As long as you're staying awake at night about the inherent evils of supermarkets tracking your purchases, don't forget to campaign that all check out personnel have their eyes gouged out. You see, all of the sinsiter tracking that goes on with ADVISE also occures at the check out with human vision. Those people "see" trends as they roll across the scanners, such as people buying gourmet olives also buy gourmet cheeses, and being the evil, totalitarian, corrupt bastards/bitches that they are, they comment on this to the stores management, who then passes this on to their bosses, who then decide to stock the olives and cheese together.

As you can see, this is something to be terrified about.

Others might say warrentless eavesdropping, a war based on lies, global warming or tanking economy might be more worthy of our attention, but thankfully you, and you alone, see this as the world threat it is.

Good work! I'm glad I gave you money.

A new low was reached for Video Dog today. After hyping the clip for the Ellen DeGeneres Show you give us... the opening sequence. No samples of the humor or talents you praise, no indication of what the show is like, just the opening and cheering audience.

Please, kill Video Dog. I like Salon and would like to continue supporting it, but unless you change video dog completely or remove it entirely, I will be forced to leave you and look for something better. The only thing that prevents me from quitting right now is the clip from The Colbert Report.

Rocketboom does a hell of a lot better job that Video Dog, and they don't even pretend to be a news website.

I mean it. Every time I look at Video Dog I get disgusted at how you've trashed a new way of web news reporting. I'm not going to take it any more.

Since my last post, I've visited six other independent news sites and each one had a video clip of Bush being briefed before Katrina hit, especially the clips where the experts tell him the levees will fail and flooding will be disasterous. And what do we get here at Salon's Video Dog? The opening segment of the Ellen show.

How many people here were hoping for a "War Room" type video blog? How many here were hoping for something bettert than this crap? How many here were hoping for something better than a collection of dog photos?

How many people are going to join me in leaving Salon unless they kill Video Dog or get new people running it by the end of the week? There's hundreds of important videos out there, and these idiots don't even show one.

This is what I was hoping for when Video Dog was first announced! While I enjoy pleasant diversions, humor and cute animals (all animals, not just dogs) as much as everybody else, I was losing faith that Salon, a leader in new journalism, was ignoring the promise video clips have in new journalism. This is a great clip and I'm sending links to dozens of people, much like I send links of noteworthy articles.

Keep this up!

If you want to avoid sounding like one of those trite, elitist, totally-missing-the-point and generally clueless type of bloggers, you should really try playing the game for a couple of weeks. Just one ten minute session won't do, and a couple hours spread over a few days will most likely lead to terminal foot-in-mouth. To understand why people play MMOs, and why such games are more interesting then, say, a nasty spouse or a soul-crushing job, you really should try to experience the sensation rather than taking on the attitude of looking down on gamers from your haughty throne of non-gaming superiority.

I mean, look at your main source of feedback, an ex-WoW player. Aren't current players "cool" enough to be consulted? Are they only reliable sources after they stop playing and rejoin the mainstream?

Do yourself a favor before you even think about writing another blog about MMOs: download the World of Warcraft free 10-day trial and play it over several days so you can get a good feel for why the game is so popular. You wouldn't seek sex advice from a virgin, so why would people want to read about computer games from someone who believes they're above that kind of thing?

And look where that got us.