Slick, Packaged News....Direct from The Bush Administration

Want to know what everyone's talking about in the blogosphere today? The Sunday New York Times expose of the growth of "packaged news" stories issued by the Bush Administration and various federal agencies.

References to the article appear as Nos. 2-5 among today's top links, and a whopping 14 of today's 15 burstiest people are administration officials, news directors or critics of the practice who were interviewed by the Times. According to the newspaper, video news releases produced by federal agencies are increasingly aired on TV stations nationwide as "real" news from "real" reporters, even though they are in actuality public relations videos moderated (without conflicting opinion, of course) by staffers/actors posing as "reporters." While the practice isn't new, the Times notes that it's used more frequently by the Bush White House than any previous administration -- often without viewers knowing that their "news" is promotional, not reportorial.

The other issue dominating the blogosphere today is a rash of links to America Online's terms/conditions for its popular AIM/instant message system -- and an equally large number of bloggers encouraging users to find alternative IM sources because of this condition: "You waive any right to privacy." Among others. Slashdot has a few observations, while others are recommending Jabber as a replacement.

Celebrity sightings? Michael Jackson's bizarre trial continues to create equally bizarre buzz, and filmmaker Peter Jackson says it'll be at least three years before he films "The Hobbit," the precursor to the Lord of the Rings Series. (Hurry, please?)

And if you missed it last week, don't forget to download the latest blog research from Intelliseek senior researcher Natalie Glance, who co-authored The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog, with Lada Adamic of HP Labs. It examines the posts of 40 "A-list" conservative and liberal blogs in the two months leading up to the Nov. 2004 Presidential Election and includes a one-day snapshot of more than 1,000 political blogs. As part of the project, Adamic and collaeage Eytan Adar have also have posted an interactive tool for exploring Figure 3 in the paper, which illustrates the network of the most cited 20 liberal and 20 conservative blogs.

BLOGPULSE TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: Democracy in the Middle East has been a long-term, seemingly unreachable goal. But now there's democratic movement, discussion, rallies and reform in key Middle East countries.