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In a victory for the much embattled congress, a Federal Judge ruled Thursday that executive privilege does not preclude Bush advisors Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten from appearing in conjunction with congressional subpoenas.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge John Bates said there’s no legal basis for Bush’s argument and that his former legal counsel, Harriet Miers, must appear before Congress. If she wants to refuse to testify, he said, she must do so in person. The committee also has sought to force testimony from White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten. MSNBC Story
Although only Bolten and Miers were mentioned in Congress’ petition, they are hoping that this victory will also allow them to enforce the subpoena that they have issued to close Bush adviser Karl Rove.
(Writer’s Commentary: Unfortunately, Bush will probably appeal this ruling to the Supreme Court, which is no longer balanced, but more in his favor as a result of the two appointments he made during his presidency.* Hopefully this doesn’t get to the Supreme Court and we can actually see these advisors in front of Congress to see them defend their involvement. And they will probably invoke executive privilege once they get there, but at least they will be complying with the subpoenas. Freedom of information will yet again get screwed in favor of secrecy and cronyism. What makes this more ironic is the subpoenas are in reference to dirty dealings in the hirings and firings in the Justice Department.)
* Disregard first sentence of writer’s commentary. Edited to remove my biased, and wrong partisan views. I’m nothing if not willing to admit my mistakes.
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We are near the point where very sophisticated content management systems are going to put “enterprise publishing” (e.g. the technology behind NYTimes.com) within reach of nearly everyone, and business bloggers are catching on.
Steve Rubel points to InfoWorld report suggesting that the information management power of blogs could easily replace expensive corporate content management systems. Steve also hypes his client simplehuman, which built its press room using TypePad.
I love the idea, but I’m surprised that so many public relations and marketing bloggers hype TypePad and MoveableType. These certainly are not the tools that spring to mind when I think of a sophisticated content management system.
I’m much more interested in the opensource offerings that are becoming increasingly powerful and userfriendly, like Mambo and Drupal for content management, and WordPress for blogging. The pace of innovation in the open source community is staggering and it makes expensive proprietary systems look clunky by comparison.
Within the next year we should see an easy-to-use, opensource, publishing platform that combines standard CMS features with blogging, wiki, and bulletin board functionality. Right now an experienced network admin could cobble together a system like this by using various applications in tandem. Soon this publishing power will be available to everyone. Will it revolutionize personal publishing like the blog did? Can we handle this much power? It waits to be seen.
To take any available opensource CMS software for a spin, check out opensourceCMS.com.
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The power, the money, and the glory go to those who unify. So, who is going to unify the blogsphere? Technorati seems to be the clear leader of the moment - the Google of the blogsphere - but it has a myriad of competitors. Further, it would seem natural for the big search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or MSN to launch a search function that tracks blogs, but that has yet to happen. Yahoo! is currently testing a blog search.
So, where is the blogsphere headed? I’ve noticed that there are relatively few high quality blogs in any given topic area, and all bloggers list and link to the other good blogs in their particular sphere, so we have developed a very high quality social network that is already completely linked with itself. A search engine like Technorati merely exploits this preexisting network to create a comprehensive compendium of millions of blogs.
Today, bloggers working together can very quickly create a comprehensive network of high quality content. Given this fact, it seems that a network model - yes, sort of like TV and old media - might reemerge, as teams of bloggers get together under the umbrella of a larger organization, which can provide the structure and power needed to win big advertising dollars.
We can see the beginnings of this trend with Gawker and Corante, which offer a select and high quality group of blogs that readers come back to again and again. It is my casual observation that most blog readers only read a very small group of blogs on any kind of a regular basis. If this is true, there is a huge possibility for consolidation in the blogsphere. Yes, eventually most of the power will be concentrated in the hands of a few, just like with old media. That’s the way of the world.
