Jim Rosenberg | jerotus.

Eleanor Holmes Norton is the non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives for the District of Columbia. She appeared late Thursday on Stephen Colbert’s program – and handled his piercing humor with aplomb. Was it her idea? Did she get good coaching from her flack? Did they agree ahead of time to play funny? Any way you look it, this is a victory for Norton and makes for good television.

David Pogue of the New York Times has an extended transcript of an interview he did with Ana Marie Cox, who claims her fame by being the original Wonkette. It’s a timely posting, since Cox has just been named Washington Editor for Time.com. She says blogging, like everything else, is changing fast:

Six months, a year ago, I would have talked about what I think made Wonkette successful and makes Gawker successful, to a certain extent, and other blogs: A strong, defined personality with a sense of humor about themselves. An ability to filter news quickly and to recognize, you know, what is interesting
to other people as well as interesting to themselves, and finding the balance
between those things.

What I think is changing is that people have now become addicted to the rapid update. You know, the not just 12 times a day; 18 times a day, 24 times a day. And it’s almost physically impossible for one person to do that.

And so I think that we’re probably going to see that the individual, strong-personality blog is not going to be at the forefront, because group blogs are going to be able to do what people expect of blogs better.

[link]

Maybe this is one week (more than others) where globalization doesn’t seem to be working so well, but don’t tell the editors of BusinessWeek, who are focusing on the burgeoning opportunities for technology in China and India.

In China, one story is venture capital’s hunt for growth – and the interesting nugget that Intel itself has launched a (staggering) $200 millon VC fund of its own. One company getting backing from Intel is called Campus Media which is

a one-and-a-half-year-old company that wants to install TVs in university cafeterias nationwide that it can use to show programming and advertising. China’s higher-education sector is expanding rapidly, with schools across the country adding new buildings or constructing completely new campuses.

That’s a market that Intel’s new partner wants to reach. So far, Campus Media has installed more than 7,000 TVs in 300 universities, with a total enrollment of 4 million students. The company provides four-and-one-half hours of programming (including sports and news provided by China Education TV and the Shanghai Media Group) to its 34-inch screens.

That’s a lot of televisions for a company that’s been humming along for a mere year-and-a-half.

What about India? Of note – the mobile telecom sector is about to surge, bringing telephony to the unwired rural poor:

The good news is that sizable investments are underway. BSNL is spending around $4 billion over the next three years on rural coverage as well as broadband and optical fiber network expansion. In its largest markets, such as the states of Maharashtra and Goa, it will increase its 1,200 base stations to 3,000 by March of 2007. Another major India telecom, Reliance Infocomm, is expected to invest around $550 million through the end of the decade, mainly outside of major urban centers.

Though BW dryly adds that India’s notoriously unreliable power grid will need a serious upgrade if new mobile phone towers are to function once they’ve been built. Infrastructure, anyone?

Apparently a rather contentious Wikipedia entry on the Israel/Lebanon conflict has entered a Galaxy Far, Far Away. This image was removed after just a few hours, which is testament to the fact that Wikipedia works…and a reminder of the study in Nature late in 2005 that demonstrated that Wikipedia’s error rate is in fact comparable to the venerable Britannica.

Oh, I don’t mean to get all hysterical (I’m actually not a big shopper, though I am a gadget freak) but there’s a new shopping site that uses Digg-like methods to create a real-time consumer hive of opinion….John Battelle’s blog has the goods:

It’s probably a good sign when the first response to a new service is, Why hasn’t this happened before? dealspl.us (uncapitalized) users contribute posts on shopping deals they find and community votes determine the importance of a bargain, bringing it to the front page.

It’s self-billed as a combination of Digg and BensBargains.net, for which one of the DP co-founders also serves as President. From the press release: “dealspl.us… is the first and only this site combines social bookmarking, user level, and non-editorial control over the posted content.

[link via Battelle]

The Los Angeles Times has what may seem to be an inevitable (and many will hope it’s not a clarion call) story about how venture capitalists are, shall we say, over-egging the pudding of video services on the web and that the time is near for another crash. 

Over at Sepia Mutiny there’s, well, mutiny about the paucity of coverage of the Mumbai attacks among the top-ranked political/news blogs in the US (Sepia Mutiny also posted the image at your left, which is from a t-shirt that takes a very cheeky poke at an old, racist cliche. Being from Arizona and having developed an interest in India, I LOVE it and couldn’t resist).

I have to say I was amazed this morning by how the Mumbai attacks were treated in the mainstream media, as well. NPR’s news bulletin at 8am EDT ran the attack as a couple of lines, I think it was the third story. The New York Times and the Washington Post treated it as an off-lead. To be fair, two other huge stories broke in the past 24 hours that pushed Mumbai down a bit in the US press: the Dept. of Defense issued a statement in reaction to the Hamdan case, and hostilities in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict have spiked.

Back to the points originally raised by Sepia Mutiny – that American bloggers (let alone the media) don’t fully appreciate just how serious these attacks were in terms of their impact within – and beyond – India…well, here are some reasons why the attack is relevant (analysis not mine, it’s from Sepia Mutiny):

• India and Pakistan are now nuclear armed states. This sort of attack, if it ends up being traced to Pakistan could have very serious consequences. Couple that with the recent resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and British frustrations there, and an argument might be made that Pakistan is engaging in serious destabalization of its neighbors.

• Of course, this is all speculation but Indian security sources indicate that they suspect Pakistan had a hand in these events. If that suspicion becomes widespread, won’t there be an outcry for retaliation? If so, will Bush be able (or willing) to protect Pakistan again? Musharaff prepped nukes for use during Kargill (according to Nawaz Sharif), this could get very ugly.
• On the other hand, if the bombings were actually committed by a new group connected to Al-Qaeda, this marks the opening of a significant new front in the “Global War on Terror”. Al-Qaeda activities are of clear importance to America.
• These events are pertinent domestic fight on anti-terrorism funding. Another mass transit bombing gives credence to Schumer’s argument that DHS is giving too little money to New York. In other words, recent events in India undermine the argument for protecting targets in Indiana.

Having experienced first-hand the information vacuum during an emergency, I’m heartened to see bloggers jumping in to help in Mumbai, India where a series of bombs have killed scores of people who were on their way home from work on Tuesday. This is another example of how Web 2.0 has really empowered so many people to communicate beyond traditional media. It’s especially important when authorities are themselves scrambling to respond to a crisis – let alone effectively communicate with the public.