Paul Boutin

The paperwork isn’t dry yet, but Wired News just contracted me to write about Campaign 2004 from a well-reported Net point of view. Like the magazine that spawned it in 1996, Wired News has steadily drawn more and more readers by giving up on catering to hipsters in the southeastern corner of San Francisco. In fact, while I wasn’t looking, they boosted their readership to well over three million vistors a month over the past year, putting Wired News in the same ballpark as Slate and Salon (for comparison, Time magazine’s print circulation is about four million per issue). They’ve also moved their center of coverage from the tech trade / cypherpunk / geek chic of the week stuff to more general interest stories on the power and the perils of technology. I’m all for that. It’s not 1993 anymore, and it’ll be November 2004 real soon.

My blog buddy Buzz Bruggeman’s ActiveWords software must have demoed well at the DEMO 2004 show. It’s been praised in both the WaPo and the WSJ. Here’s an excerpt for non-subscribers:

To open Microsoft Word, for example, type “word” anywhere, in any Window. Then hit the F8 function key. Hey presto, Word launches. Open the invoices folder? Type “invoices,” hit F8 and off it goes. Your hands never leave the keyboard to grab the mouse, or scratch your head trying to remember what the Word icon looks like and which submenu it’s in.

In short, ActiveWords removes the machinery and graphics from your face. I’ve perennially had the problem of not being able to get Buzz any press, so I’m happy to offer some A-list newspaper links.

Bill O’Reilly: “This Gavin Newsom guy, like him or not, is pretty gutsy. But Newsom has made a calculation that few will stand up to him, and he’s absolutely right. At this point it’s me against him.”

Don’t hit the back button yet! Usually when a blogger mentions copyright, you know what’s coming: “I can rip anything I want, and anyone who says that’s wrong is a jerk.” For a change of pace, Lawrence Lessig has a good story this morning about how copyright law and its current interpretation in the courts makes it hard for copyright holders not to keep their work, but to give it away:

Ron Suskind wanted to make sure that the records supporting his book, The Price of Loyalty, were in the public domain so others could draw upon them to verify, or critique, his account of Paul OíNeillís time at Treasury. In principle, the documents should be in the public domain because they were government documents. But there would always be a way for someone to argue that, e.g., the digitization created a separate right, or special marks on the document created a special right, or whatever.