Over at HuffingtonPost, Howard Schweber has the best analysis of Obama’s ad strategy–or lack thereof.

I’m wondering if there’s anything I can do to get the campaign to start plagiarizing from BraveNewFilms ASAP. Robert Greenwald’s studio, which is posting its McCain criticisms at TheRealMcCain.com, is a national treasure.

RealNetworks’ recent decision to sell DVD ripping software, RealDVD, has the public asking: “Why not rip DVDs like CDs?”

Doing a Google News search today for the software, I got over 200 hits, many from decidedly mainstream sources like USAToday and USNews. Those of us who pride ourselves on some modicum of tech savvy have long known that this was possible, but RealDVD has enough financial backing, perceived legitimacy, and user friendliness that it may reshape how many people watch movies.

The next big question is when the motion picture industry will send out their lawyers, waving the DMCA’s Section 1201 in RealNetworks’ faces. While it is probably the best publicized program to do so, RealDVD is just one of many brave commercial programs trotting out onto this legal minefield. From the EFF DeepLinks blog:

Real has chosen to follow in Kaleidescape’s footsteps. Apparently, it is not alone — CEPro has an informative article summarizing all the DVD media server solutions for the home theater market that were announced at the recent CEDIA conference. Looks like Hollywood’s iron-fisted grip of DVDs is slipping a little every day.

Ironically, I’ve been falling behind on these developments as I focus on my dissertation on DRM politics. I’d assumed that the free programs, like HandBrake and MacTheRipper, were still filling this vacuum. It’s good to catch up, and even better to hear that somebody’s fighting and winning against the DVD-CCA.

RealNetworks has made a splash of late with their RealDVD software. Other small-scale commercial programs have come and gone; most memorably among them was 321 Studios‘ DVD X Copy. Under the pressure of Hollywood’s massive legal onslaught, 321 folded up shop.

RealNetworks may not fold over so easily. They are a much more substantial company, and the studios are more likely to negotiate something mutually acceptable.

I’m not sure which side is helped more by viral internet politics, but the email circulation of partisan political discourse is certainly becoming a more important part of the campaign.

Three bits I’ve encountered suggest some of the possibilities.

First, consider the Anne Kilkenny letter. Written by an actual Wasilla resident, it documents all the local’s concerns about Palin’s time as Mayor and Governor. Penned just last weekend, it’s already exploded as a much-forwarded email.

Next, the cliche example is YouTube, but consider it as a vehicle for sharing less-visible public appearances by candidates. This rally speech excerpt by Joe Biden, “The Silence is Deafening,” went up on Friday and has already been viewed almost 80,000 times and earned over 1,400 reviews averaging 5 stars. It likely would have been lost in the weekend news cycle to many, if not most, of these viewers, myself included. Emailed links to the video on YouTube kept it alive.

Finally, consider the Daily Show. This week, they have been fiercely criticizing the Republicans during their convention. Even for those who didn’t watch the first time around, the show’s encyclopedic video library allows the sharing of these gems:

Sarah Palin–Vet This! (Start about 5 min in. Best summary of the Giuliani and Palin speeches starts just before the 8 min mark.)

John McCain, Reformed Maverick (Narrated by Ian McShane)

John McCain’s Big Acceptance Speech

I don’t doubt that the right also has a hall of fame of viral emails and videos that are also mobilizing their base. While I’m not going to dig up the source to link to, I’m pretty sure viral internet video is a phenomenon that has much greater resonance among the young–that age and online video consumption are inversely and strongly related.

While the impact may not be necessary or sufficient, I think the Obama/Biden ticket stands to accrue a unique benefit from the widespread adoption of home broadband. This is especially true since young people are by and large sold on Obama but may still need to be mobilized to vote. If every few days, a different friend is passing along a relevant video, young people may be more likely to register and vote than in previous elections.

As a debate champion who spent 12 years in the activity, I am utterly appalled at the repugnant, personal attacks that Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin leveled at Obama and Biden tonight. I would be shocked to see such juvenile antics from a high school freshman.

If I tried to document every ad hominem blow, every sleight-of-hand straw-man attack on policy issues, and every bit of shallow mockery of Obama’s life of service, it would take me all night. Here are a few bits from what I see as particularly low: Read more »

There are already thousands of blog posts about the revelation that Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant. This post is not just another addition to the pile; rather, I think the story has a couple lessons about online political communication.

First, the (insert adjective) blogosphere has become a magic talisman in discussions of current affairs; it is whatever a speaker wants it to be. Second, this only accelerates the right’s remarkable ability to shoot the messenger.

As strongly pressed by the Obama team (Obama to media: Back off!), there is little political hay to be made over Bristol’s pregnancy. The Palin pick gives Dems plenty of ammo without touching this story. Even beyond her obvious inexperience, Palin carries very many serious liabilities, and we’re likely still learning more. Her family’s baby count isn’t a wise target. At best, it’s an opportunity to talk about sex ed policy, a position on which Palin is far out of the mainstream.

The crazy part of this story centers on the allegation (which I am not making) that Gov. Sarah Palin faked her fifth pregnancy to cover for Bristol–that the Palins’ youngest son, Trig, is actually their grandson. No political figure or news outlet of any weight will touch this allegation except to treat it as an internet rumor.

While most official news sources credit anonymous bloggers (even Huff Post does it) for their source on this allegation, it is most specifically attributed to dedicated DailyKos diarists–users who do not speak for the site. One user in particular stoked the flames with pictures and details; the original post was deleted in the last few hours in an obvious exercise of the site’s policy against poorly-sourced allegations of conspiracy and the like. Another user’s conspiratorial entry remains up for now.

The surface-level analysis would lead us to view this as an instance of one person getting attention in a way that was just not possible in the offline world. But why did it gain traction?

The few who chimed in on Kos and elsewhere would have remained on the fringe had the right not seized the opportunity to blame “liberal bloggers” and strongly insinuate that the Obama camp had a hand in it. Frankly, this is a crap allegation. Real lefty bloggers have plenty to say about Palin without picking on her daughter. In fact, here’s a mini linkfest summarizing the collective verdict of the actual, established liberal blogosphere:

Lee Stranahan, @ Huff Post: Palin ‘Definitely Pregnant’ With Trig

RJ Eskow, @ Huff: ‘Hey, Pundits, Leave Them Kids Alone‘

Kos: ‘I don’t think the evidence is there to claim Trig is Bristol’s son‘ (headline: ‘So Much For Abstinence-Only Education’, a more-or-less legit policy swipe at Gov. Palin)

Faiz @ ThinkProgress: basic rehash of pregnant daughter story, gratuitous swipes on reproductive policy issues

Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic is the most legitimate source I could find even discussing the allegation as something worth rebutting, and he assumed it was false, urging Palin to release the medical records. “And then we can move on.”

For conservatives in this story, the liberal blogosphere serves as a magical uber-enemy: nameless, faceless, with untold power to spread lies to gullible swing voters. This talismanic quality is often attributed to the blogosphere, both in negative and positive terms. Liberals (Joe Trippi) and conservatives (Hugh Hewitt) alike have long sold partisan books promising that the internet will set “our side” free.

The truth about the internet is subtle, complex, and evolving. Things are different by a nontrivial yet nonrevolutionary degree. We could attribute any and every rumor to the internet, but until the mainstream media picks it up, it still doesn’t exist for most people on most days. I learned of the Palin story from NPR’s All Things Considered, and I study internet politics. In short, concerns about this rumor’s internet life were more theatrical than genuine.

One important difference that rarely gets described in adequate detail is the degree to which the internet allows collaborative, distributed production of knowledge and opinion. Many sources offline and on (including Drudge) explicitly credited DailyKos with the conspiracy theories expressed by unauthorized Kos diarists; this is either a convenient smear (again, Drudge) or a sign of real ignorance. A Kos diarist has almost as much free rein as a Blogger user; we don’t blame Google for the junk they host, but once a blogger hosts a blogging service, people get confused or deliberately muddy the issue.

Both search engines and browsing habits reward sites for getting inlinks. This leads to swarming. If there’s a noteworthy story, the internet collectively decides it is noteworthy by saying, literally, “Go read this.” This can also have the occasional effect of amplifying the visibility of garbage. (Think “girls” and “cup”.) With enough inlinks or the right kind of inlink, the linked-to site gains an authority it did not previously have; if this isn’t the lucky break for somebody who actually produces quality material, that visibility will wane over time.

This all fits quite well with the shoot-the-messenger trick that the right does very well. Whenever one is facing news that can be cast in a bad light, it can sometimes work very well to go on the offensive and blame those who would make hay of such news. Karl Rove should give PhD’s in this strategy.

If nobody’s talking about it because the story hasn’t yet broken, or if you need a newsworthy hook to bring the matter up on your terms, there’s no reason you can’t create the ideal media enemy. Rove did so with Bush’s cocaine bust and, possibly, with the forged Bush military documents leaked to CBS.

Of course, I have no specific evidence to support what I am implying here about the Palin conspiracy theory, but it was awfully convenient that the best-known liberal blog that allows end users to create their own posts just happened to have an incredibly well-documented post on the issue.

I can’t even take credit for this idea; many comments on the original post noted the similarities to earlier Rove tricks (including a joke about typeface) before the offending post was removed. The user had just one post prior to the story breaking out, but the removed post had many more photos and links than one would expect from a total noob.

Before you start making me a tin foil hat (follow the link above; this really has become a pattern), note at least one more piece of pertinent data: Palin’s staff removed an official state website containing a number of family pictures, replacing the site with a raw HTML page that reads as follows:

Object not found!

The requested URL was not found on this server. The link on the referring page seems to be wrong or outdated. Please inform the author of that page about the error.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.

Error 404

gov.state.ak.us
Tue Sep 2 00:29:26 2008
Apache/2.0.55 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.1.2 mod_ssl/2.0.55 OpenSSL/0.9.8a

Screencap of Sarah Palin photos site

Frankly, this is all just a little too convenient. A total noob at a top liberal blog adds to an infinite pile of diary entries, important people in the other camp notice and get offended, and the entry gets lots of link love–including links from Drudge and the official site of the public official who’s been implicated.

The story just happens to give the public official the perfect opportunity to take a swipe at the other team without actually naming names, all while embarrassing a hated blogger. And when it comes out, it provides an awesome vehicle to dwarf the story-ness of the actual, embarrassing story, making the news story about the messenger rather than the political figure at the center of the message.

If this truly did fall into Palin’s lap, she and her team made Mt. Everest out of a molehill. But excuse me if I’m suspicious of the nameless Kos diarist’s sincerity.

Thankfully, those who are actually important members of the liberal blogosphere did not bite. This could’ve been much worse.

UPDATE: Here’s a better link explaining how the 2004 CBS fiasco went down.

Also, I was somewhat relieved to talk to Tina this morning and get her impression of how the major media outlets are representing this. For those whose media world doesn’t include FReepers or Kos diarists, apparently the story is about how sloppy McCain was to pick Palin without a thorough vetting.

The Times, for instance, has a front page article quoting political figures on and off the record who claim that the vetting was shallow to nonexistent. Here’s my favorite quote:

Representative Gail Phillips, a Republican and former speaker of the State House, said the widespread surprise in Alaska when Ms. Palin was named to the ticket made her wonder how intensively the McCain campaign had vetted her.

“I started calling around and asking, and I have not been able to find one person that was called,” Ms. Phillips said. “I called 30 to 40 people, political leaders, business leaders, community leaders. Not one of them had heard. Alaska is a very small community, we know people all over, but I haven’t found anybody who was asked anything.”

Alaska has a small population and a microscopic group of politically connected folks. If a Republican former House speaker will go on the record that she doesn’t know anybody who got asked, it’s because there was very little if any real vetting.

Incidentally, that’s the second most emailed article right now. Number 1 is a piece by Maureen Dowd mocking the Palin pick as something that would strain credulity in a movie, let alone real life.

Also, ABC notes that the bipartisan state Senate committee investigating the Monegan firing was scheduled to release a final report on October 31. The Democratic state senator in charge of the investigation, Hollis French, alleges that McCain’s team is trying to stall this process to move the release date past the election.

French also echoes Phillips’ take, saying that nobody on the committee was contacted by the McCain team during the vetting process. The Alaska Daily News has a veritable roll-call of everyone who should have been contacted but was not. Neighbors, the recently-fired Walt Monegan, and a bipartisan roll-call of legislators all attest that nobody asked them anything.

I’m not sure McCain will back down, but this pick has at least resurrected the ghost of Tom Eagleton.

I suppose that’s enough partisanship for now…

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, I can’t resist. Check out the TPM post, Palin: A Scandal We Can Believe In!, complete with a YouTube clip of the local CBS affiliate’s coverage of the scandal.

This whole thing is absolutely crazy.

Since I’m often more than happy to diss Microsoft products for being poorly designed, buggy, and otherwise painful to use, I thought it only fair to admit it: judging by NBC’s implementation, the Silverlight web plugin is pretty good.

Like everyone, this is now on my radar because of the Olympics. I finally tried it tonight because it doesn’t run on PPC Macs, and I only got my new MacBook (thanks, Hunter College!) on Tuesday. I’m still a big enough geek that the first major installs were all work related–Office, SPSS, and EndNote. EndNote X1 is MUCH better than 7 but still not great; if paying myself, I would buy Sente–and I still might–but Hunter has a site license for EndNote. But I digress…

Anyway, I’ve had a good day with MS products. The Olympics online look really good. The controls actually work (except during commercials). Neat way to experience the Olympics highlights. Not that it compares to TiVo, which we got just in time to save the (amazing) opening ceremonies. But for a web plugin, Silverlight is damned good.

NBC also invested quite substantially in a high-quality end user experience. The quality of the streaming video really is remarkable–still web video, but getting closer to TV, to say the least. For tonight, at least, I’ve enjoyed the ride toward Zittrain’s Future of the Internet.

To gain an appreciation of how good it looks, check out some of the archival footage from previous olympics. Even compared to 2004, the HD video for this year’s footage looks remarkably better. Even compared to this year’s commercials, it looks really good. The commercials look like they were re-encoded from an analog stream in comparison.

My one complaint is that NBC makes you enter a ZIP code and cable provider in order to honor their (least-exclusive-arrangement-ever) deals with most cable providers not to eat too much of their audience. If your provider/ZIP combination isn’t on their list, you have to Google around to figure out who is. But then, you can just lie, and they don’t care. (Not that I learned this because I live in a building that includes cable and broadband service provided by a niche company… I would never lie to a web interface.) Pretty silly if you ask me.

Speaking of technological satisfaction: Hunter’s IT department is amazing. Super efficient, friendly, and doing it all with what surely must be a small budget relative to the size of the student and faculty population they serve.

On their website today, the Denver post ran an ordinary story about the Democratic National Convention, but inexplicably paired it with a picture of rap star Flava Flav.

Denver Post thinks Flava Flav represents Dems

Um… What the hell is this? Flav wasn’t mentioned in the story, and he’s hardly a typical big-money political donor.

Unless this is some sort of mistake, I find this facially offensive. Stories about Flav run in the Spotlight section next to quips about Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears; at best this pairing is the same basic depiction in that detestable McCain ad–that Obama isn’t to be taken seriously, that he’s more a media darling than world leader–and apropos of nothing.

If this isn’t a mistake, this visual rhetoric has insidious racial overtones. How would the McCain camp feel if a newspaper randomly paired an article about his coronation with an unexplained picture of a white comedian known for rubbing minorities the wrong way? How about if, as with Flav, the comedian had once been arrested for possession of 2 POUNDS of marijuana? (Even this hypothetical doesn’t capture the offensiveness of randomly associating 2 unaffiliated people from an historically marginalized group, as if to imply that they really are all the same after all.)

Go to FlavaFlav.net, and then try to tell me what the Post implies by this picture. Even better, look around online at the kind of company the Post is in for associating these two gentlemen.

Have we reached the point in the campaign that a major regional newspaper (the Post is the standard bearer among all papers between LA and Chicago) can just slap a random picture of any famous black man next to any story about Obama? Even if the other man is most famous for an idiosyncratic fashion statement, and his fame of late has come as a reality TV star?

I dearly hope this was a mistake–and if so, it was a mighty sloppy one.

I’d just sat down to pound out a post describing Nas’ awesome appearance on the Colbert Report, but Crooks and Liars saved me the trouble. Let’s just say the hip hopper disses the media in general and Fox specifically.

Follow the link for full lyrics, which are on-point. It was the first time I’d heard it, and I was really impressed. Not only is it a great song, Nas’ performance was sharp. He flows so clearly that I could understand him perfectly. This despite the medium–taped “live” TV on a studio stage makes most bands sound terrible (SNL, anyone?)–and the fact that I had the volume turned way down.

P.S. I saw this in the first run last night and again in the rerun ending just now. As if to make the point even clearer for myself just now, I then flipped through the channels briefly, stopping on CNN Headline News long enough to see Glenn Beck and two guests taking shamelessly personal, juvenile shots at Obama. All the while decrying “the mainstream media.” (Uh, Glenn, you’re on CNN.)

As you may have noticed, we at ShoutingLoudly generally don’t discuss our personal lives in our posts, major developments excepted. Well, this is a major developments kind of summer for me, so here are some details.

1. I got a tenure-track job in the Hunter College Department of Film and Media Studies. This has meant getting ready to move to New York, teach courses in the fall, set up my new offices, etc. I’m excited to be moving in with two good friends of mine whom I’ve known for a couple years.

2. I’m also getting ready to move to Somerville, MA, right next to Cambridge. As I mentioned earlier, Tina got a 2 year postdoc at Harvard’s Grad School of Ed.

For a number of reasons, including the fact that the rent prices are much more reasonable there (still high, just not NYC), which means we can afford a 2 bedroom, most of our stuff is going to Mass. (As a not-quite-practicing Catholic, I’ve gotten a small giggle out of that abbreviation as I’ve been packing. “Bill, Mass., Philosophy Books.” I keep picturing my boxes of philosophy books and small electronics standing, kneeling, and saying the Our Father, while a priest with Mayor Quimby’s accent discusses the joys of salvation. Not what David Hume had in mind for his treatises, I’m sure.)

So between Tina and I, we’re getting ready to move into four new abodes–2 apartments, and 2 offices, with about 250 miles separating them. Sadly, this means we’ll generally only see each other on weekends, but happily, I have zero on-campus obligations on Fridays–and a lot of her research is on New York. So we’ll be able to extend the weekends in both directions.

3. My family came to visit for 11 days in June. They’d never been to NYC before, and they loved it. If I dare say so, Tina and I even turned out to be decent tour guides. (After 2 years living in Newark within a 10 minute walk to the train station–and almost all of it without a car–we’ve gone into the city almost every week, and I usually go more than once. I think I know more about New York City than I ever learned about Philly or Newark; it’s crazy what a difference comprehensive public transit makes.)

We loved having them visit. We did lots of the touristy things we’d never do on our own, like visiting the Statue of Liberty (nice, but roughly what you’d expect) and Ellis Island (waaay better than we expected). While they were here, my mom bought me a Nintendo Wii on a whim. I LOVE it. A little too much, actually. (I’ve already made “Pro” on golf and bowled a 233.) It had to be one of the first things I packed so that I would actually get other packing done.

4. I’m still writing my dissertation. It’s going reasonably well, actually, and I still expect to defend this summer, committee’s schedules pending. All the same, I reeeeally wish I was done and could focus on moving and getting ready for the fall. I’m anxious about stopping, moving all my books and a desk to NYC, and finishing there. Writing in a sparsely populated apartment is no big deal, but I need to get the packing and moving done properly. If something goes in the wrong pile, it’ll wind up either in Boston or some Hunter Film and Media Studies storage room.

But really, I can’t complain–okay, I can and did, but it’s wallowing in my own success. Many quality ABDs and recent PhDs are scraping together adjunct work as we speak. My job isn’t even contingent on finishing by the fall. I still expect to defend this summer, but Penn’s summer graduation deadline requires one to hand in a defended, proofread, properly formatted dissertation by August 8, which I will almost certainly not do.

In any case, that’s my life right now. Thanks for caring enough to read. If you know me (even if you just met me once at a conference 3 years ago) and want to say hi because you’ll be in Boston or New York, you can write using Bill D Herman at gee male dawt kom.

The folks at American University have found another group of folks who need some clarity around copyright law and fair use, producing a “best practices” guide for online video producers.

This is yet another in a series of projects designed to empower specific kinds of content creators to make meaningful use of the right to make fair use of copyrighted works. Earlier groups that have benefited from this ongoing project include documentary filmmakers and media literacy educators.

This best practices movement is the work of dozens of high-quality people, but it has been led by Peter Jaszi (AU Law Professor and Director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic) and Patricia Aufderheide (AU Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Social Media).

Thanks to Public Knowledge for the link.