“Michael Jackson’s Last Performance on the Web: Big, But Not Obama Big” [via Techmeme]

Thousands of U.S. Marines descended upon the volatile Helmand River valley in helicopters and armored convoys early Thursday morning, mounting an operation that represents the first large-scale test of the U.S. military’s new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

The operation will involve about 4,000 troops from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which was dispatched to Afghanistan earlier this year by President Obama to combat a growing Taliban insurgency in Helmand and other southern provinces. The Marines, along with an Army brigade that is scheduled to arrive later this summer, plan to push into pockets of the country where NATO forces have not had a presence. In many of those areas, the Taliban have evicted local police and government officials, and taken power.

“U.S. Marines Launch Major Operation in Afghanistan“

“Palin Does Runner’s World Photo Shoot”

UPDATE: I suspect Runner’s World will have one of its best traffic days ever with the Palin photoshoot. And being a member of the “respectable” media, I suspect the magazine will never admit it.

For months while a NY Times reporter was held hostage in Afghanistan Wikipedia administrations played a cat-and-mouse game to keep the news of the kidnapping under wraps. An anonymous editor griped after the reporter escaped , “Is that enough proof for you [expletives]? I was right. You were WRONG.” In this case being factually right before David Rohde’s escape could have made his situation worse. It’s easy for a Wikipedia editor in Florida to scream about the free flow of information. They didn’t have anything at stake, unlike the NY Times and Rohde’s family.

“Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia“

“Facebook Takes Aim at Twitter: New Publisher Makes Public Status Updates Easy”

As I’m slowly entering the world of the Mac (but not giving up my Windows machines) I’ve already found it surprisingly easy to move my music from iTunes on my Windows desktop to my MacBook. I transfered the files with an external hard drive then simply dragged and dropped the music into iTunes. The Mac does all the hard work of organizing them nicely on my hard drive, finding the album art, and arranging them into the iTunes library.

For me, I go with Favre. A lot of what made the legendary teams Starr was on was coach Vince Lombardi. He had an uncanny ability to find talent and motivate them to play their best. With Farve you had to always watch, because you never knew what he’d pull off. Sure, he broke your heart, but he did things mere mortals shouldn’t be able to do on a football field.

Who’s your choice? And if you say, “Randy Wright” you’ll receive enteral mocking from me.

[via Cheesehead.tv]

e can assume that from now on, something like this is going to happen every time a citizenry butts heads with its government. (If there was any doubt, the creator of the DoS tool made the code available on his site; the target sites can be easily modified.) It’d be silly to think that we could contain it by declaring it invalid. Still, we–the technopolitics community–need to consider the morality of this tactic, as our collective ability to spread the “Attack!” message is not inconsequential.

“On The Weaponization of the Collaborative Web” [via Danger Room]

It’s not that I don’t want an iPhone with more memory (up to 32 GB), faster downloads, and the ability to record video. I’d love it. It’s just that I bought my iPhone 3G in January, and according to Apple and AT&T I’d have to fork over up to $499 for an early upgrade. Sorry, Apple, I’ll be waiting for a while. Until when prices go down I’ll enjoy the soon-to-be-released iPhone 3.0 upgrade.

For an eCampaign angle imagine the real-time neighborhood canvassing and GOTV applications that can be built with the greater download speed, Google Map integration with apps, and push technology? If I were on a campaign next year I’d brainstorming possibilities and looking for quality iPhone developers.

“iPhone 3G Users to Pay $200 Premium for Early Upgrade to iPhone 3G S“