While I do less watching TV these days, I still manage to catch great moments in television.

Today, I just saw Jay Leno's full interview Barack Obama. At the end of it, Jay Leno says, "Well Mr. President, I must say this has been one of the best nights of my life."

This morning, Barack Obama sent a holiday message to the Iranians.

The other day, Jon Stewart landed one of the most signature moments in this financial crisis by knocking Jim Cramer in the solar plexus.

And I love this kind of viewing. Pre-Internet, TV was this semi-constant stream of entertainment. Post-Internet, it's like week-after-week, something really amazing happens on TV, and now everybody gets to enjoy the full thing. No need to wait for the 6 o'clock news to recap a small snippet of something funny on TV. No need to say, "hey, did you see such-and-such" and be disappointed when they haven't—just send them a link.

I wonder what television will mean 10, 20 years from now.

Cross-posted on DLog

In The Right to Write, the overall theme is about giving yourself permission to write. Julia Cameron says that in order to write, we must first silence the internal censor. Stephen King, in On Writing, echos this theme, and mentions this principle: "Write the first draft with the 'door' closed, and the second draft with it open." In other words, let yourself go when creating your first draft, then let all the criticism and edits flow in later.

Does your writing tool give you that kind of permission? I'm writing on one right now. It's DLog (aka Drunk Log), which records your keystrokes as you type your post. Click here to see this post as I was conjuring it. The way the app is constructed, everything I type is recorded. Everything I write is committed somewhere. Even if I delete a fragment, it will exist in the replay. Psychogically, I feel that I'm writing for an audience, live. This makes the act feel more like a conversation, and less like engineering.

So much of writer's block is just fear, and I feel like DLog is forcing me, at every keystroke, to dip into the cold water.

Think of the alternative: a Word Document. At any moment, you could hit backspace, and your words will completely vanish. In fact, that's how I came to write this post. I was trying to craft some other idea in notepad, but then I noticed an unusual amount of backspacing over my own text. My internal editor/censor was killing my internal writer.

I think a parallel could be writing a first draft in pen on paper. That could really get you to commit as you go along. One reason I don't do that, though, is that I don't like transcribing my notes, and so there's a risk I just let the paper sit somewhere, unread by somebody.

In digital form, my text is done, ready to be published now, and so I feel like I'm typing these letters into my readers' brains instantly. It's the same spontaneous feel you get when having a great conversation.

I think the meaning of news has changed, at least on blogs and sites like Digg.

When going through the submission process on Digg, they remind you often that you're submitting News, but ostensibly things on Digg don't fit the television version of news.

On TV, anything that came out in the past week or so can be considered news. Or if the network does original reporting on something that happened a while ago, that's also news. They're "breaking" a story.

But on blogs and Digg, it seems like you can post about something that is up to two years old as long as it hasn't been reported in that space before. I see things on MetaFilter or Digg pop-up that I saw on Reddit a year ago, but they're treated as being fresh.

And then, there's this deadzone of between 2 and 5 years ago that consistently seems old. For example, if I "discover" something that came out 3 years ago, and post it here, it's not going to count as "news." Too many people on the Internet have seen it, in my head, and so forget about it.

But, there becomes a separate kind of news, that is anything before 5 years ago. Maybe it shouldn't be considered "news" and it's not exactly a TV "remember when" segment. It's more like an "oh, BTW" kind of effect.

I often post links on here from wikipedia about things that happened in history 10, 25, 50, years ago. And in some ways, I'm posting it as if it were "news." Like, "oh, have you heard?" It feels like original reporting because I doubt anybody has heard of these things and yet I find them relevant and fresh. For example, I posted that "We had a Native American Vice President." When Barack Obama was running, I felt this was "news" because it was a piece of reality that would be original but relevant.

It's like a "Did you know?" segment where you're breaking history as news. Bringing up the "Cluetrain Manifesto" from 1999 in the previous post I feel is something that should count as a "news" because most of you haven't heard of it, or if you have, don't remember.

And this is good. The television definition of news is too now-oriented. It seems on the Internet, the definition of news matches what our brain considers novel. I could post an old video from Noam Chomsky, and that would be a totally new experience for you. Maybe not for the rest of the world, and so it wouldn't appear on TV, but on the Internet, because people are directing their own learning through surfing, you don't have to worry about appeasing everybody's definition of news.

People wander around the Internet and bump into novelty and that becomes news to them.

I think this explains why Push Media, like PointCast, failed. Remember PointCast, the screensaver in the late 90s that would provide up-to-date news? In 1997, News Corp. offered them $450 Million, but PointCast turned it down because everybody thought Push was going to take over the Internet. "At last, this will make the Internet like television, print and radio! Like broadcast!" Finally in 1999, they could only sell it for $7 Million.

The topic of Internet griefing communities has hit the mainstream media consciousness. The Washington Post recently did an interview with Christopher Poole, the founder of 4chan. The New York Times did an interview with an infamous troll. Another example is the Chinese human flesh search engine. Every month you hear another horror story of trolls on the Internet swarming like flies.

It's come to the point now where Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, now regrets the anonymity of it all.

Internet communities fascinate me. I'm slowly building up an understanding of what they really mean. In some ways, Internet rhetoric is similar to graffiti wall rhetoric: the game is to have the last comment that can't be responded to.

I believe that rhetoric is ultimately how we store important thoughts. And so the way in which society's rhetoric evolves will be met with an evolution in our thinking.

Look at how the broadcast medium of television, with its pandering to the lowest common-denominator and its avoidance of all offense, has helped make society more politically correct.