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The Buzz Machine is posting live from a conference on blogging at Harvard. I've left the typos in and excerpted a few lines. One eye catching exchange goes as follows: : Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia, says that a few years ago, nobody could have predicted that a bunch of unpaid citizens could replace the Encyclopedia Brittanica with its budget of $350 million but it happened. He said that the business model of The New York Times is not sustainable. Abramson shudders, of course. Kaplan said Wales doesn't know what he's talking about; he has not been in a place like Baghdad and does not know the dififculty of getting information there and does not know how the existing system can be replaced. :Hinderaker goes back to Bill Mitchell's question from his presentation, in which he asked what tool we need to help build trust. Hinderaker says it would help to show us the material behind the story. The attitude bloggers have is -- via the link: ...

The target="_blank">Washington Post report on Iraqi elections is unlikely to convince those who regard it as 'illegitimate' otherwise because the polling results on which the story is based were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. BAGHDAD, Jan. 20 -- An overwhelming majority of Iraqis continue to say they intend to vote on Jan. 30 even as insurgents press attacks aimed at rendering the elections a failure, according to a new public opinion survey. The poll, conducted in late December and early January for the International Republican Institute, found 80 percent of respondents saying they were likely to vote, a rate that has held roughly steady for months. "Despite the efforts of the terrorists, Iraqis remain committed to casting their vote on election day," IRI President Lorne Craner said in a statement. The organization, which is funded by Congress through the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Agency for Inter...

The Iraqi Election Newswire links to this letter in the href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1395206,00.html" target="_blank">Guardian which exactly echoes the analysis of the href="http://http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050207&s=editors">Nation . Iraq is being denied free and fair elections, after enduring decades of Saddam's brutal dictatorship. The US and British occupation governments have engineered a process for reproducing the US-appointed Iraqi interim government to prolong the occupation and incite sectarian and ethnic conflicts. Millions of Iraqis, under siege in many parts of their homeland, will be disenfranchised. While boycotting this undemocratic exercise, we strongly condemn all forms of violence against Iraqis participating in it. We, as exiles, are confident that the vast majority of Iraqis, at home and abroad, shall unite to end the US-led occupation and establish democracy, whatever ...

The Lost Elections The Nation argues in its article href="http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050207&s=editors"> Iraq's Lost Election that the elections in Iraq are a lost cause because the interim government and the United States have failed to provide adequate security for the campaign and balloting to take place according to an accepted standard. As Dexter Filkins of the New York Times reported, rather than the normal democratic ritual of voters and candidates, what Iraqis know is "a campaign in the shadows, where candidates are often too terrified to say their names. Instead of holding rallies, they meet voters in secret, if they meet them at all. Instead of canvassing for votes, they fend off death threats." Filkins further reported: "Of the 7,471 people who have filed to run, only a handful outside the relatively safe Kurdish areas have publicly identified themselves. The locations for the 5,776 polling places have not been...

Unrepentant Thomas Friedman observes that it's hard to be an American in Paris these days, unless you are an anti-American American. Europe, he says, is the "ultimate Blue State". Only in Iran, apparently, is the general population looking forward to a second Bush Administration. Watching George W. Bush's second inaugural from a bistro in Paris is like watching the Red Sox win the World Series from a sports bar in New York City. Odds are that someone around you is celebrating -- I mean, someone, somewhere in Europe must be happy about this — but it's not obvious. Why are Europeans so blue over George W. Bush's re-election? Because Europe is the world's biggest "blue state." This whole region is a rhapsody in blue. But European disapproval is counterpointed by the emotion of surprised helplessness: and then suddenly, as the truth emerged, there was a feeling of slow resignation: 'Oh well, we've been dreaming,' " s...

"I've Never Been Happier" The Mudville Gazette has a special on Rick Rescorla, the man who fought in, among other things, the battle made into the movie We Were Soldiers Once, And Young . But being in a particular place at certain time was nothing so special as being a particular kind of man in every place and time. The survivors of the 7th Cavalry still tell awestruck stories about Rescorla. Like the time he stumbled into a hooch full of enemy soldiers on a reconnaissance patrol in Bon Song. "Oh, pardon me," he said, before firing a few rounds and racing away. "Oh, comma, pardon me," repeats Dennis Deal, who followed Rescorla that day in April 1966. "Like he had walked into a ladies' tea party!"  ... After fighting in Vietnam, he returned to the United States and used his military benefits to study creative writing at the University of Oklahoma. Literary minded, even before college he had read all fifty-one volumes of ...

A Ghost on the Internet There are interesting points of contrast between Sarah Boxer's speculation on the affiliations and motives of the Iraq the Model bloggers and Associated Press' determination to protect the anonymity and refusal to judge the motives of a stringer who photographed the execution of Iraqi electoral workers at fairly close range on Haifa Street . The juxtapositions are even more interesting because one of the bloggers in Iraq the Model   is standing for election under the Iraqi Pro-Democracy Party ticket while the victims of the Haifa Street execution were workers helping organize that election. Iraq the Model Bloggers Unknown Associated Press Photographer When I telephoned a man named Ali Fadhil in Baghdad last week, I wondered who might answer. A CIA operative? An American posing as an Iraqi? Someone paid by the Defense Department to support the war? Or simply an Iraqi with some mixed feelings ...