• Let us do something useful for you: Google DC Metro map. [Metamonkey via Unrequited Narcissism]
• AU students protest former president Ladner. Our current favorite superfluous perk? “His use of university security guards to fetch his morning newspapers.” [DCist]
• Stuff that’s filming around here. [GW Hatchet]
• Some lawmakers have blogs. Or, uhm “blog-like pages.” [WP]

With the debut of “Public Eye,” CBS joined the pajamahadeen today. It’s a blog. Or maybe it isn’t: Former Hotline editor Vaughn Ververs inaugurated it with a frank admission:

The questions, asked over and over again, in many ways still seem unanswered. What is it? Why is it a blog? How often are you going to update it? What are you going to write about? How is this thing going to work? MORE »

There are many wonderful things about Jessica Cutler’s motion to dismiss Robert Steinbuch’s invasion of privacy suit, chief among them the contention that because Cutler only gave the URL of the blog to three friends, she didn’t mean for the blog to be public. In fact, the whole opening anecdote of the motion reads like a “Bridgette-Jones-tries-to-program-the-VCR” set piece:

Cutler visited the “Basic Settings” area of Blogger. There, Cutler entered a “Description” of the Blog, which Cutler simply defined to be the same as the “Blog title” — “Washingtonienne” (Ex. 1 [Cutler Decl. ¶ 5]). Next, the “Basic Settings” area asked Cutler whether she wanted to “Add your Blog to our listings?” Answering “yes” here would have displayed the Blog’s URL on Blogger’s public Internet site, thus advertising its existence to the world of cyberspace. Importantly, Cutler answered this question “no”! She did that in an effort to limit access to the Blog only to those close personal friends (and one friend of one of those friends) with whom she wanted to share the contents of the Blog. Cutler could not find in the “Basic Settings” area or any other area of Blogger the option of making a blog password protected. And thus, by not adding the Blog to Blogger’s listings, Cutler took all opportunities Blogger offered to restrict access to the Blog to a few individuals.

Except, of course, the whole putting-it-on-the-internet thing. MORE »

The Washington Post reports on the erratic career of Mayor Tony Williams, blogger. The mayor’s blog has been largely dormant since he kicked it off on August 15, with an enthralling post called “Getting Started: What Button Do I Push?” Some 44 DC residents have posted comments to the blog, but his honor didn’t follow up with another entry till this Monday. MORE »

• Attack of the 50-foot blogswarm. [Philly.com]
• Joel Achenbach, natural born blogger: “As an artist, my normal impulse is to write things that people don’t care about and, ideally, can’t even understand.” Also, the blog is a harsh mistress: “I am constantly having to post something new just to make the blog interested in me again.” [WP]
• HuffPo is like cable television for those too lazy to appear on cable television: “a cyber Town Car service for liberals who can’t be bothered to blog on their own, and only blog for Arianna because she’s so damn charming and persistent.” [AdAge]
• Blogs good for reaching obsessive shut-ins. [NYT]

So maybe the young John Roberts made indelicate jokes about career women. In 1983, as an aide to Ronald Reagan’s attorney general William French Smith, he took an influential stand on an issue near and dear to the blogger’s heart: Free White House access for semi-employed freaks playing at being reporters. The Gipper’s press secretary Larry Speakes was feeling beseiged with press pass requests from ” ‘fringe’ news organizations and hit upon a plan to charge White House correspondents for the passes. Roberts fired off a memo declaring it a “terrible idea” noting that it was both hostile to the First Amendment and distinctly impolitic: MORE »

No More Mister Nice Blog calls out Washington Times columnist John McCaslin for retailing an anecdote, sans attribution and with lightly mussed word changes, from a conservative blog Libertas. The column concerns an incident at a film-festival screening of the Ronald Reagan vehicle The Killers, in which the audience burst out into spontaneous applause when Reagan’s character was shot and killed. One can cluck–oh, can one cluck–about journalistic ethics and whatnot, but we sort of take this as a positive sign: Clearly the professionally indignant conservative pundits are running out of things to be operatically outraged about if they’re lifting ideas from blog entries about film revivals. What’s next, after all? Complaints that Harry Reid’s manner is curt, or that Ted Kennedy is red-complexioned and bulbous? That the peanut bags you get on airlines are hard to open? MORE »

Tom Curry at MSNBC marvels at the new political power wielded by “bloggers”–people who possess the magic ability to conjure words from computer keyboards. Curry revisits the unexpectedly strong run that Gulf War vet Paul Hackett mounted in the recent Ohio contest to replace Bush trade representative Rob Portman in Portman’s heavily Republican district. Bloggers such as Bob Brigham of Swingstateproject.com–whose avowed mission is to recruit Democratic candidates to run for all 435 House seats in 2006–managed to gin up enough interest in Hackett’s campaign to get him within 4,000 votes of knocking off GOP favorite Jean Schmidt. This leads Curry to speculate:

The work of such bloggers as Bob Brigham . . . points toward a day when the traditional campaign — tailored by Washington-based consultants, centered on 30-second TV ads, with fund-raising driven by Washington-based party committees — might become obsolete.

But then again? Nah, not so much. It turns out campaigns require, you know, knowledge and shit:

To win the open seat in Iowa’s first congressional district next year, for example, one needs to know very place-specific details: Which are the reliably Democratic precincts in the city of Waterloo? How much will the United Auto Workers spend on get-out-the-vote efforts? When would be the right time to run the candidate’s 30-second radio ad in the Davenport market?

Whereas, Curry gently observes, Brigham is a “self-employed communications consultant” based in San Francisco. On the other hand, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has to use euphemisms to make its ass-fucking jokes. In your face, old information paradigm! — HOLLY MARTINS MORE »

An op-ed in the WP today looks at the legal merits of Robert Steinbuch’s publicity stunt law suit against Jessica Culter (a.k.a. “The Washingtonienne”). There’s apparently merit to the case, but only if you use doc’s time machine to find a court in the previous century. Bemoaning how everyone is all concerned about free speech these days, the op-editor (one Andrew J. McClurg) sniffles that “Today’s technology grants any person — no matter how selfish, irresponsible or malicious — the power to invade privacy globally, at almost no cost.” And you thought the internet was only good for porn! Speaking of, McClurg goes on to warn that today’s number one safe-sex query shouldn’t be “Do you have a condom?” but “Do you have a computer?” MORE »

Not only has Judy Miller gone to jail to defend First Amendment rights of reporters, but in a bitter irony, free speech now constitutes one of her principal punishments. Five weeks of confinement have left her suffering the effects of blogosphere withdrawal. Here’s Lucy A. Dalglish of the Reporters Committee on the Freedom of the Press describing a recent Miller visiting day to Newsday’s James T. Madore: MORE »

• Inside the Beltway: Barney Frank proposes scheduling evacuations of the Hill to speed up Republicans’ wrangling. . . State Department bans bloggers from attending briefings. [WT]
• Rush & Molloy: Cleland: “Young men and women are dying and being blown up at the very moment the American people are going the other way.” [NYDN]