Ross' report yesterday that Hasan had attempted to "make contact with people associated with al Qaeda" took over the internet yesterday and sparked a furious round of speculation that Hasan's attack was part of an Islamic terrorist plot. The headline, "Officials: U.S. Army Told of Hasan's Contacts with al Qaeda," said it all. The far more mundane truth emerged today in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post: Hasan had communicated via e-mail with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American cleric living in Yemen who formerly served as the imam of a mosque Hasan had attended in Virginia. What did they talk about? From the Washington Post:

The FBI determined that the e-mails did not warrant an investigation, according to the law enforcement official. Investigators said Hasan's e-mails were consistent with the topic of his academic research and involved some social chatter and religious discourse.

We were confused this morning, because Ross had clearly reported that Hasan had made contact with "people associated with Al Qaeda," and the only contacts that other reporters were confirming were with al-Awlaki, who is, as far as we know, a single person. We called Ross and asked him if there were more "people." No, he told us, his initial report was only in reference to al-Awlaki.

"That's how it was initially described to me by my sources," he says. "Given what they told me, that's all I could say. It's a strange use of the word 'people.' But when pinned down, my sources said it's just al-Awlaki."

A strange use, indeed. How about false, too? Especially because Ross' original story did, in fact, report that al-Awliki was among the "people" Hasan was suspected of having contacted. So he reported that Hasan contacted more than one person associated with al Qaeda, and then named one person that he was suspected of contacting. What he apparently didn't bother to do was "pin his sources down" on exactly what they were saying. The result was a clear suggestion that Hasan had tried to communicate with the al Qaeda network on more than one occasion.

So did he? Al-Awlaki is routinely described by the FBI and others as an al Qaeda supporter, and a fiery inciter of violence against infidels. And he was the imam at the Virginia mosque attended by two of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as Hasan. But while it's clear that Al-Awlaki is a bad guy, what's not clear is whether he's simply a propagandist or someone who actually operates as a part of al Qaeda. It's one thing for Hasan to have sent e-mails to someone who vocally supports al Qaeda, and quite another for him to have sent e-mails to al Qaeda itself, or to operatives actively involved in trying to kill people. Ross told us that, according to his sources, "Al-Awlaki is considered a recruiter," which is how he justified invoking the name of the terrorist network. We'll defer to him on that point.

But without knowing what the e-mails are about, can it really be known that Hasan's communications were "attempts to reach out"? The FBI didn't consider them as such. Ross didn't know the contents of the e-mails when he described them that way, but felt perfectly justified in doing so based solely on the knowledge that Hasan had sent the e-mails.

We asked Ross if he had tried to contact Al-Awlaki in reporting the story:

"Yes."

So you reached out to al Qaeda, then?

"To al Qaeda? No. I reached out to him. Oh. I see what you're saying."

What's particularly maddening about Ross' hype is that it had already been well established that Al-Awlaki was the imam at Hasan's Virginia mosque in 2001. Hasan's mother's funeral services were held there at the time. While it hadn't been definitively established that Hasan had ever met Al-Awlaki, it was abundantly clear that the two men were in one another's orbits and that Hasan likely heard him preach. That wasn't reported as a "contact with al Qaeda," but once Ross got his hands on the fact that Hasan sent e-mails to his former imam, who had a web site with a comment form, he turned it into a blockbuster story.

Which wouldn't be the first time. Ross reported—inaccurately—after the anthrax attacks in 2001 that the powder contained a "potent additive...known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons - Iraq." He laundered CIA agent John Kiriakou's lie that the agency only used waterboarding once, for 30 seconds, when in fact Kiriakou wasn't even in the same country as the secret prison where his colleagues waterboarded two men a total of 266 times. He fell for the lies of Alexis Debat, a grifter and fraud who masqueraded as an intelligence expert. And he hyped his access to the phone records of DC madam Deborah Jean Palfrey for days, but only came up with the names of two low-level clients.

Ross' stock response to these complaints is that he only reports what his sources tell him. "We reported what we knew, when we knew it," he says. "I'm comfortable with the story." His problem, as we've said before, is that he has shitty sources. And he just repeats what they tell him. Which is how you get from "Hasan sent e-mails to his former imam, who now preaches in support of Al Qaeda. We don't know what the e-mails were about, but they didn't raise alarms at the FBI" to "Hasan tried to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda" to the headline's blunt, and thoroughly unsupported, reference to "Hasan's Contacts with al Qaeda." It would have been a good story if Ross had stuck to the first, accurate, formulation.

So yea, breast cancer is a big thing, among ladies and all, and people are always talking about "Examine your breasts, ladies," but nobody is actually showing that breast exam, right? That is where WJLA "News" comes in! They're going to show a couple ladies just stone cold examining their bare breasts, for education of the public. Tune in to WJLA during sweeps week to learn about this important issue, of breasts. No reason for mature people to get all titillated! They're doing it for you, the breasted public, reports the Washington Post:

"The public benefits of this will outweigh any criticism," [says WJLA's general manager]. "I suppose some people will call up and say, 'I won't watch your station.' But they'll be outnumbered by those who say, 'You helped my sister. You helped my mother. You helped someone I love.' "

"You helped me leer."
[Pic via]

New York magazine, 2005:

Now that people are breaking up with each other through text messaging, it's only natural that the hottest social-networking program to emerge in recent months is Dodgeball, a free texting service that lets users tell their friends and crushes what bar they're in at any moment so they can meet up. Two recent NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program grads, Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, both 28, launched Dodgeball last spring as an alternative to loud cell-phone calls from bars. When Dodgeball users "check in" at a given locale by sending out a text message, it goes to all their preselected friends, as well as any friends of friends within a ten-block radius. A photo is sent along with the alert-which helps with identifying near strangers. Introductions are made, beer is poured, and then hookups can occur-casually, and in a low-pressure environment, all under the guise of knowing someone in common. It's Friendster, except in real time and in the real world.

(The Friendster comparison proved eerily prescient.)

New York magazine, 2009:

Foursquare is a better Dodgeball, for those who remember the now-defunct social-networking, texting, friend-locating mobile-phone app. The new iteration, rapidly being installed on iPhones across the city, is a fast route to a good night out. Download the app free at playfoursquare.com to track your friends' locations (meaning no more rounds of "Where are you?" texts). It's also a game, with goofy badges awarded to users who check in frequently. And most helpful, members share their ample nightlife experience; according to one enthusiast, the saffron Sazerac at Apotheke is the drink to get.

(Photo by dpstyles)

How fitting, since Second Life, a piece of software which allows users to move "avatars" representing themselves around in a three-dimensional space and decorate themselves and their virtual land, resembles nothing so much as a failed academic experiment.

Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, has raised $19 million in venture capital from a star-studded list of backers, including Benchmark Capital, the backers of eBay; eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus; and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos. But the last infusion came nearly three years ago. The company charges fees on people and companies who own virtual land in Second Life, and also issues a currency, Linden dollars, used to trade goods in-world. Kapor, the company's chairman, told the Financial Times last year that it was "absolutely in the ballpark of profitability."

Second Life may well be on the verge of profitability. But it is firmly headed into irrelevance. It is impossible to imagine another BusinessWeek cover story like the one it garnered in 2006. Reuters closed its Second Life bureau last year. The former bureau chief, Adam Pasick, told PBS's Mark Glaser that there was no longer a there there:

We were primarily interested in Second Life as a business/commerce/finance phenomenon, covering it like we would any small but fast-growing economy in the real world. The bureau is now closed. Essentially the story we were there to cover has moved on.

His reporter, Eric Krangel, who now writes for Silicon Alley Insider, was more trenchant:

The very things that most appeal to Second Life's hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let's not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life). As part of walking my 'beat,' I'd get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I'd right-click the dancefloor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry.

What's left for Second Life? Community meetings, underattended cultural events, and education. CNN uses its Second Life "island" to hold meetings with volunteer reporters. WGBH threw a virtual concert with a grand total of 70 attendees. And the Modern Language Association, that bastion of English-department wonkery, is pursuing the idea of using it to hold meetings.

Imagine a dry academic conference enlivened with a few space-alien avatars. Deans with mohawks and tight leather pants! Only compared to the life of a university professor might Second Life actually seem exciting. We look forward to the news that Linden Lab has sold itself to an academic consortium. It's where the virtual world belongs.

There will be no online ordering of the new phones, and they have to be activated (which we're told takes like 10 precious minutes!) in-store. AT&T refused to tell Gizmodo how many would be available at launch, and they're not even sure what the demand will be.

The in-store activation also means the scene at the stores should be even more of a mess than last summer's hyped iPhone launch day—because at least then, consumers could pick up the phones and head home to turn them on. Not anymore!

So come July 11, you are advised to avoid Apple Stores in Manhattan. And if you want the damn phone, hop the Amtrack to Newark, Delaware or something, 'cause you're not getting one in New York.

Well, eight months after it first started making headlines we finally managed to score an invite to the Zivity beta site, and now we can tell you: not very much.

After all the hype it's received, we expected ... well, something we hadn't seen before, or at least something pretty special. You know, something slightly more than just an opportunity to set up a profile page and look at some pictures of naked chicks female beauty.

Granted, Zivity has entered the market at more than a bit of disadvantage. With megaporn site (excuse us, modern pinup showcase) SuicideGirls setting a certain standard for adult communities online, it can be pretty hard for any new kid on the block to compete. Still, given that Zivity is clearly aware of SG (Missy Suicide is one of their photographers), you'd think they'd at least try to have a site that's more impressive.

No such luck, though: aside from the photos and their totally original voting system, there's not much there there Does anyone really need yet another website where they can set up yet another profile? Sure, the pictures are pretty hot (if a bit tame) ... but why do you have to have one more profile to keep track of just to look at them?

Sample model page

Sample Photo Set

Photo Upload Page (note: no nudity for nonmodels!)

To be fair, Zivity is in beta, so maybe they have some other features in the works that will be in place before their public launch. If not ... well, we sure hope at least a chunk of that $7 million is winding up in their models' pockets. We hate to see good money going to waste.

· Zivity

* * * * *

Previously: Zivity's Big Score: Good Money After Bad?, Porn 2.0: Haven't We Been Here Before?, The New Porn.com: When Bad Things Happen To Good Domains

Anyway, the reviews are in. And boy are there reviews! Joyce Carol Oates, a terrifying critic if any are, weighs in for the New York Review of Books ("Gessen's humor is persistently Seinfeldian"). The Observer had a delightfully freewheeling, bitchy opinion. The NY Times appears slightly befuddled, and as Gessen himself said, even that fabulous literary heavyweight NYLON has given their opinion—negatively.

Because the media moves as a herd, one is basically required, at this point, to have an opinion or angle on this book. Why? Is it because n+1 is the most important literary journal of our time? (It isn't.) Is it because a novel bold enough to reference Fitzgerald in the title automatically merits discussion? Is it because this could actually be a new flagstone in the Way We Live Now—that is, if we're twentysomethings who went to Ivy League universities, saw that fact as an important pinnacle, and found themselves unenlightened and stuck years later, none the wiser?

Who knows. One of the passages Gessen chose to read was one that is oft-quoted in reviews, about the character Sam. (There's also a character named Keith, written in the first person.) It reminded me of the sad young literary men I have personally known, and exactly why I found them so insufferable:

His Google was shrinking. It was part of a larger failing, maybe, certainly, but to see it quantified... to see it numerically confirmed... it was cruel. It wasn't nice. Sam considered the alternatives: he knew people with no Google at all, zero hits, and he even knew people like Mark, Mark Grossman, who had never published, who had kept silent, whose name drew up the hits of other Mark Grossmans, the urologist Grossman and the banker Grossman and Grossmans who had completed ten-kilometer runs.

"I have the road map to crazy," Albert tells him (no shit!), but the story and details mostly aren't anything new. (Weird factoid: Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins was one of the first people to know the truth!). Albert has frequently—though not always succinctly or in any discernible order—told her woes: financial, mental, legal—to the press since her outing last year.

She's crazier than two multiple-personality peas in a pod, obviously (not that we're judging!): "Phoning suicide hot lines and talking in the voices of teenage boys was a compulsion for her."

About her alliance with her former boyfriend's half sister, Savannah, who played the public face of "JT" for years:

Savannah walked the red carpet at Cannes behind Angelina Jolie. The two friends giggled like teenage girls, picked at each other's food, finished each other's sentences, even slept in the same bed and showered together—not in a sexual way, but out of the closeness of their entwinement. "We felt we were a trinity," Albert says. "We were creating a third. It was like we fell in love with each other."

How badly we all want to believe! In something.

• Disney acquires Club Penguin for $700 million. Actually, it was half that. The other $350 million is dependent on meeting earnings goals by 2009.
• Intel acquires Havok for $110 million. Second Life may use the Havok physics engine, but its engines are most commonly used in videogames, not virtual worlds.
• Double Fusion raises $26 million; Double Fusion Japan secures undisclosed capital investment. Double Fusion is an in-game advertising firm. It no doubt is inherently interested in product placement and ad sales in virtual worlds, but its in-game ad engine is widely marketed to console and PC videogame publishers. Again, counted properly, this is a videogame investment.
• Emergent Game Technologies snags $12 million in funding. Emergent creates game engines that are used in massively multiplayer online games and casual titles, but its biggest clients are, yes, traditional videogames.
• Greystripe gets $8.9 million from Steamboat Ventures. Greystripe distributes ad-supported mobile games. It's like Double Fusion for cellphones.
• Weblo cons manages to obtain $3.2 million in venture capital from VantagePoint Venture Partners. Really? Have you seen Weblo? It might bill itself as a virtual recreation of the world, but it's little more than glorified MySpace pages.
• GarageGames acquired by IAC for an undisclosed amount. GarageGames is a jack-of-all trades developer, publisher and Torque engine creator for independent games.
Setting the bar extremely low for what qualifies as a virtual world investment — businesses that apparently derive most of their incomes from running or providing support to virtual worlds, and thereby including content creation tools, virtual-world-specific in-game advertising firms, and, grudgingly, Weblo — the grand total investment for the year is shy of $500 million, half of Virtual Worlds Management's claims.

You know what this reeks of? Someone throwing together a little hocus-pocus to stir up some virtual hysteria for an investment conference that you can conveniently learn all about for $1,000 a head. Now that sounds like where the real money in virutal worlds is. (Photo by Christian Kadluba)

Here's what I think happened. I think UPS's network was overwhelmed by Amazon's Potter-volume in some parts of the country and they had no way to deliver all those packages. (The forums for the book at Amazon and Google Blog Search are full of similar complaints from others...warning, spoilers! UPS even offloaded some of the volume to the USPS for "last-mile" delivery.) So, UPS just marked all of those packages they had no intention of delivering as "oops, we missed you, you must have been out".

Let's go back to Amazon's guarantee, which states that the refund "does not apply if delivery is attempted, but no one is available to accept the package". Amazon would be pretty angry with UPS if they cost them a bunch of money due to refunds and, more importantly, the loss of a bunch of customer goodwill...maybe Amazon would switch a larger portion of their formidable package output to another carrier, for instance. So UPS intentionally misclassifying those deliveries covers their ass with Amazon and covers Amazon's ass with regard to the refund.

Harry Potter and the Phantom Delivery [Kottke.org]
(AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)

The article suggests growth in IBM's software business will boost services deals, but then states: "the unanswered question about I.B.M. is, Can the new, higher-margin business grow fast enough to offset the maturing of its traditional services business and rising competition from the Indian outsourcers?" The article does little to answer that question while still proclaiming IBM "has made impressive progress." Even CEO Sam Palmisano is less bullish on IBM's prospects than the Times: He merely says that "there's still a lot to be done." (Chart by NYT)

An PR source tells us, "The coverage comes from pitches we made to these writers. Johnny Miles' column does great things for restaurants." Though our source (predictably) disagrees, summer in New York is a lull in openings and there isn't much restaurant news, so, if you believe the publicists, items are easily "placed." Though don't tell any of the writers that, because their story will differ.

But if PR companies didn't do any good at all, wouldn't they cease to exist? (Err, wouldn't they?)

Still. When we passed by FR.OG on our way home recently, the restaurant was empty—save for a newly framed copy of Cuozzo's review.

Earlier: FR.OG in SO.HO SO.SO

University College London (UCL) is looking at conducting—in a virtual world—psychological experiments that no longer take place in the real world.

The UCL-led study repeated, in a virtual environment, a classic experiment from the 1960s by social psychologist Stanley Milgram—which found people would administer apparently lethal electric shocks to a stranger at the command of an authority figure—and discovered that participants reacted as though the situation were real.

Virtual world may revive outlawed experiments [News.com]

At least, that's what the "shiny e-brochure" received via email for a "Mr. Nick Edwards," who is apparently the editor here at Valleywag, said. The not-so-critically-acclaimed Web 2.0 Wave in the US and POLAND conference took place at Stanford University just a few short weeks ago.

Did you know that Poland has the largest Skype user base? Or the leading contribution to Wikipedia, per capita? But what does that have to do with Web 2.0? And why did Poland fall victim to the Web 2.0 hype machine, promising that "many companies are breaking new innovative ground in astounding ways." Yawn.

For any who may care, the full propaganda after the jump.

————— Forwarded message —————
From: Clay Bullwinkel <[redacted]>
Date: Nov 12, 2006 6:34 PM
Subject: "Web 2.0 Wave in the U.S. and Poland" - brochure
To: tips@valleywag.com

Mr. Nick Edwards
Editor
ValleyWag

Dear Mr. Edwards,

Below is the shiny e-brochure announcing our event. Press can be admitted free of charge. We hope one or more of you can attend. Please also forward this to fellow journalists, friends, and Web 2.0 business people who may be interested.

Poland is coming on strong with world class Web 2.0. Many companies are breaking new innovative ground in astounding ways. It's about time that they get to know their U.S. counterparts and explore partnerships. Poland has the largest Skype user base, leading per capita contribution to Wikipedia, rampant proliferation of all kinds of media aggregation sites, leading interactive mobile TV technology, and other stunning infrastructure and user interface innovations.

If you or any of your press colleagues will be attending, please let me know with a quick email. I can then make proper arrangements at our registration desk. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Clay

Event Details [U.S.-Polish Trade Council]
The Sweet Very 1.0 Slides [Stanford.edu]
US and Polish Web 2.0 companies swap notes at Stanford [SiliconValleyWatcher]