Dowbrigade

A coastal Maine blogger who criticized the state’s tourism
office has been hit with a lawsuit seeking potentially more than $1 million
in damages for allegedly making false statements and posting on his website,
Maine Web Report, images from proposed tourism advertisements a New York
agency prepared for Maine officials.

The case raises the issue of how free speech protection will be applied
in the proliferating world of weblogs, or blogs, and underscores the growing
influence of bloggers on business and government.

”It’s a reflection of the extent to which businesses are
taking critiques from the blogosphere very seriously," said John
G. Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman
Center for Internet & Society
at Harvard Law School. ”Bloggers have gained enormous power."

Warren Kremer Paino Advertising LLC, an agency hired by the Maine Department
of Tourism, filed suit in US District Court in Maine last week, alleging
the blogger, Lance Dutson of Searsmont, Maine, outside Camden, violated
the agency’s copyright and defamed the agency in blog entries self-published
at www.mainewebreport.com.

from the Boston Globe

Maine Web Report

John Palfry blog

This
is the image, pulled from the Maine Department of Economic and
Community Development website, that Dutson re-published. It features
a phone sex number instead of the real number to call for Maine tourism
information.
No
wonder the
state is embarassed.

Camcorder
accessory manufacturer Bella has just announced a new device that will
let you toss those MiniDV cassettes straight out of your bag and replace
them with your iPod or nearly any other USB 2.0-compliant storage system.
The Catapult, as it’s known, is an paperback-sized digital encoder
that plugs into any standard or HD camcorder with a FireWire port and
processes the video as you’re recording, eliminating the need to convert
your footage later on.

from the Engadget

This is something we have been fantasizing
about since
we got the idea of attaching a tiny camera and microphone to our glasses
and recording our whole life in real time. Why not, we wondered, capture
the resulting video directly to the 30 gig hard-drive we habitually carried
around on our person – our iPod?

Impossible, we were informed by helpful
commenters, for
a number of reasons, the most convincing of which was that iPod hard-drives
only rotate at 5400 rps, which is not fast enough to capture digital
video in real time.

Perhaps the Catapult solves this problem by "encoding" the
signal in a format that can be smoothly recorded at 5400, but we would
have to see it in action to believe it. Plus, we still haven’t gotten
over our deep disillusionment that our
LAST iPod only lasted 13 months
before it turned into a $300 doorstop.

At any rate, this whole mobile recording bottleneck is
only a temporary workaround until we have wireless mobile feeds directly
from glasses cams on people with MUCH more interesting lives than the
Dowbrigade,  onto the Net, live and in color, up close and personal,
uncut and raw, each wired individual a permanent personal channel available
to subscribers or browsers, human nodes in the ultimate reality show.

thanks to Steve Garfield for the head’s up

Any
Scrabble aficionados will enjoy Brian
McGrory’s column in today’s Boston Globe. Note: the Dowbrigade
would be National Scrabble Champ if not for a congenital inability
to spell…

For kicks, he overturned seven random letters in front
of him — ”I S A T R N E" — and told me to add an eighth. I gave
him a ”G."

He casually proceeded to make ”ANGRIEST," ”RANGIEST," ”GANISTER," ”GANTRIES," ”INGRATES," and
”GRANITES."

I walked out that door realizing I never had a chance. Maybe somewhere
there’s a kindergarten Candy Land champion that I can take.

from the Boston Globe