Politicians want to control their image - and that means controlling the media when they can.   And when they can't, that means removing a highly respected journalist in one of the most liberal cities in the country, one that voted 80% for Barack Obama during the 2008 election - and even re-elected Nancy Peloso in 2010.

Part of the press' job is to strip away the cloaks and veneers politicians and their media flaks create.    But they have rules and one of them is that if you are a 'pen and pad' reporter, you shouldn't take video with your phone, it seems - especially if the video is a protester of Pres. Obama.

Apple now admits that iPhones store location information and plan a patch to scale back their data collection but also say it was no big deal.   Steve Jobs, however, reportedly claimed “We don’t track anyone. The info circulating around is false.”

Google traffic to Demand Media sites is down 40 percent and other content farms seem to be following, according to an analysis by Experian Hitwise.  They looked at downstream traffic from Google, what sites users visit after visiting Google.com and Demand dropped from 0.57 in January to 0.34 percent last week, a 40 percent decline from the start of 2011.

That means their Panda upgrade to penalize content farms and (hopefully) make way for quality sites like ours to show up in the best results, and not just the best-SEO results, is having some impact.

Apple is the kind of marketing machine that will be discussed in business classes for decades to come.  It is a mega-giant corporation that makes its young, progressive users feel individualistic and rebellious.   Its chairman, Steve Jobs, gives almost no money to charity, was caught illegally obtaining stock options (yet got no penalty) and controls what you can put on Apple tools but is fondly regarded as a man of the people while Microsoft chairman Bill Gates donates billions and is reviled as a monopolist even though people can install Flash or anything they want on their PCs.

If you followed renewable energy in the 1980s and 1990s, all you heard about was ethanol.  Despite a lack of evidence it would be beneficial, activists - and a government point guard in Vice-President Al Gore - insisted ethanol would save us from fossil fuels.

In 2005, ethanol was finally mandated and subsidized but activists can't take the blame - it was President Bush and a Republican Congress that passed it.   Only then did environmentalists and their staff scientists finally give it a critical look and ethanol turned out to be expensive, inefficient and worse for the environment.

Simcha Jacobovici says he has discovered two of the nails used to crucify Jesus - and a movie (naturally) is showing up at a propitious time, just a few days before Good Friday (naturally).

A publicity stunt?  Hard to say.    Jacobovici claims to be simply making a 'strong' case, which is what archeology does.  Previously, Jacobovici said he found the lost tomb of Jesus.
 
The site is an ancient Jerusalem grave discovered in 1990 which may have been the burial place of the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, who in the New Testament presided over the trial of Jesus and sent him to the Romans, which led to his death.

You can learn to play guitar better watching YouTube videos - it doesn't replace practice, it helps inspire and educate by bringing talented practitioners to the world in a way not possible 40 years ago.

Why not surgery?  Otolaryngologist Martin Young writing at KevinMD.com argues that because he has learned so much from watching more experienced surgeons work, peer-reviewed videos might be the wave of the future - obviously a South Korean teenager may be fun to watch play guitar but he is not going to be a source for best surgical practices.   

Forbes has done its annual Fictional 15 ranking of the richest fictional characters.    Why?  It doesn't matter why.   #1 is, as you'd expect, Scrooge McDuck, and #2 is Carlisle Cullen who, I am told, is one of the sparkly vampires in that sparkly vampire series that delved into important issues like how important it is to have a boyfriend.

A 75-year old Georgian woman who was scavenging for copper to sell sliced through an underground cable and cut off Internet services to all of neighboring Armenia.   Pulling up unused copper cables for scrap is a common means of making money in the former Soviet Union. 

Web users in the nation of 3.2 million people were left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours.  Maybe they even talked to each other.