If you’re going to write a panegyric to a failed court case (“Eight Years After Eldred”), at least have the intellectual integrity to admit that Larry Lessig blew that case in the U.S. Supreme Court. He had no trouble admitting that (eventually).

If losing the case was a loss to the advancement of copyright, let’s lay blame where it is deserved.

I of course appreciate it when a newspaper that invests a billion bucks into printing presses and glossy stock trumpets its new mobile Web site. The blog version of such trumpeting makes a smashing case for the Globe and Mail’s new mobile site. The actual mobile version of the same announcement raises a number of questions about its source code, which I posed to the trumpeter, Greg MacGregor:

I’m really not clear why your new mobile site can’t even bother to declare <doctype HTML> or its human language, or use real links (href="#" means nothing), or use an alt text that isn’t "img", or use the CSS cascade instead of malarkey like class="serif fontsmall menuitem gbb", or heading elements.

In short, how is your mobile site new and improved if it doesn’t really even have HTML?

My esteemed colleague should very much know better than to claim “[c]ritiquing is a force for productive good if it’s done to better a product, but not when it’s used only to point out the faults.” If your newspaper is trying to convince us its new mobile site is an improvement, please actually improve it.

Kooky fun fact! The Globe homepage lead us to believe that h1 h3 h4 h6 is a permissible heading sequence.

The Community Advisory Panel is an independent group of advisors that has spent the last months canvassing feedback from “the community” about Pride Toronto. I’ve attended two of the in-person consultations and have read a great deal of commentary online and in print. I have yet to encounter a point made during this process that was completely new to me. Here, however, I raise an issue that will probably be new to you: Ending separatism at Pride Toronto. [continue with: End separatism at Pride Toronto →]

Jennifer Egan’s episodic novel A Visit from the Goon Squad traverses the decades from the ’80s to the not-too-distant future. A vehicle she uses on that journey is, in fact, PowerPoint.

Ed Champion thinks it’s the stupidest fucking thing he’s ever seen and pointed me to some allegedly superior uses I didn’t bother to look up. Egan’s pacing and degree of exposition are exactly right and were obviously dictated by the medium itself, as the authoress effectively admits in a video hosted by a Microsoft bimbo (hitherto an unimaginable category).

Nonetheless, I have some objections to the presentation.

• Egan offers us a movie of her PowerPoint deck instead of just giving us the PowerPoint file. This strikes me as quite a bit worse than a PDF of a text-only MS Word document or a screenshot of a multilayer AutoCAD file. We need the native file with its native interface. (We especially need that file to stick it to open-source fanatics.)

• Even if you take high-resolution printing into account, the typography is too good. It’s only as good as typography can get in that medium, but too good it still is. I strongly suspect a designer has wrestled with these slides post-facto. (I also suspect it was created in PowerPoint for Mac, not Windows.) As with a “screenshot” of a Web site used in a print ad or on TV, the type is overprecise and unpixelated.

  Stated another way, Egan’s slides aren’t ugly enough to be real.

But in storytelling terms, it works shockingly well.

I wonder what’s next, then: A screencast that really works as a motion picture? We have one of those already, and it’s called La jetée.

Will Carson be laid out in Quark or in PageMaker?

Fox News (yes) reports, via a journalist’s blog:

One soldier showed me a Web site on his laptop where in December last year there were more than 340 male soldiers in Iraq actively seeking encounters and friendships while deployed. It was one of several established online sites gay soldiers use.

And what site would that be? It isn’t BigMuscle, despite the ease with which one may locate active U.S. servicemen there.

If the “world” of Boing Boing is not merely “wild” and “wacky” but “profitable,” why does your article on the subject never ever actually document the income, expenses, and profits of the site? In 2007, Frauenfelder admitted the site takes in a million a year just in ads. What are the current numbers? Were you forbidden from asking? too afraid to ask? Did your editors suppress that reporting?

(Cf. Cory Doctorow’s six-figure income.)

While you were in high dudgeon about Delicious maybe shutting down or getting sold, J.M. Snyder, the owner of a Rainbow Reviews, a site with a reputed 2,300 reviews of gay and lesbian books, plans to shut down that site and delete everything six months from now. The latter is not a guarantee, but what other interpretation can one glean from Snyder’s official statement? “Our last site update will be December 31. After that, the site will remain online with all reviews archived for at least six months.”

You lost your shit when Geocities got deleted from the Internet. What are you going to do about this?