Two new multimedia software updates will be making their way into the toolkits of many in the Army of Davids this fall. This week, Adobe announced their latest CS4 lineup of products, updating Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and other Adobe products. Meanwhile, Cakewalk has announced Sonar 8, their more-or-less annual update to their flagship Sonar digital audio workstation platform for Windows.

Along with Adobe's Ultra chromakey program and accompanying virtual sets, recent iterations of all of the above products are what powers my Silicon Graffiti video blog. And speaking of video blogging, I have an article in the September issue of Nuts & Volts magazine on that topic. (No, that's not me on the cover; and unfortunately, the article is only available on dead tree at the moment.)

This video, originally produced in January when I was still getting it all together, gives you a sense of what a product like Ultra 2 can do--this was only the second video I had shot with it; and was still learning my around the program, and yet, I think it does a reasonable job of walking the viewer through what's possible via DIY video.

What's next? RAM power! Lots and lots of memory will soon start appearing in your computers; as the 64-bit computing revolution is still in its infancy.

Here's my review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, from the March issue of the New Individualist magazine. The text of that issue is not yet online, so I'm reprinting this review online with the permission of editor-in-chief Robert Bidinotto, who, separate and apart from his long-form work "on dead tree", is also a fine blogger.

Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 496 pages, $27.95.

With America committed to war overseas, an American president (who many consider to be racist) suspends vast swatches of American liberties. Opponents of the war are demonized, their patriotism routinely questioned. Even popular foods bearing the names of now-unpopular, formerly allied nations are spontaneously renamed, in banal demonstrations of mass support for the war effort.

Is this an account in 2004 by a blogger on the leftwing Daily Kos website, railing feverishly against President Bush and the Global War on Terror? No, it’s a description of the state of our nation in 1917, under President Wilson during World War I. As Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online, writes in his new book Liberal Fascism:

The liberty cabbage, the state-sanctioned brutality, the stifling of dissent, the loyalty oaths and the enemies list--all of these things not only happened in America but happened at the hands of liberals. Self-described progressives--as well as the majority of American socialists--were at the forefront of the push for a truly totalitarian state. They applauded every crackdown and questioned the patriotism, the intelligence, and decency of every pacifist and classically liberal dissenter.

That so little of this history is remembered, Goldberg argues, is the result of two things. First, since the left has a remarkably firm grip on academia, they tend to write history--and write it in a way that’s favorable to their side of history. Second, the left tends to have a remarkably short collective memory. While most conservatives and libertarians can name those movements’ founders (such as Hayek, Buckley, and Rand), the typical modern leftist tends not to remember his intellectual forefathers nearly as well. Or as liberal journalist and Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. wrote in his 2004 book Stand Up, Fight Back, “Liberals and Democrats tend not to view themselves as the inheritors of a grand tradition. Almost on principle, they are suspicious of such traditions, of too much theorizing, of linking themselves too much to the past.”

The result is that the intertwining of Marxism, Progressivism, and Fascism in the first decades of the twentieth century--the theme of Liberal Fascism--has been virtually forgotten among the modern left. Which is why it is now routine for conservatives (including whichever Republican happens to hold the highest national office at the time, whether it’s Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, or George W. Bush) to be demonized by the left as a Nazi, and for the Nazis--and fascism in general--to be widely described by the left, and much of the culture at large, as rightwing movements.

The Mustache on the Left

Of course, it was the Soviets of the 1920s who first began to describe fascism as being on the right. As a more populist strain of totalitarianism, it was, arguably, to the right of communism, which ultimately killed tens of millions more people during the twentieth century. But the collectivist nature of fascism is far, far to the left of American conservatism and especially American libertarianism. To paraphrase a remark by Charles Krauthammer shortly after the 2006 midterm elections: Americans play politics within the middle of the football field; since 1789, Europeans have confined themselves mostly to the forty yards on the left side of the field. This helps to explain why, when the wall dividing Berlin fell in 1989, the same region embraced a corporatist, nanny-state European Union only a few years later.

Goldberg does yeoman’s work researching and documenting material that the American left had consigned to the memory hole since 1945. By the 1970s, this pre-World War II past was considered hermetically sealed by liberals. As Goldberg writes, Ronald Reagan, a former FDR backer, was attacked in the Washington Post as late as 1981 for correctly pointing out the favorable lip service that he remembered being paid by FDR’s brain trust to Mussolini.

But lots of intellectuals and artists of the era before WWII had good things to say about Il Duce. Herbert Croly, a founder of the New Republic, offered, in Goldberg’s words, “qualified support for Mussolini” in the pages of his magazine. Cole Porter (or possibly P.G. Wodehouse, when he revised Porter’s lyrics for the British stage) name-checked Mussolini in an early version of “You’re the Tops.” In fact, the title of Goldberg’s book comes from a 1932 speech by H.G. Wells at Oxford University to Britain’s Young Liberals organization, in which he said, “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.” Goldberg quotes George Orwell, discussing Wells nine years later: “Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany.” Of Germany’s Italian counterpart, in 1933’s The Shape of Things to Come Wells wrote, “Fascism indeed was not an altogether bad thing; it was a bad good thing; and Mussolini has left his mark on history.”

Populist Totalitarianism

In fact, Mussolini’s fascist Italy features rather prominently in Goldberg’s book, for numerous reasons. It predates Hitler’s vision of a National Socialist Germany. As David Ramsay Steele wrote in a 2003 essay titled “The Mystery of Fascism,” the ideology’s most influential thinkers--including Mussolini himself--evolved their positions in an attempt to create a more populist form of socialist government than Marxism, especially the Soviet revolutionary model. And as Goldberg writes, fascism, by its very nature, will embody the nationalist traditions of whatever nation it infects--which is why fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany were each very different regimes. Anti-Semitism, now often viewed as part and parcel of fascism, was a key historical component of Germany in particular. In contrast, Goldberg writes:

For most of his career, Mussolini considered anti-Semitism a silly distraction and, later, a necessary sop to his overbearing German patron. Jews could be good socialists or fascists if they thought and behaved like good socialists or fascists. Because Hitler thought explicitly in terms of what we would today call identity politics, Jews were irredeemably Jews, no matter how well they spoke German. His allegiance, like that of all practitioners of identity politics, was to the iron cage of immutable identity.

The word “fascism” is Italian for bundling together, derived from the Latin word fasces, and Mussolini adopted the original Roman symbol of power--a bundle of birch rods tied together with a red ribbon--for fascist Italy.

As Goldberg mentioned to me in a recent interview, Mussolini similarly invented the word “totalitarianism” as a way to describe a cradle-to-grave socialism that would bind all aspects of his nation together. “Mussolini meant it to be appealing to people,” Goldberg said. “It was a sales pitch for his kind of government. He meant it as we would use words like ‘holistic’ today, as sort of covering every aspect of life; everyone’s going to be included, everyone’s going to be part of the community. No child is going to be left behind. That was the meaning of totalitarianism in its original conception.”

These sorts of reminders are part of Liberal Facism’s strength. Goldberg does not just look back with ninety years of hindsight and editorial bias. He presents the concepts and the words used in the way they were envisioned at the time.

It’s only after WWII that totalitarianism understandably became associated with militaristic, jackbooted thugs. But militarism wasn’t exclusive to European fascists. The collectivists of the first half of the twentieth century--from Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to the Soviets--chose military forms and imagery because they were thought of as the most efficient ways to mobilize their nations. The New Dealers were inspired by Wilson’s handling of World War I--both in the trenches in Europe and almost as aggressively while fighting the administration’s enemies domestically. And much of the New Deal was an attempt to place the Depression–addled U.S. economy under the equivalent of a wartime footing. As Goldberg notes, the imagery promoting the National Recovery Act was virtually indistinguishable from much of the concurrent propaganda of 1930s–era Germany.

Brave New Village

That the wartime pitch of the 1910s, 1930s, and 1940s was global is one of the reasons why Orwell’s 1984 predicted that socialist England could come to resemble a mélange of fascism and Stalinism only a few decades after its 1949 publication date. And ever since, 1984 has been seen as the model of a totalitarian future. But modern, post–1960s collectivism--whether it’s the EU and its “soft” but all-encompassing policies; Hillary Clinton with her “It Takes a Village” imagery; or President Bush with his “compassionate conservatism” catchphrase--has generally moved away from militaristic imagery and instead uses muted, much more seductive language, symbols, and programs to expand government. Which is why Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Goldberg writes, is the more apt model for modern socialism and its cradle-to-grave nanny state.

This also explains the “have a nice day” smiley face with the Hitler mustache on the dust jacket of Liberal Fascism. It’s one of the few signs of humor in this otherwise scholarly book, from a writer known for drafting very funny columns during the early days of National Review Online.

Since I’m writing this over a month before the book’s publication date, I’ll be quite interested to see how liberal elites respond to it. We already know what the rank-and-file left thinks: Months before publication, its Amazon.com page was full of the most vile ad hominems and slander, when it wasn’t being hacked; and since no one attacking the book on Amazon had yet read it, it’s safe to assume that their attacks were based almost solely on the book’s cover art and title. Which illustrates one of Goldberg’s central theses remarkably well: How many of the book’s detractors know that they’re attacking it for language written by H.G. Wells from 1932?

One debatable point I noticed was in the chapter on New Age mysticism, where Goldberg writes:

Tom Wolfe, in his essay, “The Great Relearning,” details how the counterculture, inspired by the German Bauhaus, wanted to start over, to declare a New Year Zero (much as the Jacobins and Nazis did), to go back to the fork in the road where Western civilization allegedly took the wrong path.

I think Goldberg misses Wolfe’s point and inadvertently draws the inaccurate conclusion that the ’60s U.S. counterculture took some inspiration from Bauhaus theories. The history of the left during the twentieth century is one of an endlessly repeating theme, “start from zero”; that theme connects the artists of the Bauhaus with the hippies of the sixties. But otherwise, modernism was anathema to the countercultural denizens of Haight-Ashbury. If they had even heard of the Bauhaus, hippies rather forcefully rejected its modernist aesthetics, which were then at their cultural peak in the form of every major corporation’s skyscraper.

Also, I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the concluding paragraphs of Goldberg’s book:

In 1968, in a televised debate on ABC News during the Chicago Democratic National Convention, Gore Vidal continually goaded William F. Buckley, eventually calling him a “crypto-Nazi.” Vidal himself is an open homosexual, a pagan, a statist, and a conspiracy theorist. Buckley, a patriotic, free-market, antitotalitarian gentleman of impeccably good manners, could take it no more and responded: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

It is one of the few times in Buckley’s long public life that he abandoned civility, and he instantly regretted it. Nonetheless, having been on the receiving end of many similar insults and diatribes, I have deep sympathy for Buckley’s frustration. For at some point it is necessary to throw down the gauntlet, to draw a line in the sand, to set a boundary, to cry at long last, “Enough is enough.” To stand athwart “progress” and yell, “Stop!” My hope is that this book has served much the same purpose as Buckley’s intemperate outburst while striving for his more typical civility.

This ending seemed to cheapen, just a hair, what is overall quite a remarkable book. For a moment, I was left thinking that Liberal Fascism is little more than a “Nyah!”--a thumbing of the nose back at liberals for decades of calling conservatives Nazis. But it’s so much more than that. And I’m worried that these two paragraphs will be reported as the whole theme of the book (er, as I just did).

But Goldberg’s real point is inescapable: The modern American left totes a lot of historical baggage, much of which it’s unaware. And that baggage continues to inspire it, even as the left mutates into softer, kinder, gentler, squishier forms unthinkable by its ancestors when they “started from zero” ninety-some years ago.

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With the return of Dan Rather, an article I wrote for the September issue of the New Individualist magazine seems especially timely. It's titled "Atlas Mugged: How a Gang of Scrappy, Individual Bloggers Broke the Stranglehold of the Mainstream Media" , and I certainly hope you'll stop by and give it a read. It features quotes from interviews conducted especially for the piece with Glenn Reynolds, James Lileks, and also Shannon Love of the Chicago Boyz Website, who provided loads of great material on the birth of mass media.

For better or worse, it was also a chance to shoot some video, obviously inspired by the look and feel of Hot Air's "Vent" series:

OK, now that headline is definitely hyperbole to get your attention. But as the New York Sun notes:

Fifteen years ago, the notion that an amateur filmmaker could write, shoot, edit, and project a professional-grade film in only 48 hours would have been a near-impossible thought. But times change quickly, and for the 2007 filmmaker, in the age of Final Cut Pro and YouTube, the idea is a challenge rather than an impracticality.

Update: In City Journal, John Robb explores the flip side of the Glenn Reynolds' "Army of Davids" meme:

Eventually, one man may even be able to wield the destructive power that only nation-states possess today. It is a perverse twist of history that this new threat arrives at the same moment that wars between states are receding into the past.

Some assorted recent reviews of mine on the 'Net and dead tree:

Over at CE Pro, the trade publication for custom home theater installers, I have an article on 64-bit computing. The video above explains the concept in terms of audio, but the same concepts apply to video production as well. Think Hot Air, 18 Doughty Street, or the next multimedia site is going to take advantage of the near unlimited RAM that 64-bit computing promises in the coming years to help shape their content?

Me too. Which is why this number is only going to shrink--and the resultant hysterical reactions from Old Media will only increase in concurrent response.

A bunch of longform articles I've been working on over the past few months seemed to have reached simultaneous fruitition this week. So all of a sudden, like Visa, we're everywhere you want to be:

Home Electronics? The cover story of the May/June issue of The Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine is my piece on "Eight Easy Ways To Update Your Home Theater

Music? I have a piece on electronic harmonizers in the April issue of Computer Music. It's out now in England, and will be available next month in the US. Here's the Blogcritics product review from last fall which inspired it, to hold you over.

High Fashion? In the latest issue of Classic Style, I have a piece on Apparel Arts, the 1930s and '40s menswear magazine that birthed not only Esquire but GQ, and continues to inspire designers such as Ralph Lauren and (especially) Alan Flusser to this day.

At the moment, those are all strictly "dead tree" articles. But here are a couple of online items:

Media Bias? Thanks to the InstaPundit, you've probably already seen this.

Podcasting? I produced the latest Blog Week In Review for Pajamas, in which Austin Bay interviews The Belmont Club's Richard Fernandez on the state of the hot war in Iraq and the increasingly heating up one against Iran.

Be on the look out for all of the above at your favorite newsseller and/or Internet. And tell 'em we sent you!

Speaking of the Long Tail and pop culture, accompanying the buyer's guide for DVD production and editing hardware and software in the latest "dead tree" edition of Videomaker magazine is my introduction to the topic.

And for those feeling really ambitious, don't miss the ongoing guide to shooting your own production that's been running at Libertas. Just keep scrolling through their "Put Up Or Shut Up" category.

(Previous thoughts on the topic here.)

Back when I began learning how to play guitar in the fall of 1982, there were two guitar magazines: Guitar Player, and Guitar World. Guitar Player was more established; it started life in the late 1960s, first covering the psychedelic guitarists in its Bay Area backyard, then the Brit superstars of the 1970s (Clapton! Beck! Page! Frampton! Richards! Townshend! Et al.), but its heart seemed to be in the jazz world. A heroin and Jack Daniels-ravaged pipe cleaner-thin Jimmy Page with his Danelectro slung low bashing out “Kashmir” at 190 decibels may have been on its cover, but its heart was set on telling you how Howard Roberts fingered second inversion E flat 11th sharp suspended fourth chords at the sixth fret position.

Guitar World was (and is) Guitar Player’s upstart competitor, and it was looser, funkier. It loved rockers. It wasn’t trying to climb into the inner workings of the Tritone scale; it wanted to show you how to play the solo to “Stairway To Heaven”.

An early issue had Les Paul on the cover though, which had plenty of crossover value: my dad loved Les because he had played with Crosby; I loved Les because Page, Beck, Townshend and Keef all played his signature guitar.

As I may have mentioned before, back in 2002, after I interviewed Les myself in New York (for articles that appeared online in Blogcritics and Catholic Exchange and on dead tree in Vintage Guitar), I asked Les to autograph my battered copy of his 1983 Guitar World cover story, and he was delighted to do so. (Les will autograph anything--just search through eBay to see how many of his guitars he’s autographed over the years after his second Monday net set.) I made a color photocopy of that cover and framed it, as a reminder of the distance I travelled since when I began playing.

Flashforward to two weeks ago in Texas. While Nina and I were out Christmas shopping, we stopped in the Barnes & Noble in Waco, and I picked up the February issue of Guitar World. It’s out in December, so it has a Holiday-themed cover with Ozzy’s longtime gunslinger Zack Wylde on the cover dressed as Santa, and Billy Barty’s Mini-Me dressed as one his elves.

Oh, and it has three of my articles, which I wrote early this fall.

(Best. Christmas. Ever.)

There’s my history of Carvin, the San Diego-based guitar and amplifier builder, an interview with the fellows who designed and built this incredible Stratocaster variation, and a brief interview with actor Steven Seagal, who’s now dividing his time between Kung Fu-ing bad guys in the movies, and singing the blues. And owns something like 300 vintage guitars, including a superb “Black Beauty” Les Paul Custom from the mid-1950s, and at least two of the late Albert King’s Flying-Vs.

So if you see Santa and his favorite elf on the cover of Guitar World this month, look for me in there as well.

I truly appreciate the kind words of Hugh Hewitt, who wrote on Tuesday:

New media start-ups looking for new media talent to steal would be well advised to start with Ed Driscoll, who has the best Michael Richards' round-up here.

But those new media start-ups looking for talent to steal--or at least commission--are welcome to email, by clicking here.

I have a review of the Polk I-Sonic tabletop entertainment system, in the latest dead tree edition of The Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine, conveniently available at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble--the information sources so simple to use, even Larry King can operate them!

Elsewhere, my Blogcritics article on harmonizer plug-ins for PC recording programs--technology that's probably a little over Larry's head--is an Editors' Pick of the Week--thanks guys.

My TCS Daily piece on Hollywood's implosion was excerpted in the Washington Times' "Culture Briefs" section today.

And from the omega to the alpha: the electronic hobbyist magazine Nuts & Volts is running a "Tribute to the Tube" this month, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of the vacuum tube. As part of that, they asked me to write a profile of David Sarnoff, the man who launched commercial radio in the 1920s, before starting a television network of the same name a couple of decades later, called NBC. The article isn't online, but you can find it at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble.

I have a few articles online and on dead tree this month that you may enjoy.

Regarding the latter, I have a piece in the Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine on IPTV, a technology being leveraged by phone companies to become players in the arena previously reserved for cable and satellite providers. Initially, it's being sold as a cheaper alternative to digital cable and satellite. But the format's long-range potential could lead to dramatic shifts in how we watch TV. For one, expect to start seeing downloadable YouTube-style TV, err, on your TV. As well as much more narrowcasting video, and... well, read the article for more.

For DIY recording enthusiasts, in the October issue of England's Computer Music magazine, I have an article on step sequencers, arpeggiators, and other electronic instruments that allow you to play one note and get ten. Or 100. Note that in the US, this issue probably streets next month. At least the Borders' chain seems to have a 30 day delay between the issues' cover dates and when they appear in stores.

At the moment, to the best of my knowledge, both of those are strictly "dead tree", but we'll let you know if that changes. As for online material, speaking of DIY music, my podcast interview with The Man From Izotope on audio mastering is also online at Blogcritics. Along with a piece that could be titled, "An Orchestra Of Davids". It's a review of an impressive self-published book on programming orchestral arrangements from MIDI synthesizers.

Sad to say, no Vanessa Williams sightings in any of these pieces, though.

I have a piece on what to look for in a computer monitor, in this month's Videomaker magazine. In the "dead tree" version, it accompanies an extensive buyer's Guide; click here to read the article itself online.

Chris Anderson's post (see below) about digital movie making echoes many of the same points producer/guitarist Nile Rogers once noted about digital music making:

The old restrictions in technology forced us to do things right. It forced us to have to make decisions. It forced us to spiritually be so in tune with the other people that magic had to happen. It made you step up to the plate, whereas now, when I go to play on someone's record I feel uncomfortably free-and I almost hate that. I can actually play on a record all day long and do ten different solos and take all these different approaches to the rhythm and all this kind of stuff. And then the producer has to look at all this work like a film-they have to go back and edit and figure out which bits they want to use. Whereas in the old days, when a person hired me to work on a record, I had to get it right, right there. You had to play great, you had to be smokin', and there was no way that they could fix it and make it better.

When I played on Michael Jackson's last record, I knew what they were going to do, so I said, "Hey, Michael, here's like a billion ideas. I'm going to play all this cool s***, and you go off and do it." So I didn't have to write it, so to speak. I didn't have to give them the definitive, perfect, guitar part; I gave them lots of definitive, perfect guitar parts, and they decided which ones to use. That's weird to me. Once you're unlimited, you'll never play that same way--you'll just go on and on and on and on. It's like the ultimate jazz person's fantasy: "You to tell me I'm going to solo for the rest of my life, and you guys will think it's great?"

Having infinite options also means you don't have the pressure on you...

It's pressureless.

-which means that you won't necessarily work as hard as you would if you knew you had just two takes in 20 minutes to get it right.

You can't help it. You see, I grew up in the days of, time is money-as Madonna would say, "time is money, and the money is mine." And I like that, I love that.

You had a limitation of tracks, too. You were lucky if you had two tracks and you could do an alternative take.

You know what people do now when they want me to overdub on a record? They'll send an album with a mix, and I have like 22 open tracks of guitars I can put down. So now you are going to figure out what my part is.

The article greatly expands on this Blogcritics piece from a few years ago. But I have no idea where they found the guy they photographed for the article...

But no tape, glue, or Julien French Fries alas: I have the cover story on video editing in the March issue of Videomaker magazine.

...Well, not exactly; sadly, I haven't been back since 2000. But because I am so very, very cool, I had an article in the December edition of England's Computer Music magazine on using technology to improve lead vocals. It's not online, but if you're in the US, it's the issue that's currently on the shelves at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble--that's where I picked up my copy tonight.

I haven't been blogging as much lately about home recording because of all the Pajamas-related stuff that went on this fall here at Casa de Ed, which pushed that particular hobby of mine temporarily somewhat in the background. But I'm eager to get back to it this new year, if only for its theraputic value, and to not allow whatever meager music and recording skills I've honed off and on over the last 20+ years to go to waste. And as an offshoot, look for additional music-related articles online and on dead tree, from time to time this year as well.

That was the slogan for a series of TV commercials for the old Atari 2600 game system in the late '70s and early '80s, as you can see in this ultra-cheesy vintage clip.

And if you'd like a history of the 2600, my latest bi-monthly "Micro Memories" column for Nuts & Volts magazine is devoted to the rise and fall of the Cartridge Family.

Speaking of Electronic House, I have a piece on Digital Rights Management in the November/December issue of their sister publication, TechLiving.

I have an article in the October issue of PC World that explains how to use Adobe's Premiere Elements software to make surprisingly professional DIY DVDs--and it's online now.

I have an article on the Apollo Guidance Computer in my bi-monthly "Micro Memories" column in Nuts & Volts magazine, with several photos supplied by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California that you might enjoy. Sadly, it's not online, but it should be at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble, or you can click here to subscribe.

And for more old school outer space action, check out my piece on Spacecraft Films' Apollo DVDs over at Tech Central Station.

I have a short primer on blogs in the September/October issue of TechLiving magazine that you might enjoy--it should be arriving at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble shortly. I think the text is onnly available online to subscribers; if that changes, I'll let you know.

An article that I wrote last summer for the Unique Homes real estate magazine on high-end home theater is now online.

I have an article explaining the basics of DLP-based TV sets in TechLiving magazine.

Makes for nice reading if you're planning on a new 50 or 60-inch TV set to kick off another year of watching the NFL--whose preseason is right around the corner.

Note: I wrote the bulk of this post late last night, before I woke up to the news of the terrorist bombing in London. I've only modified this piece slightly; I apologize if it sounds too exuberant after the news today.

I have two articles inside the July Nuts & Volts, that are curiously interconnected.

The first is an update to a piece I wrote for the July 2001 issue of N&V. Back then, I did a piece for N&V on Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum. At the time, it was located in the oddest and funkiest of locations--a Quonset hut on the former US Navy air base at Moffett Field (now controlled by NASA). In early September, I spun that article off into a shorter and slightly less technical version for National Review Online, back when they had their now sorely lamented "NRO Weekend" feature. A new blogger, whose Weblog had only gone up back in late August happened to spot it, which I only found when I did a vanity search on Google. (All writers do Google--and now Technorati vanity search--usually a few times a day...) That blogger? Glenn Reynolds.

This of course was all in the weeks leading up to 9/11, which would cause literally thousands upon thousands of Weblogs to spring up in response.

Flash-forward to 2005. Glenn's blog, and Power Line and their "Blog of the Year" sobriquet bestowed by Time magazine are both featured in my new article on Weblogs, along with numerous quotes from multiple interviews I conducted with Hugh Hewitt. The article includes explanations of how that term was derived, how to start a new blog, and what the Long Tail is, and how it benefits new blogs. If you've read the articles I've written for online publications since 2002 on Weblogs, a lot of this will be old hat, but I tried to write the piece as a primer for those coming in cold to the Blogosphere and wondering simultaneously what the heck a Weblog is, how they managed to raise so much hell last year, and how to get in on the fun.

If you're thinking of starting a blog in light of today's events, it could be a good starting point to get your ideas together before "going live".

As for the Computer History Museum, they moved into swank new facilities last year, a huge step up from their old Quonset hut days. If you can't make it out to Silicon Valley to visit in person, it's a great primer (at least I think) on the museum, its origin, and some of the rare pieces of computing history that's on display there.

Brian Anderson is the senior editor of the the Manhattan Institute's estimable City Journal magazine. He has a new book that's just hit the streets (and Amazon) called South Park Conservatives. It builds on themes discussed in this Tech Central Station piece by Stephen Stanton a few years ago, and also Brian's own article from 2003, in which he declared that the right had achieved parity with the left in the culture wars, thanks to a combination of talk radio, Fox News, shows like South Park, web-based publications such as NRO and the Weekly Standard.com, and of course, the Blogosphere.

Brian brings all of those topics up to date to cover The Passion, the Swift Vets, RatherGate, and their November 2nd dénouement. He also has some thoughts on where we go from here.

The title subject of the book is the unlikely Gen-X conservatives who are fans of shows like South Park and The Simpsons. In other words, they're not your traditional, Bill Buckley/Alex P. Keaton-style blue blazer wearing conservatives. They're hipper, rowdier, but also deeply patriotic, distrusting of most of the media, and driving their college professors crazy. And for obvious reasons, South Park appeals immensely to them.

Which brings me to a fun announcement: because I am the paragon of existential Internet coolness, I'm mentioned in the book.

Brian quoted a little from the piece I did for Tech Central Station last year, in which I ripped apart the statistics quoted in a then-recent CNN.com article on Weblogs. Prior to that, Brian and I had exchanged some correspondence when I interviewed Bernard Goldberg for TCS, and mentioned Anderson's article on culture war parity. I knew he was working on this book, but hadn't heard from him again until this morning, when he emailed to let me know it's been published.

So look for my brief cameo appearance inside South Park Conservatives, which is inside your local bookstore--or better yet, just click on the Amazon link on your left!

(And look for additional posts about the book, and an article elsewhere from me about it; details to follow.)

Update (4/14/05): My profile of the book and its author (along with numerous quotes from an interview we recently did) is now online at Tech Central Station.

Get ready to start buying new versions of all your favorite movies! I have an article on high definiton DVD in the current issue of Smart TV & Sound. The dead tree version is at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble, the text is online, here.

I finally updated the "dead tree" articles list to take it beyond 2001. There's a gap much longer than 18 minutes during most of 2002 (and I know I churned out lots of material that year) that I have to fill-in, but at least the whole thing is no longer four years out of date.

Update: It's not 100 percent complete, but most of 2002's missing 18 minutes have been filled in.

In addition to being linked to by the Blogfather, and my three pieces in PC World, I also have a review of the Sirius Sportster portable satellite radio in Digital World, the magazine-in-a-magazine that's bundled with PC World. And I also have a review of Unledded, from Jimmy Page & Robert Plant, in this months' Vintage Guitar. It builds on some of the material that Kevin Shirley, who engineered the DVD, told me for Blogcritics.

Ed Driscoll: on the Internet, at your local supermarket's magazine rack--and beyond!

Well, PC World that is, where I have an article on "HDTV on the Cheap", as well as a couple of computer reviews, in the December issue. They're all online (hence the hyperlinks), but don't let that stop you from picking up a hard copy or three of the magazine.

The text isn't online, but I have an article about a fellow named Jean-Yves Archambault, who owns an extremely high-tech Canadian home. It's in this month's TechLiving magazine.

I have an article on DVD burners in the latest issue of Videomaker magazine.

I have a review of Samsung's SyncMaster 173mw widescreen HDTV LCD monitor. It's online here, but wouldn't a nice dead-tree copy or ten make reading much, much easier?