BuzzMachine

Motherland Security
: I’m one of the apparently few who actually likes Homeland Security as a name for the department charged with protecting us.

But in the interest of (rare) open-mindedness I will propose an alternative.

Tonight, I was listening to Natalie Merchant‘s latest album — Motherland — and it came to be:

Motherland Security.

It works on so many levels: Don’t mess wid my Muddah. Mother and apple pie. Mother nature. The feminist version of Fatherland.

And besides, I like the song:

Motherland, cradle me

Close my eyes,

Lullaby-me to sleep.

Keep me safe,

Lie with me.

Stay beside me,

Don’t go,

Don’t go…

Motherland Security II
:My colleague Joe Territo (the guy who turned me onto The Week, below) has a good suggestion regarding our Homeland/Motherland Security Department: The Washington Post says:

A possible complication in recruiting a secretary for the new department was revealed by a senior administration official, who said most of the department might be located outside the Washington area for security reasons.

The official said a new Homeland Security building could be located in Maryland or Virginia, well beyond the Beltway. “We think it’s something that at least should be discussed,” the official said. “We should be thinking differently about this department.”

Joe’s suggestion: “Maybe they should put it way beyond the Beltway, in lower Manhattan, providing a symbolic and economic boost and putting Rudy in charge.”

Amen to that.

(I think this counts as Joe’s first blog post; he’ll join the cult soon.)

WiFi goes wide
: From my Fierce Wireless newsletter:

According to a report in today’s BWCS, both Toshiba and IBM are said to be planning their own 802.11-based wireless networks. IBM is currently planning to launch a national Wi-Fi network and is gathering members for a consortium to work together on this plan. No word yet when IBM’s network will make its debut.

Meanwhile, Toshiba is planning to launch a “public spaces initiative” in which the company will set up hotspots in malls, coffee shops, and possibly supermarkets. All of these will connect back to Toshiba’s hosting site, effectively turning the company into an ISP. Toshiba plans to launch its Wi-Fi initiative on June 25 at PC Expo in New York.

Big doings. WiFi everywhere…. It’s the next big thing. But we learned lately not to trust the next big thing until we see it….

Nonprofit
: Kuro5hin raises $10k in its tip jar in one day and decides to go nonprofit (via Metafilter).

: Speaking of nonprofit…

I owe you all an update on my thinking on the Weblog Foundation: coming soon. I’m not a nonprofit; I have to work and that has gotten in the way.

Join the club
: Another Rossi fan: Asparagirl.

TeeVee
: Marc Weisblott has started a blog reviewing fall TV pilots. It’s cool. It’s useful. It’s blogging about something other than politics, which is good.

It’s also deja view for me: I used to spend the end of summer getting and watching all those tapes and coming to grand conclusions about them for TV Guide and People before that.

I do miss those days.

But what I really miss are the days a few decades ago when the new season really meant something, when shows didn’t die in a week, when we all watched and talked about the same stuff. That was fun. I’d still take the wealth of choice we have today over that — and the new seasons that come year-round (what’s more important: the new season on ABC or the new season of The Sopranos?) — but still, those days were fun.

Deep Link
: Josh Marshall is ever-more convinced that Pat Buchanan is Deep Throat. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking this one through. But the one thing I wonder is: If Buchanan is DT, why wouldn’t he announce it and make political hay as the one honest man in American politics? Marshall argues that he can’t because his fellow conservatives would consider him a traitor. But it’s not as if they do him any favors anyway. And running on a third-party ticket is a worse form of betrayal to them. So why not put yourself on a pedestal and nya-nya all those below?

Science is amazing
: An artificial lung.

Why I love The Week
: The Week is a magazine born of the Web era.

It is a weblog on paper, a brilliant weblog at that. The only problem is, paper doesn’t come with links.

For me, the appeal of The Week is the same as that of weblogs: These people read the news, all the news, from all over the world, so I don’t have to. They find the best. They discover the things I didn’t discover. They give it to me in quick, witty, pithy bits. They know I’m busy. They also know I’m smart.

This is not like the magazines that came before it. Time and Newsweek stopped summarizing the news decades ago; now they thirst to break news and when they don’t, they turn current events into news for dummies, so well pasturized and homogenized and smoothed out that it might as well be frozen yogurt (vanilla). Reader’s Digest is the magazine our grandparents read because they didn’t like to read.

On the other hand, The Week, like the Web, recognizes that there is a tremendous wealth of information out there that we just don’t have the time (though we do have the intelligence and need) to absorb. So it helps us by finding the best reports and not only summarizing them but also quoting them; it doesn’t try to be smooth like Time and put everything in its voice and under the umbrella of its authority; it repackages the best sources in media and relies on their authority. This, I believe, is a new form of news packaging inspired by the Web and we’ll see more of it. The Week is just leading the way.

I am little surprised I’m saying all this. When my colleague Joe said he was dying to see this magazine before it was launched, I rolled my eyes; the thing sounded cheesey: news lite. But I respect Joe and so I gave The Week a chance and soon became an addict.

It’s useful and informative, provocative and entertaining.

Felix Dennis, the publisher, says it is designed to give you “all you need to know about everything that matters” and do it in an hour and 10 minutes a week. What’s amazing is that it succeeds.

I start each week reading the editor’s note; I can’t say that about any other editor’s note (and I used to have to write them). This one is only two graphs long, about as long as a good blog post. Short is good. That’s what I said when I started Entertainment Weekly: It’s harder and smarter to write short. And every week, The Week Editor William Falk shows it.

Next I read the magazine’s one-page briefing — its backgrounder — on a major story of each week. Sometimes, I miss the beginning of a big story and then I’m too embarrassed to ask about what I missed and newspapers too often don’t fill me in. The Week takes a topic like Kashmir and explains how everybody got in this pickle concisely and smartly and after reading this one well-packaged page, I’m up to speed. It’s a fine service.

Then I read summaries of other major stories with important reporting and commentary from papers around the world.

Next: On three pages, the magazine gives us short squibs on the major stories in countries around the world.

Then I turn to the best columns, letters to the editor, editorial, and editorial cartoons.

I read the best of gossip: “It must be true… I read it in the tabloid.”

I read summaries of current reporting on business, science, health, and sports. I read short features on travel, food, and shopping. I read summaries of reviews of books, plays, movies, and music.

And I always lust after pictures of posh homes for sale around the world ($3.995 million for a nice joint in McLean, Va.).

The Week does all this and more in just 40 pages (only six of them ads).

And it does all this with a tiny staff, the size of which should be the envy of every magazine executive in the country. The masthead of The Week is a marvel of efficiency.

My only criticisms: The magazine is near-impossible to find on newsstands. The design is too British (this is a spin-off of the British publication) and might put off American readers. And it might as well not have a web site. I fear these things limit its growth.

I’m writing all this because I’ve seen that some bloggers are curious about The Week and others haven’t even seen it.

So go looking for it. It is a magazine a blogger should like.

Homeland Defense defense
: Glenn Reynolds may not like “Homeland Security” as a moniker but, like me, he defends it:

I’m certainly among the large number who regard it as creepy. But perhaps it’s a good thing: given the ineffective-yet-intrusive nature of the domestic-security approach to date, why give it a popular name? One that sounds creepy and slightly unAmerican may, in fact, be perfectly appropriate.

Face time
: Nick Denton has created a compelling gallery of bloggers.

It’s just like radio: You always want to know what the face behind the voice looks like.

Ditto weblogs: I always wonder what they look like. Now, I know.

I just have to say it
: I enjoy Richard Bennett. We should all be half as opinionated.

Coopt
: Oliver Willis argues that the Democrats should become the antiterror party.

Cool is still cool
: All hail Pyra/Blogger. It is Fortune’s coolest media company of 2002.

Nothing destroys productivity like blogs, the frequently updated online diaries that have exploded in the past year. Blogs, short for Web logs, run from the personal (dating life in St. Louis) to the political (views on Arafat) to the arcane (diseased bees in Virginia Beach). The company behind the trend is Pyra, a minuscule operation in San Francisco that runs Blogger.com, the most popular tool for hosting and posting blogs, with almost 600,000 registered users. Pyra’s CEO, Evan Williams, 30, talked to Fortune from his apartment-cum-office in San Francisco….

Q: Where do you see Pyra in five years?

A: I have a hell of a problem thinking five years out. The whole reason that I started a company was to build cool s–t that matters. I’d like to be a player in how the Web is evolving.

Ev should be in Hollywood. I’ve never known anyone (this side of Denton) who can get such great publicity. If only publicity were money.

But give Pyra credit: It is amazing for an Internet company today to be (a) alive and (b) growing. That is cool.

: I can’t resist a bit of proud-uncle bragging. In the entire Internet go days, I successfully touted three investments and I’m happy to say that they are all still alive and doing well: Pyra, Moreover, and Cassiopeia. Whew.

Homeland Security it is
: I disagree with Mickey Kaus and half of Blogville already. Kaus doesn’t like the moniker “Homeland Security.” I do. He argues that “homeland” is too Teutonic — too much like the Germans’ “Heimat.” What, so anything German is now Nazi and verboten? No hamburgers for you! (This must be the first time that PC anti-defamation finger-wagging has been done on behalf of Germans.)

I like “homeland” — vs. the predictable “domestic” — precisely because it conjurs up the idea of our nation, our Heimat, our land, our America. It has a patriotic undertone. That is precisely what the Department of Homeland Security should be about: protecting America.

And as for fears that “security” is too Big Brotherish: Get used to it.

Rudy!
: So Peggy Noonan joins the campaign I started months ago: Putting Rudy Guliani in charge of Homeland Security. This bandwagon’s getting crowded.

Grrr
: It amazes me that people who irritate you think that you then will want to do business with them.

If a spammer offered me the greatest product in the world for the lowest price, I wouldn’t trust them for a second, wouldn’t ever buy from them.

The latest popunder trick to irritate us: The ad moves all over your screen so you can’t catch up with it to close the damned thing.

Not-so-fast food
: The Guardian reports that McDonald’s and Coke are about to spend billions to convince us Americans to eat healthy (in an attempt, they say avoid cigarette lawsuits).

Makes a person feel sorry for the corporate giants. What silliness. What we eat is clearly our choice. Fast food is not an addiction (at worst, it is a bad habit — one I used to have). If you choose to eat burgers every day, you shouldn’t be able to blame Ronald McD for that. But, of course, someone will. If you get fat, its your fault, not theirs. Take a little responsibility, people!

So now we have companies forced to advertise not to use their products too much. What has capitalism come to?

: I do love fast food. Used to eat it all the time. But then I got older. I got married. I saw my father-in-law in the cardiac unit. I try to eat well. But I still love fast food. And my kids eat it. So now I try to find the healthy fast food.

I’m pissed at Burger King (the chicken nugget house of choice in my house) for they ruined their grilled chicken sandwich. The BK Broiler was great but they morphed it into the Chicken Whopper; the chicken is no longer marinated; it’s dull; its chewier; it’s just not as good.

I loved Taco Bell’s new grilled stuffed burrito (chicken).

And I’m very excited by McDonald’s new menu item: The grilled chicken flatbread sandwich (peppery grilled chicken, grilled onions — a very nice touch, pepper-jack cheese, lettuce, tomato, on a nice slab of flatbread). I’ll take two, please.

: Monkeys drinking Coke is an entirely different matter.

Bloghaus
: Doc is in Munich, blogging away. He notes how wi-fi in public places makes computing social (an observation I saw elsewhere in recent days — thought it was Denton but can’t find it now):

having a wi-fi hot spot in a social space (the library on the boat, the lobby in the hotel) has social effects. Guests aren’t in their rooms, jacked to the Net in private. They’re working, corresponding and chewing fat, all at once. The social protocols are interesting, too. Sometimes people collaborate (“look up ‘munich bierhaus’ on Google and click on the third link…”). Sometimes they pound their keyboards in private. Others respect both the private and public behaviors.

What he blogs
: Kottke on the dreaded also-ran browsers that drive us web-site creators completely batty when trying to do anything new or nice for our users:

I agree, Netscape 4 has to go. Please get it out of my sight. It sucks because it’s not a browser as much as it’s a dirty bomb lobbed over the fence in the heat of the browser wars. If Netscape 4 were a car, they would have recalled it years ago.

But I’m not sure that Mozilla is any better. Mozilla is a toy built by developers for developers…a return to the days of Mosaic when some geeks in Illinois built browsers for other geeks around the world. Developers slobber over things like support for standards and XUL (which are cool), but end users have different needs and priorities.

Yeah, remember them? The end users? The ones that you’re building the software for? They don’t care about your damn cross-platform interoperability…they want fast, they want features to help them browse the Web, they want an interface that was designed by someone who knows about interface design, and they want a good user experience.

Your friendly neighborhood blogger
: Arnold Kling at Corante’s Bottom Line asks — with some help from John Hiler and Dave Winer — whether blogging is really just the decentralization (or, as we’d say in the ’70s, devolution) of news and media. That is, at the start of the last century, every town had its own local paper and we didn’t have big broadcasting conglomerates; does blogging cut all our media centralization back down to size so, thanks to bloggers, you can find the best story that interests you regardless of the source or publisher or distributor?

This is a corollary to the decades-old debate over whether the mass audience is dead. I used to be part of that debate when I was a TV critic, witnessing the growth of choice thanks to the remote control and cable and the VCR (and now satellites and the Internet, too). Never again, it was said then, would all of America ask the next morning, “Who shot J.R.?” because we now had far more choice; some of us would be watching MTV or CNN or TBS instead. True. But the mass audience did not die; it only shrank; it only became harder to reach; it changed the economics of entertainment media.

So Kling is wise to add an important question to Hiler and Winer’s speculation: The economic question: “Somebody has to figure out how to get money to flow to the reporter in Pakistan, the musician, and probably to the more useful recommendation services or weblogs.” Right, and nobody has figured it out, least of all me. It’s what Bill Quick and I talked about over coffee the other day; it’s what we all talk about.

It might sound cool to say that bloggers replace publishers but that misses the fact that there is no money in blogging and the only way there will be money is if its consumers pay or if it becomes big enough — yes, mass enough — for advertisers to pay attention to it and if these advertisers have easy ways — that is, through convenient conglomerates — to market through it.

It’s not a brave new world yet.