This last few days have been a trial by fire for news organizations as well as for residents of Southern California, where hundreds of homes have burned while close to a million people have been evacuated — the largest displacement of people in the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina.

whois started as a way for geeks to know who to speak to to manage domain name issues. This was way back when there weren't many domains around. More recently it has turned into an enforcement resource for crime hunters. Now it's seen more as a violation of privacy, because personal names and addresses are revealed in it. phone numbers.

At the end of the day what people have been trhying to move to is an operation sl point of contact. A way to move bac,k to what it was, which was aqa way to manage an internet resource.

But the interllectual property folks see this as their enforcement database. So ICANN has working group. And now it's open to public comment.

Astroturfing.

human beings who want to get in touch with icann an dtell them they want privacy, they have a way to do that.

motion 2 and 1 and 3 is inside baseball.

Last October and again this past August, I published a ten-point list of things Newspapers needed

What they need are developments that can only come from unmanaged hackers working out in unmanaged nature, doing what only hackers can do — invent useful stuff that's pure NEA (Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, and Anybody can improve it), and improve it continuously out in the real world.

Cases in point.

Not long after the San Diego County fires got out of control, the San Diego Union-Tribune, which goes by SignOnSanDiego.com on the Web,

Here's the LA Times Google Map of fire locations, with data balloons that pop up when you mouse over them. And here's the outline to the right of the map:

Resources Breaking News Blog

What we're seeing here is how newspapers are learning to take advantage of the Live Web as well as the (relatively) static one.

The Live Web is the one where you post and syndicate and update and follow and twit and message and converse.

The Static One is where you architect and design and build and "manage" stuff called "content".

They overlap and you need both, especially if you're a newspaper. What the papers are discovering, now literally under fire, is that the Live Web is not one you can "manage" with an expensive CMS you buy from a third party. Its developers are out there in the wild. New developments are coming along all the time. Ideas such as Dave Winer's twittergrams (among other payloads) And Chris Messina's hashtags can only arise out in the wild open natural world that comprises the real Web. There's no way they can come from the kind of company that produces a traditional newspaper CMS (Content Management System).