Things I took away from the Balloon Boy debacle: The right story scales fast and now that people are channels it can scale really fast. Social networks scale a story best if it's a story that catches the imagination. It doesn't even have to be true. In fact, people like hearing, sharing and following something that catches the imagination way, way, more than they like fact-checking or following a serious news story. Community is stickier than communication. 360-degree media giveth and taketh away. Or, if you want to live a lie on camera, get your frakking story straight. Maybe the Heenes should have gotten Colin Powell to hide in the attic instead. We've got no one to blame but ourselves. The Heenes like a show more than the facts. So do we. A poorly-raised six-year-old doesn't care much about lying. How old is the press? How old are we? Does…

EurasiaNet reports a new $10M plan by the Pentagon to build foreign-language web sites in support of U.S. foreign policy. Let's count the ways that the plan, as described, is dopey: Ten million dollars?? Ten million dollars?? Do you know what Sunlight or Global Voices could do with ten million dollars? Madon', if this was somebody else's wedding... DoD invented the damn Internet. As a peer-to-peer information-sharing platform. They of all people should have the savvy to know that brochureware is about as effective in 2009 as those ranks of musketeers who shoot and reload like they did in the War of Independence. It's inauthentic. The websites, in languages including Russian, Farsi, Georgian, Azeri, will feature "news and analysis that helps garner support for US policies." Right, like your average Farsi-speaker is going to go to the U.S. Department of Defense for fair and balanced analysis of anything they care…

I am neither American royalty nor likely to ever be as accomplished as Ted Kennedy, but I felt unexpectedly connected to him yesterday when TV pundits were speculating about the crushing pressure he must have felt in 1962, when he became a senator (apparently despite his president-brother's reservations about three Kennedys with that much power at once), and then again in 1968, after the assassination of RFK, when all eyes turned expectantly to him as the presumptive, redemptive future candidate for president. Pressure, I understand. Not at the national level of course. But when you're over-subscribed, or working late at night, or a few weeks behind, it sure can feel national. So my respect for him has been transformed in the last 24 hours, when I try to imagine enduring that level of pressure, suffering in myriad ways, but never leaving your post and somehow finding, as Gail Collins put…