Internet thinker Clay Shirky ruminates on how the Internet conveys authority.

The Star reviewed six cut-above burger joints in Toronto. Top of the list: Oh Boy, which opened recently on Queen W. just slightly east of Portland St. (they started working on the space more than a year ago).

But old favourites like Utopia on College St. W. aren't included in the mix. I guess Dangerous Dan's really doesn't qualify as gourmet.

However, the Roxton (on Harbord, just east of Ossington) is reputed to make a great burger, but it's left off, as is Beer Bistro at King E. and Victoria.

Some like Allen's on the Danforth (south side, block or two east of Broadview, great patio!), but I don't count myself as impressed with theirs.

A commenter on the story reminded me that Epicure on Queen W. near Portland also serves up a good burger. Some other pointers from commenters, although not necessarily to gourmet burgers:

• Watermark Lounge in the Radisson Admiral Hotel --- 249 Queens Quay West.
• Sandwich Box on Richmond/Bay
• Mitzi's Sister for lamb burgers
• The Burger Shack, Oriole Parkway/Eglinton
• The Artful Dodger, Isabella/Yonge
• Hair of the Dog, Church/Carlton

The trusty old Downfall clip has been pressed into service again, this time to have Hitler ranting about the Toronto Maple Leafs.

However, the value of the clip is less in its hilarity, which is modest, than how it lays out the club's long history of drafting ineptitude: (Seen first at Toronto Mike)

I should say the Leafs did defeat the Washington Capitals in a shootout on Saturday night. As a result, they increased their total number of wins by 33 per cent in just one game!

SNL did a very funny parody of the movie trailer for 2012, incorporating everyone's plain-talkin', moose-huntin' ex-governor, Sarah Palin: (seen via Twitter)

And if you want an entertaining analysis of the Palin Phenomenon, check out Matt Taibi's take at True/Slant: Sarah Palin, WWE star.

There were two takes in Saturday's Globe and Mail:

• Rex Murphy - Obama inspires, Palin connects
• Tabatha Southey - Why women can't afford to ignore Palin's ego trip

The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson on the Conservative government's reflex to attack its critics when under criticism.

After trumpeting the virtues of a free press at a rubber chicken dinner in Markham on Saturday night, Prime Minister Stephen Harper did not deign to take any questions from the wretches of the fourth estate.

From the NYT's Media Decoder blog:

The New York Times News Service will lay off at least 25 editorial employees next year, and will move the editing of the service to a Florida newspaper owned by The New York Times Company, The Times and the Newspaper Guild said on Thursday. ...

The plan calls for The Gainesville Sun, whose newsroom is not unionized and has lower salaries, to take over the editing of the news service. Ms. McNulty said new jobs would be created at The Sun to handle the extra work. Five of the top news service employees will retain their jobs in New York.

Mark Luckie of the blog 10000 Words pointed to this HowStuffWorks primer. (seen first on Twitter)

An excerpt:

Augmented reality adds graphics, sounds, haptic feedback and smell to the natural world as it exists. ...   more »

Ruth Teichrob -- formerly of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which shut down in March -- surveyed her former newsroom colleagues to see how they are doing. Seventy-one of 140 responded.

The results are sobering.

Lindsey Hoshaw, a young journo, travels out to a Pacific Ocean garbage patch. Blogs about it over a period of weeks.

Her travel is funded by Spot.us, which crowdsources funding for worthy journalistic ventures.

Spot.us does a deal with the New York Times to have a news story published. Approximate length - 900 words.

Critic Megan Garber, writing at CJR.org, pronounces the NYT story to be not so good:

The kettle started boiling when Paul Carr, writing at TechCrunch on Nov. 7, wrote a provocative post entitled After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth.

A sample:

For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands people with family at the base would have been freaking out already, and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved.

Citizen journalism and social media defenders rode to the rescue.

This could well be the future of media. A correspondent emailed me the link to this Wired story: "The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model."

Last Thursday, CBC TV's The National hosted a panel discussion on the media's coverage of the swine flu issue. It featured Dr. Allison McGeer, an infectious disease consultant at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, and Dr. Richard Schabas, a former chief medical officer of health for Ontario.

Here are some tweets I made, in chronological order:

While travelling in the Ukraine in the fall of 1989, I met up with a fellow named Tom Koppel, a journalist working for a communist newspaper in Kyiv on an exchange program.

With the 20th anniversary coming of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, I thought I'd excerpt an article I wrote for Bulletin, then the magazine of the Canadian Association of Journalists. It was published in the Fall 1990 issue and outlines how the paper that hosted Koppel covered the Wall story:

John Miller, before he became a Ryerson j-prof, toiled at 1 Yonge St, home of the (once mighty?) Toronto Star. He's mortified by the paper's apparent plan to outsource its editing and page production work.

From the Torontoist:

Earlier this week the Toronto Star announced, among other changes, that it was planning to outsource some one hundred in-house, union editing jobs. In the press release issued by the union in the wake of the announcement, union chief Maureen Dawson explained that "Journalism is a collaborative effort, the product of a team of reporters, photographers and editors working in concert to produce the kind of activist agenda that has served Star readers and our community so well for so long...To remove a critical element of that work is to shortchange everyone who depends on it."

Now, one (apparent) editor at the Star has decided to show us all the benefits of collaboration. An extensively marked-up copy of Publisher John Cruickshank's internal memo announcing the changes was sent to Torontoist by a self-described "intermediary who was asked to send this for a friend who works at the Star" this morning; it's, allegedly, "the work of a Star editor."

Here's the whole thing:

Jayson Blair, whose fabrications triggered the worst ethics crisis in the history of the New York Times and cost two very senior editors their jobs, will be speaking later today at a journalism ethics conference.

James Poniewozik makes an argument out of a point that I've long believed; centrism can be a form of bias. It's about coverage of American politics, but ask yourself whether the same effect plays out in this country.

... Reads Lady Gaga's Poker Face out loud:

And if that's not enough, here's a dose of the real thing: the Lady herself performing Love Game, which includes the following unforgettable verse:

Lets have some fun
this beat is sick
I wanna take a ride
On your disco stick

Globe and Mail corro Doug Saunders, travelling through Romania, found that cab drivers loved that tune (Saunders is doing 20th-anniversary coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall).

When I said in a tweet I could only take 10 seconds of that song, he replied: "10 seconds is all it takes."