If you check out most movie ads, you’ll nearly always see a list of excerpts from glowing reviews – “…A masterpiece!” “Riveting from start to finish!” “When Oscar time comes, look for the makers of ‘Elektra’!” – even if the film actually left viewers and critics bored into comas.

One running joke is that the blurbs leave out the really important words: “To think the filmmakers had the gall to call this a masterpiece!” “The credits were riveting from start to finish — and they were the one part of the film worth watching.” “When Oscar time comes, look for the makers of ‘Elektra’ at a seedy Hollywood bar somewhere, drowning their sorrows.”

So in the same vein, if you check out the Liberal web site, you’ll see a page of glowing reviews of Paul Martin’s performance in the recent debates, including “The best theatre in Friday night’s leaders’ debate was the moment when the prime minister rounded on separatist Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Quebecois. ‘I am a Quebecer, and you are not going to take my country away from me with some trick, with some ambiguous question.’”

Well, those cheeky monkeys at the NDP’s web headquarters had the temerity to actually read the rest of the reviews in question. And they’ve come up with a list of the cherry-picked quotes, and the parts the Liberals left out:

The best theatre in Friday night’s leaders’ debate was the moment when the prime minister rounded on separatist Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Quebecois. “I am a Quebecer, and you are not going to take my country away from me with some trick, with some ambiguous question.” They were empty words, for Bloc fortunes in Quebec owe a huge debt to scandalous behaviour by members of the party Martin now leads. To thus present himself as the prime minister for national unity was bold. (Editorial, Calgary Herald, December 17, 2005)

Although I haven’t worked with the NDP’s web crew or the rapid response team this time around, I’ve admired their handiwork from afar, from Average Canadian or Liberal insider? to their debate Bingo card. They’ve been getting kudos from bloggers and others across the political spectrum. It’s been a joy to watch — and I bet they’re having a ball doing it.

From our good friends at Blogaholics, the great news that Microsoft is discontinuing support for Internet Explorer for the Mac.

There was a time when I would have been horrified at this news. When Microsoft first released IE Mac, the only other browsers around were clunky, buggy, slow and feature-poor. IE changed all that: it was (relatively) snappy, stable and a joy to use.

Suddenly we Mac users weren’t the Internet’s poor cousins any more; in some ways, IE on the Mac outpaced its Windows counterpart. And when Apple rolled out OS X, IE was right there alongside us, completely updated for the new operating system.

But as time went on, it felt more and more sluggish. Rendering bugs plagued users, and holes in the browser’s support for CSS were a growing, glaring problem. When Steve Jobs unveiled Safari at MacWorld in 2003 — a peppy, brand-new browser that ran circles around IE — he also effectively killed Internet Explorer.

The Microsoft browser’s share of the Macintosh market plunged, and in one of those vicious circles that marks so much of the online world, that made accommodating IE’s CSS quirks less and less worthwhile. For web developers, adding “except for Internet Explorer for OS X” to your list of supported broswers became standard practice. As Safari and then Firefox climbed steadily in features and stability, the case for Internet Explorer crumbled.
So part of me is happy to learn that IE for the Mac will soon no longer be available for download. But another part of me is just a little wistful. Ironically (because it came from Apple’s old nemesis, Microsoft), IE was one of the applications that helped to fuel the Mac’s resurgence in the late 1990s, and kept the momentum going through the shift to OS X. In its own way, IE Mac helped keep choice alive in the computing world.

There’s been fantastic response to my post on blogging/podcasting NDP candidates. Thanks to everyone who’s contributed suggestions and let me know about their own blogs. I’ve updated the OPML file several times since I first posted it, so if you were one of the first to sign on, you’ll want to download the latest version.

What’s the OPML file for, you ask? It’s a file format that many news aggregators (such as Bloglines, Newsgator or FeedDemon) can use to import a lot of news feeds at once — in this case, all of the NDP candidates with blogs that offer feeds. (Learn more than you ever wanted to know about OPML at Wikipedia.)

One more thing. More than a few candidates out there are using the free Blogger service. If you’re in that category, and you haven’t switched on your news feed, why not go for it? It’ll take you about a minute; the detailed instructions are right here.

If you’re a writer who’s had to endure editing by committee, bad news: the single biggest example of that practice appears to work.

I speak of Wikipedia, which has had a pretty lousy week or two of press what with the maligning of individuals and the class action lawsuit and the Adam Curry. But just as style guides across the continent were about to start requiring that the word “Wikipedia” always be preceded on first mention by the word “embattled” (see entry for “Apple“), Nature magazine came riding to the rescue:

Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds….

Several recent cases have highlighted the potential problems…. However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.

The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.

I still have a healthy skepticism about Wikipedia’s entries, and I’ve learned to treat any information I glean from the site less as the final word and more as a handy starting point for future research.

But what a starting point it is – and what an amazing example, warts and all, Wikipedia provides of the capacity of a very disparate online community to come together and build something very worthwhile… and something I’d miss very much if it were to vanish. The Nature article couldn’t have come at a better time.

In a post about a few technical issues they’re experiencing, my pals at Bryght add an assurance that it has nothing to do with Yahoo!.

And then they throw in this graphic.

If I ever get my heart restarted, I’m heading over to their offices with an air horn and a Freddy Krueger mask.

I spent the 2004 campaign in the belly of the beast (friendly beast, very comfortable belly, no complaints from this end), and I was able to pay only passing attention to the Revolutionary Moderation Gaffe-o-Meter.

This time, though, it’s my go-to place whenever I see a news story about a candidate, aide or leader going off the rails. Don, the webmaster, invites readers to submit the latest error, misstatement, screw-up or slip by e-mail. He scores the parties based on a simple formula: seriousness of gaffe multiplied by prominence of the miscreant.

(A little partisan schadenfreude: the NDP has, to date, run the most goof-free campaign.)

It would be cool if some admiring codester could create a little doodad that would let people put a live Gaffe-o-Meter on their web sites, linked to Don’s, no?

For the past few months, I’ve been lucky enough to see an extraordinary project take shape: Net² (pronounced “net squared”), a resource for non-profits that want to take their online presence to the next level:

Through the immense possibilities of the Internet, nonprofits can turn hundreds of supporters into thousands, access new reserves of volunteerism, and give their constituencies tools to take charge of change.

This site is the online home of our effort to highlight projects around the world that succeed at the intersection of pervasive access, new tools, and new audiences.

Part of the site’s focus is the upcoming Net² conference, bringing together non-profit leaders and tech visionaries next May in San Francisco. If your group has the resources to send you there, it promises to be a valuable opportunity to learn, share and network.

Read on…

Samuel Goldwyn once famously answered criticism that his company’s films lacked artistic merit with a biting, “Pictures are for entertainment. Messages should be delivered by Western Union.”

That’s more or less where J. Kelly Nestruck stands, too, in a discussion of the movie Syriana, a political thriller and indictment of the oil industry:

I just don’t believe that making fictional movies is an effective way to create social change — and certainly not an efficient one. I often think of all the filmmakers who made anti-Bush movies in the lead-up to the 2004 election; if they had spent even one-tenth of that time and energy knocking on doors in Pennsylvania instead of preaching to the art-house converted (I’m looking at you, John Sayles), the United States would now have a different president — one less tied to oil interests. How many solar-panelled roofs could Syriana’s $50-million budget have bought?

(Kelly brings the discussion to his blog, as well. Yours truly attempts to play movie critic in the comments section.)

There’s no word yet on Syriana‘s box-office success, with the film still in only narrow buzz-building release. (The jury is in on Sayles’ Silver City, however, and the verdict was harsh… critically and financially. I hate to say it, but I’d have voted to convict, too.)

But Syriana’s makers aren’t relying on ticket sales and café conversations alone to drive the movie’s political impact. And that may be where politically-minded filmmakers are starting to answer Kelly’s critique.

Read on…