May 15, 2003

Get your warblog-coverage on

The Austin Chronicle has an article by Marc Savlov on warblogs.

Savlov had sent a request to the webmaster for austinbloggers.org for background info for the story. That e-mail addresses is an alias for several people, me being one. Although I’ve felt for years that Savlov is a prick, I responded in a helpful spirit, with some info and links.

Apart from sending no “thank you,” message, Savlov ignored or contradicted everything I sent him, which (I assume) conflicted with the story he wanted to write. This is not to say that I am right and he is wrong, but if a journalist asks someone assumed to have some knowledge of a specific field, and gets a response that doesn’t agree with what he expected or has been picking up from other sources, he might shoot back “That’s different from what I’ve been hearing. Why do you say that?”

He took the typical old-media condescending view of blogs in general.

And he spent about one-fifth of the story talking about a site that he acknowledges is not a blog but is “blog-like.” Whatever.

Paging David Nelson…

If your name happens to be David Nelson, you’re on the government’s “hassle me” list. There are a lot of guys named David Nelson.

This article contains a mistake: “Somewhere in the world there’s an actual terrorist suspect named David Nelson who started all this mess.” Not true. It seems that anybody the government feels like hassling can get on the list, including peace activists. I leave the irony as an exercise for the reader.

One thing about this concerns me: the government could use this problem as an excuse to introduce a national ID card system.