RFID and your privacy. A good idea, putting RFID chips into people like Altzheimer's patients who might wonder, or tuna fish to keep track of where the schools are, could go bad if it ends in ubiquitious personal surveillance. This is an issue that needs to be considered and talked about before commercial pressure just makes it happen everywhere. Human chips more than skin-deep - News - ZDNet

Church and state, journalistically speaking. Here's a new wrinkle in breaking down the boundary that should exist between news and advertising. Wired News covers this story.

It's not surprising that marketers love IntelliTxt while many journalists despise it. AlwaysOn columnist Rafe Needleman called IntelliTxt "pretty bad news" from an ethics standpoint "because it blurs the line between editorial content, which readers should expect to be free of commercial influence, and advertising, which we know is paid-for and biased." In AdAge, Kelly McBride, a member of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute, compared the technology to "product placement," while Doug Feaver, editor of washingtonpost.com and president of the Online News Association, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he refuses to consider IntelliTxt because for a publication to maintain credibility the lines between ads and news must be "as clear and distinct as possible." When Vibrant Media pitched its product to Wired News, editors also gave it the thumbs down. A chief concern was that rational cynics might suspect that Wired News was loading its stories with keywords like "memory," "video games" and "impotent" just to make an extra buck.

Blogs and blogging. Barb is back from Florida, unscathed by Charlie, and what should be in the news, but blogs and their use as a tool for teaching. Elementary teachers can use them, so I expect that college profs need to roll up their sleeves and get busy with blogs too. Read the NY Times article (free registration required.)

RFID hacking.Forbes.com: A Hacker's Guide To RFID

A bit from Dan Gillmor's new book, "We the Media." (registration required)MercuryNews.com | 08/01/2004 | We the media: "Journalists: We will learn we are part of something new, that our readers/listeners/viewers are becoming part of the process. I take it for granted, for example, that my readers know more than I do -- and this is a liberating, not threatening, fact of journalistic life. Every reporter on every beat should embrace this. We will use the tools of grassroots journalism or be consigned to history. Our core values, including accuracy and fairness, will remain important, and we'll still be gatekeepers in some ways, but our ability to shape larger conversations -- and to provide context -- will be at least as important as our ability to gather facts and report them."