In a massive public relations own-goal, Romano Prodi’s centre-left government in Italy has preliminarily approved a compulsory registration system for any web site involving “editorial activity”.

And it definitely, definitely, definitely doesn’t have anything to do with silencing comedian, blogger and general thorn in the Italian establishment’s side, Beppe Grillo (Wikipedia article).

Definitely not.

Since the story broke, the article in question has been watered down to presumptively exclude ‘personal’ sites, but the discretion to make that distinction remains with the ministry implementing the law, rather than the courts.

Thanks to Maureen Lister for the Times Online article. I expect that she’ll cover the story at some point on her blog too. Maureen makes an excellent point about Grillo in an unrelated post:

Grillo is successful first of all because he is a brilliant comedian, secondly because he comes up with a lot of information (rather than bla-bla opinions) and thirdly because he uses webtools intelligently, something that hardly anyone in the media has bothered to mention.Of course blogs, used by averagely intelligent people, are a serious threat to traditional media, (and therefore to traditional politics) and have the power to undermine the present RAI-Mediaset duopoly.   

More coverage:Beppe Grillo – original postBeppe Grillo – updateSlashdot coverageTimes online articleTimes online updated articleBoingBoing coverage

Cheers all.

Why I’m doing this:

I have a Livejournal and have done since I was 16. However, I have found I have wanted to broadcast my opinions further than my Livejournal friends list and to other friends who do not have access to Livejournal.

Does this mean I have a manifesto?

(Via Laura – Woman with an Opinion).

Ahem.

I realised last night that the hellish import procedure I went through to get my posts out of the old Blogsome site was to some extent in vain.

It turns out that the XSL stylesheet I used to turn the Blogsome Atom feed into RSS 2.0 chose the summary field and not the description field for each item to use as the RSS description.

The practical results of which is that all of my imported posts were truncated to about 300 characters, and links and images were stripped out.

I’m going through all of them gradually putting the needful back in.

Arr.

Found on Blogshares (currently down after a DB Crash)

(Via Sen No Sen.)

Scan forward to 1m 55s, and you’ll hear Dave’s… rendition of ‘Dixie’ – him ‘singing’ with a MIDI file (played through a terrible software synth)…

On today’s podcast I ponder…:
On today’s podcast I ponder the possibilities for tomorrow’s broadcast podcast for KYOU-AM in San Francisco. More singing this time with the MIDI of Dixie. You’ll have to wade through it to get to the talk. Also includes philosophy from Ed Cone and Rogers Cadenhead.

(Via Scripting News.)

Winer also posted an expletive-laden entry criticising Adam Curry’s claims to have invented Podcasting:

I winced a half-dozen times reading this interview with Adam Curry. He didn’t invent podcasting, he didn’t figure out that RSS would be a good transport. And he didn’t write the first iPodder. Here’s what Adam actually did do. He figured out the last yard was important and worked tirelessly to get people to listen to him. I was the only one who did, and I turned that idea into RSS with enclosures, and wrote the first iPodder, in 2001, three years before Adam claims to have done all this stuff. I never denied him credit for his role in this work, quite the opposite, I praised him every way I could for his insight. I also did regular podcasts for a couple of months before he started. He was listening to them, calling me all the time, ecstatic at how I was reinventing radio. There are a couple of ideas in Daily Source Code that didn’t come from me, and for that Adam deserves full credit and our thanks. But these lies have gone on and on, he just doesn’t stop.

He then threatens to:

kick him in the ass, and then look him in the eye and say “Shouldn’t have lied so much, dickhead.”

Someone has not taken all of zee pills zis morning, no?

As part of my job I have been looking into some of these ideas for possible use for student/faculty communication. The current choice is between an extended blog environment, a large set of Wikis and/or a large and (apparently) clever email system including group-ware functions. Although I don’t have the technical skills to implement much of it, a sort of hybrid Wiki and blog server, with some sort of automatic clustering/editorial technology to generate a digest of posts and discrete topics, is something that I find a really nice idea. Maybe something like Google News, but for individual communities or rough topic areas, and the blog elements added on. It would give some level of editorial control, like a multi-user blog, but would be as extensible and powerful as a Wiki, and with automatic ‘landing page’ generation for each search/topic/department.

If anyone knows of something like this which already exists please contact me.

Where the Hell is Matt?: “Man dances his way around the world [wmv - 36MB] getting jiggy on a mountaintop, busting moves in an impenetrable forest, dodging Hanoi motorcyclists with his finely tuned moves, and, well, I wouldn’t want to give anymore away. It’s the feel good movie of the season.”

(Via MetaFilter.)