Ack, looks like the membership list page got eaten in the website transition that Bob Cox talked about above. I should have double-checked myself. Here's the Internet Archive version of the page I remembered:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061109183931/mediabloggers.org/members/
Michael@272 "Why shouldn't we go ahead and post what we discover as we discover it?"
Let me thoroughly disclaim here I'm replying from my personal perspective, from the viewpoint of my own thoughts and about general issues, and will attempt to answer you by conveying my feelings about that.
When you say that, what comes across to me is something I deeply hate about the blogging world, the abusive, bullying, arrogant, conduct endemic to A-listers. It sounds like: "Why should we people with big megaphones, who can smear and attack someone to thousands, maybe millions, care about any sort of accuracy and fairness? What does it matter if we publicly accuse someone based on a mistaken impression or third-hand report? It's "conversation"! We have a legal right to do it, as long as we don't cross over certain lines. It's all the fault of the targets anyway - they brought it all on themselves for not immediately catering to us, considering us to be the center of the universe, because of what we can do to them."
If you detect a certain parallel here with the worst of the press, that's deliberate.
If someone is going to make serious accusations to a huge audience, it is REALLY, REALLY so tough, so requiring of elaborate philosophical discussion and analytic justification, to give an opportunity beforehand to explain?
Here: There's a list of MBA members. Many are approachable to the writers of this blog. Is it SO HARD to ask privately to some of them "What's this MBA - is it for real? And who is this Cox guy, is he legit?" before dumping this stuff all over the place?
What does it say that I'm taken to be sort of the "bad guy" (roughly) here?
pericat@251 "How can you say he's not had a chance to defend himself?" - That's a joke. Here's some of the most-read blogs around posting attacks on him, without asking him or the MBA's lawyer about the accuracy of third-party charges or their own charges, but OMG, he's posted "14 comments"! Who could ask for anything more fair? Nobody reads comments (sigh, that last sentence is in conversation English which includes slight hyperbole and is not meant to be read as a strictly literal statement because it is obviously then self-refuting).
The word "damaging" was used a summary to encompass a range of categories. There's a difference between "criticism" and "hatchet-job". If I say, this post, this specific one, right here, this single item, is a hatchet-job that has no place being echoed in contexts that imply it has any accuracy, that should not be taken that the MBA can't stand criticism. To turn it around, one could talk of the impression of whiny A-list entitlement, that any rant deserves maximum publicity otherwise it's censorship (tedious: I didn't say censorship is being claimed, I'm inverting your point to a similar hypothetical absurd point).
Disclaimers: I'm not the MBA, I'm not acting for the MBA, I haven't communicated in any way with Cox for a long time. I just got annoyed at how much people were dumping on him, without even giving him a chance to defend himself before the attacks were all over the place.
Sigh. I took that as an clear answer phrased in conversational English, rather than as a legalistic evasion.
John Chu @223: "I do find it a little disturbing that he has refused to disclaim representing all bloggers when asked several times now. Agreeing that he does not represent all bloggers, and stating that the AP knows this, would clarify things a lot."
Look at what Robert Cox said @150:
"Doesn't it seem absolutely idiotic to anyone here that anyone in their right mind would have the chutzpah to claim they speak for the blogosphere? So, why then would you believe it just because you read it somewhere? I also addressed this in my recent post."
No personal offense intended to you, but this sort of idea is what I mean by people having their rant on, and not caring it's against strawmen.
Look, Robert Cox can be criticized for being
1) A right-wing flamer
2) A self-promoter
He should not be criticized without any chance at defense, in the middle of a big case, as:
"To summarize thus far: Robert Cox shoehorned himself into the story, fibbed about being the intermediator through whose agency all the bloggers got their credentials, already had a deal going with AP, and tried to force the Firedoglake bloggers to join the AP pool, which would have given AP complete access to their superior and quite valuable reportage.
Now we’re supposed to believe he’s dickering in good faith with the AP on behalf of blogdom? No way. Even if his motives were purer than Ivory soap, he should have more sense than to go anywhere near this issue."
Espeically given what Rogers Cadenhead said.
pericat @ 221 - Yes, absolutely, I did act with haste, because, drumroll, there's a lot of publicity today because it's the meeting with AP! And here are big-audience bloggers doing de facto character assassination from on-high, without talking to Robert Cox, without giving him any chance to defend himself against their very serious charges. That's wrong.
The policy is that potentially damaging material in Wikipedia articles gets removed immediately until there's a consensus that it's permissible, and this is an exception to the conflict of interest rules. It's a "do no harm" principle, and I acted on it, with full declaration of what I was doing.
"What you have done is to give the impression that MBA's adherents will brook no critical views" - Oh, please. Do you have any idea how much the MBA, and Robert Cox in particular, gets criticized by MBA adherents?
Look, excuse me for a moment - the guy involved in this case (Rogers Cadenhead) came in - set you (the group) straight - AND YOU DON'T CARE!. People are enjoying their ranting against the boogeymen, don't confuse them with facts. And you're criticizing me for doing a small thing to mitigate that?
Hi, I'm Seth Finkelstein, and I'm the MBA.
Seriously, the entire impact of the MBA on my life has been material for a few blog posts (and $25 or so membership dues out of my bank balance). I had a long talk with Robert Cox a while back about my concerns, and I can attest that, everything else aside, he does believe in what he's doing.
I was lurking in this thread earlier, and thinking that whatever his self-promotion sins, he doesn't deserve the hate-storm he's been getting.
Yes, I removed the reference to this thread on the Wikipedia entry. Yes, it does leave me open to challenge. But I think I know Wikipedia's rules well enough to win the challenge. I declared my potential conflict of interest right up front. The key policy passage here is (my emphasis):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COI#How_to_handle_conflicts_of_interest
"An important example is that unsupported defamatory material appearing in articles may be removed at once. Anyone may do this, and should do this, and this guideline applies widely to any unsourced or poorly sourced, potentially libelous postings. In this case it is unproblematic to defend the interest of the person or institution involved."
That puts me in a safe-harbor on that edit within Wikipedia.
As to personal connections, Robert Cox didn't ask me to do anything, nobody in the MBA asked me to do anything. I know Rogers Cadenhead (n.b. he didn't ask me to do anything) and have commented and emailed him about the case in general out of personal interest.
Earth might be some sort of rest stop on a galactic backroad. A place to get out of the ship for a while, or do some minor maintenance made easier by gravity and atmosphere. The amusing natives could just be a bonus, like picking up frogs near a pond ("I was abducted by hairless apes"). You don't hear about all the ships where nobody has an interest in the local fauna.
C.E. Petit @ 239 - I believe you're being too harsh on FredvL's statement about the non-compliant DMCA notices. I think you're misreading "ignore" in a global sense, akin to "the ISP can pretend it never heard of you if the notice is noncompliant", and then pointing out that 512(c)(3)(b)(ii) says the opposite. But in context, READING THE PRECEDING PARAGRAPH, I think FredvL meant it in a local sense of something like "the ISP doesn't need to do any take-downs from a non-compliant notice, the statement under penalty of perjury is an absolutely critical part, not a flourish". Of course the ISP has the obligation to respond that the notice is non-compliant, but that doesn't seem to be, err, "substantially" at issue here - i.e. Scribd was replying to Andrew Burt, not claiming they couldn't contact him (though we don't have their reply public).
[Disclaimers: I am not a lawyer (though I have studied the DMCA extensively), and politically close to the EFF, but I've read some of CEP's posts and respect them]
Lis: Just a quick reply - I've heard that called "stable versions". The idea is to fix the vulnerability of any vandal mucking with the page, since there are pages near-continuously vandalized ("George Bush" being a notable example, for obvious reasons). In some cases, Wikipedia's iterative editing process doesn't converge at all, but goes into full-scale chaos.
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|---|---|
| 2008 | 9 |
| 2007 | 3 |
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