also: Garfield As Real Cat

Warner Todd Huston blogs over at The Next Right that Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania is full of dirty hippies not only because they offer credit for a “gap year” (when one takes a year off between high school and college) but because some of that credit can be gained by volunteering with the Obama campaign:

So, not only are we failing our children in high school, NOW we are teaching them that they deserve a break from the nothing that is their high school “education”! On top of that we are telling them that working for Obama is good for college credit but not bothering with the Republican side of the aisle. Not too partisan there, eh?

His post is erred on all points.

I’ll start on the gap year as it’s one thing that hits closest to home.  Not everyone goes to college off the bat.  Your’s truly took plenty of time off in order to work in the real world a bit.  I finally finished that degree and while having gotten it years ago might have been nice, I don’t regret the experiences I’ve had through the years or the resume I’ve been able to build and am now able to use to back up my degree.

I am not alone in this.  Nor is Franklin & Marshall alone in recognizing that people sometimes need to take time off or can use such time to build character and do things that they can apply to life.  Many a university offers “life credits” that take into consideration your resume when awarding a degree.

Maybe Mr. Huston thinks many of our fine men and women in the armed forces are wasting their time or being lazy when they decide not to go to college right away.  But I digress.

Secondly, just because the Obama campaign has approached universities about offering internships with the campaign for credit does not reveal a bias in that school.  If they deny the same to McCain, then, yes, there’s a clear bias.  But the majority of internships are not proposed by the university but by organizations who approach the school in search of free labor.  That Obama has done this and not McCain says more about Obama than it does about the university in question.

Both of these points, the very basis of the blog post, are easily refuted by basic research consisting of opening one’s window and shouting a couple simple questions to a passer by or two.

Now, maybe there’s a legitimate argument of liberal bias at universities and colleges in America rooted in Mr. Huston’s reasoning.  I could get behind a well reasoned argument that displays that, hey, could make one of my own while I’m at it.  But when you go so far off the reservation in an effort to make a point you really lose a lot of people and turn some would be allies into skeptics.  You’re seeing conspiracies where they don’t exist, man, and you’re just going to go crazy.  Stick to the facts, fight the good fight, that’s how you’ll win.

Doug over at Below the Beltway has a good roundup of what’s really going on with the Associated Press’s “attack” on blogs and fair use.

• Foreign Policy: The List: Top Tourist Spots Americans Can’t Visit

• EchoDitto Blog | Do Journalists Care About Blogs?
• Lessons and Ideas to Replicate from Campaign ‘08 | Convio
• Are Personal Blogs Appropriate for Professionals?
• Blogs Then and Now » Outside The Beltway | OTB
• Political Blogging 2.0
• IPDI » Blog Archive » Not the right answer

One night everyone and their grandmother heard about this thing called Twitter and started joining it. Twitter was pretty nifty, a nice little tool where you could shoot a short message from your computer or phone and let folks know what you were up to.

But Twitter’s open API invites third party applications that have made it not only easier to tweet but allow you to tweet just about anything: blog posts, currently listening to, whether or not you washed your hands after you flushed the toilet, and on and on.

And this is where Twitter lost me.

Twitter is a nice tool to supplement an online presence. These days, most everyone has a blog or Facebook profile, and Twitter provides a simple extension to the content you might put on those pages. It was a way to add filler to your virtual content, thoughts between the conversations and rants.

But now it’s more than that. It’s a social network summary itself, an aggregate of every piece of Web 2.0 that someone might be a part of and that’s where it gets overwhelming, not just for me but maybe for Twitter’s servers as well since it’s been down more often than not this last week.

Twitter doesn’t strike me as serving well as a funnel of information about people. There are other applications more suited for that, something like Friendfeed, but even then, there are times when too much information just turns me off to a service or even a friend.

There have been a couple instances of my no longer following someone on Twitter because of some plug in that tweet what they were listening to. Every three to four minutes a new tweet would pop up with the new song they were listening to. And, like a stereo turned way too loud at a party, it drowned out everyone else.

I’m almost at that point with some people who use TwitterFeed, a service I myself use that updates your Twitter feed every time you add a blog post. This is OK, except sometimes people blog a lot. And the same people I follow on Twitter I more than likely am following through my own RSS reader or on an aggregator somewhere. So instead of informing me of things, again I’m overwhelmed.

Twitter struck me as an odd application at first and then I started to get it as a way to fill in the gaps. This video really went a long way for that:

But now it’s so much more. Too much more.  And at a certain point it’s going to turn people off.

People want more out of Twitter and they have third party applications which can provide it, but maybe Twitter really can’t handle such things.  So sites like Plurk, which looks like a souped up Twitter that does everything a blog might do, are going to become appealing alternatives.But maybe this is people trying to turn Twitter into something it was created to be the alternative of: a blog.

For all the bluster, Barack Obama and Virginia Democrats couldn’t quite round up the expected 50,000 people for Obama’s event at Nissan Pavilion last night, pulling 8,000 to 10,000 instead.  That’s some big nomentum for the Audacity of Hype.

You can smell the North Carolina wildfires up here in Richmond.  The haze is from it too.  I was wondering what I was smelling all the way from Bryan Park to WoB.

Gov. Jim Gilmore is the Republican nominee for Senate and he will beat Mark Warner this November.

Do not listen to the naysayers even within the Party. If every Republican who is throwing up their hands and throwing in the towel now instead took the time to visit Gilmore’s site and sign up to be a volunteer then Mark Warner’s coranation would be anything but. If every Bob Marshall supporter could fire themselves up for the nominee and bring the same enthusiasm to November as they brought to the convention, you’d have another David on your hands.

We can not afford to sit idly by and simply allow Mark Warner to win this November. There should not be a single Bob Marshall supporter who can sit there with a straight face and say Mark Warner speaks closer to their values than Jim Gilmore.

Just as I would be asking Gilmore supporters to help Bob Marshall had yesterday’s results gone the other way, tonight I am asking Marshall supporters and all members of the Republican Party of Virginia to please stand up and be counted. Do not just stay home and let Mark Warner ensure a Democratic majority in the Senate for the foreseeable future. Don’t count on trying to beat him next time, we must beat him this time!

Now is not the time to quit, it is the time to keep fighting and ensuring there is one less pawn for a Democratic agenda that harms Virginians and Americans.

Folks, Jim Gilmore is our nominee and with our help he will be the next Senator from Virginia.