Looking for Mr. Nader. Nader has been conspicuous in his absence since election day. He says he’s been busy wrapping up his campaign in accordance with Federal Election Commission regulations, but it appears that’s just a pretext. He’s apparently receiving conflicting counsel about whether he’d be helped or hindered by a critical stance toward the Democrats now, in light of his being viewed by some liberals as a “spoiler.” And Nader has an ambiguous relationship with Greens as well. In These Times

Never go skiing with a mobile phone… at least not in avalanche country. If your phone is on when buried with you, it’ll disrupt the signal your avalanche beacon is putting out and prevent you from being located.

Google buys Deja.com. I share in Jorn Barger‘s elation at this, which might be lost on anyone who is not a veteran of Usenet newsgroups.

But here’s the bad news one day later:

Message to Google: Usenet is a few useful conversations, hidden
by lots of noise. Duh.

In recent years Deja had tried to orientate the archive to being the
centrepiece of a shopping channel, with a number of tacky
manoeuvres such as inserting adverts into postings. But they’d
never (almost, but not quite) managed to break the main Usenet
archive overnight, which is effectively what Google has done. You’d
almost think Google wants to be thought of as a bunch of
come-lately, VC-flushed hooligans with no inkling of the history or
the culture of the Internet.

Something as simple as maintaining the Deja interface – Google
acquired the software as part of the deal – while signalling a change
of front-end and soliciting user input, could have avoided this PR
disaster for Google. The Register [via Robot Wisdom]

Joe Conason: Put Ye No Faith in Bush’s Ministers. “It seems likely that the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives will soon become a highly effective patronage scheme…” and some of the beneficiaries are none too savory characters. New York Observer

The debut issue of the Harvard Journal of Convergence, on the policy challenges of “the information and communications technology revolution.”

The New Yorker Goes Digital, but there’s not much online, at least yet. Slate