Thursday, October 23, 2003

No deal: The much-anticipated renovation of the old Wachovia building in downtown Greensboro is off. Reliable sources say that developer Cherokee Investment Partners LLC of Raleigh and building owner Jefferson-Pilot Financial couldn't make the numbers work -- the costs of renovating the 16-story building for residential and retail use were millions of dollars higher than the estimated return on the deal. See details in the Business Journal and the N&R after they read this post. Update: Cherokee CEO Tom Darden says, "I haven't been told" that the deal has fallen through. He says he has not gotten a full report from the latest meeting. EdCone.com stands by its story. 5:14:13 PM    comment []

"A White House administration official who can be blamed for leaking the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to the press remains at large, White House officials announced Monday. "'We are doing everything in our power to see that the scapegoat is found and held accountable,' President Bush said. "We will not stop until he—or she—is located. Believe me, nobody wants to see the blame placed squarely on the shoulders of a single person, and photos of that individual in every newspaper in the country, more than I do." Why is the best news reporting always in The Onion? 5:04:29 PM    comment []

"That's just false." William Saletan in Slate, on the description of "partial birth" abortions used repeatedly during the Senate debate, and by the President. My personal feelings about abortion have grown more nuanced since going through two (healthy, planned) pregnancies with my wife. I'd like to move on to the post-Roe era of legislated abortion rights. But as long as this type of misinformation informs public policy, there's not much room for progress. 5:00:58 PM    comment []

I'm a Doonesbury fan, and Garry Trudeau is one of the nicest, smartest people I've ever written about, and I'm grossed out by Schwarzenegger's handsy history. But I still find this week's strips depicting Arnie as a giant hand named Herr Gropenfuhrer to be, well, heavy-handed. 4:48:05 PM    comment []

Ziff Davis is listing my blog address as part of my ID at the bottom of the corporate blogs column, both at Baseline and eWeek, and as part of my permanent writer ID at the Baseline site. The mad genius was willing to run the column as soon as I wrote it, instead of waiting for print.  Nice. They're getting it. At BloggerCon we talked about journalists who work within a corporate structure. I said that if ZD doesn't own a piece of my soul, they certainly rent it. I feel that having them link to my blog puts some responsibility on me, too, or at least underscores the responsibilities I've felt all along. My rules as a blogger with a job remain the same. I won't report any news about ZD or Baseline until I see it posted at Romenesko or some other outlet. I will respect my colleagues and the privacy of our workplace. I won't write much about technology here, because that's the part of me that ZD pays for, and that includes ideas and information that I might not use myself but that I pass along to my colleagues for the good of the enterprise. I say clearly on my About Me page that this is a personal site. I will try not to be a complete jerk or freak when I can possibly help it. 11:59:31 AM    comment []

Microsoft gets weblogs (continued). Robert Scoble: "We're giving our developers open access to a very recent build of Longhorn. Just days old at this point. And we want you to hate it. Openly. On your weblog. Tell us what's wrong with it. What can be improved about it." 11:37:02 AM    comment []

I can't go into too much detail yet about what I saw at Dean HQ, because somebody is paying me to tell that story for them. But I will say this: it is not a campaign that discovered the Internet and decided to use it, or tacked a Web strategy on to a conventional plan. It is a campaign built around the Net from the start, and in some ways modeled on it. That's part of the reason it's working so well. 8:32:45 AM    comment []

John Edwards: "I may talk about my own children too much in these blogs but I think of them all the time when I’m on the road."   We're so used to seeing the TV versions of the candidates, hair perfect and sleeves carefully rolled, that it's easy to forget the personal toll that campaigning takes on them, and on their families.   A funny thing about weblogs is that despite their essential immediacy, they gain heft from repeated use, the accretion of detail and the emergence of themes over time. As the posts roll by, the Edwards blog is breaking new ground in humanizing the candidate and his family. 8:27:22 AM    comment []

Eric Muller makes the case that the Rumsfield memo was released, not leaked. Glenn Reynolds disagrees. I think Muller makes a credible argument.   * * *   IsThatLegal also opines on the imposition of tolls on North Carolina's stretch of I-95, and the related topic of using time-stamped toll tickets to figure out who's been speeding, then fining drivers who arrive too quickly at the next tollboth. Hmm. I don't like the precedent of a toll road in my fair state, although the idea of nicking a few bucks from the snowbirds headed to Florida is certainly appealing. As for time-stamp tix, that's OK as long as they raise the speed limit to 80. 8:14:45 AM    comment []