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Note to mainstream media: Iran cannot construct nuclear bombs with uranium enriched only to less than 4%. It needs to be enriched to something like 90% to make a bomb. So all the silly articles on Friday about how iran now has enough enriched uranium to make a bomb are just illiterate.

As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, attention is not scalable. Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) - an increasingly thinning state of focus. It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share. That something is forever vying for our attention and relentlessly pushing us to do more with less driven by the omnipresent fear of potentially missing what’s next.

We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

building a community around the statusphere - the state of publishing, reading, responding to, and sharing micro-sized updates.

Cell phones are definitely in, but cable TV is not regarded as crucial

Daily newspapers will become a thing of the past for readers in four Michigan markets, with issues being printed only three days a week in Flint, Saginaw and Bay City, and twice weekly in Ann Arbor. Advance Publications said it would close the 174-year-old Ann Arbor News in late July, and replace it with two new corporate entities: a primarily Web-based news operation, AnnArbor.com; and a printing company that will publish two days a week.

Peretz doesn't seem to know what a blog is or to realize that it wasn't PBS that made me prominent, but "Informed Comment" and my daily commentary and reportage here. And, it generated lots of television, not just the Lehrer News Hour. I have been on ABC Evening News, Nightline, the Today Show, CNN Headline News, Anderson Cooper 360, Wolf Blitzer, John Gibson's Big Country (yes, on Fox), Keith Olbermann, Ron Reagan, the History Channel, etc., etc. Lehrer has hardly been alone among television journalists in valuing my perspective.Peretz has smeared Jim Lehrer, indeed, libelled him, along with Ray Suarez, Margaret Warner and Gwen Ifill (all of whom have interviewed me), and must apologize. Now.

what’s truly embarrassing is that none of the public affairs staff at the academy had any idea who Borat was. Shouldn’t we expect public affairs officers to have at least a passing familiarity with popular culture?

the news business as we've known it for generations is changing and will continue to change in ways we can't possibly imagine now.I accept that and even embrace it. Yet at the same time, I can't help but wonder how we can recover what is almost certain to be lost in this revolution: a sense of shared knowledge of our communities.

I think we're reaching the point when we need some technology that helps us filter, sort and make sense of the river of data that we swim in every day.There used to be something like that. It was called a newspaper.

I believe people still want what newspapers have provided: a sense of being presented with important, useful and enjoyable information, culled from many sources and thoughtfully organized.Like Clay Shirky, I don't know what online form that might take. And given the economics of the Web, it may be that nobody can make a living producing it.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

both the press and the public let down their guard in the aftermath of 9/11. “The major newspapers joined the [Bush] team,” Hersh said. Top editors passed the message to investigative reporters not to “pick holes” in what Bush was doing. Violations of the Bill of Rights happened in the plain sight of the public. It it was not only tolerated, but Bush was re-elected.

Spence said he plans to become a "human surveillance machine" to explore privacy issues and whether people are "sleepwalking into an Orwellian society."

Spence, who jokingly calls himself "Eyeborg," told reporters at a media conference in Brussels that the camera hidden in a prosthetic eye — the same pale hazel color as his real one — would also let him capture more natural conversations than he would with a bulky regular camera. "As a documentary maker, you're trying to make a connection with a person," he says, "and the best way to make a connection is through eye contact." But Spence also acknowledged privacy concerns. "The closer I get to putting this camera eye in, the more freaked out people are about me," he said, adding people aren't sure they want to hang around someone who might be filming them at any time

Great that Bill gave you a louder platform to point out the corrosive effects of the Washington bubble, of which the national media are so important a part. A shame that the discussion of the possible impact of the internet was so brief at the end there. Nevertheless, I think what came over quite strongly was the sense that this is a moment of real potential for change, for fracture in the ideological hegemony of the establishment, for ideas otherwise readily dismissed as 'radical' or 'far left' or simply laughable to finally get a hearing in the public sphere. Because the public sphere itself has become a more contested, dynamic, and fractious place, which is all to the good. Nice work all round.

There are a couple of reasons why many people don't realize how close newspapers are to a meltdown. First, news media executives don't want to paint a depressing picture of the future. Not surprisingly, they're inclined to present an optimistic and hopeful narrative that says they'll ride out the worst and emerge even stronger. Second, so far anyway, news consumers haven't seen anything close to the full impact of the digital revolution.

The truth is no one knows what the future of news will be

Let's apply the same model to the present.  In brainstorming the future of news, all hands are needed, those of the amateurs as well as the pros.

Among the studies Greenfield analyzed was a classroom study showing that students who were given access to the Internet during class and were encouraged to use it during lectures did not process what the speaker said as well as students who did not have Internet access. When students were tested after class lectures, those who did not have Internet access performed better than those who did. "Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning," Greenfield said. Restrain me, quick, before I break something. Because there’s a missing element in this bit of sloppy science that makes me want to throw my beloved laptop through the window. It’s this: the freaking teacher. So let me correct this: “CLUELESSLY wiring classrooms for internet access does not enhance learning.”

It’s totally schooly, and divorced from the authentic uses we put this stuff to in that non-school place called the real world.

More pointedly still: Creating an opposition between "critical thinking" and "reading and discussing," on the one hand, and electronic/social media on the other, is a logical false disjunctive (in plain talk, a false either/or). Any competent teacher can use the new literacy tools to create new possibilities in critical thinking, reading, discussing, and more, that were only dreamt of in pre-Internet philosophies.

On her blog, a friend of mine recently lambasted Egyptians for their failure to take to the streets like people in Turkey, Morocco, France and dozens of other countries. While I don’t feel the same way she does, I feel her frustration. What is happening to Philip Rizk is just a reminder of the harsh realties of life in Egypt. There is no way Mubarak and his people can maintain their alliances without a crushing iron fist - state of emergency.

I’m curious to see how much media coverage this whole story will receive… So far, very few news outlets have picked it up.

With the Iranian government clamping down on foreign journalists, Kelly has a point: access to Twitter and ilk are crucial sources of information. Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook have already emerged as sources of raw news in disasters and political crises before--from the Hudson River emergency plane landing to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. But this is the first time they've been highlighted as vital information channels in Iran--both for protesters trying to spread information and for government authorities trying to gather it.