The Shield law is a privilege, not a right. We grant journalists the privilege of shielding their sources to further the public good. Because some stories will never see the light of day unless someone betrays their trust to lay a foundation for those stories.

In turn, journalists have the responsibility to exercise that privilege wisely. Just because a source asks to be shielded, it doesn’t mean that the source has to be shielded. It requires a judgement call that the public good generated by the story outweighs damages accrued along the way.

Sometimes you buy a pig in a poke. You promise to shield a source for what turns out to be a non-starter. And you have to live up to that promise. But how does revealing confidential information about Apple’s upcoming products serve the public good?

I think that some bloggers will eventually be upheld as journalists. I just don’t think that the result of Apple v. Does or Apple v. ThinkSecret is going to set that standard.

A big win for Stanford, bouncing back from a bad loss to Washington State on Thursday. The final minutes seemed to go on forever, but Stanford kept their cool and made their free throws. I’ll feel even better with another win at the Pac-10 tournament, but this one should put Stanford on solid footing for the NCAA tournament.

I was also pleased to discover that XM Radio has Pac-10 coverage. ESPN game update will do in a pinch, but it doesn’t provide a good feel for the game. With Murph at the mike, it was just like being back in the Bay Area again.

Ouch. It’s been a long time since Stanford found itself on the outside looking in at March Madness. But with last night’s loss to Washington State and the regular season finale against Pac-10 leader Washington, Stanford faces a final regular season record of 16-12 (10-8 in the Pac-10). And as much as much as I dislike the Pac-10 tournament, Stanford may need a good showing to make the NCAA tournament.

I was playing around with the new “Address Bar Browse by Name” when I stumbled across my DMOZ listing rather than text from my weblog in the search results. So I scurried back to the PowerBook and was eventually able to get the right query to the right data center for this screen shot.

It may be time to submit a new description for my DMOZ weblog listing (the current listing was provided by an editor who happened to visit while I was going through a blogging and journalism jag).

The furor over Google Autolink is a clash between competing value systems. If you feel strongly enough about reader’s rights, then there is nothing wrong with autolink. And if you feel strongly enough about writer’s rights, then there is nothing right about it.

Reader’s rights are not absolute. You don’t get to buy a book; contract with the bookbinding elves to modify, reset and rebind that book; and then place it back on your book shelf as if it were the original.

Writer’s rights are not absolute. You don’t get to punish people for adding information to the margins of your books.

I hate the slippery slope because it frames the discussion as you’re either with us or against us, and denies the possibility of compromise. In the real world, you don’t get to believe in either the irresistable force or the immovable object.

Writers have the right to recognized for their writing and that others’ writing not be confused with their own.

Readers have the right to modify works that they’ve legally obtained. They have the responsibility of recognizing the difference between the original and their modifications.

And intervening parties need to maintain the balance between the two.

We upgraded the home network to 802.11g last week. The hardest part of the process was sifting through the internet to evaluate compatibility with AirPort Extreme. So there was a certain amount of trepidation when we purchased a D-Link DI-624.

I’m pleased to say that I’m experiencing no problems between our 10.3.8 PowerBook and Rev C DI-624 (2.50 firmware) using WPA-PSK. The ‘book reported an error when I entered the pass phrase, but I have not detected any problems since. There are no error messages on either the console or the router log while the ‘book stays awake (there is a disconnect/connect burp every time it sleeps/wakes).

Anyone interested in a used D-Link DI-614+? D-Link marked it’s end of life in March 2004, but it’s a solid 802.11b wireless router that gave us 2 years of troublefree service.

As a reader, I subscribe to the precept “personal use is fair use” - that I’m free to slice and dice content for my personal use once it has been legally obtained.

As a blog author, I accept that act of distributing my words via RSS entails the loss of control over how those words are presented. But the words remain mine and should always be presented with proper context and attribution - a link that attributes the words back to the original source and context that makes authorship clear without following the link.

Now, Google Autolink raises the possibility that my two personas may be in conflict. So I fired up a windows box and took autolink out for a test drive.

And I have to say that I’m conflicted. As an author, I find it offensive for a 3rd party to insert links into my content. But as a reader, I found the link between address and map convenient. And I suspect that I would like the link between books and amazon.com listings as well.

Scoble sees this as the start of a slippery slope. I rarely find slippery slope arguments persuasive - they always seem to require that I sacrifice an immediate good to preclude a hypothetical bad. I’d much rather adjudicate the brink step by step. And right now, here’s where I draw the line:

1. Automatic Autolink is several steps too far. Don’t go there.
2. Undo should be more prominent. Find the link may be more useful, but undo autolinks is more important.
3. Style the autolinks. There should never be any ambiguity between the original content and the added autolinks.

1 Mar: Life is a Camel

An interesting juxtapostion of contact and non-contact sports this week. For the contact sports, Steve Shannon was suspended for offering a bounty on an opposing player. And on the non-contact sports side of the ledger, John Chaney was suspended for inserting a goon to “send a message” against St. Joseph’s.

It may be the relative unimportance of the United Hockey League compared to Division 1 NCAA basketball, but I don’t detect the same sense of outrage about Shannon as about Chaney. And for my part, I think Shannon’s punishment was too harsh and that Chaney got off easy.

As I examined my thoughts on the subject, they seemed related to my understanding of the difference between contact sports vs. non-contact sports. In my eyes, any attempt to cause injury in a non-contact sport is beyond the pale. That’s not so clear when it comes to contact sports.

I think that all hockey fans admire the calculated violence of a hard check. But let’s be honest, we want the opposing players to be hurt. We don’t want a career threatening injury, but a trip back to the dressing room and a few missed shifts would suit us just fine. We accept injury as long as it is the result of clean play.

But watch the dirty player accusations fly when Christian Laettner partially steps on an opposing player. Or when a player gets undercut on a drive to the basket.

In a non-contact sport, every injury is a tragedy. And deliberately causing an injury cannot be punished hard enough. John Bryant’s arm was broken and his career is likely over. At the very least, John Chaney should be suspended until next season. As it stands, he’ll be back on the sidelines for the Atlantic 10 tournament.

The Chasm is where many high-tech fortunes have been lost … the Tornado is where many have been made.

This morning, I realized that Geoffrey Moore’s theories dictate Apple’s removal of firewire cables from iPod packages. Because the iPod is Inside the Tornado, enjoying that wonderful condition where demand outstrips supply and a backlog of customers appears.

Inside the tornado, priorities shift from customer intimacy and product leadership to product leadership and operational excellence. And the keys to success become:

• Ignore the customer and ship.
• Extend distribution channels.
• Drive to the next lower price point.

Viewed in that light, removing the Firewire cables from the base iPod package is exactly the right move. Because it is much more important to reach a lower price point than it is to placate a slow adopting Mac customer.

And from my Sunday newspaper ads, I see that both Best Buy and Target are onboard and advertising the iPod shuffle.

Every year, I resolve to implement a solid backup strategy. Every year, I fall short. And every year, I say that this year will be different - this time for sure.

I’ve tried backing up to CD. Life is way too short to backup to CD. Personal directories maybe, but a full system backup is out of the question.

I’ve tried backing up to DVD. It’s not enough better than backing up to CD. It may be faster and it may require fewer manual disc swaps, but a full system backup still takes the better part of a day.

This year I’m using Déjà Vu (bundled with Toast Titanium to clone my laptop hard drive to a Firewire hard drive. I’m using Retrospect Express (bundled with Other World Computing Firewire hard drives) to back up my Firewire hard drive to DVD. And I’d be all set if I only had an off-site repository.

The full system backup to DVD was just as painful as ever. But I will only have to endure that process once or twice a year. Synchronization to the Firewire hard disk is fast and easy. And incremental backups to DVD are bearable.

A good backup strategy had always been just a bit out of my comfort price zone. But with inexpensive external hard drives abounding, no one has that excuse anymore.