TechCrunch: It was probably to be expected that Twitter would struggle as reportedly hundreds of thousands of tweets came in about Jackson in a very short amount of time. While I only got a couple actual Fail Whales, the site was really sucking wind for much of the hour that people were trying to get information about him. But Twitter was hardly the only site that was struggling. Various reports had the AOL-owned TMZ, which broke the story, being down at multiple points throughout the ordeal. As...

UPDATE II 9 a.m. – The State: Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media. He says he considered hiking the Appalachian Trail but chose, instead, to do something “exotic.” While there, he “drove along the coastline.” Incredible. UPDATE...

David Carr asks, How Good (or Not Evil) Is Google? His conclusion: As with most matters involving Google, it is less about the specific activity than the scope of it. A company with Google’s wherewithal and ambition may have the ability to eventually seem like the only choice in all manner of endeavors. The morning before I went to visit Google, I searched my Gmail to find my schedule and plugged it into my Google Calendar before pumping the address into Google Maps. I checked Google News to make...

Paul Lamere at Music Machinery: One of the ways that Music 2.0 has changed how we think about music is that there is so much interesting data available about how people are listening to music. Sites like Last.fm automatically track all sorts of interesting data that just was not available before. Forty years ago, a music label like Capitol would know how many copies the album Abbey Road sold in the U.S., but the label wouldn’t know how many times people actually listened to the album. Today,...

A few months back Siva Vaidhyanathan asked if anyone had ever used Google Street View for something important? He posted some of the interesting answers he got, but none was quite so newsworthy as this: A four story building collapsed in Brooklyn today, just before 2pm. The “Vesper Bar & Lounge” at 493 Myrtle Avenue is completely unrecognizable after the collapse, which saw no casualties and four minor injuries, according to early reports. The Bar was closed at the time and emergency services...

The NYTimes today looks at Why the Gay Rights Movement Has No National Leader: Until 1973, homosexuality was classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. Today, same-sex couples can marry in six states. How did a group that has been so successful over the last generation in countering cultural prejudice and winning civil rights make it so far without an obvious leader? One explanation is that gay and lesbian activists learned early on that they could get along just fine...

The documentary on the food industry went into wider distribution this weekend. Critics agree — SEE IT! NY Magazine: After an hour and a half of sighing, wincing, and clucking over the manifold outrages portrayed in Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., I gave up the thought of “reviewing” the documentary and decided, instead, to exhort you: See it. Bring your kids if you have them. Bring someone else’s kids if you don’t. The message is nothing new if you’ve read Eric Schlosser’s Fast...

Following up on yesterday morning’s post from Michael on the “breathtaking hypocrisy” of John Ensign things have heated up some today. ProPublica’s Robin Fields, brings us up to date: The fallout from an extramarital affair between Ensign and Cindy Hampton, a campaign staffer, is threatening to ensnare other Republican leaders as they try to marshal opposition to the Obama administration. A June 11 letter written by Hampton’s husband, published today in the Las Vegas...

Jack Shafer at Slate is doubting Twitter: Unlike several other technology-friendly journalists, I’ve found it more noise than signal in understanding the Iranian upheaval. I’m not saying that there is no signal to be found; I’m just saying that my cognitive colander isn’t big enough to strain out Iran information I can rely on…. I appreciate, as Atlantic Senior Editor Andrew Sullivan wrote in his blog, that many of the reports are “more about the mood than hard...

The White House: REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AT THE SIGNING OF A PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM REGARDING FEDERAL BENEFITS AND NON-DISCRIMINATION Oval Office 6:04 P.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT: Well, today I’m proud to issue a presidential memorandum that paves the way for long-overdue progress in our nation’s pursuit of equality. Many of our government’s hard-working, dedicated, and patriotic public servants have long been denied basic rights that their colleagues enjoy for one simple reason...

In Iran, why didn’t they just turn Twitter off? From All Things Considered: Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, says Iran uses a basic filtering architecture that has the average Internet connection piped through a government server farm before it goes anywhere else. But, like resourceful American students in search of Facebook, many Iranians can get around blocks. Complicating matters for the authorities, Zittrain says, is the...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report today on the effects we can expect that global climate change will have on the United States. Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States draws material from 13 US government science agencies. Ten key findings: Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow Widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase Climate...

How surprising. A leak. Politico: Reacting to a rising tide of anger from gay and lesbian supporters at a series of slights and deferred promises, President Obama will tomorrow sign an executive order extending benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. The move, which mirrors the policy of many large corporations, will have an immediate effect for many workers, but it is a deeply reactive response to a core Democratic group whose concerns have been festering for six months. The executive...

UPDATE: In comments, Twitter is down for maintenance. 1:30 am in Iran, they delayed to minimize the impact there. ++++++++++++++++ Both CNN and Reuters are reporting that the Obama administration asked Twitter to delay going down for scheduled maintenance last night to ensure Iranians could continue using the service to communicate to each other and the outside world. Twitter rescheduled. But some folks are worried that the Iranian government might view users’ profiles to find and punish them...

Check it out. Following up on this morning’s post, it looks like a perfect storm is brewing.

The NYTimes editorial today on the recent Department of Justice brief defending DOMA: The Obama administration, which came to office promising to protect gay rights but so far has not done much, actually struck a blow for the other side last week. It submitted a disturbing brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, which is the law that protects the right of states to not recognize same-sex marriages and denies same-sex married couples federal benefits. The administration needs a new direction...

Taxes are the means through which we pay for the infrastructure of civilization. While I can’t exactly say I’m happy to pay them, I understand, expect and accept that I will always pay a big chunk of my wages out in taxes each year. I believe in community, taxes come with it. Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has a piece on the NYTimes’ Economix blog that makes a bunch of great points. Here are a few I particularly like: We live in...

Yesterday Fred Wilson proposed we give bing a chance. He set his default search to Bing and promised his reaction to it in the coming days. Later TechCrunch’s MG Siegler reminds us that back in the 90s he was something of a Microsoft fanboy before going on to admit: I mocked Bing from the second I heard its name, as basically a non-starter. But here we are a few weeks later, and I’m still hearing a significant number of people talking about it when I go various places. At the very least,...

Max Cleland ended a seven year hiatus from public life this month when he attended the D-Day ceremony on the cliffs of Normandy. The former Georgia senator was named secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission by President Obama in May. In that capacity he served as the official escort of the president and First Lady at Normandy. American news outlets largely ignored Cleland. If a forthcoming book is as juicy as The Hill suggested this week (their piece was headlined, “Cleland’s...

“It’s almost like a horror film, like ‘Invasion of the Food Snatchers,’ ” – Robert Kenner, Director, “Food, inc.” The NYTimes: Forget buckets of blood. Nothing says horror like one of those tubs of artificially buttered, nonorganic popcorn at the concession stand. That, at least, is one of the unappetizing lessons to draw from one of the scariest movies of the year, “Food, Inc.,” an informative, often infuriating activist documentary about the big business of feeding...

They learned to be players all right. From the ESPN story: Think a wrestling singlet is revealing? The photos and video of [University of Nebraska wrestler Paul] Donahoe on Fratmen.tv left nothing to the imagination… The Web site’s producers masked the tattoo of his real last name on his torso. But that didn’t keep Nebraska wrestling coach Mark Manning from recognizing Donahoe when the images reached his desk. On Aug. 12, 2008, Manning kicked his national champion off the team. He...

The NYTimes’ story makes it sound like the legislation is some draconian new regualtion of the tobacco companies: More than four decades after the surgeon general declared smoking a health hazard, the Senate on Thursday cleared the final hurdle to empowering federal officials to regulate cigarettes and other forms of tobacco for the first time. The legislation, which the White House said President Obama would sign as soon as it reached his desk, will enable the Food and Drug Administration...

I could not agree more: The traditional TV industry–cable companies, networks, and broadcasters–is where the newspaper industry was about five years ago: In denial. [...] Specifically, the TV industry’s attitude is the same as the newspaper industry’s attitude was circa 2002-2003: Stop calling us dinosaurs: We get digital; We’re growing our digital businesses; We’re investing in digital platforms; People still recall ads even when they fast-foward through them...

I got mine! From the beginning of Facebook, people have used their real names to share and connect with the people they know. This authenticity helps to create a trusted environment because you know the identity of the people and things on Facebook. The one place, though, where your identity wasn’t reflected was in the Web address for your profile or the Facebook Pages you administer. The URL was just a randomly assigned number like “id=592952074.” That [changed at midnight ET]. [Facebook...

Stephen H. Miller points to Maura Flynn who makes The Republican Case for Gay Marriage at Big Hollywood: The Republican Party has made a huge mistake in advocating a kind of Cafeteria Constitutionalism. (I’ll take some guns, no helmet laws, please, a free market, and…yuck, hold the gay marriage!). One can’t legitimately invoke the Constitution to oppose federally mandated sex education, and then use the federal government to impose school prayer. Leave that fair-weather-federalism to the Left. It’s...