Tweetgeist: The imaginary CTO, charging for blogs, Rosen on "impending tyranny"

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a made-up CTO

On Sunday InfoWorld announced it was severing ties with a contributor, Randall C. Kennedy, and removing Kennedy's blog from its site, since it discovered that Kennedy "had been misrepresenting himself to other media organizations as Craig Barth, CTO of Devil Mountain Software," which produced Windows security software that InfoWorld distributed.

InfoWorld competitor ZDNet had been invesigating Kennedy/Barth on its own and concluded that there were more problems with Kennedy and his company beyond the "fictional sidekick." More from Gregg Keizer at ComputerWorld and Charles Arthur at the Guardian.

Kennedy responded in ZDNet's comments, saying that InfoWorld publisher IDG knew about his ruse, and defending the integrity of his company's data about Windows security.

NYT blogs for pay?

Much chatter about Felix Salmon's Friday report from the PaidContent 2010 conference that "The NYT’s blogs are set to be paywalled" -- though "metered" might be a better verb here:

@dangillmor I can't believe the NYT would be foolish enough to paywall its blogs.

@mathewi I think that's pretty dumb, @katecollinsnyc -- blogs should be part of what helps build engagement with readers so they will want to pay

links from everywhere

Tons of good reading from the weekend and this morning. In brief:

• Jay Rosen returned to his PressThink blog with a post about "The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism." Rosen asked why a New York Times investigation of the Tea Party movement chose to describe followers' belief in "a narrative of impending tyranny" without weighing in on whether that narrative had any basis in reality.

  Later, Rosen tweeted:

  @jayrosen_nyu Most frequent reply to the argument in my new PressThink post: "readers can figure it out; they don't need to be told." http://bit.ly/8ZanGb

• New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter interviews the anonymous activist who uploaded the Neda video from last summer's Iran protests -- which just won a Polk award.

• The Atlantic offered a pair of passionate posts on the Justice Department OFfice of Professional Responsibility report on the Bush administration torture memos and their authors: James Fallows argued that it is "this era's 'Hiroshima'" (referring to John Hersey's account of America's 1945 nuclear bombing of Japan), and Adam Serwer drew the parallels between Islamic-law justifications for terror attacks and U.S.-law justifications for torture.

  @ezraklein This might be the single best thing I've ready on John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and the Bush admin's approach to torture. http://bit.ly/ccOQeU

• danah boyd's observations on random-video phenom ChatRoulette:

  @ethanz @zephoria on chatroulette as a happy "reminder of ye-olde-Internet culture" of randomness and occasional ickiness: http://is.gd/8U7Rn

• NBC's decision to air ice dancing from the Winter Olympics rather than the USA-Canada hockey game inspired widespread derision:

  @ClayTravisBGID Is the NBC decision to go with ice dancing over USA-Canada the best possible satire of the winter olympics? I think so.

  @cressman RT @Jimmert444: I really hope the taped Ice Dancing on #NBC was worth missing out on an incredible Hockey game. No wonder u are failing.