IN LIGHT OF MY EARLIER PROMISE, I’ve uploaded some outtakes from the video I shot for my TCS column that’ll be out later. They’re not as exciting as the ones I used there, but for purposes of quality they’re pretty illustrative. You can see J.D. Lasica and Bill Hobbs talking about the Nikon D70s and the Canon Digital Rebel, as well as some better-lit footage of the documentary folks. It was all shot with this rather cheap digital still camera, and while the video is pretty good, the most impressive thing is the sound produced by the matchhead-sized microphone. This kind of thing seems like it should be a really potent tool for blog journalism.

You can see the outtakes in Windows Media format here.

A Quicktime version is here. They’re both broadband-sized, as there’s no point doing tiny dialup files when you’re trying to illustrate quality.

JAMES LILEKS:

This is why I don’t believe in ghosts: if they existed, they wouldn’t float down the hallway weeping or make the walls drip with blood – they’d wake you up, whisper “come here” and bore you with a story about how little Jimmy used to sit in front of the window, here, and wait for the mailman when he sent away his boxtops for something. That’s the stuff ghosts would want you to know about.

I think he’s right.

YES, IT IS A RATHER DRY SPELL, news-wise.

Given the pace of events over the past few years, I think this is a good thing. Though I may have to start blogging about cookware, or razors or something if things don’t pick up.

Hmm. Maybe power tools!

UPDATE: Merv Benson writes: “Definitely power tools. Collect as many as you can, even if you don’t use them that much. Your spouse should also be appropriately awed at what you can do with them, too.” She understands her role.

Reader Robert Schwartz emails: “Digital Cameras!” (Only in 32-point boldface). I’ll see what I can do.

I will note that I shot some video at the conference using the very inexpensive Sony still camera, and the results are pretty good. The video’s going to my TCS column this week, but maybe I’ll post an outtake or two just to illustrate the quality of the picture — and, just as importantly, the sound.

UPDATE: Reader John Wixted emails:

The last time I had that feeling was early August, 2001. I was so bored that I was practically praying for some interesting, newsworthy event to happen. Now, I relish the absence of interesting news.

What he said. I’d rather write about lawn mowers. Or, as I was doing around that time, about who had the best abs at the Video Music Awards. (I thought it was Alicia Keys).

MORE: Foodblogger Kevin Weeks emails: “Go for the broad demographic — power kitchen tools.”

I like it!

A TROUBLING OBSERVATION regarding the British elections:

With all the MSM whining about Blair’s vistory and all the blogger hand-wringing over ‘Jihad’ George Galloway, most people seem to have missed the real story of last week’s elections in Britain. The British National Party (BNP) is now the fourth largest party in the UK, even larger than the Greens. Check out the BNP results here. Notice that the BNP is up in nearly every district compared to 2001: 16.9% in Barking; 13.1% in Dewsbury; 9.7% in Dudley North where their raw vote count more than doubled over ’01. And this is during good economic times in a country free of jihad attacks.

I’ve worried about this sort of thing.

UPDATE: From troubling observations to comforting corrections — reader David Steven emails:

The “troubling observation” about the BNP is not true. . . .

According to the BBC, 11 parties and 1 independent gained seats – the BNP are still a long way from winning a seat. In terms of share of vote, the BNP came 8th, behind the three major parties, an Irish and a Scottish party, the UK Independence party and the Greens.

While it is disturbing that 192,850 people voted BNP, this is only 0.7% of those voting.

It’s easy to rack up big percentage gains when your numbers are small.

NEWSBEAT 1 is a new Canadian blog, focusing heavily on the ongoing scandals.

STRATEGYPAGE:

The Sunni Arab media in the Middle East has gotten tired of blaming the United States for everything that doesn’t work in Iraq. More and more stories blame Iraq’s Sunni Arabs for the terrorism, corruption and tyranny in Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East. This is part of a trend, the growing popularity of Arabs taking responsibility for their actions. This is a radical concept in Middle Eastern politics. For several generations, all problems could be blamed on other forces. The list of the blameworthy was long; the United States, the West, Colonialism, Infidels (non Moslems, especially Jews), Capitalism, the CIA, Israel, Democracy and many others too absurd to mention. Giving up this crutch is not popular in the Middle East. Oil wealth has made it possible to sustain, for decades, the belief of all these conspiracies to keep the Arab people down and powerless. But the invasion of Iraq, and the overthrow of Saddam, forced Arabs to confront their long support for a tyrannical butcher like Saddam. Here was a dictator who knew how to play the blame game, and position himself as an Arab “hero.” Saddam’s supporters turned to terrorism to restore themselves to power. Two years of killing Iraqis has shamed an increasing number of Arabs into admitting that this is an Arab problem, not the fault of the United States.

Very interesting. Read the whole thing.

TIM WORSTALL has posted his weekly BritBlog roundup.

Tim also has a response to Adam Cohen’s unimpressive ruminations on blog ethics in today’s New York Times, and so does The Mudville Gazette.

I should note that all the chin-pulling about journalistic ethics didn’t really start until newspapers became monopoly enterprises. Where monopolies are concerned, we tend to look to regulation, because we can’t trust the market to do the job. But although newspapers — and, to a substantial degree, broadcast news operations — are monopolies or near-monopolies, blogs certainly aren’t.

In our ethics book, The Appearance of Impropriety, Peter Morgan and I noted the use of ethics establishments as smokescreens concealing deeper institutional problems. I think that most of the late-twentieth-century ethics apparatus, and certainly much of the journalistic ethics apparatus, falls into that category. But competition is coming, and the Times is already starting to feel a touch of discipline. Which I suspect is what motivated Cohen’s column to begin with. . . .

UPDATE: As Virginia Postrel writes in Forbes, “There’s something about blogs that makes a lot of respectable journalists hyperventilate.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Free Range Librarian:

I realize Cohen’s column is just commentary on the opinion page of the national newspaper of record, but where are the facts grounding this piece? “It is hard to know who many bloggers are,” states Cohen, a comment I read in his article which at last count has already been linked to dozens of blogs written by people with painfully thorough “about pages” and blog names as eponymously transparent as Grant’s Tomb. Let me ask you, Adam: who do you think writes Edcone.com?

Heh.

SPITTING ON SOLDIERS: Tom Maguire looks at the (revisionist) history.

RESERVE POWERS: Will there be a constitutional crisis in Canada?

GOT BACK LAST NIGHT, now I’m busy with the video interviews I did at the conference. Blogging will resume later.

Sadly, there were no Hooter’s girls present, though.

DAVE WINER lectures on civility, at what seems to be the most contentious of the sessions so far.

John Jay Hooker suggests that blogging is “inherently adversarial,” but stresses the need to use good manners and disagree without being disagreeable.

Dave took offense at this remark, though I’m not sure why.

UPDATE: I left just after Dave sat down and refused to continue as moderator. I imagine that things sorted themselves out later, though.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Les Jones stayed and blogged the whole session.

Meanwhile, on a calmer note, Blake Wylie blogged the protecting bloggers session with Mark Glaser.

MORE: Here’s a report on the faith-based blogging session.

STILL MORE: Here’s Dave’s take on the session: “We’re going to have to work hard if we want to work together.”

MORE STILL: The civility discussion was captured on video for posterity, here.

HERE’S LIVEBLOGGING OF Dan Gillmor’s talk on citizen media.

LES JONES is liveblogging Hossein Derakshan’s talk on Iranian bloggers.

I MISSED IT EARLIER, BUT THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES is up.

LOCALBLOGGING: Sitting next to me is a guy who runs this site in Paulding County, Georgia. There’s no daily paper there, but if there were this site just might kill it. He’s got classified ads, news stories, and even TV (well, web video) commercials. This is just the beginning of something that I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of, soon.

MICHAEL SILENCE is blogging from the conference. And Bill Hobbs notes that it’s getting a good deal of coverage.

LINKS FOR IRC, VIDEO, ETC. are at the BlogNashville homepage.

I wish I had video of Dave Winer leading the crowd in a stirring rendition of America the Beautiful this morning, but I was up at the lectern and couldn’t take any. I’m sure somebody did.

YOU CAN SEE STREAMING VIDEO HERE: Log in with any name, then click on “Blog NASHVILLE.”

I’M AT HENRY COPELAND’S PANEL ON MAKING MONEY, and the discussion is very interesting. (Best line: “Bloggers are the garage bands of the Internet.”)

The two themes of this conference seem to me to be making money, and video. There are lots of videobloggers here, and the place is overrun with video cameras.

The big question from Henry: What do bloggers give people that other media outlets don’t? Lots of interesting answers. The best one from John Cox of Cox and Forkum is that “we’re having fun!”

Another line from Henry: “There are more political page impressions in the blogosphere than in the Washington Post and the New York Times put together.”

UPDATE: Yes, the woman in the red sweater with the webcam is Tara Sue Grubb, the blogger who ran for Congress in North Carolina last time around.

IF YOU’RE AT THE BLOG CONFERENCE, you want to use “nashvilleblog” as your SSID.

JOSEPH BRITT THINKS ABOUT DARFUR:

Does Tom Friedman during all his earnest chin-stroking about the problem of terrorism and Arab culture pause to consider that this might be related somehow? Saudi imams get young men inspired to blow themselves up in the middle of Iraqi crowds, but we sure don’t hear too many reports of young Saudi men risking death to stand between Muslim villagers in Darfur and the janjaweed.

What about Nick Kristof, who has access to the same maps of Africa that the rest of us do? Does he wonder that the largest Arab country, directly north of Sudan with a large army and an air force hundreds of planes strong, has never made a move toward establishing, say, a no-fly zone over any part of Darfur? Demanded UN sanctions against Sudan, or imposed any of its own? To be honest, I doubt the idea has even crossed his mind.

Read the whole thing.

MICHELE CATALANO LOOKS INTO THE FUTURE and finds things, er, colorful.

A SWELL AFTER-PARTY at the not-yet-opened Gaylord Center, where I met lots of cool bloggers I hadn’t met before.

Above: Unidentified T-Shirt person, Hossein Derakshan of Hoder.com. Below: Eric Scheie of ClassicalValues.com, J.D. Lasica with review model of Nikon D70s. Why didn’t Nikon send me one of those?

I’M ON THE CAMPUS OF BELMONT UNIVERSITY, where the BlogNashville conference is going on. Donald Sensing is sitting next to me, and I had a beer with Ed Cone and Chris Nolan. So far it’s a success — but I’ll start talking soon, and then things will probably go downhill . . . .

UPDATE: Comments on the panel, here.

CNET HAS AN FAQ on the “Real ID Act.”

I’m skeptical that this will have significant anti-terrorist benefits.