When I sat down to read Friends, Followers and the Future by Rory O’Connor, I thought I knew what to expect. This is how I earn my living- by advising others on how best to integrate social media into their lives and work. The world that is social media is at best a microcosm of the world at large and at worst a poor substitute for the offline world, and I figured that it would be easy to read this book, digest it into manageable pieces and write this intro for today’s book salon.

I was wrong.

The public wants better news than it’s getting.

Everything changed on September 11, 2001. It’s become an American truism. And for many, it’s also absolutely true. It certainly was the case for Tom Engelhardt. He was roughly seven miles north of the World Trade Center that morning and that’s about the furthest he’s been from it since.

After referring to David Brooks as the “Bard of the 1 Percent,” I was assaulted with a barrage of threatening letters and phone calls from representatives of Thomas Friedman who insisted that he holds this title. I will let the two NYT columnists slug it out between themselves and deal with the substance.

A coalition of press outlets have written DOD General Counsel Jeh Johnson, calling that the banning of four Gitmo reporters for publishing the name of Omar Khadr interrogator Joshua Claus an unconstitutional example of prior restraint.

Less than 72 hours after the BP oil spill began, Firedoglake had discerned, and blogged about, the likely cause of the catastrophe, that heat from the curing concrete had thawed methane trapped in the ocean floor beneath deep waters, and that methane had exploded.

Today, mainstream media thinks this is a front page story; so did we, a week ago.

Please, TradMed, stop it with the “ooh ooh Obama doesn’t play nice with Republicans” crapola. Bush treated Congressional and Senate Republicans far worse than Obama has so far — as you all know, or should.