The argumentation in this morning's NYT editorial More News, Less Diversity by Matthew Hindman and Kenneth Neil Cukier, concerning media consolidation, is really interesting:

The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to decide today whether decades-old regulations on news media ownership should be loosened. It is expected to do so -- in part on the rationale that the Internet increases the number of information sources that Americans see. This reasoning is mistaken.

There are, of course, millions of Web sites, and in theory they provide a diverse spectrum of viewpoints, which is one rationale for restrictions against any one company owning too many news outlets. In practice, however, almost all this diversity is ignored. Users may be able to choose from millions of sites, but most go to only a few.

This isn't an accident or the result of savvy branding. It's because Internet traffic follows a winner-take-all pattern that is much more ruthless than people realize.

Relying on links and search engines, most people are directed to a few very successful sites; the rest remain invisible to the majority of users. The result is that there's an even greater media concentration online than in the offline world.

If restrictions on media ownership are loosened today, this will be a bad thing. It does seem inevitable, given the political situation. But the behavior of search engines is a whole other matter: the web is a somewhat self-governing entity, and we can change! How seach engines could be changed to preserve information diversity is a topic we should all think about.

Josh Marshall does a nice job with the willfully obtuse William Safire editorial in this morning's NTY. Here's Safire:

When weighing the murky evidence of an aggressive tyranny's weapons, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair were obliged to take no chances. The burden on proof was on Saddam. By his contempt, he invited invasion; by its response, the coalition established the credibility of its resolve. There was no "intelligence hoax."

The Safire piece seems to me a fairly cynical counterpunch to the accusations that the Bush administration lied to get us into a war. I don't think Safire really expects to be believed in the long run, only to muddy the waters.

The burden of proof was on Saddam. Now there's spin for you! Safire takes a statement which is true in a very limited context having to do with cooperation with weapons inspectors and pastes it into a different context, implying that Sadaam and not George should be answering all these questions about the whereabouts of the alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction. What an ingenious excuse!

I THINK I'VE HAD THIS BUG: Human metapneumovirus, profiled on CNN, sound an awful lot like whatever put me in the hospital in October of 2001. Reseach on this newly identified respiratory virus has so far focused mainly on children.

SO I'M THE 81ST PERSON TO BLOG THE SINGING HORSES, but I just wanted to mention that when David started them up this morning, one of our Australian White's tree frogs thought they were really cute and possibly mate material and so began croaking in response. That was the first time the frogs had ever tried to talk to (let alone mate with) the computer.

FAMILY UPDATE: My brother, John Cramer, is in Electronic Business News today:

John Cramer, marketing and business development manager at the Plymouth, Mich., company, said, "There's an ASIC that predicts the next frame and makes the display suited for gaming and medical applications." The ASIC improves inter-grayscale response time for a TFT-LCD from an average of 84ms to less than 20ms, he said.

[I fixed the link. John, who came over for dinner last night, pointed out that I'd linked to last month's quote, not this month's.]