We must be entering the slow-mo month of August, and so the silly season begins:Double-dog dare: Mooselini’s attorney from the prestige law firm of Dewy, Screwem and Howe, threatens the blogger that released the Mooseline-Crow Magnin splitsville story.“I know nothing” The WaPo tells us that a new book, The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election, that Grandpa Walnuts campaign was so in the dark that they did not have any information on Mooselini before it was announced.

  ExpenseBay Wins Showoff Twiistup 6 has come to an end.  It proved to be a great transitional year.  Out is the “cocktail only” Twiistup and in is the new format of a conference that should take its rightful place on the national technology calendar.  I believe that Twiistup is now a platform from which to grow and highlight what is uniquely LA.  We are a city unique in merging the world’s best content with digital media and technology expertise.  Much of this was highlighted at Twiistup.

I remember when I was back in school and professors would always drill into our heads the pitfalls of plagiarism. When I read this piece by Ian Shapira from the Washington Post , it reminded me of this. Blogging is an outstanding function when it is done correctly. But too often, bloggers and news blogs cut and paste a large amount of original reporting from newspapers –original reporting that requires a tremendous amount of time and resources–without the appropriate attribution.

Teaching Online Journalism How to teach online journalism: 6 questions We’ve reached the point where having journalism students take one isolated class about “online journalism” is not sufficient. Ideally, online reporting and editing skills (and associated ethics) would be integrated into every reporting and editing class. If that’s not happening, then your program will need to offer specialized courses.

So a  Washington Post writer, Ian Shapira, wrote  a story about a generational consultant who’s paid to explain the Millenials to Boomers and Gen-Xers.  It’s interesting because someone actually gets paid to do this.  A writer at Gawker, Hamilton Nolan (who’s one of the better Gawker writers),  picked up the story , which means reprinting most of it, making a few sardonic observations about the reporter’s work and tossing him an attribution at the end. Which has basically become de facto policy for Gawker and the web in general.