Today Obama responded to charges about his old pastor by publishing an article at the Huffington Post. Obama points out that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who made some inflammatory remarks that Obama has denounced, “has never been my political advisor; he’s been my pastor.”

But then he went on to point out that Wright is retiring and the new pastor of his church is Rev. Otis Moss III. Boy did that bring back memories! You see, the black church I have locked in my memory is the church of III’s father, Rev. Otis Moss Jr., in Cleveland. That’s where I grew up and that church was always a stop for my father on the campaign trail and at other times. How cool is it that his son is now Obama’s pastor! Small world.

I don’t know where MTV is airing these ads, but I am impressed that they are. We have to remember how flawed we are and constantly guard against giving anyone the power to behave this way. That’s something we have been pretty bad about in the United States these past seven years.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the pointer.

Thinking about searching with Google’s Custom Search Engine today led me to realize that it would be very helpful if search engines like this allowed more flexibility in how results were presented.

In the case I was considering today, it would be cool if I could do a regular spidery harvest of content, index it as usual, but then present the results in a different way. An example: items harvested from the MDL-SSR (such as this) should be able to point back at a different page (such as this) and include a link to a related graphic (such as this). This could be accomplished either by leaving “meta” hints behind in the HTML header of the to document retrieved or by writing a transform procedure to munge one set of URLs harvested into a different form for display and linking.

I wonder if anyone has done this. This is quite different from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) approach of harvesting only structured metadata. It could maybe be built into the Heretrix project or a related indexing tool.

Elle found a cheap flight to Europe on Kayak. May be worth checking out.

Highrise looks like an interesting option for contacts & CRM. From the folks at 37 Signals who bring us Basecamp.

I needed this today. I am getting real weary real fast of Clinton shenanigans.

The New York Times wrote earlier this month that publishers are moving away from DRM for audiobooks. Publisher have long insisted that they need Digital Rights Management to ensure their customers don’t steal their works. But others have seen DRM as Digital Restrictions Management that simply punishes customers by not letting them use the content they’ve purchased on the devises they own. It looks like the publishing industry is following the music industry’s conclusion that tripping up your customers and assuming they are criminals is a bad idea.

Of course, there is a business side to this. Publishers are also unhappy about the power they put in one vendors hands by pushing DRM content. For music that vendor was Apple. For audiobooks that vendor is Audible (now part of Amazon). Ironically, Amazon itself provided the music industry with a way out of the DRM bind by creating a very successful DRM-free alternative to iTunes in the Amazon MP3 store. Now it will be interesting to see if Audible gets behind the move to DRM-free audiobooks.

I’d like to give Apple some credit here. They usually get hammered folks for not licensing their FairPlay DRM technology. This has meant, for example, that the Zune has not been able to play content purchased at the iTunes store. It is rarely recognized, though, that by doing this Apple has left its partners with only one reasonable choice besides iTunes and FairPlay: going DRM-free. Since no other vendor in the market could play FairPlay content, to break away from the Apple stranglehold the industry had to break away from DRM altogether. Now we will see what Apple really believes in, if it starts licensing FairPlay to other manufacturers this would be a clear signal that it is trying to extend the life of DRM vs. free content. I don’t think that will happen.

All of this stands to simplify the life of those who are trying to move content onto devices like the iPod or other MP3 players. This may make life tougher for outfits like PlayAway as well. Still, PlayAway has a niche that may help it weather the storm: it serves people who do not own a player and want to share the content without moving digital files. Libraries like that. We’ll have to see who else (museums, doctors?) goes down that road.

An election season like this one will get you talking. You may talk with family, friends, even strangers about what you think about your candidate or cause. Mary points to a diary on DailyKos that takes a stab at helping us all be more persuasive in our rhetoric. It is a tough, fairly academic read, but I highly recommend it. It reminds us that if we really want to persuade someone we should consider who they are and where they are coming from.

Mary points to this Rolling Stone article about Obama’s campaign organization and what makes it fresh. The “bottom-up ethos” is so clearly different from the Clinton way of winning an election. We (yeah, each of us, the bottom in this bottom-up campaign) have to keep working to make the win a reality.

Meanwhile, Rolling Stone also endorsed Obama. A nice read on a day of Hillary’s continued campaign for McCain.

Thank goodness Comedy Central at least puts up some clips from Cobert. I find it hard to last through 30 minutes, but these four minutes are quite the tonic!

I sincerely hope the Democrats in Congress keep resisting the fear mongering Republican press for needless revisions to FISA. It is particularly galling that anyone in this country would think it appropriate to retroactively grant immunity to corporations for breaking the law. Just because “high administration officials” tell you it is OK to break the law is not reason enough to break the law in this country. I hope, anyway.