Network

To Del. Curtis S. Anderson's extreme consternation, despite repeated attempts, he couldn't log on to Facebook from his Annapolis office Thursday night. He walked out into the hallway in frustration and ran into an equally stymied woman. When the Baltimore Democrat got to work yesterday morning, he realized it was no fluke: The Maryland General Assembly had blocked all elected officials and staff from Facebook and MySpace - apparently the first legislature in the country to ban the popular online social networks.

LOS ANGELES -- Isaiah Washington, who was written out as a major character on ABC's Grey's Anatomy after publicly using a homophobic slur, has been written into NBC's promising new fall show Bionic Woman, network executives said yesterday at the annual summer television press tour. The controversial actor, who has been attacking his former network as racist for firing him, will appear in five of the new show's first six episodes. In spite of Washington's obvious baggage, Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios, said he was elated to land the actor, who became the butt of national jokes this year when he entered a Malibu, Calif.

Longtime Democratic strategist Elaine Kamarck started her government career as a Woodlawn middle-schooler, listening to her father read his Medicare training manuals to her. "If I could figure them out, he knew he was writing clearly enough," she said of her father, a career civil servant at the Social Security Administration. Almost 30 years later, Kamarck arrived at the White House to help Vice President Al Gore "reinvent government," injecting corporate management practices to the tune of 350,000 fewer federal jobs.

When the cast and crew of Law & Order: Criminal Intent found out last spring that their show was being moved from NBC over to its sister cable network USA, the initial reaction was relief that the drama hadn't been canceled - followed quickly by wariness about the change. But these days, the team behind the third installment in the Law & Order franchise talks about its new home with an optimism long missing from the set of the crime procedural, now entering its seventh season. "`Reinvigorated' is a good word," said Warren Leight, the executive producer.

Documentarian returns in a 'reality'-wary age Once again, Terry Wrong has spent three months living, breathing and chronicling the inner life of Johns Hopkins Hospital for an ABC broadcast documentary. If there is one thing he wants viewers to get from his film, it's "a shock of recognition that this is real, this is true, this is life and death." Facing a viewership jaded by so-called "reality TV," the award-winning broadcast journalist says, "People aren't being paid to come on and die before the cameras in this production -- these are not wannabe actors.

Like many people these days, I have a Facebook account, which I mostly use to stay connected with high school chums and other friends. In the last six months, though, I've also established a professional online presence through LinkedIn.com, a popular career-oriented network. (The site has 13 million members, who can establish a personal account free. LinkedIn charges fees for extended services.) While it's nice to reconnect with old co-workers and see what they're up to career-wise, the idea behind LinkedIn is to help professionals advance their careers.

Taking a spin around the sports media block while thinking about how much I'll miss all those Frank TV promos: With the World Series beginning next week, expect to hear the wails of protest about how Fox's Tim McCarver overanalyzes a game, stating and restating the obvious. Not to deny that point, but John Madden has accentuated the obvious in each of his network NFL gigs, yet he hasn't been subject to the same widespread criticism. Maybe McCarver would fare better if he had a best-selling video game named after him. A quick difference noted between the look of TBS' postseason baseball coverage and that of Fox: TBS doesn't go quite so heavily into the extreme close-ups of faces on the field, in the dugout and in the stands, meant to convey the high tension and intensity of certain moments.

With the playoffs starting tomorrow, an NFL fan might have one important question that has little to do with Marty Schottenheimer's postseason history, Rex Grossman's shaky passing or whether Bill Belichick has learned how to simulate fellowship with Eric Mangini. How do you navigate the Internet to enhance your football fix all the way through the Super Bowl? Pro football knowledge abounds on the Web. But identifying the best information while searching through league-wide sites, team pages, media-affiliated operations and independent bloggers can be overwhelming.

Obtaining exclusive material related to the nation's biggest news story is a network executive's dream. But when NBC received a package yesterday of video, photos and texts made by gunman Cho Seung-Hui, it also faced serious ethical concerns. The network, which received the delivery yesterday morning, reported that it had handed the material over to the authorities. But NBC also first copied the packet, which Cho had mailed between the time he killed two people in a dormitory and then gunned down 30 more in classrooms at Virginia Tech.

Sept. 7 1927 U.S. TV pioneer Philo T. Farnsworth, 21, transmitted a line image by electronic means with his "image dissector" device. 1979 Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) made its cable TV debut.

In its decades-long struggle against violence, Baltimore has adopted a number of different crime-fighting strategies, with mixed results. Now the city has joined a network of cities whose leaders are teaming up to discuss what works and what doesn't. Officials from 30 cities have joined the National Network for Safe Communities, a dialogue largely centered around groundbreaking policies developed by criminologist David Kennedy that have been credited with significantly reducing violence and drug dealing.

A small Maryland-based cable channel and a large Pennsylvania family have improbably teamed up to supplant Hollywood starlets such as Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton as the new epicenter of our celebrity-obsessed pop culture. TLC, which began in 1980 with the educational mission implied by its title as The Learning Channel, has a megahit on its hands with the fifth season of Jon & Kate Plus 8, a no-holds-barred reality TV series about a suddenly unhappily married husband and wife, Jon and Kate Gosselin, and their eight children (sextuplets and twins)

If you happen to enjoy both home-computer networking and fine cigars, Donavon West has the perfect all-in-one solution: the Home Servidor. The Baltimore-based independent software developer has designed what he calls the Home Servidor - a desktop humidor made of cedar that also doubles as a computer server for storing and sharing photos, videos and other files across your home computer network. The ideal customer, he thinks, will be people with home offices and small businesses who like a good cigar and are avid consumers and producers of digital media.

Maryland is poised to jump ahead of the rest of the nation in health information technology on Tuesday when Gov. Martin O'Malley signs a bill intended to coax doctors into using electronic medical records. The computerized files are seen as the foundation of a national health information network that proponents say will improve care, advance medical knowledge and save the country tens of billions of dollars annually. But with the startup costs to individual doctors in the tens of thousands of dollars, many smaller practices have been slow to move from clipboard to computer screen.

For a week now, Michael Phelps has been one of the most polarizing figures in sports. And though this isn't the first time Phelps' judgment has been questioned, fallout from the incident has introduced something new to his career: indecision. Maybe, Phelps told The Baltimore Sun last week, in his first interview after the story broke, he wouldn't swim in the 2012 Olympics after all. Perhaps it was a rare moment of unscripted honesty from a celebrity whose life has been scripted for so long.

To Del. Curtis S. Anderson's extreme consternation, despite repeated attempts, he couldn't log on to Facebook from his Annapolis office Thursday night. He walked out into the hallway in frustration and ran into an equally stymied woman. When the Baltimore Democrat got to work yesterday morning, he realized it was no fluke: The Maryland General Assembly had blocked all elected officials and staff from Facebook and MySpace - apparently the first legislature in the country to ban the popular online social networks.

Presenting weekly sports media notes while wondering whether I, too, can apply for a slots license with - as they say on commercials - no money down: * Now batting for Costas, Buck. With Bob Costas' departure to a cable-exclusive deal with the MLB Network announced this week, HBO yesterday presented his replacement, Fox's Joe Buck. Buck's quarterly show will carry the "town hall" setting used on Costas Now, but other than that, HBO and Buck said, much of the format is up in the air. "I imagine there'll be some swings and misses, and there'll be some things people will be talking about," Buck said in a conference call yesterday.

The Johns Hopkins University students formed a frenzied hive around classmate Linmiao Xu and his Facebook page, but they weren't checking out the latest gossip on the Homewood campus. They were marveling last week at "Mosayick," a new Facebook application that potentially could create mosaic pictures made up of thousands of an individual's online photographs. Xu, of Albany, N.Y., developed it with another student, Billy Prin, in a January term course that just concluded at Hopkins. Students aimed to develop new, and perhaps profitable, tools for the popular social-networking site that Mark Zuckerberg launched as an undergrad at Harvard University five years ago. Facebook now has 150 million users, and its growth beyond the college set is helping it become one of the top dozen busiest Web sites in the U.S. The Hopkins' two-credit course was formally titled "Developing Photo and Video Applications for Online Social Network," but informally it was "Facebook 101."

I can't help but think the one piece of the puzzle the UFC is missing right now is a major TV deal. UFC president Dana White repeatedly says that it's not a priority for the UFC and that when he can get the right deal, then the UFC will be on network TV. ( For more, go to baltimoresun.com/mmablog)

New network outpulls its old rival CW For the past three weeks, the upstart My Network TV has accomplished something that would have been considered unthinkable just two years ago. The network, quickly cobbled together by a group of Fox-owned local stations after the 2006 merger of the WB and UPN into the new CW left abandoned stations with nothing to put on the air, has averaged more prime-time viewers than the CW. My Network TV is the only one of...