Top Stories for the Week of August 25-29, 2008

Burning Man started on Monday and if you're not there, well... Laughing Squid has ideas on how to experience the festival remotely, with lots of photos, Twitter links, radio, the Burning Blog and a Burning Man Web cam. If you're actually in Black Rock City, Instructables has lots of guides on how to fit on by doing things like wearing a homemade color-changing lighted faux fur scarf. Flickr's created an Open Street map with geotagged photos, and O'Reilly Radar explains why this type of map works so well for cities that, you know, spring from the desert and exist for only one week a year. Oh, and you might see this guy (Howard Davis) in his phone car (via Underwire). Milk and Cookies has this clip of Stephen Colbert confusing Burning Man with the DNC, and the two are also coming together in this blog Burning Dems: Fear and Ecstasy from Denver to Black Rock City. Its creator explains, "Sometimes life doles out coincidences so remarkable that to not act would be crazy....When Burning Man and the Democratic National Convention fall on the same week and readily present themselves as dueling extravaganzas, we said 'Yes we can. Let the blogging begin.'"

Speaking of the Democrats, this was, of course, not only the week of the DNC but also the week that THE TEXT MESSAGE went out. Actually, the message hit at 3:30 on Saturday morning, so it was really the week of reaction to the text message. Some, like Gigaom, think it was "the smartest marketing campaign we've seen in decades." Others, like Matter/Anti-Matter, say that because the Biden news leaked before the message went out, it was "one of [the Obama campaign's] rare glitches."

Also experiencing rare glitches this week: Apple. There was lots of bad news for the company normally associated with good news. A huge iPhone security flaw put users' private information at risk; Apple banned a comic book, "Murderdrome," from its eReader, leading to cries of censorship; and the UK banned an Apple ad for being misleading (via Gizmodo, Apple 2.0, Mike Cane 2008, and Tech Observer). AND, in the process of updating Steve Jobs's obituary, Bloomberg accidentally published it. News companies routinely prepare obits in advance, and "The obituary contains nothing to indicate Bloomberg has new information on Jobs's health, at least in our quick skim," says Gawker. Maybe things will get better on September 9, which is rumored to be Apple "Special Event" Day--when iTunes 8, with a music recommendation feature (via AppleGazette), and the iPod Nano Rainbow and iPod Touch GPS (via 9to5 Mac) will be released. Then again, maybe they will get worse before that.

But had you forgotten there is also another kind of MP3 player called the "Zune"? It's the John McCain of MP3 players. Actually, McCain might get the chance to try one, if someone else turns it on for him, because Microsoft has created special editions for both conventions. The one for the RNC is boring red, white, and blue with a striped elephant, but the one for the DNC has a pretty, modern tree design and says "Innovating to Improve the Planet" (via Gizmodo). Kotaku says the Zunes are preloaded with content, including one game, and we seriously wish we knew what else.

Finally in celeb news, don't you want to know who's at the DNC? PopSugar has lots of photos, Us Magazine reports sightings, Bobbi Brown is doing Jill Biden's makeup (via The Beauty Crucible), HuffPo has a list of celebs saying lots of good things about Obama, and Politico lists good places to stalk. The most Biden-esque quote was from Anne Hathaway: "I was kind of afraid of [Barack] Obama the first time I saw him," she says. "I was afraid to trust him and I was afraid to have hope when I first kind of became aware of him. It was around the time that he gave his speech on race that I just said, 'I can't deny how I feel about you, Barack Obama.'"

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