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For the past few years, and particularly during the US Presidential election last year, the media have been trying to set up an adversarial debate between blogging and journalism. The idea has propagated that blogging might be ’the new journalism’ and once they’ve established such a concept, traditional media have then sought to undermine this strawman blogging. As many have commented, if current affairs blogging has an analogue in the traditional media it’s probably the comments page, not the headlines. Occasionally bloggers break a story, but the only real threat to the traditional journalist’s investigative role is the abject failure of many of them to exercise it. ...

I just made another round of changes to Services_Technorati. As well as a few maintenance tasks, I made it more explicit that the caching is optional, added a factory method, and worked in support for the new TopTags API call. The Attention.XML support is still not working as hoped. Niall Kennedy (Technorati’s Community Manager) assures me that they will be working on it at their end as soon as possible, so I’ll wait for that before doing any more work there. ...

Last year I wrote up an entry on Noruz, the Persian New Year. It’s here again, so to anyone who may be celebrating: Happy New Year! Naturally, Google have a special logo for the occasion. Tags: Noruz Norouz

The weekend saw more and more commentary on the Wolfowitz nomination, including this piece from Oxford Analytica, which included the comment: Wolfowitz’s nomination follows that of Condoleezza Rice as U.S. secretary of state and John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.–trusted confidantes from Bush’s first term who are being moved into positions from which they can orchestrate U.S. “soft power” in support of the war on terror. The phrase ‘soft power’ was probably the phrase I was looking for in this post and this certainly seems a more compelling argument than that of those who believe that Bush sending his top people into these international bodies is supposed to symbolise a new commitment to the international system. If he really had that commitment, he has enough other close associates who would be more warmly received. ...

I found Thomas Hine’s “I Want That” while browsing through the Friends of East Grand Rapids book sale with Brandon a few months back. When it comes to consumption, books are one of my greatest weaknesses. The book’s claim to be a cultural history of shopping was a little too much to resist for someone who, from time to time, finds himself fascinated by consumerism. The opening gambit of the piece is that shopping/consumption is both the most potent tool we have for establishing our identity, and an activity inextricably tied in with societal changes over the past few centuries. Hine traces the development of shopping from the Athenian Agora, through medieval European markets, to the birth of department stores and on to modern North American malls. He does a good job of demonstrating the social and psychological thinking behind the changes, and whether intentionally or not shows the moral amiguity of many of the decisions. ...

Alex and David at World Bank President are doing a sterling job of following the various statements being made in the wake of the nomination of Wolfowitz. The level of dismay being expressed is quite unprecedented, and I suspect Bush would at least have expected a warmer reception from the UK government. Theories float around as to why Wolfowitz was nominated. Some speculation is that it is a ploy by Bush to remove one of the DoD’s most divisive figures, and the appointment certainly would be helpful if the administration want to reposition that department. Personally I’m more sympathetic to the view that sees this as a simple progression from the appointment of John Bolton to the UN. ...

We’re currently in Denver, where Kari is representing Calvin at a variety of events, and I’m enjoying a change of scenery and a different set of wifi-enabled coffee shops. Travelling always seems to put me in the mood for catching up on blogging–something I’ve been amiss with lately–and I’d intended a ’links’ post of this sort yesterday, before events at the World Bank overtook me. So without further ado… I have another review up at the Phantom Tollbooth, this time of Steven James’ book “Becoming Real”. I was probably more restrained writing the piece than I should have been. Deborah James has a good piece at Common Dreams on the status of the WTO: The Walking Zombie of the WTO I’d planned to join in Greg’s google-bombing of the term Jerusalem Prayer Team, and now that he’s offering free beer to those of us who do… Media Mouse report that one of the factories featured in The Take is under attack. Streak has a great piece up on Christianity, commodification, and Wal-Mart Time to get back to writing my presentation for the Festival of Faith and Music. ...

When she played at Calvin back in October, Sam Phillips told us she had “a thing” for Tom Waits. She’ll be wanting to check out the latest Observer Music Monthly this Sunday, then, as Waits holds forth on how much he likes her Martinis & Bikinis. (which can be purchased for the bargain price of $7.99 from amazon.com) Tags: Tom Waits Sam Phillips Observer

So it’s true. In a press conference this morning, Bush confirmed that he has nominated the abominable Paul Wolfowitz, US Deputy Secretary of Defense, for World Bank President. One of the chief architects of the neo-conservative imperialist policies is proposed for one of the world’s key financial positions. The news was broken by Reuters and quickly picked up by WorldBankPresident.org. The World Bank website currently states: The Executive Directors of the Board, who are charged under the Bank’s Articles of Agreement with the selection of the Bank’s President, are in the process of consultations with the member countries they represent. An official announcement of the outcome of the deliberations and actions of the Executive Directors will be made as soon as a decision has been reached. ...

Today I found myself reworking a set of directory classes I wrote in haste a few months ago. I decided that some of them would gain from making use of DB_DataObject_FormBuilder but had to remind myself of how to make that package work with multiple tables. The presentation included as part of the documentation demonstrates how to create a form with data from multiple tables, using something like: $first_table =& DB_DataObject::factory('table_one'); $first_table->fb_createSubmit = false; $first_build =& DB_DataObject_FormBuilder::create($first_table); $first_form = $first_build->getForm(); $second_table = DB_DataObject::factory('table_two'); $second_build =& DB_DataObject_FormBuilder::create($second_table); $second_build->useForm($first_form); print $second_build->toHTML(); Personally, I’m not a fan of the headers that QuickForm (the form class behind FormBuilder) adds for each table, so after a little hunting around I discovered that: ...