Chris Matthews gives a lesson in history and grammar:

Link via TNR.

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Powerset has developed a tool that allows users to search Wikipedia with "conversational phrasing instead of keywords." I tried this out by searching "Who is the current president of Russia?", and didn't really get my answer. The first link told me it was Vladimir Putin, but Dmitry Medvedev was inaugurated on May 7. How do I know this? I Googled "president russia" and eventually got my answer. The first link of the Google search gave me Putin as well, but the second and third links gave me Medvedev.

And this is what I don't get. Who is it that is having such a hard time searching the Web using keywords? I'm not arguing that this is the best way to search, but I do think it's currently doing the job. Much like the QWERTY keyboard (which was designed to slow down typists who were jamming typewriters), it seems we've settled on keyword search for any number of random (and not so random) reasons.

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Reading this story about the recovery of a melted hard drive from the space shuttle Columbia made me think of the current state of the rhetorical canon of memory.

Specifially, it reminded me of Greg Ulmer's discussion of memory in Internet Invention. The current version of the Simonides story is the Internet - a redundant system meant to recover things after the disaster. Ulmer reminds us that the Web was designed by the U.S. Department of Defense so that communication channels could survive a nuclear attack.

Do we still teach memory? What happens to this canon "after" the Internet?

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All three potential presidential candidates have backed a shield law to protect the confidentiality of journalists' sources. As the New York Times points out, conservatives are now showing support for this bill:

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I have been a Weezer fan since the first time I heard "Undone" in 1994. With the exception of their most recent album called Make Believe, I think Weezer's stuff still has something to offer. (Make Believe struck me as an attempt to reach a younger demographic. If so, then maybe it wasn't "bad." Maybe it just that it wasn't "my" Weezer.)

The new album will be self-titled but it will be called The Red Album (in the tradition of The Blue Album and The Green Album), and it will be released in June. The first single is called "Pork and Beans" and sounds promising. But in the meantime, front man Rivers Cuomo has been using YouTube to pull together his minions in a collaborative song-writing effort. I've included the video for steps 1 and 2 below, but you can watch all the steps of the compositional process at Rivers' YouTube page.

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I know this is a bit old, but Bitch Ph.D. linked to the video of Obama supposedly "flipping Clinton the bird." The editing of the clip makes it seem as if the crowd cheers because Obama flipped the bird, but as Media Matters reports a different angle shows that Obama used one more than one finger to scratch his itch.

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I stumbled into a strange story at the Wiki-Observations blog, which had a cryptic discussion of the departure of a Wikipedia admin named Newyorkbrad. After some googling, I think I've pieced things together. It seems that Wikipedia critic Daniel Brandt has outed (or threatened to out) Newyorkbrad by publishing his name and the law firm he works for. This has prompted Newyorkbrad to leave Wikipedia. From what I can tell, Brandt was able to figure out Newyorkbrad's identity because of pictures taken of him during Wikipedia's "Wikimania" conference. Many Wikipedians like to remain anonymous for various reasons - one oft-cited reason is cyberstalkers, but I can imagine that Newyorkbrad might not want the firm he works for knowing that he spends parts of his days editing Wikipedia.

Brandt's site - Wikipedia-Watch - has a list of a number of Wikipedia admins that Brandt deems to be part of a "hive mind." He feels he's been personally attacked by many Wikipedians as he's attempted to get the article about him deleted (currently, there is no "Daniel Brandt" article on Wikipedia.) Brandt also thinks that Wikipedia's anonymity policy is unethical and invites corruption.

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I've read two pieces recently that situate current discussions of race in a long line of "the same conversation":

1) Ta-Nehisi Coates's "'This is How we Lost to the White Man'" in The Atlantic is a discussion of Bill Cosby's "black conservatism.

2) Garry Wills's "Two Speeches on Race" in The New York Review of Books is a comparison of Obama's speech on race/racism/Jeremiah Wright to Lincoln's Cooper Union address.

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Victor Vitanza, The Blogora's own Cynthia Haynes, and some others at Clemson have launched a podcast called "KDM Digital." KDM stands for "Knowing, Doing, Making" and is a nod to Aristotle.

I've only listened to the first episode thus far, which provides some background on how the podcast was conceived (we get to hear a behind the scenes discussion amongst KDM collaborators.) In other episodes, there are interviews with Byron Hawk and Thomas Rickert about their new books.

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Clay Spinuzzi writes of an updated version of the elevator pitch - the 30 second answer to: "So, what do you work on?"

Inspired by the micro-blogging tool Twitter and the need to schedule meetings with various startup companies, Stowe Boyd has invented the Twitpitch:

Here's the rules for Twitpitching:

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German Wikipedia will be published as a book. Will it still be called "Wikipedia," or will it be called something different? It seems to me that that a new name is required the moment a wiki is transformed into something more stable. It ain't a wiki anymore. Unless maybe they are going leave some blank pages at the end of each article...

The Alt Text video below guides you through the fallacies used in flame wars. I'm not sure about his example for "straw man," but it's still work a look (and maybe even worth showing in class.) Then again, I was just talking to someone the other day about teaching fallacies, and I argued that we too often only teach fallacies as "wrong" ways to argue (rather than as a way to parse arguments). Was it Perelman that said every fallacy (or every argument?) was some version of "begging the question"?

Anyway, this dude's take on ad hominem is entertaining:

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Some readers of this blog might remember that I posted my notes to Greg Ulmer's book Internet Invention while I taught my Fall "Computers and Writing" class. We used Ulmer's book in that class to work through a genre of writing called mystory. Mystory is an attempt to understand the various images and discourses that shape us as thinkers, readers, writers...as beings.

I never did post anything about how that class went, so I thought I'd post a description of the Mystory projects that students in that class developed. Overall, I was very pleased considering I'd never taught the book before. I'm submitting this project for the CWRL's annual MEME Award. Here's a brief description of the project with some links to student mystories:

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This story about connections between "military analysts" (i.e. talking heads that defend war strategy) and military contractors is making the rounds. I've now seen it linked on Boing Boing, The Blogora, and a few other blogs. It turns out that those "explaining" U.S. war strategy in Iraq had financial interests linked with that war and also served as a kind of public relations staff for the White House:

“It was them [the Bush administration] saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Followers of Wikipedia know this tactic by the name of sockpuppetry. As Bevelacqua notes, a sockpuppet involves some other entity sticking their hands up another's...errr..."back" and putting out a particular message. On Wikipedia, this is used to hide identity and it's linked to whitewashing and other nefarious practices.

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Sometimes I worry that this is how I sound to my students:

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This image comes via Bitch Ph.D.:

An interesting documentary about Web 2.0, and it even includes Andrew Keen doing his thing. I'm really starting to wonder if Keen believes much of anything that comes out of his own mouth. Dude has found a niche market and is hanging onto it for dear life. Interestingly enough, he's using the Web to make sure many people receive his message...hrm:

Byron Hawk's book A Counter-History of Composition (published in November 2007) is required reading for anyone interested in composition theory, complexity theory, Deleuze, and/or the history of the discipline (among other things.) Byron was interviewed by Victor Vitanza at 4C's an interview that will be made available via podcast.

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Via Collage of Citations, check out this video from 1993 about "Internet."

It turns out "Internet" (when did we add the article?) has changed a bit in the past fifteen years:

"there's not a lot of cursing, swearing...there's not a lot of put downs you'd expect to find, there's not screenfulls of 'go to hell'"