The Dirt on Perry’s New Site — And More

Perry digs deep for site name: When asked about the name of his soon-to-launch community and news website a few weeks back, former City Pages editor Steve Perry joked about calling it The Hoe, as a garden-themed companion site to The Rake. But on TPT’s Almanac Friday, he revealed the name to be something deeper — deeper under ground, that is. The site, which goes into beta testing late this week, will be called The Daily Mole. An animation at the placeholder site features a mole grubbing in the dirt, chomping local luminaries as it goes along, from David Strom and Al Franken to Katherine Kersten, Brother Ali, and Paul Westerberg. Almanac also featured MinnPost.com’s Joel Kramer and yours truly in a discussion of the local online mediascape (Sept. 7 broadcast, click on “New Media”).

Collins corrects Kersten: In her column linking arrests at a recent Critical Mass ride to “anarchy” at the 2004 Republican National Convention, the Star Tribune’s Katherine Kersten “worked overtime to create an image of New York that would make it easier to make her point,” write’s MPR’s Bob Collins. Among the facts he’s questioning: GOP delegate Annette Meeks’ charge that protesters spit on her. “[D]elegates didn’t mix with protesters,” he wrote. “See, the way it worked was a ‘tiered’ security area was placed around Madison Square Garden… the closer you got to it, the tighter the security.” Kersten also choses not to note the peaceful — and sometimes creative — protest by 100,000 people the Sunday before RNC2004 began.

WWW inventor fears end of free internet: “When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission.” That’s not Al Gore talking (although, for the record, Gore never made the claim), but Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who created the World Wide Web in 1989. In a recent blog posts he writes that a free internet is threatened — and along with it the kind of innovation he’s heralded — and that regulation enforcing “net neutrality” must be considered. He defines the term: “If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.” Learn more at Save The Internet.

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