Don't feed the decor

This week's irresistible headline comes from the Wall Street Journal: A Llama in the Yard Makes an Impression On the Neighbors:

People have used animals as prey, pets and food for thousands of years. Bored with conventional landscaping, some homeowners now are using bulls, sheep, chickens and other live animals as outdoor decor.

(Addendum: On a kind of related note, the Christian Science Monitor reports at a rise in the number of encounters between suburbanites and wild animals.)

Charlie Brown, savior

Seattle Weekly has a great story on how good ol' Charlie Brown proved the savior of specialty-comics publisher Fantagraphics. Long flirting with bankruptcy, it's now well in the black because of an ambitious 12-year project to publish every "Peanuts" strip in book form.

Writer Michaelangelo Matos details the company's history, set against the context of overall changes in the comic-book industry over the past quarter-century, and explores just how it landed the remarkable "Peanuts" deal:

What continues to guide Fantagraphics—what made the Schulz family trust them enough to do Peanuts justice—is the overwhelming sense of mission that emanates from everything they issue. [Company heads Kim Thompson and Gary Groth] are driven by what comics should be, not how much they might make.

This print edition has a really cute cover, too.

At the speed of blog

With CBS now promising to "redouble its efforts" to determine the authenticity of the now-notorious Bush memos, San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor muses on just how big a role bloggers played in the controversy. His conclusion, which I agree with, is that even without the blogosphere, mainstream news media would have raised serious questions about the memos by now. But, the whole process happened much faster because of critical bloggers.

Regardless of what one thinks of the bloggers' politics, they advanced the memo story. And they did it fast -- no doubt more quickly than the mass media would have done.

They could fuel the firestorm for several reasons. First, they were passionate about their cause: looking for reasons to shoot down the CBS report, which turned out to be a huge target.

Second, they are many. We in the media -- at least those of us who might have been prepared to jump instantly into the question of whether the memos were real -- are relatively few.

Third, the velocity of information is so much greater with digital technology. What once would have taken days or weeks to make its way through the media sphere now ricochets around the world in hours.

One danger in such a world is the spread of misinformation, corrected too late to erase or even very much mitigate the damage. Some hard-core partisans don't seem to care about this, but the rest of us should.

And it's worth noting that this would not have become such a public controversy had the major media not picked up the story.

Even as we take care not to draw the wrong lessons from this episode, though, let's not debunk the genuine achievement of the bloggers. Their version of ``open source'' journalism is notable.

Warrior-librarians

Wired News columnist Adam Penenberg looks at "radical librarians" who most definitely will not be shushed when it comes to defending patrons' civil rights and resisting government snooping.