Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

I drove up to NH today, gorgeous blue-skied day to go digging around the Court Clerk’s offices in Federal District Court, just to see what lawyers for convicted phone-jamming conspirator James Tobin are up to in exchange for the $2.3 million they’ve been paid (so far) by the Republican National Committee (RNC).

Tobin’s lawyers did their best work for the RNC during his trial, by convincing him that they would get him acquitted. Tobin chose not to make any plea bargain–and unknown numbers of unindicted co-conspirators breathed a sigh of relief. But despite “his” lawyers’ confidence, Mr. Tobin was convicted and shamed.

Now defense lawyers have filed three separate kinds of appeals. The boldest of these asks the district court to acquit Tobin, setting aside his jury’s verdict of guilty. Failing that, a different appeal demands that Tobin be given a second trial. A third appeal asks the court to “arrest judgment”. (Some relevant documents.)

Much of this effort is based on technicalities that have nothing to do with the conspirators’ attempt to disrupt a Federal election. Pages are spent complaining that phone calls don’t “harass” the recipient unless they are intended to cause fear. More pages are spent claiming that Tobin didn’t know that Democrats’ phone lines would be jammed with repeated phone calls–he might have thought they would be jammed by some different method.

Most if not all of these quibbles were already advanced during Tobin’s trial, to no avail. So what is the point of these scattershot appeals? Maybe the goal is to keep Mr. Tobin quiet until all his chances to swap information for mercy have passed him by. But what do I know–I am not a lawyer.

Interestingly, the defense’s motion for judgment of acquittal acknowledges that James Tobin did telephone Allen Raymond in order to promote the phone-jamming. During his trial they dramatically produced a witness who swore that Tobin’s phone call to Raymond was made at her behest, and on quite different business.

And I didn’t even tell you yet about my trip to Hillsborough County Courthouse in Manchester. Or my nominee for the coming-soon fourth indictment. Paul Kiel at TPMCafe thinks it’s Darryl Henry; I have a different idea. But for tonight, I’m getting too tired to type.

“I’m not nearly as Pro-Wal Mart as I am anti-union.”

That’s how Bob Beller aka CrazyPolitico explained getting caught (with several other right-wing bloggers) blogging Wal-Mart PR spin straight from the Edelman computers.

Beller insists that nobody paid him for channeling Wal-Mart. He was happy to do it in return for a regular supply of punchy blogfodder bashing big unions and other Wal-Mart critics. Disclosure? Only after the New York Times breaks the story.*

Did you imagine that it’s a GTFB (Good Thing For Blogging) when Big PR Firm Edelman teams with Technorati to study bloggers and hires Steve Rubel?

If you thought so, check out today’s NYT.

p.s. Richard Edelman has responded, spinning the story as yet another big media attack on bloggers.

p.p.s. Steve Rubel responds to some personal attacks made on him about this story. Read his response, and give the guy a break.

* Correction: Bob Beller sent me email saying that he personally did disclose that he got information from Wal-Mart. I’m assuming this is the blogpost he’s talking about–his email doesn’t link to it, nor does either of his front-page NYT/Wal-Mart stories. Please consider me fact-checked by Mr. Beller and disregard my suggestion above that he personally failed to disclose that Wal-Mart/Edelman was feeding him information.

How did anyone learn to write before “Thog’s Masterclass“?

This month’s collection of (published) bad examples just arrived in Dave Langford’s latest issue of Ansible.

Wouldn’t you like a few blasts from Thog’s horrible past?

• `Wearing an aura of rugged-intellectual charm like a plastic raincoat …’ — Sam Merwin Jr, The Time Shifters
• `Gosseyn’s intestinal fortitude strove to climb into his throat, and settled into position again only reluctantly …’ — A.E.van Vogt, The World of Null-A
• `The wagon lurched forward like an armadillo trying to mate with a very fast duck.’ — James P Silke, Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer, Vol II Lords of Destruction

Thank you, David Langford, and thank you, Thog!

Sick of signing her novels, Margaret Atwood invented a long-distance pen, says Wired. Thanks to her Unotchit, Atwood can sit in her livingroom manipulating one robotic pen, while across the Atlantic its spindly twin scrawls her signature onto somebody’s brand-new Oryx and Crake.

Take out the Atlantic Ocean, and this looks just like Thomas Jefferson’s double-pen setup for making quick copies. (Play with it in QuickTime.)

“The finest invention of the present age” — that’s what Jefferson called it.

In 1804.

As my mom would say, it seems great minds think alike.

Just a few recent finds about SXSW this weekend:

Interactive Playpen

Lotsa LEGOs for grownup geeks to play with when not panelizing. Sooz is among the creators of this fun activity.

Photo contest: find today’s random person

Every day, a new chance to win an iPod and a new reason to look closely at other people (sponsored by style master)

BlogHer Meetup

BlogHers and friends of BlogHers, of any gender, will gather Friday, March 10, at Stubbs, thanks to Paige Maguire

Or–if you’d rather feel SXSW-scared, check out this last-year’s Flickr of “What’s in my bag.” I won’t measure up to that, but then I’m not MetaFilter.

That picture above: just some blogfriends from SXSW 2004 (legend here, and even more people I met
listed here.) Yee ha, Austin–I can’t wait to see you again!

Why not, I once asked Dave Winer, organize your next unconference in IRC, or maybe give up on the time-synch and conference in wiki? Nobody would come, said Dave. Even an unconference is much more than text on a webpage.

Text on a webpage is the ultimate fate of most Web 2.0 thunderbolts. Once the hot story scrolls out of Tailrank, Tech Memeorandum, or Technorati, its yesterday’s sushi and nobody wants to touch it.

Even so, let me be just maybe be the last to link to Russell Beattie’s “WTF 2.0” critique of Web 2.0 business models. And, as a public service, here are some examples of how Web 2.0 does make money:

• …most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail…By overcoming the limitations of geography and scale,.. Google and eBay have discovered new markets and expanded existing ones.
• The availability of offbeat content drives new customers to Netflix – and anything that cuts the cost of customer acquisition is gold for a subscription business.
• In a Long Tail economy, it’s more expensive to evaluate than to release. Just do it!
• .. free has a cost: the psychological value of convenience. This is the “not worth it” moment where the wallet opens.
• Use recommendations to drive demand down the Long Tail. This is the difference between push and pull, between broadcast and personalized taste. Long Tail business can treat consumers as individuals, offering mass customization as an alternative to mass-market fare.

The pre-Web-2.0 source of these recommendations is “The Long Tail” (Wired, December, 2004) by Chris Anderson. Congratulations on your new book, Chris!

May you be adored by nobles and princes,
two miles away from you may your lover
tremble with excitement, one mile away
may he bite his lip in anticipation…

From the 4500-year-old clay tablets of Gilgamesh, recently translated by Stephen Mitchell and reviewed by Oxford emeritus professor Jasper Griffin, who has written a lot more great articles in the NYRB.

…and that’s not the only good news to come out of the NSF’s recent tasty-sounding Cocoa Conference.

Chocolate-loving inhabitants of Panama (Kuna island-dwellers drink 5 cups of cocoa a day) seem to be protected from cancer and heart disease by the very high levels of flavonols in their cocoa. Sadly, most of these flavonols are lost in the process of making commercial chocolate. But Mars Inc. is experimenting with a new pro-cocoa product that may fulfill the hot-fudge prediction in Woody Allen’s Sleeper.*

Five cups of cocoa a day? I’m not sure that even I want to be that healthy…

Two future doctors are puzzled by “ancient” health foods:

Dr. Melik: … wheat germ, organic honey and… tiger’s milk?

Dr. Aragon: Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.

Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or… hot fudge?

Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Those were thought to be unhealthy… precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.

Tip for cabin fever: a tower of tippable teddy bears from the Netherlands…and thanks to MontaukRider for sending them to me!

And I’ve got even more linkadelic links:

• From Shutterclog Niek, Sun rising and setting over the globe
• Even more from the Netherlands–a contest for latte swirlies?
• Dive right into the work of this sidewalk chalk guy
• God spoke two words to a television preacher–unbelievably, those words were “Millionaire potential.”

Steve Rubel’s explaining memetrackers* to the marketers. “Look, but don’t touch,” says he. Darn good advice, but not possible in quantum mechanics, where observing any event inherently changes it.

Now, picture Web 2.0 as a Schrödinger’s cat, with more people peeking and poking at her every day. Is she starting to look rather different from what we expected?

Sticking to memetrackers, since that’s what Steve wrote about:

There’s now a huge difference between linking to the last story at the bottom of the page on Memetracker X and linking to the only-slightly-less-popular story that almost but never-quite made it onto that page. This creates a huge incentive for ambitious bloggers to try to link to stories they think will be popular link-targets instead of linking to stories that tickle their interest.

The linkage pattern of profit-seeking bloggers is changed because it’s observed–pulled toward what Kevin Marks called the zero-sum game of traditional media, instead of the what GapingVoid calls the “nice long tail.”

A lot of Web 2.0 Schrödinger’s cats need to worry a bit more about those nice long tails.

* Steve mentions Memeorandum, Tailrank, and Digg. I also love their grand-daddy, Cameron Marlow’s Blogdex.