ask-mark.com

I just finished completing the move to Google Apps for ask-mark.com. E-mail will now be handled by Gmail. I have also added Docs, Chat and Calendar to the list of apps available for the site. I hope this improves the quality of my e-mail experience with the site.

I just read that third year teacher Kaleb Tierce has been put on paid leave in Texas because the parents of one of his ninth grade students filed a police report alleging that Tierce distributed harmful material. The alleged harmful material? Cormac McCarthy’s 1974 novel titled "Child of God." Here is the book’s description from Amazon.com:

In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard — a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape — haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.

It will only cost you $10,000 to buy my winning lottery ticket worth $3.7 million. Or at least that is what a scam artist (and I must say that this was pure artistry) told a suburban man in Schaumburg. The victim was told that by the scam artist that he could not redeem the ticket himself because he is an illegal alien. The victim went to his Hoffman Estates bank and gave $10,000 to the scam artist. Shortly thereafter, the scam artist fled with the lottery ticket and the cash.

Police Sgt. Jim Campbell warned residents to be cautious of such deals, saying, "If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is." I don’t know what I am more surprised at: the fact that anyone would fall for such a story, or that someone who had $10,000 put away in the bank would so easily hand it over to a total stranger.

Ars Technica has a post about a recent ruling from South Carolina that states that some bloggers are journalists. Blogs and their content had not previously been considered journalism in any legal sense, and this ruling sets a precedent that allows bloggers and the content they create to be protected as journalists and journalism, respectively. It is important to note that the ruling does not by any means declare all bloggers to be journalists. From the article:

The most important section of the ruling is the one dealing with Smith’s status as a journalist. The court admitted that it was impossible to determine in advance whether a blogger was a journalist and so used a "functional analysis" that "examines the content of the material, not the format, to determine whether it is journalism."

So, if you blog, I wouldn’t go posting whatever you want assuming that it will be protected as journalism in court. There are some things to consider when trying to determine if a blog post should be protected as journalism, such as whether a post is backed by researched, whether a post is balanced in its presentation of facts and whether a post is informative in nature.

As a blogger, I try to have a fair and balanced tone, even when it is quite obvious where my opinion lies with respect to a particular topic. In fact, sometimes I wonder if I cloud my own stance by playing devil’s advocate in posts and comments. At any rate, I doubt that there are many posts on this blog that would lead to legal troubles (*knocks on wood* — yes, Brad, I wrote it).