Speechwriting the Wikipedia Way
Congressional Quarterly’s Political Insider blog has taken note of a fascinating fact about Sen. John McCain’s speech on the Russiia-Georgia crisis today: Several passages are uncannily similar to Wikipedia’s entry on Georgia. Considering that McCain says he’s just now learning to use a PC, one presumes that any funny business was committed by a McCain speechwriter, not the senator himself. But it’s still a strange testament to the power of Wikipedia’s community-driven content: Contribute an entry, and maybe your words will end up being spouted by a candidate for the highest office in the land!

Read more at: Political Insider

Vongo: It’s Gone-go
Cable TV movie channel Starz is axing its Vongo PC-based movie service, which will go away as of September 30th. Introduced in January of 2006, Vongo got decent reviews but was ne of numerous new ways to wach movies that never quite caught on. (Hey, anyone remember Moviebeam?) You gotta wonder whether Vongo would have stood a better chance if it had sported a better, more descriptive name. Such as oh, let’s say…Starz?

Google Says It’s Sorry
After today’s Gmail outage, Google has apologized–profusely–on its official Gmail blog. As far as I can tell, few Gmail fans’ faith in Gmail has been shaken to the core, and the blogosphere isn’t seething with anger about the downtme. I still think that in instances like this, the eating of crow is ultimately less important than honest and straightforward discussion of what happened, how it was fixed, and what the company in question is doing to prevent it from happening again.

MobileMe: Still a Mess?
Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop is reporting that users of Apple’s trouble-ridden MobileMe service are still suffering e-mail outages, a couple of weeks after the promised regular status updates on Apple’s MobileMe blog ended. If they persist, MobileMe will enter its second month of erratic service; wonder if Apple will extend the month of free service it offered as an olive branch to everyone who’d shelled out $99 for MobileMe?

Read more at: Infinite Loop

Happy Birthday, IBM PC
Tuesday marks the 27th anniversary of the announcement of the IBM PC–the machine that introduced MS-DOS and led to the “Wintel” platform that dominates computing to this day. Big Blue’s first personal computer wasn’t sexy or innovative–some of us who were into early computers thought it was a great big snooze at the time–but its impact turned out to be immeasurable, and a little bit of it lives inside every Windows system. Next time you need to perform the “three-fingered salute” to reboot a Windows PC with <Ctrll><Alt><Del>, consider it a silent tribute to the original DOS box.