TroySchneider.com

I'm in the process of reviewing Tarleton Gillespie's Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture, which (so far) is a very smart look at an issue that's of great personal and professional interest to me. So rather than just scribble in the margins, I thought I'd drop random questions, observations and interesting factoids here as I work my way through the book.

I would say this is the first of many posts in a series, but hopefully there won't be too many -- the review itself is due soon...

On Friday, VentureBeat's Dan Kaplan wrote about PoliticalTrends.info -- a site that mines web data "to track political buzz in the blogosphere." It got me thinking about a rather unfortunate reality -- at least from the perspective of political junkies and would-be web moguls: Like newly launched restaurants, nearly all big-time political web ventures are doomed to fail.

In the always-be-nice-to-your-inlaws department: Be sure to check out WashingtonPost.com's new blog on small business, authored by Sharon McLoone.

I've been playing with Twitter for the past couple weeks, to see for myself whether it is: a) the latest Web 2.0 fad; b) a truly cool new tool; or c) another harbinger of the collapse of modern civilization.

With apologies to Nick Lewis, whose post I read and re-read when wrapping my head around Drupal in early 2006.

Drupal is great. Drupal is modular. Drupal is scary complicated.

I'll admit it: Since launching this site a week or so ago, I've been anxiously watching -- OK, borderline OCD about checking and re-checking -- the Google Analytics and Technorati stats to see who, if anyone, is visiting and linking.

Kudos to WashingtonPost.com for experimenting in the Facebook world; the Compass application is cool little widget for figuring out where you fall in the political spectrum. I've yet to try it myself, but it supposedly "gets more interesting when your friends [on Facebook] install it because you will then be able to see where you all land on the political map." And it's certainly a good way to get the Post.com brand onto hundreds of thousands of Facebook pages.

As Michael Gerson and David Frum learned, staking claim to a buzzword or phrase is often more trouble than it's worth. But since it's increasingly being bandied about -- and since I've already taken the ribbing from colleagues on the subject -- I can't resist planting the "post-partisan" flag.

President Bush's move to commute Scooter Libby's sentence comes as no surprise -- using presidential clemency when the crimes were committed within your own administration is unseemly, but it's hardly unprecedented.

And frankly, I won't lose any sleep over Libby's lack of jail time. A 30-month sentence struck me as excessive, too, and I wouldn't call a $250K fine "getting off easy."

What is troubling, however, is that Bush's sense of mercy doesn't seem to extend much beyond, well, Scooter Libby.

It's safe to assume that Google, in purchasing GrandCentral, didn't set aside millions of dollars as a hedge against lawsuits like it did as part of the YouTube acquistion. So it's not surprising to see Grandcentral -- which offers "one phone number for all your phones, for life" -- making some quick changes to curtail possible copyright-infringement claims.