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I’m from Santa Barbara, CA, and going back to a wedding last month for a high school friend, I dropped by the Paseo Nuevo shopping mall and saw that the parking cash collectors were gone. In their place, were electronic cash machines. My parents, in their mid-60s, commented that it was sad that machines were replacing people  everywhere and that sometimes these simple jobs needed to be left alone so that all people could find a job in these tough times.

I share this short story because I think it relates a lot to what is going on with the newspaper industry. People in menial, labor related jobs are being replaced, literally with computers and technology.  We’ve seen this in future of journalism without human reporters where  articles are now by computers, without human writing or editing! Check out:http://www.narrativescience.com/

See this article below from Forbes – none of it written by humans…. with Cited Author: Narrative Science. (not a person!)  Check out:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/narrativescience/2011/10/25/forbes-earnings-preview-hershey-company/2/

Which brings me to the point. Producing simple narratives, like merely reporting out facts and details doesn’t cut it anymore. Computers can now do this and replace humans. David Winer gets to the heart of the matter in his article, “The Reboot of Journalism.” When sources go direct, “it’s the thing the Internet does to all intermediaries, it disses them. It happened to travel agents, realtors, classified ads, allkinds of shopping, and it has happened to news too, ” Winer argues.

Yes, it’s happened to news. Obviously. I don’t consider the value of journalism to be merely reporting. We have tons of bloggers doing that now – where news is like reporting observations. I consider the value of it to be giving me context and unique analysis and synthesis that I don’t have time to do myself or have the access to piece together. Winer argues that the information through bloggers has gone “direct, wholesale, and real-time with their observations.” Dan Conover in his 2020 Vision piece talks about the corps of amateurs, bloggers, citizen journalists and “pajamas-clad rabble” that are doing much of the journalistic writing, editing, and producing we’ll see over the next 10 years, which makes the question “are journalists really needed any more?” salient. I say yes, but not in the traditional form. When volunteering as a Twitter reporter at the Shorentstein Center’s 25 anniversary talks two weeks ago, I heard talks from Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing and Anne Marie Slaughter who was describing the  new roles and jobs in journalism – including data aggregators and policy curators. The point being there that journalism is no longer just recorded observations or reported stories. Reporters and editors no longer needed. Aggregators and curators are needed, especially to sift through all the data that’s out there and to make sense of the muck, when time is at a premium. Dan Conober writes that “Journalism includes explanation and memory” where news is explained in intelligent ways.

I found the class discussion prompted by our reading of Clay Shirky’s piece memorable  as we talked about the generational gap and the way that younger people receive their news vs older folks reading printed copies of the newspaper. It’s a loss in the traditions that have tied us together and a loss in the way we have gotten and processed information. What is shiny and new is how fast we get news now from many different sources, not controlled by centralized publishers anymore. Case in point: I remember Anne Marie Slaughter saying that her number one source for news is Twitter.

But the new and shiny doesn’t come with any worries or problems, as we have talked about in class. Eli Parisier’s Filter Bubble TED talk which discusses our “increasing isolation in a web of 1″ where the internet only shows us what we wan to see, and not what we need to see is disturbing to say the least. We need news that we don’t want to hear and the internet gives us consolidated and curated info increasingly in formats that are tailored to what we want to know and read about, and not what we should know and care about. Jared Lanier takes it further, in his piece:  Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, from Edge.org (5.30.06). where he talks about the blind adoration for online collaboration. Take for example, Wikipedia, and how it contributes to more mob mentality and de-emphasizes individuals. It’s fascinating to hear the argument play out of dumbing down materials by engaging in consensus building through the masses.

My takeaway here is that journalism has already changed for quite some time, and new roles and identities around information search and presentation have evolved. The cost/benefit analysis is still up in the air as people are migrating more towards culling through massive amounts of data that they are drowning in. It will be a very exciting, and interesting, and scary time for journalism as it invents itself around technology possibilities that allow and demand more than just rote reporting.

Good evening.  As part of my Media, Power and Politics course at the Kennedy School, I just created a user profile on Wikipedia and selected an article to review on my former employer, Michele Rhee, former Chancellor of the DC Public Schools. You can find  my new user page entry right here: Cowboysushi

Rationale: I just finished reading the Wikipedia Revolution by Andrew Lih and was amazed by the level of detail in the book about how the Wikipedia community originated,  how it functions and now governs itself. I also was interested in the chapter on Crisis of the Community, where veteran journalist, John Seigenthaler documented his story where the Wikipedia entry on him was not only factually incorrect but linked him to the Kennedy assassinations.  After reading this, I was curious about how Michelle Rhee, a controversial figure in public education, was written about on Wikipedia.  I worked for the DC Public Schools under her administration from 2007-2010 in the central office. The Wikipedia article pops up first in Google search and I wanted to see what the nature of the coverage was like on this encyclopedia. I  will now proceed to analyze the article coverage.

Wikipedia Article Evaluation: Michele Rhee Article

Comprehensiveness. The article is fairly comprehensive, documenting her early years starting off as a teacher in Teach for America in Baltimore, The New Teacher Project, Chancellor of the DC Public Schools and now heading up Students First. What is missing is some of the chronology of her involvement with TFA and TNTP and some of the important details of her appointment as Chancellor. The article makes it sound like she only took the job after being promised mayoral backing, but there were other factors as well, including recommendations from top education officials. What is sorely lacking is information about the struggling DC school system she inherited under the Section “Chancellor of the DC Public Schools.” More citations are needed in this section, and data is readily available from the Data department in the DC Schools or the Office of the State Superintendent. Another missing piece is a description of IMPACT – the teacher evaluation system and educator assessment system, which has been a new and innovative model for evaluations across the country. There is no reference to that, which should fall under the section “Chancellor of the DC Public Schools” as well as “Support and Criticism.” I also believe that the section on school closures needs more information and specific community meeting data that is not there.

Finally, what is also missing is more information regarding the work and campaigns of her new post at StudentsFirst, which has now been running for almost 1 year now.

Sourcing: There are 53 sources cited for this article, many coming from mainstream media feeds like Washington Post, Washington Examiner, Time Magazine, NBC, New York Times, and the Daily Beast. Curiously, I noted that most of the Washington Post articles are cited from Bill Turque, a report notorious for reporting primarily negative articles on DCPS. At one point Michele Rhee did not accept interviews with Bill Turque. As a result, it seems like the section under “Support and Criticism” reads more like criticism and does not seem as balanced as it could be. This is in large part due to the sourcing of the quotes and information which are more critical to begin with. The sources don’t include as many articles by Jay Matthews of the Washington Post and some of the material from the Bee Eater by Richard Whitmore and the PBS specials she taped, which offer some more context and details to her chancellorship.

Neutrality: I already started hinting at this, but I think the article airs more on the side of negative than positive in terms of neutrality. It lacks some context and details. For every description of “placing tape on children’s mouths” when she started teaching, there is also a positive counter story of when she motivated her classroom  in the Bee Eater. Student achievement data from the DCPS paragraphs are missing and references to key initiatives she achieved, including IMPACT as well as the way she handled school closures is missing. There were also many business groups and parent groups that were largely supportive of the reform efforts she lead, but they are not referenced in the article as they should be.

Readability: Printed out, the article is long at 8 pages. It could be better written. There are missing citation notes in different places around the article and in the reference section.

Formatting:  The article adheres to the Wikipedia Manual of Style. The right hand info box needs to be updated, however. Kaya Henderson is now confirmed as the Chancellor, not acting anymore. She has a new role – no longer “former chancellor of the DC Public Schools” but Founder and CEO of StudentsFirst. The references are listed below along with a See Also section that points out other related items of interest including Wendy Kopp and NCLB.  Unfortunately, there is one cite error in red at the bottom of the article that reads:

^ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs namedmayor_marries; see Help:Cite errors/Cite error references no text

Illustrations:  There are 2 pictures of Michelle Rhee in the article, although both are pretty outdated given the length of her hair in both pictures – from DCPS publications her first year a Chancellor.

Reference Interest: Just for interest, I am pasting the references list below for further examination:

References

Hey world:

This is my second official post for my Media, Power and Politics Class at the Kennedy School, which by the way, is one of those rare courses across  Harvard that actually makes you smarter just by being in it. A media and tech class that relates to politics, entrepreneurship, education, monopolies, and organization all rolled into one. It’s also a great class because it’s stretching my non-tech mind in ways I didn’t think was possible. It’s also giving me another outlet to write and “publish”, which I haven’t done in years.

So, up for today are some reflections on Steven Levy’s In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.  Steven Levy was recently on NPR talking about his book, which you can find here. *That’s my first link attempt!

We’ve been focusing the past few weeks in class on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and I don’t know how the world got by pre-Google. How did students do their research? I try to avoid libraries now if I can help it. Much of search online is faster, tailored and more convenient. My dependence on Google for everything has come from it’s focused, almost obsessive emphasis on the speed of it’s RELEVANCY and scale of it’s search and functionality.  One quote from Levy’s book stuck with me and gave me more insight into the importance of speed for Google:

“Human life expectancy is seventy years. That’s about two billion seconds. If a product has 100 million users and unnecessarily wastes four seconds of a user’s time every day, that was more than a hundred people killed in a year. So if the Gmail team wasn’t meeting its goals, it might go to the Picasa team and ask or ten lives to lift its speed budget into the black. In exchange, the Gmailers might yield a thousand servers from its allocation or all its message tickets for the next month.” But you couldn’t keep borrowing forever. “People have definitely been yelled at,” says Holzle. If a team got too deep in the hole, the latency policy would close down the casino. “There’s a launch gate where if you’re too in the negative, you can’t launch features. From that point on, you need to focus on latency alone until you’re close to your goal.”  (In the Plex, p. 187. )

Relevancy. The quote above highlights that. That’s what Nicco preached to us in class. The internet as platform and its ability to give me exactly what I want as quickly as possible. That’s definitely what Google has been banking on with its mathematical and magically secretive algorithms.  It was cool that they relate things to people’s lives and the time it takes to search. I took away that this is life and Death for Google.

The book was also helpful to me in understanding Google’s context and the success its become and why it has so many haters who are charging it is a monopoly, there are many factors for Google’s success including MAD human capital which I discussed in my previous post. But over time, Google’s efforts to perfect its software, to deliberately own its own fiber networks, to innovate in conservation techniques, to turn its computer spending to only a third of what its competitors paid and to explore taking on its own telecommunications network has made it almost untouchable. Levy boils it down to Google’s “massive parallelized redundant computer network” which has given it its power, and which they have quietly assembled over the past decade or so. Google thinks in a different time frame as well. They don’t work on problems a year out. Larry Page demanded they work on problems a decade out or maybe a problem that would come up only in a science fiction novel.” P. 198.

My favorite quote from Page to sum this point up: “If you are ridiculously premature, how can people catch up to you?” p. 198.

The China chapter was disturbing, given our talks in class about the “filter bubble” and the rise of the increasingly insulated echo chambers online. It was hard to read about the struggle of Google over censorship in China and limiting what people could see with their mantra “Don’t be evil”. I was perplexed by the description of how you would search Falun Gong and then anti-Falun Gong sites  would pop up or a search of Tiananmen Square would yield touristic pics of happy couples on it pointed to the power of Google to control search. Levy writes,  ”Google’s algorithms had done a scary-good job in preventing Chinese citizens from accessing forbidden information. ” It was a China’ partner in political censorship. I know that Google was able to resolve it tenuous relationship with China by drawing the line on censorship from the Google end, but it speaks to the power o the SEO and the algorithms that it has to show me or not show me things. Is the web platform only as free as the search engines that run it and how restrictive or not they are?

This gives rise to Google’s public perception. Levy talks about how Google sees itself as a “scrappy underdog”,   but how others see it as digital bully pounding on other vulnerable weaklings.  Google is trying to retain it original nimbleness and innovation in the spirit of entrepreneurial start-up, but lately from some of my consultant friends who have worked or Google, the phrase, “Google doesn’t want to become another Microsoft” or “Google is seen as a place where ideas die” has permeated my own conceptions of Google and the battle that’s heating up in Washington DC over its monopoly charges.

Google as monstrous monopoly?. Fascinating. Facebook as the new scrappy innovator with a billion users?  Lately, I’ve been trying to better understand all the comparisons between Google and Facebook and the challenge Google has on its hands of getting access to Facebook’s ginormous online community.  We’ve talked about the difference in philosophies between the two and the battle between them in terms of relevancy. Do I trust Google’s algorithms as much as the information recommendations of my close family, friends and connections that Facebook gives me?

It’s getting murky.

I signed up for Google+ this weekend after discussing all the group functionality in class I could do with a group of my friends online  and on the same day Facebook revamped its Facebook site to prioritize  the flow of stories on personal pages into a news feed that puts “top stories” on top, and the more chronological list of everything down below.  According to the CNN articles I’ve linked below, now top stories are selected by an algorithm of some sort that “knows” what will be important to the user based on past behavior and numbers of connections to those recommending the story, and so on. Check out the 2 articles: Reaction to social media changes and Does Facebook Really Care About You?

The Does Facebook Really Care About You? editorial actually ties a lot of our class discussion in nicely. It discusses how Facebook was a “lazy persons’ friend and time waster but that the new dashboard actually turns social networking into more like work and being productive. The argument is that Facebook’s new algorithms are about  how Facebook can monetize  our social graphs” and that the accumulated data about how we make friends, share links and makes decisions are actually just for advertisers and researchers.

Which makes me think that Facebook and Google are not so diametrically opposed in philosophies. Google’s trying to get more social with Google + and Facebook is trying to publicly introduce more algorithms in search with its revamped changes. It’s more like the yin and yang that’s blending more and more together as they cash in on all this information of the SEO. I’m not sure what I think of all this, other than my truest relevancy to others online is a powerful currency, a currency which is king.

Just got Steven Levy’s book, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes our Lives which I have been wanting to read for a while and it is utterly fascinating! I like this Wall Street Journal Review of the book and am including it here for background.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703712504576243483407048582.html

I consider myself an organizational culture junkie and while I am at Harvard I am trying to develop my expertise in group dynamics, social psychology, and power and influence background to better understand how companies, education systems and schools function and perform more efficiently. I also am interested in how employees enjoy their work. I devoured the chapter on Google Culture, entitled, “Don’t Be Evil” after their cultural mantra. Nicco Mele, my prof at Harvard has said that he wants us to understand the mindset of the “nerds’ and the technical speak so that we can imagine different ways of approaching the technology world and the dramatic internet changes that are taking place in the world of social networking, interfacing, etc.  Below, are some of my notes and reactions to the culture at Google. So, in the “Mindset of Google Culture” in Part 3 of the book – here is my top ten list:

1. As  a doctoral student in education, I immediately took note of the quote on the back on the book. It reads: “You can’t understand Google unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids. Its’ really ingrained in their personalities. In Montessori school you go paint because you have something to express or you just want to do i that afternoon, not because the teacher said so. Do something because it makes sense, not because some authority figure told you. This is really baked into how Larry and Sergey approach problems. They’re always asking, why should it be like that’ It’s the way their brains were programmed early on.” – Marissa Meyer.

2. Engineers run the show at Google and everyone else in operations is secondary. Everyone accepts this if they want to work at Google.

3. In its early days, Google believed that the key to its vibrancy was its human density. They also developed a 70-20-10 rule of division of labor. 70% on search and ads, 20% on key products and 10% on wild card projects.

4. Culture at Google was both based on the concept of the conveniences of home with food, and amenities provided to increase the productivity of workers and minimize the time they spent away from work or on operational activities. It was also based on American university culture where smarts, GPAs, SATS, and the freedom to explore one’s academic pursuits were honored and smart people rose to the top. Operations are done up in excellent ways – with all conference rooms equipped with chargers for MACS and PCs, all linked to wireless and presentation capability, with dry erase markers. This is not frivolous spending by a big company, but good investments in the ultimate productivity and messaging of the high valuation put in employees at the company. School systems don’t do this as well as they should nor do the central offices that employ thousands of workers. Educators and ed system reformers could learn from Google on the emphasis on smooth operations in terms of impacting employee morale.

5. OKR’s (Objectives and Key Results) are widely published internally and emphasize the numbers culture and execution on results that is expected of employees.  OKRs are not private benchmarks but are a part of the every employee’s job description and identity. This is an interesting idea on effectiveness that I wish we could apply to teachers, administrators and principles in school systems in measuring effective performance on the job and ensuring that they are learning and being challenged by their work. Information was the “great leveler” at Google.

6. Google doesn’t want the typical smart ivy leaguers and traditional MBA’s. What works for them are the technical people and the technical leaders who form the elite group  in terms of thinking, problem solving and have the most advanced tech expertise in the world. The hiring process reflects that as well as their incubation of key programs like APM where folks were recruited right from college so their “careers could evolve with Google and engineers with CEO aspirations (not the other way around) would thrive and lead Google. they also played around with doing away with managers and letting people assemble together to get the work done.

GOOGLE compared to FACEBOOK Culture

7.  In the Epilogue “Chasing Taillights” Levy writes that Facebook was a scary competitor because it was very much like Google. He describes Zuckerberg as “a wildly ambitious leader with quasi-religious trust in engineering” and that he described how Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook would have hacker values.

8. Zuckerberg felt that Google had lost its nimbleness and focus. Some of my associates who have done some leadership in consulting with Google have told me that Google is now known as a “Place where ideas die” referring to the difficulty in getting support for new ideas and backing for innovation, which made it tick in the first place. Herein I learned an important insight about Google where the company liked to give young people massive responsibility but it also relied on world class scientists for its operational innovations – it was like a university as Levy describes it with older, top execs revered like professors. Facebook, by comparison, took its bets on sharp undergrads figuring they would make up for their lack of experience with boldness.

9. Big Bets: Google bet on the web culture of web intelligence as assuming the central part of people’s online lives whereas Facebook bet it was the social networking, relationships, and updates and the possibility of like-minded relating to each other over the internet as the social glue of their interactions. the basic premise of social networking that a personal recommendation from a friend > than the efficiently generated recommendation of a computer algorithm designed to yield correct answers in a search.

10. Google is  a “terrible taillight chaser” it shouldn’t go after Facebook killing strategy, but examples exist where it tried to start its own Twitter like service and (Google’s Taco town and Google wave) – the problem was a lack of coordination – different projects but no coordinated goal. the irony here was that they were pursuing social space and the connections, links and coherence among people online and in membership groups, but the way Google formed and the philosophies of its org culture made them act in fragmented, unconnected ways in this competition with Facebook, Twitter,etc.

Bottom line: Organizational culture can’t stay stagnant but should evolve with the different needs of a company as it scales in size, reach, and development in new markets. I understand about the moves and products Google invested in and didn’t invest in after reading more about the personalities, mantras, and schooling of its leaders and feel like I get more the “nerd mindset” where, numbers, data, and the technical skills of engineers matter over generic ideas/management people.

I’m very new to the blog world, so new that I just opened up this site yesterday and am just starting to blog for class at the Kennedy School and a little bit apprehensive around the start of this new experiment. Especially when I am admittedly technologically deficient and my friends have all made fun of me opening up a blog, considering my level of always messing up and the amount of technical computer problems that seem to follow in my wake. I am probably going to mess up on blog posting at some point, but so far it’s been very painless and easy. knock on wood.

So let’s get down to business and start something. I am going to summarize, analyze and synthesize what I read in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. From the wiki entry it states that the book is about: The author says it’s about “what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures. I will refrain from summarizing here because I think the wiki covers it best: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody

But, I will summarize why I like this book so much.  Shirky’s book has a tagline that reads, “Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technology, it happens when society adopts new behaviors.” It’s a quick, in-depth read that combines game-theory, social capital, activism, group dynamics, collective action and the power of exerting individual voice. The idea in brief is that sharing creates community and that new behaviors around technology lowers hurdles and removes barriers to the cost (Coase principle) , managerial oversight and technology expenses required to identify, organize, mobilize and get groups to form. Shirky offers a helpful framework that guides the book: There is a ladder of activities that a group engages in  that are enabled or improved by social tools. The rungs on a ladder are sharing, cooperation, and collective action (p. 49).

So my main takeaways are contained in the following sentences:

1) “Mass amateurization” (p. 66).

2) “Everyone is a media outlet” (p. 71). and if “Anyone can be a publisher, anyone can be a journalist.” Who is a journalist now?”

3) “Individuals with a camera or keyboard is now a nonprofit of one”(p. 77).

4) “Community now shades into audience and it’s as if your phone could turn into a radio station at the turn of the knob.”

5) Every web page is a latent community” (p. 102)

6) Symmetrical participation and amateur production is that “once people have the capacity to receive information, they have the capability to send it as well” (p. 116).

I dig it. Power to the people. Barriers are removed for open communication and open access to information and other people. Not only that, but people have the power now to form as they want and to publicly broadcast on a massive platform their views, whether they are socially acceptable or not.

In terms of synthesis, yesterday I saw the movie Contagion over the weekend totally aware of the star-studded cast – Gwenyth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law and directed by Steven Soderbergh.  I knew the basic outlines of the movie. Pandemic drama with millions of people dying around the world. CDC, WHO, Homeland Security, FEMA all involved in finding a vaccination and trying to control the chaos that erupts in major metropolitan areas – Chicago, Minnesota and abroad in Hong Kong, China and London. I wasn’t prepared for the prominent role that Jude Law took as blogger whose posts against government and pharmaceutical companies become increasingly aggressive as the epidemic spreads.

Read more about his prep for the role here: http://www.kentucky.com/2011/09/09/1873647/jude-law-did-his-research-to-play.html#ixzz1XgxtHiHA. Jude Law plays the character Alan Krumwiede who tells his newspaper editor who refuses to pick him up that “papers are dead” and begins to build up his power in the movie as an influential leader who has a platform of 12 million followers online who go to his site for the truth. Alan Krumwiede starts to promote an herbal concoction that hasn’t been tested by the CDC as a “life saver” and as a result of his posts, people try to buy it in stores that run out of their supply and riots ensue. As panic sets in and fatalities go up, Alan Krumwiede advocates to his online followers not to get the vaccine and has a media confrontation with the head of the CDC where he charges that the CDC and federal government are in a conspiracy to withhold treatment from the masses.

The movie at one point ends up in a confrontation with the Homeland Security Director and Alan Krumwiede where the Director says to Jude Law’s character: “I wish I could put your computer in jail.” when he realizes that Alan Krumwiede as been blogging falsehoods all along and people have been following him for the truth and facts he boasts to have. This made me think about a few things:

Jude Law’s character has easy access to a large platform and his online influence makes him powerful. But he lies. He misrepresents the truth and during a time of crisis, he generates a crisis  and accelerates panic. This speaks to the issue of lack of control and policing. I am not sure how you regulate the truth among bloggers who are now their own journalist, publisher and editorial team? Perhaps its a community that self-policies but the lack of control scares me. It speaks to the ideas of the book “Groundswell.”  http://www.forrester.com/groundswell/book.html where people are connecting outside of institutions to get things done. Most companies see this a threat. I wouldn’t go as far as that, but it kind of feels like pandora box at this point to me.

Although I am not sure, I think the question posed by Shirky on pg 210 is the right kind of question and points to the problems of access and potential social dilemmas that are arising from the freedom.”What are we going to do about the negative effects of freedom?” Shirky explains it simply as “Falling transaction costs benefit all groups, not just groups we happen to approve of” (p. 208). It applies to the Pro-Ana girls who were promoting the benefits of anorexia on the YM interface, forcing the website to shut down the discussion portion. It applies to the rise of Jude Law’s character as the self-interested web journalist whose raging posts and bully pulpit of false information exacerbate the epidemic and endanger public safety. By the time I left the theater, I wasn’t sure if his character is a prophet, a pragmatic systems person who can see through the big bureacracy or a lunatic out to make some money. It reminds of Shirky’s argument that reduced barriers and reduced definitions as to what constitutes “professional membership.” All great things in my book, but the downside are ways of policing and quality control of the information out there that professional societies set with training, norms, and expectations of conduct.

Examples of the self-regulation of Wikipedia were helpful, as the Tragedy of the Commons is averted through people who continually edit each of the articles so that the wiki is “a process not a product” (p. 119).   A process that can be equally edited, revised, updated by anybody. This could answer my question in how you deal with the Alan Krumweide’s in this world as featured in the moview Contagion. For every blogger with unscrupulous motives and means, there are other influential bloggers to counteract, refute, challenge and present a fuller picture of the truth. I take some comfort in that at least I have that access to the large range of the blogosphere.