The Well’s current inkwell.vue interview is with Derek Powazek, about his new book, Design for Community. The interview is shaping up to be very interesting. To go off on a tangent, I often consider adding community features to this site, but I never have. I’m pretty sure the main reason is that I don’t want to attract bunches of comments by people who are the conversational equivalents of sideshow freaks. I see enough of their comments on other sites that have discussion areas that I don’t want to waste hard drive space to store them on this site.

For some reason, Launch sent me an email today telling me that they were being assimilated into Yahoo. That led me to discover that I completely missed the fact that they were acquired by Yahoo way back in July. Here’s a link to the press release. (Update: they made me merge my Launch account with my Yahoo account. Finally I get to be rafeco instead of rafeco2 on Launch. In the meantime, a lot of the collaborative filtering stuff seems to be disabled.)

The Observer (UK) has an article detailing the strategy used by US and UK to rout the Taliban (link via Red Rock Eater).

Today, Bob Woodward reports in the WaPo that CIA units that have been operating in Afghanistan since 1997 played a key role in the recent successes there. It seems, from reading the article, that the talk of our having too few “on the ground” intelligence resources wasn’t true, at least in the case of Afghanistan. Of course, being that the story has basically no named sources, that may be post-success spin by the CIA.

Joel Spolsky: Working on CityDesk, Part Five. I can say that in my own misadventures in content management, I’ve run into all the problems he talks about in point one. Editing content (including the content that I’m typing in right this second) in a browser window really sucks. I also think that XML and XSL are a huge pain in the butt.

The LA Times is reporting that Charles James, the chief of the DOJ’s antitrust section (discussed in a Newsforge article I linked to the other day), said that Microsoft’s competitors were unhappy with the proposed settlement because it didn’t advance their commercial interests.

I was as skeptical as anyone about ClearType when Microsoft announced it, but I’m here to tell you that I’m now a true believer. It doesn’t help out much on a CRT, but it makes text look about 100 times better on my laptop’s LCD. Arial normally looks hideous, but with ClearType enabled, it’s beautiful. I truly hope that Steve Wozniak’s prior art nullifies any patents Microsoft might file for ClearType so that everybody can build it into their window managers. It’s amazing. I want a nice, big LCD for my desktop machine now. (If you’re running Windows XP, you can use Microsoft’s ClearType tuning tool to tweak your ClearType settings to make it look even better.)

It occurred to me that I could just look up Fouad Ajami in Google and see what came up, being that he’s a professor at American University. Apparently, some Arabs aren’t big Ajami fans: here’s a satirical fake interview with Ajami that somebody posted to a message board. Here’s a 1999 review of Ajami’s book that talks about his background. An excerpt:

Ajami’s cachet is that he is the only Arab-American expert to appear with any real frequency in the national media. He echoes the kind of anti-Arabism that both Washington and the pro-Israel lobby have come to embrace. “The Sunnis are homicidal and the Shiites are suicidal,” Ajami once told television viewers. Attempting to explain Arab culture in the United States, he remarked, was like “getting lost in the twisted alleyways of [a] Middle Eastern bazaar.” Indeed, when Bush emerged from his wartime meeting with Ajami, he reportedly confided, with some surprise, that he found him more anti-Arab than even the Israelis.

You’re going to see a ton of links to Fouad Ajami’s New York Times Magazine article on Al Jazeera, What the Muslim World Is Watching. Ajami thinks Al Jazeera is bad, really bad. I have no idea if it’s as bad as he says, but I’m willing to give it more credit for being a positive force than he seems to be willing to. I could definitely hear the sound of an axe grinding as I read the article. It’s important to remember that one’s impression of a media outlet is filtered through the lens of the observer’s biases. CNN seems middle of the road to me — it seems liberal to conservatives. By the same token, conservatives feel like Fox News is balanced, whereas I see it as radically conservative. Ajami does little to explain what biases he carried into his evaluation of Al Jazeera. Another thing I wonder about when the radicalism of Al Jazeera is discussed is whether Al Jazeera is indoctrinating its audience or reflecting its views.

Sarai Shah, the woman who made the documentary Beneath the Veil, has returned to Afghanistan since 9/11 and filmed a follow on documentary called Unholy War, which airs today (also on CNN). Janelle Brown has also interviewed Shah about her new documentary, in which she returns to try to help the three girls who were featured in the original documentary.