Media Culpa

Swedish christian web site Crossnet.se reveals plans to launch a blog. Individuals will be able to publish a personal blog under the domain crossnet.se for a small annual fee.

Crossnet writes: “Blogging is seen by congregation researchers as a means of changing and developing the new generation’s view of the church.”

Read today on the Media Drop about problems with people sending trackback pings that have absolutely no relation to the post. It never occured to me that trackbacks could be abused, but it is very obvious once you think about it. All possibilities can be abused and exploited, just like email and comments.

…and it’s not even that new. Googling “trackback spam” gives you more than 9,000 hits! How long will we be able to have trackbacks that doesn’t require approval first?

Swedish business daily Dagens Industri‘s New York correspondent Lars Thulin yesterday went to a polling station, waited in line for the voting booth for 20 minutes, went in and checked out the voting machine. If he wanted to he could have voted. Problem is he is not a US citizen.

He cheated his way in by simply ignoring to have his signature checked and instead go straight to the voting booth line. Had he done it the proper way, the officials would have seen that he was not in the electoral register, but the world’s most powerful democracy was pretty easy to fool.

If he’d only had a camera phone with him to photograph the incident like Brian Nicks did when he tried to vote in California on Monday.

The Times today is shifting to full tabloid format for the first time in its 216 year history. The historic event gets covered from different perspectives in the Times and in rival paper The Independent.