“The U.S. Air Force has hit Iraqi TV with an experimental electronmagetic pulse device called the ‘E-Bomb’ in an attempt to knock it off the air and shut down Saddam Hussein’s propaganda machine, CBS News Correspondent David Martin reports. The highly classified bomb creates a brief pulse of microwaves powerful enough to fry computers, blind radar, silence radios, trigger crippling power outages and disable the electronic ignitions in vehicles and aircraft.” Later, all references to the E-Bomb disappeared from the story. Has the military embedded a censor in CBS’s editing booth? (BoingBoing reports.)

Home equity loans are the crack cocaine of the American economy — fun while they last but then a real disaster. Banks like Wells Fargo are pushing Americans to “unleash the spending power locked up in your home!” and arguing that the practice isn’t risky because banks generally lend no more than 75% of the home’s value. Well, sure, the practice is not as risky for the bank that has the home as security, but for a family that has to sell or give up its home if the economy softens, the practice is potentially ruinous.

How many remember that half of America’s mortgages were in default in the depths of the Great Depression.

Proof we should worry: 10% of spam is pushing home refinancings. Yes, folks, step right up… pulling cash out of your home to buy a new car is about as wise as paying to “increase your bust size 20%!!!” and “FREE LUNCHES FOR ALL!”

Jeff Jarvis, one of the enlightened big media execs who blogs and has succeeded in fostering blogs within his company, notes that Time has now joined CNN from axing a reporter’s blog. Jeff runs through all the pros and cons of publisher-funded blogs and concludes, “I predict competition will open this up. If Newsweek blogs, Time will. If FoxNews blogs, CNN will. Give it time.”

Jeff rebuts publisher concerns that j-bloggers will hurt their brand’s credibility. But he doesn’t address what I’ve assumed that the core publisher fear: that the j-blogger will establish a big audience of his/her own and hive off into nanopublishing.

Although publishers pay the bills for now, blogs dissolve the fundemental formula of publishing economics, the imbalance of power that allows a publisher to remind an uppity journalist: “you need our distribution more than we need your copy.”

But perhaps the moguls don’t see this as a threat, but just failed dotcom fantasy?

Winter ended first thing Saturday when a six year old boy awoke and shouted: “the whole front yard is full of grass!”

He’s been singing “the blues” recently, having been hooked by something mournful on the car radio. Inspired, he now croons, “Ohh, baby, I just want to call you on the telephone.” We’ve bought “Whole Lotta Blues,” a compilation CD, and now dress each morning to John Mayall and Eric Clapton jamming “Steppin’ Out.”

Glenn Reyolds says he got 600 Instapuntit-related e-mails yesterday. Blogcritics’ traffic was up 10-fold yesterday, winning 24,000 visits.

Reading up-to-the-minute blogs and news sites, the Layne family subscribes to the local paper “for the coupons and the (limited) local news, and the whole front section is about as worthless as putting on a condom after you got laid. If I wanted to read a bunch of L.A. Times articles from Friday, I would’ve done it Thursday night.”

The intensity of interest in Internet based news is clear in our traffic logs: a) we didn’t have the normal weekend dip and b) visits doubled yesterday morning as people returned to their broadband offices. (I bet newstand sales are up no more than 20%.) To see a traffic graph for one of our servers click Read the rest of this entry »

Tony Perkins has apologized here for his reaction to my roasting of his new group business blog Always On.

Tony adds: “i want to be a part of [blogging], becuuse frankly it is the most fun i have ever had in my professional life.”

Apology accepted Tony. My critique of your strategy stands but I hope you will continue to improve. Every drum beat for blogging is helpful.

Joi Ito, pundit VC, suggests that its “better to try to learn how to blog before evangelizing.” Not wanting to use Always On to pursue a personal debate, you’ve been restricted to using my comments section and Elizabeth Spiers’. Take Joi’s advice and create your own blog. We’ll have some fun.

Google seems to be having trouble scaling its fabled advertising technology in war time. (Via Soundbitten.)

Just four days after launch, group war news blog Command Post is on its way to 40,000 visits today.

Nearly 70 bloggers contribute breaking war news and links to the “warblog collective.”

Web traffic is usually 50-90% lower on weekends — most people surf from the office — so it will be interesting to see what kind of traffic the site gets Monday.

To put the site’s explosive traffic in perspective, the site’s third day (yesterday) saw nearly half as much traffic as super blog Instapundit, which had 80,000 visits yesterday.

Update Monday 7.30AM: More than 60 bloggers posted roughly 300 links to breaking war news Sunday on Command Post. The site had 55,000 visits and 72,000 page views.

The event-tied collective news log is a simple mutation of the communal posting format pioneered by sites like Slashdot, Fark, Metafilter and Kuro5hin. Will each important future event have its own collective log?

Is this the fastest grass-roots media launch in history? Fark had 50,000 page views in 1999, 100,000 in 2000, 30,000,000 in 2001 and is now doing 19 million a month. Wonder what Command Post’s traffic will look like a month from now?

Baghdad taxi driver to self-styled human shield:“Really, how much did Saddam pay you to come?”