Douse the controversy, or transform it?

Everyone has been making much of the Obama speech on race and racism in america. David S. Broder of the Washington Post has written well on the subject and why it will continue to be a controversy. But he suggests that Obama’s immediate objective was to “douse the controversy” surrounding his relationship with Reverend Wright.

I don’t believe that this was Obama’s objective. Most politicians seek to push away from controversy, but Obama seems to want to use it rather than to simple make the controversy go away.

This is one of the things I find impressive about Obama. I hope he continues to push us all to confront these difficult issues of race and class, so we can make America the place we all believe it can be.

Original Washington Post article

Anti-Customer Update – WSJ Online

WSJ Online now has a policy that shuts down your account access if they detect you logging in from more than one computer at a time.

TechCrunch does a nice job telling the story behind this fiasco.

What I find really funny is that this sort of stupidity is now considered an “understandable, and classic reaction” from incumbent executives. Erick at TechCrunch is exactly right about this.

There’s hope for WSJ, of course. If Rupert Murdock has his way

 – but what about YOUR company?

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Danah Boyd on socialization in the digital world

In this video interview, Danah Boyd makes some great points about lack of socialization of kids. Lack of space for them to gather and be social even in with their own friends and some of the factors making this happen. Then she talks about how they DO socialize, online… OK, there’s a few asides regarding Scoble being different from normal users, but the rest is fascinating stuff.

Danah Boyd interview by Robert Scoble, at Davos:

[From QIK | Streaming video right from your phone]

Danah Boyd is a researcher who studies teens ad their online interactions. See more on Danah at her website.

You can also read about her on Wikipedia