Julia once described her blog as a more detailed scrapbook of her life. I like to think of mine in the same light. Or perhaps, it is simply a jumbled stream of thoughts that will someday find some semblance of reason…

My blog is not a billboard that you must see while driving down a highway, or a building that is erected in the middle of a city, or even a chip planted in your head providing thoughts you might otherwise not have. It is a location on the internet that you are welcome to visit or to ignore. Given the nature of this relationship between me and my readers/non-readers, there is a very simple answer to a problem some may have. The problem is that you don’t like what I write about, or how I do it. The solution: You go away, I stay. There are a zillion sites on the internet, surely you can find one you like.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, ‘There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down.’ But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

The internet lets me buy just what I need when I remember I need it and get on with my life.

As an aside, it drives me crazy that people like Seth Godin and John Moore are pouring countless hours into creating priceless content as sharecroppers on domains they don’t own.

Unlike a Potter film or computer game, the authors of the Lexicon encyclopedia are not simply moving Potter to another medium. Their purpose, rather, is providing a reference guide with description and discussion, rather like a very long and detailed book review. Such guides have been around forever—centuries if you count the Bible, and more recently for complex works like the writings of Jorge Borges or The Lord of the Rings. As long as a guide does not copy the original work verbatim, it falls outside the category of “adaptation.” And that’s why it is largely unnecessary to discuss the more complex copyright doctrine of “fair use.” Rowling’s rights over the guide don’t exist to begin with, so we don’t need to go there.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but here goes: suing people is like going to war. If you’re going to go to war with tens of thousands of your customers every year, don’t be surprised if they start treating you like the enemy.

What do you call a program that gets loaded in surreptitiously and without your approval, has the potential to lock down your computer so you can’t get access to it, takes up significant system resources and promptly crashes upon running. Normally, I’d call it a virus, except for the last part … viruses are usually stable (and well written) once they start. On the other hand, it’s a perfect description of Internet Explorer 7.0.

Q: Do you think technology is changing that? That a good reporter will always find a venue because there are so many media outlets now?
A: No, but I do think it is kind of sad when everybody who owns a laptop thinks they’re a journalist and doesn’t understand the ethics. We do have to have some sense of what’s right and wrong in this job. Of how far we can go. We don’t make accusations without absolute proof. We’re not prosecutors. We don’t assume.
Q: So if there’s this amateur league of journalists out there, trying to do what you do…
A: It’s dangerous.

Funny, it had never occurred to me that Stephen A. Smith was a journalist. I guess he is, credentialed or otherwise. I just thought he was loud.