Tuesday, March 25, 2003

Two new Technorati services, Hot Links and Breaking News. Technorati, my favorite blog oriented engine just announced two new services. Breaking News and Hot Links. Breaking News shows articles from about 4000 "professional" news services that have been published in the last 12 hours that bloggers are talking about. (Take THAT Google News. ;-) ) Hot links shows links that bloggers are talking about in all categories in the past 12 hours in chronological order so you can see what is hot NOW. Very cool. [Joi Ito's Web] 11:33:19 PM

News From the Front Burner - Technology and Entertainment News from Mediaburn.net 10:42:40 PM

Tuesday, March 25, 2003 8:17 AM. OUR MAN IN BAGHDAD Has earned his own page on the BBC website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2881491.stm The idea of Salam Pax as Tokyo Rose is an interesting one, though not because I think he's an Iraqi ruse. Rather because the people who immediately suspect he is often seem to have been previously unfamiliar with the concept of weblogging. One of those techno-cultural divides. Myself, I think that if Iraqi intelligence were capable of cross-cultural emulation at the level required to spoof the likes of a Salam Pax, they'd be about as good as it gets. Their reputation in the international community of intelligence-watchers, however, is not that. In fact distinctly the opposite. I doubt that simple totalitarian dictatorships often mount intelligence operations manifesting great imagination and creativity. Probably because most of the local creatives are already dead, or pretending to be stupid. More complex states generate intelligence burearocracies in which there are interstices for creatives. Mere ruthless cunning will get you somewhere, but I doubt it could produce as baroque a figure as a fake Salam Pax. Nonetheless, I'm quite convinced that intelligence organizations the world over have duly noted Salam Pax, and the potential usefulness of such a figure. Next time around, it'll be harder to make the call. [William Gibson] 12:30:19 PM