Blogisattva Award for Wisdom Quarterly?

A Blog is a Buddhist-log. A bodhisattva is a self-sacrificing "being bent on enlightenment." (A blog, lowercase, is simply a frequently updated "Web log" about anything -- conspiracies theories, for example). Take the two and you get the Blogisattva Awards in recognition of selfless service to the Blogosphere and, uh, humanity. *Fingers crossed* As The WoQ (Wisdom Quarterly) approaches a million hits, we ask: Will we ever win? Of course, we're still waiting to be nominated. Which brings to mind a story:

How To Win

A devout Buddhist went and placed offerings at the feet of Kwan Yin begging to win the lottery. Not winning, she returned with more offerings and prayers. Still not winning, she returned with choicer offerings and more ardent prayers. Kwan Yin was terribly moved by the display of devotion until finally she entered the statue and whispered to the woman, "Buy a ticket."

• Nominate your favorite Buddhist blog today

"Forgiveness" in Buddhism? (video)

(The Young Turks)

Richard Eskow: "You know what I love about this is of course it fits in with what we all know about the Dalai Lama, which is he's the most unforgiving S.O.B. you could ever meet, because forgiveness has no place in his ideology. You cross that guy, you're dead! That's number one."

Michael Shure: "There's no forgiveness in Buddhism."

Richard Eskow: "No forgiveness. I'm a contributing editor to a Buddhist magazine. So I've written a lot about Buddhism...in the Buddhist blogosphere."

NOTE: This is an ironic and humorous exchange to make the point that Brit Hume (Fox News) is absurd to take his stand against Buddhism on the basis of forgiveness -- as if there were no forbearance in the tradition when, in fact, it's fundamental and evident in the behavior of its prominent figures.

AP to crack down on use of stories

Text: Richard Perez-Pena (New York Times, July 23, 2009)

Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press (AP) said Thursday that it would add secret software to each article. The aim is to show what limits apply to the rights to use it; the software notifies the AP how the article is used.

Tom Curley, the AP’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article -- a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators, and blogs.

Asked if that stance went further than the AP had gone before, he said, “That’s right.” The company envisions a campaign that goes far beyond the AP, a nonprofit corporation. It wants the 1,400 American newspapers that own the company to join the effort and use its software.

“If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that,” Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

Search engines and news aggregators contend that their brief article citations fall under the legal principle of "fair use." Executives at some news organizations have said they are reluctant to test the Internet boundaries of fair use, for fear that the courts would rule against them. More>>

• UNnassociatedpress.net

China: Tiananmen Square clampdown

Propaganda poster of Mao Zedong, architect of a dictatorship (themarxistleninist).

BEIJING, China (AP) – Foreign journalists were barred from Beijing's Tiananmen Square on Wednesday as an Internet clampdown that blocked Twitter expanded to include more blogs on the eve of the 20th anniversary of a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests.

• Video: China clamps down on eve of anniversary
• Slideshow: 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square protests

In a further sign of the government's unwavering hard-line stance toward the protests, the second most-wanted student leader from 1989 said he had been denied entry to the southern Chinese territory of Macau.

Police monitoring visitors on 5/29/09 at Tiananmen Gate in front of portrait of former leader Mao Zedong. On 6/2/09, Chinese authorities rounded up dissidents and shut down Internet sharing sites in an apparent clampdown ahead of the 20th anniversary of the bloody suppression of 1989's pro-democracy protests (AP/Andy Wong).

In exile since fleeing China after the crackdown, Wu'er Kaixi traveled to Macau on Wednesday to turn himself in to authorities in a bid to return home. Immigration officers at Macau's airport pulled him aside and demanded he fly back to Taiwan.

Authorities have also shut photo-sharing site Flickr and confined dissidents to their homes or forced them to leave Beijing, as they ramped up efforts to prevent online discussions about or commemorations of those who died in the military assault on demonstrators on the night of June 3-4, 1989.

The sweeping measures have been imposed even though there were few signs of efforts to mark the protests within mainland China, where the government squelches all discussion of them. More>>