August 31, 2002
Just noticed that this was released the other day: The standalone TrackBack implementation is now released. This tool allows anyone with a server capable of running CGI scripts to send and receive TrackBack pings, and display those pings on their public site. Instructions for integration with other content management systems are...
August 30, 2002
x-pollen hub coming together. I'm working through the logjam at my web server, having just set up the DNS for some new domains: antiweb.net, x-pollen.com, radiofreeblogistan.com, and a few others. Still need to restart the server to get the new virtual hosts working, set up cgi access where needed. A few...
Baseball deal reached, games on [USA Today]...
Don't feel bad, Salon Blog writers, when you look at the rankings and see Scott's traffic dwarfing that of the rest of us. I just took a look at his referrer log for the first time and a quick count showed over 1000 of the hits coming directly from salon.com and...
Darwin Magazine offers some conventional wisdom on this moment in hype/backlash about blogging. (That doesn't look like a permalink.) Mentions Andrew's Dreaming of China blog....
Fight, fight! The writer artist behind Textism (forgot to check his name and pretend to know him personally), in a single serving called Please Like Me reports on a Lileks bleat with a slow rolling boil: James Lileks, a harmless, affable bumpkin ... takes yet another drag-queen-on-poppers free-association bitch-lurch.... Sniggering like...
Let the religious war end. With the wit and panache we've become accustomed to, Zeldman discusses real-world pragmatic choice for commercial web design or the development of any site that wishes to be presentable and accessible to as wide an audience as possible. As ugly as hacking and debugging nested tables...
I'm starting to wonder if there's anything I shouldn't be logging. So much of my personal knowledge management problems (read: disorganization) involve forgetting, losing track of, and worrying about issues as they come up an afterward until they are resolved. Sure, some things are private or proprietary. Not every log (blog,...
I seem to be breaking a cardinal rule of starting a lot of sentences and paragraph with the word I and using the I-word frequently throughout my posts. I lost count of the number of times I used the word I in the previous entry. I seem to remember reading somewhere...
Well, coincidentally, I was just dipping into my RSS aggregator news feed when I got a note from Charly Z encouraging me to check out a discussion about RSS syndication going on among some other Salon Blogs. Scott Rosenberg's Links and Comment picks up on a complaint from the author of...
Onward toward the semantic web! Here's an article proposing methods to make the Web more structured and more personalized. Any article that includes the concept of meta-meta-services is all right by me, even when the author's first name isn't Christian. Here's the tip of the iceberg: Users (other than the author)...
Much of my browsing these days start in my referrer logs. If someone has linked to Radio Free Blogistan then there's a chance they're writing about stuff I'd be interested in. Today this practice took me to Seb's Open Research, an immediate keeper, with links to good pieces about why certain...
Does anyone remember Walter Miller's hilarious website? That was kind of a blog, wasn't it? It was updated regularly with accounts of a supposedly true life. It may have been fiction (at least I hope it was: Walter's grandfather sounded pretty evil) and it predated the blog boom and all, but...
One of the most popular blogs here at Salon has been the Pornographer's Picks weblog that basically links to porn sites. More interesting by far is the reverse cowgirl's blog, which is also about pornography but offers more than just pointers to stroke material and is written from a female perspective:...
August 29, 2002
Jamie Lee Curtis Has Nothing to Hide. The actress outs her body in More:Because in 2002, more than three decades into the women's movement, it is still a radical act for a woman to accept her body as it is. "We knew the article was important," said Susan Crandall, editor-in-chief of...
Brig at Eatonweb posted to this comment thread about where and how to find philosophy blogs and she admitted to being a bit miffed both by my original post and by the fact that no one in the comment thread had suggested Eatonweb. I did not mean to give offense. I...
I could always just sit back and read boingboing, let Cory do all the work. I don't know Cory, by the way, I just like calling him by his first name so it seems like I know him and so must be cool like him. I haven't read his new story...
Stock Market Press Flacks Still Riding High. In Talking Bull, The Guardian wonders why the journalists who pumped up stocks during the bull market are still heeded in this bearish downturn:Instead of being required to write, "I will not confuse libertarian hallucinations with practical investment advice" 36,000 times, he was indulged...
William Quick announced Daily Pundit Premium and introduces the business model of Blogging Network. (Subscribers pay $2.99 for unlimited access to network blogs. 50% of this goes to upkeep. The other half is prorated among the blogs the subscriber actually reads.) The interesting part is the extensive comments section. Collectively, people...
Jonathan Peterson weighs in at way.nu on the debate about intellectual property, copyright, and source code pinging around the blogosphere these days: I think Doc's tendency to not pour any more legal epoxy on top of the sand foundation of our software intellectual property is a good idea. Technical solutions and...
Reading Spartaneity drew my attention back to Stanford'sWeb Credibility Project where you can read detailed explanations of and research behind these guidelines: Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site. Show that there's a real organization behind your site. Showing that your web site is for...
Following a link from Small Pieces I landed at a BurningBird post about a blog threading project: Project is called Thread the Needle, or "Needley" for short. Its purpose is to track cross-blogging threads. How it works: You register your weblog, once, with an online application I'll provide (i.e. provide your...
I was surprised to read that Wired chastised Michael Rogers for only updating his Practical Futurist blog once a day. Isn't once a day plenty? I don't promise to even manage that. Sure, I've been posting four to seven times a day in this blog, but face it: I'm in the...
Waxy.org demonstrates how to use Google's Usenet archive to track memes, in this case, the "All Your Base'"meme. This is precisely what I intended to do with memewatch.com. I think the phrase I first wanted to plot this way was "six degrees of Kevin Bacon." Here's the tricky thing: not all...
August 28, 2002
It's a dirty job but somebody has to do it. A memetics experiment — pass it along. Life in the Aggregator. An Experiment: Life in the Aggregator. How far can it travel? Please play by passing it along, including all source links... [jenett.radio] I'm willing to play [McGee's Musings] There we...
Don Park responds to Ray Ozzie's obituary for publishing, saying "Publishing is not dead." I would tend to agree. Publishing is definitely sick, buffeted by unfamiliar pressures, in disarray, due for some changes, racing to keep up with technology changes, slow to adopt technology. Publishing is many things. (I feel mildly...
Dylan Tweney has summarized some of the recent thinking on weblogs (overlapping with many of the recent links posted here) in an article in which he also discusses realizing the personal knowledge-management benefits of keeping a weblog: In other words, I realized that a weblog could be a useful tool for...
Andrew Bayer was hassling me about not having set up radiofreeblogistan.com yet, but hey, my sysadmin is a friend, we barter services, he's been busy. So I spent a little time reading up on httpd.conf and I set up the VirtualHost entries for that domain and a few other pending domains....
Was visiting some friends visiting in San Francisco last night. Catching up on each other's doings, we naturally got into a discussion of blogs (almost derailed by jokes about how funny the words sound). One, an old philosophy buddy from my undergraduate years (he's now a professor at Ohio State) said...
Robb makes the case that weblogs will (and do) scale more effectively than discussion groups: Too much input is exactly the reason that discussion groups can't scale. A serial thread on a topic with a million contributors swamps a discussion. As a reader, I can't find the good posts in massive...
August 27, 2002
Adam Barr takes to task the insider-y side of the blogosphere's hypocracy in this article posted to kuro5hin: Back then you had to be able to write pure HTML to put up a site like that. With modern blogging has come authoring tools that free you from that restriction. So is...
Rereading Bricklin's Aug 12 article on small business blogging, I realized that his first example is a pretty close fit for the intangibles I get from doing this blog: One type of small business is the "consultant". This covers a wide range of areas, from engineers, to marketers, to event planners,...
Via Doc, who never metapun he didn't like (groan): No time to write about it, but here are three links to get the chewing started: http://www.truthlaidbear.com/001274.html#001274 http://www.truthlaidbear.com/blogmd/ http://blogs.salon.com/0000002/2002/8/27/#200208272 http://www.blogs4god.com/...
Swimming upstream via my referrer log I landed at which led me to his recent article on corporate blogging for Business 2.0: That doesn't mean business blogs should be bland and corporate in tone. In fact, especially for customer-oriented weblogs, it's better if they aren't. Trellix co-founder Dan Bricklin suggests that...
Clay Shirky addresses the issues of scale in two-way media: Prior to the internet, the outbound quality of mass media could be ascribed to technical limits — TV had a one-way relationship to its audience because TV was a one-way medium. The growth of two-way media, however, shows that the audience...
In the three-button setup for Radio, the three buttons are Post, Publish, and Post & Publish. I get what Post does. It saves the draft without putting it on the Web. I get what Post & Publish does. It both puts the new entry on your local server and schedules it...
Believe it or not, I'm still sorting out what I've learned about Traction Software, sifting and trying to digest what I've learned. Traction was heavily influenced by Doug Engelbart and his ideas about through journaling: Our Journal system was conceived by this author in about 1966. I wanted an underlying operational...
August 26, 2002
More CVB Memories. I remember now that they also played When I Win the Lottery and Flowers from Key Lime Pie.The tension between Lowery and Siegal was light and they made light of it, though David wore a cowboy hat that obscured the nonbearded half of his face, and winced when...
(Via blogpopuli) Massive is worried about the influx of newbies at the influential community weblog metafilter breaking the culture there: User numbers bloomed by over a thousand in less than two months. I shrugged my shoulders and thought, "What difference is 15,000 from 14,000? Little will change." I'm not so sure...
Here's someone's idea of some good blogs to check out. What interests me is this assertion: Further, the distinction between web diaries and web logs continues to become more blurred. Which, ultimately, makes for better reading....
I should have known I'd get sucked in. I remember reading Jon's columns as he continually documented what he was learning about web servers, content managemenet, database-backed websites, and so on. From the link mentioned in my previous entry I've now read Udell's review of Radio 8 and a three-part article...
John Udell wrote a good overview of RSS Aggregators in a May 27 column in Byte, the seminal, now-online-only computer magazine (the only such magazine I ever paid to subscribe to): No single person will be completely authoritative in any one area, but that won't matter ... in fact, it's better...
Who Died and Made Rumsfeld Secretary of State?. In AlterNet: Connect the Dots With Rumsfeld, David Corn questions Rumsfeld's out-front spokesmanship for the U.S. foreign policy:Most recently, he warned (at a public meeting with Army troops) that if Russia maintains its trading relationship with Iraq, the nation will be branded a...
Just added to my blogroll: The Vicarious Delusions of Malium's journal. I think blogrolls need to be annotated, or at least that I should do more than just add people to a link and never explain why. Backfilling is always piling up, but at least from now on when I add...
Welcome Malium to the Blogosphere. Everyone knows I think shacker is the salt of the earth, but only a few know that malium introduced me to scot.now if we could only entice levi into greater blogistan... Current Music: Blackhole::Beck::Mellow Gold...
A kuro5hin post I noticed in my aggregator (The future of blog: The scaling barrier) brings up an interesting point: will blogs scale? Blogs have a scaling problem. Kinda like clubs. The good crowd moves in and they become these perfect little places for some time. And then too many people...
inessential.com says that RSS is where it's at: I think I've seen the future, or a small part of it, regarding weblogs. Two things: If you're not syndicating your site as RSS it might as well not exist. If you don't include a <link...> tag in your home page that points...
I'm tired of having to generate a new editing window every time I want to link to someone, write something, or edit something. I just made RadioExpress! pop up its editing window in a new window because I want to link to several URI's in one entry and otherwise RE! takes...
Wired News discusses ambiguous or unavailable installed-base figures for blogs. Surprisingly, they spell blogosphere with a hyphen as well, following Newsweek style? Meanwhile, the VC-oriented world looks elsewhere: Industry research powerhouses are likely to stay away from the blog-osphere until it reaches profitability. Gartner, Neilsen\//NetRatings, Forrester Research and International Data Corporation...
Mena posted at Movable Type about a new threaded version of TrackBack and alluded to a standalone version of TrackBack (that is, one that does not require MT) to be released soon. Keep them innovations coming!...
August 25, 2002
So far, so good. Posts to my livejournal and to a few other blogs are automatically being picked up in my categories/xPollen/">x-pollen category. They don't show attribution, though. That is, you can't tell if one came from my personal journal and another from my political blog. I'm not sure if that's...
Subvert Press: The 'Thank You' Sticker. Thought-virus: Thank you for financing global terror (via Metafilter sideblog)...
(Bite Media: Who Died and Made Rumsfeld Secretary of State?) In AlterNet: Connect the Dots With Rumsfeld, David Corn questions Rumsfeld's out-front spokesmanship for the U.S. foreign policy:Most recently, he warned (at a public meeting with Army troops) that if Russia maintains its trading relationship with Iraq, the nation will be...
I'm still mining the J-School resources here. This is a link to J.D. Lasica's weblog/journalism resource: Journalism's new life forms: The following links provide information about new forms of personal journalism — including weblogs, collaborative news sites, personal broadcasting, and more — as well as pointers to examples of each genre....
Just noticed that Rebecca Blood has put all the links from her book online at her site. This is a good practice, as it enables her to update links as they change from their printed version in the book (as some already have)....
Pics of New York. Check out this one showing the WTC site. Current Mood: relaxed Current Music: Zony Mash::The Meters::The Meters Anthology (Disc 1)...
Following a link from Q Daily News (I'm still exploring links that turned up from checking out the UC Berkeley J-School IP Weblog Class syllabus mentioned in an entry yesterday), I found this copy of developer's notes for Internet Explorer 6 SP 1, including the nonchalant mention that they are effectively...
Anyone trying to get caught up on weblogs, history of weblogs, what makes a good weblog, history of what people have thought makes a good weblog, and so on, should probably go back and ready CamWorld's rant from January 26, 1999. I have to admit that I used to think CamWorld...
(Via A Blog Doesn't Need a Clever Name [via Scripting News]) Ray Ozzie is working through some of the legal issues surrounding employee weblogs at Groove networks....
I must be obsessed, since now I'm dreaming about weblogs and waking up with new thoughts freshly gelled from my subconscious. This morning it was an image of weblogs as antibodies or red^H^H^Hwhite blood cells (can you tell I haven't studied biology all that carefully?), swarming to attack so-called information from...
August 24, 2002
I remember when the Internet started being big news and a lot of the reports back from it discussed some cursory overview of an arbitrary aspect of the Internet as if this random facet was the whole thing. The old "blind men and the elephant" metaphor. This April PC Magazine article...
Ever notice how many blog posts start with "Well, ..."? I've seen myself do it. I think it's because of the conversational nature of the medium. There's an instinct for writing as if you are carrying on or resuming a spoken converation. So then I......
(Via Leoville), Jason DeFillippo of blogrolling has created a blogroll of bloggers blogging Gnomedex:...
I found a link from mulli.nu! in my referer log the other day and couldn't tell what language it was in. I guess Icelandic, for some odd reason, and dropped a note to the author asking for a translation of "Favvis: Radio Free Blogistan hÔller raskt pÔ att bli min favoritblog....
Wow, I just passed Zeldman in the myelin blogging ecosystem. Something tells me this is just a slice off the real macrosystem.......
August 23, 2002
Curiouser and curiouser! has pulled together a variety of sources on the topic of using k-logs to avoid choking project managers' email queues:Reuters: Managers drowning in e-mail.A huge volume of business e-mails is generated from workers reporting progress to project managers, Nickerson said. <<< There is an answer to this: post...
Puta De las Heces De Juan. Gnosis, a Salon blog that currently has a John Lee Hooker quotation as its description, notes that the Spanish translation of the artist's name is suprisingly literal:Puta De las Heces De Juan ... means "prostitute (hooker) of the shelters (lees) of John."Good thing the folks...
Scot Hacker has posted to his O'ReillyNET blog about his process for choosing a blog tool for U.C. Berkeley's Journalism School's upcoming Intellectual Property Weblog course: Our criteria for blogging software for the class were: Must allow multiple authors (this is to be a team/group blog) Should be low cost or...
While on the one hand it's self-indulgent to devote so many column inches to discussing the design of this site and its legibility for my readership, on the other hand I'm sure many of the opinions would apply to any blog, so in that spirit I'm going to quote from some...
Ask and ye shall receive. Now I have to admit my failure of reading comprehension, as I did not grok from Dave's explanation a week ago that the Multi-Author Weblog tool has exactly the feature I wished for in my previous entry. Mark Paschal, ever helpful, commented thusly: Autoposting from feeds...
In the interests of offering one-stop shopping, I figure I should cross-post here pretty much anything I blog anywhere else (as always, by category). Frankly, though, it's tedious to cut-and-paste or even post through the aggregator (plus my LiveJournal's RSS feed is headlines-only). I wonder if it might be possible to...
Andrew Bayer Is Dreaming of China takes issue with some of Dave Winer's more upopian pronouncements of the importance of weblogs to the future: Here's the thing — he's assuming, first of all, that everyone will have a computer. Maybe at some point in the distant future, this could be the...
Chaords Everywhere I Look gives a hearty endorsement to the writing found in Salon blogs when compared to mass media....
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, you sparked a revolution, happy birthday to you: Is today the third birthday of Blogger? According to my archive, it is. Congrats! [Scripting News]...
August 22, 2002
Just when I was about to brag about having hidden the design of this site from Netscape 4.7, it appears that my new funky backdrop has cost me at least one reader: Have you ever stopped reading or cut down on your reading of a weblog because they changed the design?...
A reader I've been discussing blog page-design with asks me: Got one more query for you if you don't mind. For some reason, my page is no longer showing up on the "Updated Weblogs" page, although it does show up on referrals and rankings. I've been tuning a bit and it's...
I don't have much more than the press release for this: Macromedia and Course Technology will develop a co-branded series of multimedia and web-design content and curriculum specifically created for students and teachers in the K-12 and higher education markets. This series, which will be available in eight languages, integrates Macromedia's...
Brad Choate point to the technical colophon of a site called A Touch of Hope, for a description of how to use blogging software (in this case Movable Type) as a full-service backend CMS for multiple users... with a little tweaking....
I was having a hell of a time getting design changes to propagate out to my categories. It turned out that in the early days of this blog when I Was experimenting with many of the canned themes and giving each category its own design, these choices decoupled the categories from...
(Via blogroot/blogpopuli.blog) KMpings is a collection of Knowledge Management TrackBack pings. The site offers instructions on how to ping it with or without Movable Type. This should be a good one-stop shopping info source regarding knowledge management....
After speculating that one of the precursors of blogs was the ubiquitous .plan files of the early Unix-heavy Internet, Cruftbox has posted a roundup of sites that linked to the theory: I was also surprised to see links from two places I had never heard of before, Weblog Bookwatch and All...
A Frog in the Valley (a French weblog) links to a post about a new glasshaus book on content management systems: Book Excerpt: Content Management Systems The case in favor of Content Management is argued in this excerpt from the glasshaus title, "Content Management Systems." Included are discussions defining what CMS...
For the quickdraw file: With B back from her writing retreat I'm in full domestic mode this morning, grinding coffee beans, squeezing oranges, and making up some oatmeal from steel cut oats. She's reading the New York Times and calling out interesting copy ("Bush calls for more logging to prevent wildfires,"...
Just when I was ready to stop tinkering with the design of this site and focus once again on the writing, I was tipped off by an editor friend yesterday that at least one publishing house I've worked with (and hope to work with again) is still standardized on Netscape 4.7,...
August 21, 2002
The ELO's Electronic Literature Directory is now once more allowing authors to log in and update their listings: If you're not yet listed in the Directory but should be, please request a listing and an account. In the past we've been very slow to respond to requests for accounts, but we...
I am reworking the design of my blog at Mediajunkie.com, and renaming it from Junk Mail (clever but somewhat meaningless) to Bite Media (closer to the mission of the blog and site). Recent posts there include: Clinton TV Toby imagines the scene in Crawford Anti-American screed from a Canadian in Baltimore...
Now that blogrolling.com has added a reciprocal roll (mine is listed in my sidebar under Reciplogroll—I wish it gave sitenames and not URLs, but it's still cool) feature, I wonder if I could add some kind of macro or something that could show the sites that have subscribed to my feed...
Posting across all categories to force theme re-rendering. Please continue to ignore....
Aha! So paying for a Salon Blog entitles you to 40 meg, it appears, and the 10 meg allocation was tied to the trial period I surmise. Hit my page just now and saw it was up-to-date. Checked my internal home page and saw that it now has 40 meg, 75%...
In "Weblogs of the Stars" the S.F. Chronicle discusses Wil Wheaton and RuPaul along with some clearly not-really-blog fansites for a few other celebrities...
Yes, the problem is I've maxed out my server space at Salon's host, so I suppose this means moving over to my FTP server again. Even then, though I'll need to replace the home page at blogs.salon.com/0001111/ with some sort of link or redirect to the new address, or it will...
It is ironic that having just paid for Radio I am now running into serious difficulties. The main problems are: My last few posts won't publish My site design won't update when applied to the home page or to categories Attempts to reach http://blogs.salon.com/0001111/2002/08/20.html lead to an error message Unfortunately this...
August 20, 2002
Well, per my last entry, the fix listed fixed some problems but the category/navigator links still look messed up. Again this seems to have to do with when things are re-rendered. Frustrating.... Apologies for the design inconsistencies as I try to resolve these technical difficulties. In other news, I just opened...
Working on my list of Radio problems and wishes: Switch from FTP and back left address/link artifacts Themes rendered incompletely in categories/not updated fully How did I fill up 10 meg so quickly? Will I still be visible in the Salon Blogs community if I move over to my own host,...
Scott of the Fuzzy Group is releasing his Radio documentation as an open source book, since O'Reilly used only a fraction of it in the Radio chapter of the upcoming Essential Blogging: As the author of the O'Reilly Essential Blogging chapters on Radio, I clearly have a commercial interest in Radio....
Sorry for so many posts about the technicalities of this specific blog. It's frustrating. Radio still thinks my home page is over at my own site, so the 'before' and 'after' navigation points over to the mirror, as do the navigator/category links. The calendar links point to the blogs.salon.com address, so...
I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to do when I've filled the 10 meg provided on the Salon community server. I've pruned a few unused graphics. It's hard to believe I've upstreamed that much text! Also, after publishing a copy of this site to my own host and then switching...
Well, my trial was almost up so I just paid for this copy of Radio. Feels good. Now for some reason, though, it seems like my posts from today (Tuesday) aren't showing up on the home page. Also, and I don't know if this is related, I have only 1% of...
In Business 2.0, Rafe Needleman writes about a "dashboard" product to help VCs monitor the status of their investments: Dotcom flameout notwithstanding, the need for this product is greater than ever. Venture firms still have billions of dollars invested in technology startups, and there are a lot of people worrying about...
Just got around to reading the Steven Levy article on blogging in Newsweek online. It seems like a fairly accurate and balanced, if shallow, introduction to the concepts. One interesting comment he makes in a kind of phony blog they use to illustrate the concept is that if there are supposedly...
August 19, 2002
I was checking the look of an earlier day's page and saw that someone had responded to my link to Rebecca's essay Weblog History. One thing I realized is that I'll need to go through old posts and assign categories to them in some cases. (This one needs to get the...
More required reading here for keeping up with the ongoing dialogue in blogspace. It doesn't surprise me that science fiction writers like Sterling and Cory are playing such a big role in shaping the emerging philosophy of this internetworked world we're building. I've always felt that my hypergeek years of reading...
Had an odd thought today, probably half-prompted by Oliver Willis's American Times, a kind of Utne Reader of the blogosphere. The thought: wouldn't "Radio Free Blogistan" make a good name for an actual radio show? Say, one hour a week each featuring a different blogger as a guest to talk about...
I took the generic 3-panel CSS file I derived from a modified version of this site's new design and set to work converting it to a Blogger template, which is mostly a matter of replacing Radio macros and tags with Blogger-specific tags. A version of that Blogger template is now being...
Suladog, a Livejournal friend of mine who's a film writer, told a little story about the mixed feelings some of her peers have about embracing the potential of community through the Internet: ... two very close friends...one is the creator of a couple of hit TV series .. the other is...
Caveat Lector posts some preliminary musings about XHTML2. The old typographer in me is most thrilled by the concept of continued paragraphs. Believe me, it's almost as exciting as discovering a working em-dash character....
The proof is in the pudding. This (scaled-down, I'm afraid) snapshot of my terminal window shows the Radio Free Blogistan home page in lynx. Coooool: The navigation comes after all the entries, and it even reads fairly well, aside from things like my RSS-feed blogroll, which repeats the final names for...
August 18, 2002
Via Corante's Blogging News (at least I think so&8212;I can't verify the link now), another good exploration of the essence of blogging that tries to distinguish the medium from the uses it's been put to so far posted August 1 at mediageek. Good set of related links at the end of...
Pushing rectangles takes exception with my "to the ramparts" melodrama about the plight of Davezilla: I am not a lawyer... but I don't know that any of these chuckleheads are, either. The way trademark protection works, you need to actively police the usage of your marks. This is in contrast to...
One the first page of Google results for "Radio Free Blogistan" yields an entry in the Fierce Highway blog, about an online music format. Now here's the weird thing. The post immediately before that is called Navel Gazing. So now I'm wondering. Is this (a) a coincidence, (b) something I picked...
All this war- stuff is making me nervous! Warflying or warstorming: spotting networks from the air: Over Perth, they spotted 90 networks. Does this mean we now need warweatherballoons to mark networks? Jason Jordan wrote to note: I reckon we're the first to brag about going "War Storming". That's a phrase...
I've cleaned up the template I'm using here and made it a little more generic (put a real banner box across the top and top-aligned the blog and masthead boxes. The idea is to provide other Radio users with an all CSS floating design template. By editing the CSS (I did...
Scanning my headlines page just now I noticed for the first time an inadvertantly suggestive error* (what I've called in the past a Freudian typo): Gnosis Coints Masturblogging Put aside for the moment the philosophy-major angle that I am masturblogging right now by linking to my post about the word masturblogging....
I'm a little surprised that no warblogger has yet coined the term blogshevik to redbait the vast left-wing conspiracy in greater blogistan. At least, the Goog has never heard of it: Did you mean:bolshevikæ Your search - blogshevik - did not match any documents. No pages were found containing "blogshevik". Speaking...
It just clicked for me. Many facets just snapped together into focus. One, explaining why I post in so many different blogs (channels, brands), that almost promiscuous thrill of starting a new blog at the drop of a hat. Another, some recent conversations with business people who understand blogging and are...
I had an interesting conversation with Dave Winer the other day, partly prompted by the drafting of my product comparison into the vendetta of his anonymous detractors against him. The ability of commenting visitors to attack, highjack, or derail a weblog have led Dave to conclude that the two media (weblogs...
That's me in the corner... Uh, somehow Radio streamed my home template in a way that changed the syntax of the body style declaration. It added an <a href etc. around the url, the way you would turn a raw address into a link, but not in my template! Any idea why...
Where "right now'" is defined as a 30-second envelope around the time I posted this: Where can I buy Amish products online? Where can I learn about the sexual practice oral sex? Where can I find a map of the state California? Where can I find tour information for the band...
August 17, 2002
Doing my homework (reading blog reviews of Rebecca Blood's weblog handbook), I encountered Cruftbox passing off a disgression as "navel gazing." Having just titled a recent post with that phrase, I went into memewatching mode and decided to Google it. Lo and behold, a table of contents from Enterzone was on...
Uppity-Negro notes that James Lileks (Bleat) and Rebecca Blood (Rebecca's Pocket) were both recently interviewed on radio: The similarities of the questions, and the basic content of some of the answers, is actually a bit scary. Except when Rebecca says it, it makes sense. Not that I'm biased or anything. [via...
I'm pushing the new site design across all the categories, hence this post into every category. Apologies for its off-topicness outside of 'metablog' and 'radioactive'. Or rather, let me make it on topic, by discussing my categories a little, which I have just rationalized. While the mission of this blog is...
Experimenting with a new design, a kind of bastard stepchild CSS/tables monstrosity. Anyway, I can't seem to get the jpg to upstream into the /www/images/ directory. Do I have to put all my art in myPictures? Things need padding, and I have to learn how clearing and floating works to get...
August 16, 2002
Stavros the Wonderchicken has rechristened his site emptybottlezilla.org, rewriting all the supporting copy in a lawyer-baiting frenzy. Remember how the King of the Danes (or was it the Dutch?) had himself televised wearing the yellow star the day the Nazis (forgive me mnemonic) rolled them out? When they came for the...
Ray Ozzie writes about e-mail and blogging taking away when other technologies give back. I recognize the compulsive "system monitor" personality he talks about and so I hope I can look forward to someday hacking my flow as effectively as he describes it. It's fascinating to read how he's watched his...
Would it be possible to put check boxes next to my navigator links and have them drive CSS logic to hide entries that are only associated with unchecked categories? Would this be something like the Jakob/Zeldman buttons for switching from serif to sans-serif? I think I may need to ask a...
As I just posted about in my artsflow blog, Andrew Stafford has built a fascinating Flash website called Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp, in which he employs this interactive medium to illustrate and contextualize the works of one of the 20th century's most penetrating artists. The navigation for the site is...
Wow, I guess Dave must have run over this (anonymous) guy's kitten some time, to make him dedicate his life to stalking and attacking him. It's amusing how the criticism we blurt out about other people often seem to be projections of our own personalities. Here's where I think the anti-Winer...
Brian St. Pierre suggests that the Berman/Coble bill may actually represent an opportunity, a sort of open season on hacking, for are we not all copyright holders? The second opportunity might seem a little scary to some. I'm thinking about the US government here. Consider that there are many small copyright...
New, at A List Apart, Eastgate impresario Mark Bernstein offers 10 Tips on writing the "living Web." I'm quoting tip number 8 as a cheap way of following the advice in tip number 8: Be sexy You are a sexual being. So are all of your readers (except the Google robot)....
plasticbag rounds up the webby versions of all the essays in We've Got Blog. Just one entry later he also defines blogrolling (thiat is I think plasticbag.org is a 'he'—I should check that), particularly for the U.K. blogging audience (and cites what is also my own preferred folk etymology, from logrolling)....
I SMELL PRESS RELEASE: HBO teams up with Salon By Allison Romano Broadcasting & Cable 8/14/2002 8:00:00 AM Home Box Office's film unit is teaming up with Salon Media Group to develop print and film projects. HBO Films will underwrite select stories for entertainment and news Web site Salon.com with the...
August 15, 2002
(via scriptingnews) Some thoughts on the mainstreaming of blogs and the definition of spam in this essay, Blogging, Trust, and Discovery by Bob Frankston. A sample: I find the more interesting change is in the process of discovery. Being heard against the din of all the voices is hard and we...
Via Backup Brain another ecosystem crawler, this one called organica....
The Radio vs. Movable Type comparison has generated a lot of heat in the (literally) subtext, in the comments. Here are some highlights: Comments in response to this post: ... It highlights the fact that there is no one "best" blogging tool, but rather, each tool offers a different feel and...
Ray Ozzie hits the nail on the head, detecting the architecture of the blogosphere and the benefits it confers through decentralizing the content management and enabling people to make the connections: But blogs accomplish public discussion through a far different architectural design pattern. In the Well's terminology, taken to its extreme,...
Following up on Dave's post, I read about how the multi-author weblog tool uses RSS feeds to aggregate multi-author content. Cooool: Everyone in the group writes with their own copy of Radio and publishes their weblog in both HTML and RSS. One of the editors takes responsibility for running the Multi-Author...
I have these tapes of John Lennon reading the newspaper, making it sound like a blues or a Dylan tune. Listening to spamradio read the ads to ambient accompaniment puts me straight into an alpha state. Please specify shoe size and color … Now you can have hundreds of vendors compete...
Back when I started talking about business applications of (or lessons from) blogging, Mike Masnick sent me an interesting message about Techdirt.com, a multi-author (slashcode) technology/business news blog that's been running continuously since 1997 (that is, since before the word blog was coined). One interesting thing is that Mike and his...
Not working on Windows most of the time lately, I haven't had a chance to try TopStyle yet. I wish they'd port it to OS X! Anyway, I went from some blog to the Eatonweb portal and then through the TopStyle text ad where, after reading press-release type information about using...
I notice that most MT blogs include comments on the same page as an entry. Is there any way to do this with Radio? That is, is there a macro or something that could be put in the entry template that would inline the comments that ordinarily appear in a popup...
As someone else pointed out in my comments, I left out some Radio features that MT lacks. Radio's news aggregator provides an easy way to keep up with other blogs and cross-reference them. That's really just the tip of the iceberg, because of course Radio opens up onto a scripting environment,...
Derek Powazek writes in his personal log that he'll be taking a break from it for a while, to pay attention to his many other irons in the fire. I respect this. Knowing when not to blog is as important as knowing when to. The daily-or-more habit is great but only...
In Making the Move to Movable Type at Meryl.net, the author covers, very succinctly, the issues involved in migrating to MT. Re one the comments to my comparison from yesterday: Radio Express does not seem to capture raw HTML for me, but this may because I am using IE6/Mac?...
Last night Gwen Ifill on The Lehrer News Hour mentioned how "we" (the newsmedia, I suppose) had been glued to the SEC website all day watching the CEO and CFO filings come in. These are the certifications required by the Sarbanes law, in which the company officers must swear that their...
My agent told me yesterday that one of her other clients, Peter Rojas, was involved in a new blog called Gizmodo.com, a project of Nick Denton's. Because he's getting paid (or at least partly for that reason) this new blog is the talk of blogdom. Nick has rounded up some of...
August 14, 2002
Visiting the blogging ecosystem stats page for this blog today I found some interesting in-bound links I hadn't known about, I gather because no one has clicked on them yet. One of them features an entry linking to an article about weblogging from August 2 in the National Journal that discusses...
I spaced out on making Bladam's name a link to his blog in my review so I thought I'd call it out here in its own entry. As I said, he sent me message with a lot of insight into Radio vs. Movable Type and I appreciate the contribution and want...
It's always a thrill when you get to hold your latest book in your hands, but it's even more of a gas when Amazon finally corrects the entry that says it "will be published June 15" instead of saying that it's available. They made the fix today, and my book's sales...
Each of these comparisons seems to take more time than the previous one, and I'm sure as always that I've missed some crucial features, but this entry should serve as a good starting point for anyone making a decision. Here are some of the differences between Movable Type and Radio UserLand:...
New Batch of 'Get Your War On' Up. Just go read 'em. [mediajunkie: junk mail]...
August 13, 2002
CNN.com reports that Mesa Airlines fired a pilot who tested positive for drinking: The incident follows two other cases involving commercial pilots allegedly drinking before flying. Is this a trend or the end of one?...
In its "Other Websites" section, under the odd heading of "Peacebloggers," Slate gives a short blurb to the Blogcritics project, a site of book, music, film and other reviews entirely by bloggers. Hey, wasn't it the free LPs and movie tickets—and eventually the ad buys for so-called alternative music—that killed the...
An ex-coworker just sent me this site's address by IM. Reading some of it I am reminded that not all idiosyncratic self-published writing on the Internet is in blog format. I know that's obvious, but with blogs getting all the heat and light lately maybe I was tending to forget it....
Catching up at nickdenton.org I see he identifies a second "blog martyr" (after Steve Olafson): Other blog martyrs Brian Sobalak writes in to remind me that Heather Hamilton of Dooce was fired when her company discovered she'd been bitching on her site. Here's Heather's post on the subject. One of the...
Since I did the original test installation of MovableType locally (on my PowerBook) a few months ago and have only fiddled with it since then, I decided to bite the bullet and install MT on my remote (Linux) server to reacquaint myself with the process, and to explore the 2.2 version...
Agh. I've just tossed three hours down the blogosphere memory hole, clicking open links in new windows and following the trails of breadcrumbs. The incestuous cross-linking between blogs is a joy and a burden....
Nick Denton takes Traction to task for the buzzword bingo in their press release: Oh no, the corporate wordmanglers have got hold of blogging. "Traction is a leader in next generation Enterprise Weblog software, delivering interoperable, inexpensive, rapidly deployable, open and easy to use tools for groups and teams to communicate,...
August 12, 2002
Scott Kessler writes in Business Week that Macromedia has suffered from its acquisition of Allaire and continues to see soft demand for its products: Macromedia's wager was poorly timed. Some 17 months after the company bought Allaire, demand for its products is still weak and there's no recovery in sight. In...
Ben Brown (of So New Media) thinks we're due for a book about how to stop blogging: Isn't that the thing that like 50 people are writing 100 different books about? Seems like overkill to me. What I'd really like to see is a book about how to STOP blogging. With...
Meg's recent column (see previous post) sports a cross-link to a May 31 item by science-fiction writer and bOing bOing editor Cory Doctorow that is also part of O'Reilly's Blogging Essentials, due out any day now. In it he describes the benefits he derives from blogging, calling his blog his "outboard...
In her Megnut column at O'Reilly Net, Meg suggests that the time has come for companies to hire professional bloggers to project their news and outreach into the blogosphere: It's time to take blogging to the next level and that starts with paying people to produce high-quality, focused blogs for commercial...
I finally got around to playing back Lawrence Lessig's copyright talk from the Open Source conference, following a pointer from bOingbOing. Cory is right. It's a great talk, well honed, and one of the best slide decks of that type that I've ever seen. Not sure why I like it so...
I'm attempting now to include a list of the categories associated with each entry, following a pointer from Matthew Ernest to a script by Marc Paschal. For me, this is like following a recipe without really understanding the stove, so if it doesn't work I hope it doesn't screw up the...
Just nabbed radiofreeblogistan.com and freeblogistan.com (blogistan.com, of course, was already taken) at my favorite domain-name registrar....
In one of my (ironically, typo-laden) earliest entries in this blog I discussed the difference between typing and writing, and the fact that I write with my left hand but type with both. The New York Times today covers a patent for a one-handed "stealth keyboard" that is more like a...
Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment this morning notes that the Washington Post is stepping on Joshua Micah Marshall's brand: Today Marshall notes that the Washington Post has begun running an online column with the name "Talking Points." Talking point for Post editors: Time to rethink that....
August 11, 2002
How ugly the word blog sounds, and despite that there's no denying it's more catchy, somehow more fun to say than weblog. Part of that may be fatigue around the word web along with the pleasure of using a clever neologism, something a little more playful than unconscious language evolution. But...
Elizabeth Spiers writes in her Capital Influx blog about the end of cool for bloggers, or the inherent uncoolness of blogging, or how cool it is to be uncool, or something like that: The uncool result of the cross-linking is that something weird or interesting happens and you and fellow blogger...
When I created the subs.txt file in my Web Services folder and called the service via SOAP, I discovered that the service expected to find a tiny coffee mug graphic I didn't have, and because the img tag had no width='10' height='10' attributes specified, the long alt text showed up, breaking...
All this talk of Knowledge Logs generally presupposes a corporate (or to be a little more neutral, an enterprise) environment, but educational institutions are the prime focus of knowledge sharing in society, no? John Robb points to Weblogg-ed, a Radio blog, and Lincoln Public Schools, a crisp-looking Manila-managed site....
Over on my mediajunkie blog: There's More to the Muslim World than Palestine. think halal: the muslim group weblog has a provocative report of the attitude of an Indian Muslim who sees the Palestinian question sucking up all the media attention and aid while gujarat is largely ignored. [mediajunkie: junk mail]...
Chapter 21 of Dreamweaver Savvy described how to build an e-commerce site. Here's some useful advice from Macromedia for adding PayPal services to such as site: The PayPal eCommerce Toolkit extension for Dreamweaver MX allows web designers and developers to quickly and easily add e-commerce functionality to a website. [Macromedia Designer...
John Robb commented on the Times essay comparing bloggers to pamphleteers: Seems ridiculous that the media would continue to confuse a powerful horizontal tool (very much like desktop word processing) with how it is used by a few people. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] I've always found that the Internet is a...
A few good reasons not to blog on the weekend. [xian]...
Just followed Jenny Levine (The Shifted Librarian)'s very clear instructions for listing my subscribed aggregator feeds in the navigation column of my home page. Publishing this entry should update my template and show who I'm scanning every day....
August 10, 2002
Life ongoing, and other tragic comedies... says that Marc Weisblott writes about Salon.Blogs under the title of "Inside Blogger Baseball" and... He makes the point that Salon is basically trying to ride the coattails of blogging to improve its image and make money. If they are, I really don't mind. If...
By switching to the "in-beta" pro2.blogger.com server, I was able to get the RSS feed working for Junk Mail, one of my Blogger Pro blogs. Up to now I was using Voidstar's cool RSSify script to generate a feed, but it didn't seem to recognize titles (it made up titles out...
[RadioFAQs]Question: The list of referers seems to be wiped clean each day. Is there a way to see all hits and referers from previous days as well as the current day? [Alison] Answer: Sorry, the referers currently is only kept for a 24 hour period and reset at midnight. [Lawrence Lee] [Don W...
With my one-week probation up, I found I had something on my mind I wanted to post to Metafilter....
In a Think Tank sidebar in the Arts section of today's Times entitled "The Ancient Art of Haranguing Has Moved to the Internet" (link requires free signup), Emily Eakin discusses the tradition of independent political discourse from Tom Paine to George Orwell to today's bloggers: Of course, in today's media-saturated environment,...
I didn't even realize Bernie DeKoven had a weblog till I saw a link to it on Doc Searls' blog just now. Bernie is an amazing guy with an incredible sense of play. I still remember a long talk I had with him walking along the beach south of L.A. I've...
Via Scripting News via Jake's Radio 'Blog: Jason DeFillippo's Blogrolling.com now supports OPML. If you use Blogrolling.com for your blogroll, you can use Radio's radio.macros.blogroll macro, or Manila's opmlBlogroll macro to add the blogroll to your site. Optional parameters for these macros let you control the appearance of links to recently...
August 9, 2002
I took this picture of Morgan and Megan, who were sweet enough to pose (the flash washed it out a bit), on the set of The Screen Savers. The photo album demo went well. The studio audienced went awwww.... when they saw an album of bunny rabbit photos. What amazes me...
It's cool that TechTV has an Airport network (or two) set up in their studio. I'm here waiting to rehearse my bit (I'll be on live around 4:40 pm west-coast time), so I thought Why not post something to the blog? Better not run down my battery, though....
Driver 8 has compiled a list of uses of the word blog in mainstream ("professional") media. So far he hasn't included any Salon citings, when we know Scott Rosenberg has been covering that beat for a good three or four years now....
Blogging for Fun and Profit is doing a good job of summarizing many of the issues floating around the blogosphere; that is, why to do it, how to do it, and so on....
Blog jargon watch: Is there a term for putting entries in a Weblog that are linked to other entries in the same Weblog? If no such term exists yet, I'd like to nominate "masturblogging."...
I must have been asleep at the switch, because the5k.org announced its 2002 winners (finally) on Wednesday....
August 8, 2002
Since I added the recently titled links to my navigation area I think this home page has been loading too slowly, plus it didn't look great all crammed in there, even with the .realsmall style settings added to the dates, so I've replaced that list with a link to a new...
Tomorrow I'll be going on TechTV's The Screen Savers again, this time to demonstrate Dreamweaver's Create Web Photo Album, which requires Fireworks and uses Javascript to pull together a quick and dirty set of web-album pages for any set of photos you point it at. Looking forward to it! I'm going...
So the "eight glasses of water a day" meme turns out to be urban legend and not medical gospel at all, according to David Harris' Science News Salon Blog. Harris digs up stuff that we wouldn't otherwise see for days (the water story came from today's American Journal of Physiology), so...
As a kind reader pointed out, my post earlier today of the honorific dropdown menu included a form element that broke the Radio aggregator (News page) for anyone subscribing to this blog. The easiest way to deal with the problem is to unsubscribe and then resubscribe again. If you've already unsubscribed,...
One side effect Salon may not have planned on with this experiment is that I, for one, am finding much less time to read Salon lately. Now they already have my premium subscription so maybe it doesn't matter, and I am trying to point to Salon blogs and Salon articles (in...
There's a topic on the Well with that title (Spam in my in-box today). Got a curious message today: Subject: USA Today Vote USA Today is taking a vote on whether the words "Under God" should be removed from the pledge of allegiance. You can vote by going to the following...
From links.net: From the United Airlines Mileage Plus signup web page, a fantastic list of possible "titles" - name prefixes in a pull down menu: Note: I removed the form element, because it was breaking Radio's aggregator, losing me at least one subscriber! Here are the titles listed in the pull-down...
By now most people in the blogosphere know the the Journalism School at U.C. Berkeley is offering a class on blogging. As a project, the class will build a community blog about intellectual property. The teachers have also assembled a list of links to comments about the class. (One of them...
I wanted to add comments to uncle john's blog, so I dropped by YACCS, which seems to be the most popular third-party comment system, especially on Blogger, and discovered that (like Metafilter) they've had to restrict signups to a certain number each day (or, technically, each 6-hour period). I guess that's...
I'm moving up in the ecosystem. I think I'm number 118 now. (B said: "I thought you were number 4." I said "That's just at Salon. This is the whole world." "The whole blog world you mean," she said. "We call it the blogosphere" I said, "or blogistan.") Last week there...
Critiques of Editorials nails William Saletan's hatchet-job on Gore: But Saletan really undermines his argument by viciously attacking Gore when no such attack is warranted. Gore wrote an Op Ed that said I told you that if Bush was president that the powerful would benefit and the average joe would get...
Thanks to Ken Dow for the link. In this article John Foley looks at blogging as a professional tool, especially from the journalist's perspective: As a journalist with more than 15 years' experience myself, I'm more excited by the prospect of blogging than threatened by it. So, my business is in...
To warchalking now add seachalking....
Per Scriptingnews, here's a discussion of the integration of Blogger with Trellix, a step toward folding the blog model into more full-fledged content management system solutions....
Once upon a time, back before the e-commerce bubble, a few of the people trying to make artwork and literature on the Internet came together, originally through a shared interest in the Beat generation, and started a mailing list to go beyond the continuous ccing of each other in a long...
August 7, 2002
Scot Hacker jots in his personal blog about going to a Macromedia demo in S.F. and still preferring his native coding environments to Dreamweaver MX. He wonders if the large numbers of developers installing Dreamweaver are actually using it day-to-day. Read his post and some followup comments to find out more....
I noticed something had broken the design of my site and quickly discovered that the culprit was the code for the blogchalking symbol both in the main area of the page and in the navigation area. This made me realize two things: The code for the symbol did not include height...
Well, 7487 of the 8000 PyRad impressions I got (a $10 value!) for paying for Blogger Pro have yielded thus far a single clickthrough, around the first time the ad went live. I know in direct-mail marketing a 2% return is considered pretty good, but what about a 0.013% clickthrough rate?...
David Watson reports that a Houston Chronicle reporter has been asked to stop publishing his weblog. Something like this was probably inevitable as the trend of journalists-with-weblogs has continued, branching into edited, sanctioned weblogs at publication sites and independent weblogs of working journalists. If you blog for your employer there may...
If Metafilter, Slashdot, or Blogroots don't satisfy your need for collaborative blogging, check out LinkMachineGo. plasticbag.org, my Virgil for this morning, says the site needs more commentary....
Also from plasticbag.org, a twist on the anti-webtool attitudes you sometimes see from hardcore or longstanding hand-coders. Tom Coates makes the point that the tools used to make work easier or to enable shortcuts are not responsible for the lousy design that may result. At worst, shortcuts facilitate laziness and open...
You'll come for the blogging insight; you'll stay for the Buffy rumors. The beautifully designed plasticbag.org site includes an interesting discussion in its weblog of this new trend of publications hosting blogspaces: It doesn't take a genius to gather what is happening in corporate world at the moment - weblogs are...
BlogHog appears to be another site aggregating (and thus intermediating itself between readers and) blogs sites. I had to register to add a blog, and then it was unable to see the RSS headline feed here. Not sure what the problem is....
Thanks to dws's RadioFAQs system I now know how to delete a category. (I know, I should have RTFM, but I'm lazy!) I need to prune my proliferation. One thing is I'm going to kill the separate Junk Mail category as redundant. I have the junk mail blog at Mediajunkie, I...
August 6, 2002
Speaking of We Blog, the website for the book features a community blog called BlogPopuli where anyone can contribute posts about weblogs either using Movable Type's trackback feature or by filling out a form. The weblog to book to weblog dialectic bears watching....
Since the early days of personal home pages, the readymade shorthand for characterizing a lame website is to refer to the owner's cat pictures. Yet the most popular personal-journal type blogs have always revealed the intimate and the mundane. It's the close observation that sucks people in....
Thanks to a head's up from Lawrence Lee at Userland, I'm testing out a list of titles of recent posts in the navigation column of this page. OK, the first try was ugly. I've now put .recentPostTitle and .recentPostWhen into the style sheet in the template with the same characteristics as...
Also from bOing bOing, the blogosphere braces itself for the much heralded release of We Blog by megnut and matt-a-filter....
There was a street in Berkeley called Grove. It's name was later changed to Martin Luther King Boulevard. Some time after that the city posted a sign labeling the street "Old Grove Street." Subsequently, people would refer to the street that way, which made B and I joke that it was...
I'm overdue in putting together a tutorial for the Screen Savers' website for my appearance on the show Friday, hoping to finish that tonight. I've been working with Dreamweaver to adapt my blog templates, preparing for my next tutorial. So far I've fiddled with the color scheme at junk mail and...
A website called knucklerap reported on a collaborative grammatical/editing discussion on Metafilter (although the knucklerap writer mistook one participant in the thread for the owner of the site). Part of the cited discussion: "The problem is that the conjunction 'as well as' introduces a compound object phrase which is not parallel....
Dreamweaver Team has posted some useful advice for optimizing the performance of Dreamweaver MX....
This AlterNet article on "The Virtues of Promiscuity" discusses the evolutionary benefits of female promiscuity; that is the contributions "slutty" behavior makes toward the fitness of a species. Here's a choice quotation: Even evolutionary psychologists, stout defenders of the meat-for-fidelity model, are beginning to acknowledge the benefits of women's "slutty" behavior....
In yesterdays New York Times, an article on AOL's management shakeup reported that AOL discovered its membership was fleeing in the face of increased pop-up ads: A study showed that when the number of pop-up ads was cut in half for a group of members, their satisfaction improved notably. That led...
The news from the middle east over the weekend made me sad and frustrated and brought to a head some of my thoughts about the politics of the region, so I wrote a short essay at Junk Mail (The Case Against Peace in the Middle East). Then I copied it into...
The Business Section of the the Rocky Mountain News has an article on Starbuck's new experiment with online ordering in advance: In this latest version of clicks-and-bricks retail, customers order through the Internet or a cell phone, and in five minutes, their coffee's ready at checkout. Charged to a pre-arranged credit...
This flowchart should help you sort things out....
August 5, 2002
Seen in Adbusters: Meme Warfare suggests that it may be the memes of the western world that are outcompeting those from other cultures. Doesn't this just shift the terminology? We're still talking about Big Macs, the big screen, the Internet and porn, right?...
Caveat Lector explores ambivalence toward blogging, also indifference to the terminology in "The Call of the Blog," saying There is a malaise in Blogaria.......
I must sat that for a pinko-liberal I myself am leaning toward the "we must do something about Iraq" side of the equation, so that makes it double hard for me to stomach Glenn Reynolds's put upon attitude in this post....
Isn't it about time those involved in the latest Arab-Israeli war admit that peace in the region is—at this present time—impossible? Everyone always says they want peace (along with love and understanding), but I think more progress could be made with more realistic goals. Instead of peace, perhaps the goals of...
Who Inspired You to Blog? [xian] Might as well pump the blog meme of the moment....
Philip K. Dick + R. Crumb = What's Not to Like? [xian]...
I've never liked the way politicians hypocritically excuse their own "youthful indiscretions" and those of their family members while advocating throwing the book at unconnected offenders. Noelle Bush gets rehab, the poor and black get hard time. Fed up with draconian drug penalties, a coalition led by angry mothers is threatening...
How do I include a list of the categories associated with each entry?...
Meme Trope Proof of Concept. the alternative is to hold out for perfection and omniscience at the expense of writing [Meme List] (x-pollen from my MT experiment)...
How do I delete a category in Radio?...
When clicking a referer log entry from a Salon Blogs named anchor link indicating a specific article that day (such as this one from my log today), the octothorpe (hash mark) is escaped out as %23, leading to an error when I try to click on it. My impression yesterday was...
If I've written a post, entitled it, and entered a link, and at that point I decide to create a new category for it, I can click the (New) link next to "Categories:" and go ahead and create that category, but when I'm done I will not be returned to the...
Following my referer log to McGee's Musings on klogs, I stumbled across yet another blog tool—Traction—this one specifically aimed at the enterprise market. I haven't investigated the feature set and pricing yet, and I'm curious about how it might differ from ordinary blog software. I was just talking to a business...
One Movable Type feature I really like is the back and forward links built into the standard template. Since I generally have many posts per day, I'm only showing three days right now on my home page. I'd like it if at the bottom of the page there were always a...
August 4, 2002
Another classic for that online blog library (even though its name gives away its paleoblog origins) is why web journals suck....
Dave Roos, a self-described "blogging failure" wrote this amusing take on blogging for the website of the TechTV show "The Screen Savers": Bloggers don't appreciate press from ignorant, neophyte blog failures like myself, because blog failures like myself are prone to sweeping philosophical generalizations concerning the nature of blogging. I'll be...
Matt Croydon's postneo blog contains a pointer to w.bloggar. I'm not sure what the right term for this is, an interface for blogging? middleware? It posts to Blogger and MovableType as well as a few other tools, pings weblogs.com and offers other management services. I suppose one way of aggregating blogs...
A method for annotating and archiving my Events log would, I think, shed light on my iterative editorial process and acknowledge the effort (in the sense of crossing out items on a to-do list). Otherwise, I just cringe at old posts with typos and sentence fragments, shrug, and then move on....
Thanks to Scott Rosenberg's clarification I realize that I leapt to conclusions without reading closely enough. If MSNBC will simply be listing their journalist's blogs (Alterman, Kaus, et al.?), then I suppose what replaces their messag boards will be the comments function? I suppose that would tend to focus conversation on...
Eric Scheid on the BloggerDev mailing list answered my question about why subject titles aren't showing up on the Blogger-API-mirrored version of this site. The answer is disappointingly simple: the API doesn't support any of the PRO features, such as titles. Oh, well....
Sifry's Alerts features a cool implementation of the Google API for MovableType bloggers. From the post about the first version of the hack: With a 3-line hack to Movable Type's source code (gosh, I love having the source code to my software) I added a new function to its Google search...
My friend syrup used to get (and post) some strange search requests. This site is a community blog (very Metafilter-y design) where you can post any disturing search requests you find in your referer logs. Since I don't post much personal stuff here (see bodega for the excruciating details of my...
In a column (Blogs are HUGE) at the Macromedia site, Ed Krimen discussed the way they are using blogs to promote their products: While most of the feedback about the blogs has been positive, there has been some concerned feedback, especially from the blogging community. Companies like Macromedia don't normally use...
August 3, 2002
Here's a link to the Radio-native way of making a blogroll: Blogrolls are a collection of links on the home page of a weblog that point to sites that are somehow related to yours. They serve several purposes, they direct readers to the sites that are important to you, and serve...
Chaord Everywhere I Look caught this citation in the Economist (every thinking liberal's favorite noninsane conservative news voice). Funny that they thought bOing bOing was a tech blog, though. Daryl questions the characterization of blogs as the "anti-newspaper": I disagree. I think blogs are the anti-advertisement. Ads are always trying to...
Without the equivalent of autodial, I've been trying to remember to check MeFi each day around noon to see if the 20-a-day signups had yet been exhausted. Each day I've been too late, till today. Hurray for Saturday....
Daniel P½dua has come up with a way to facilitate geographical (and other keyword) searching for blogs. He calls it blogChalking (partly inspired by the popular warchalking meme of the moment). I've added the icon: to my navigation panel and the applicable keywords to my META tags in the HEAD of...
CNet's Blog Populi article from April, 2002, sports another of these feature-comparison charts (a less thorough overview than elsewhere, but easier to read. They ruled out covering MovableType (which I'll be comparing to Radio next week) citing the difficulty of installation for non-technical folk and the fact that it requires a...
Playing around with my site design today, I modified the Salon logo from the default Salon Blogs banner so that it looks like this: If you feel like using it, drag this graphic into your www/images/ folder (or right-click on it—click and hold with a Mac—and save it to that folder)....
August 2, 2002
I suppose Salon Blogs are to TableTalk as this new MSNBC blogspace will be to their bulletin boards (doubt they're really "chat rooms" as that distinction is lost on most journalists): Blog's the word at MSNBC.com. The news site will introduce a new Web logs section by the end of August,...
x-posted from bodega: Hey, I've finally gotten with the program and started feeding CDs into my 'puter. I think what prompted it is that I went through my roughly 600 non-bootleg CDs and chose about 50 to sell back to record stores. Bill and Jeff were polite when we talked about...
I have been plagued by a telemarketing firm called Heritage Publishing. Their schtick is progressive and bleeding-heart (missing-children type) charities. It was only for a while when B and I had Pacbell's "Privacy Manager" on our phone that I caught on to the fact that so many of these calls on...
It's hard to track earliest citation on the Web, at least using Google. I suppose the blog indexes, with all the date stamping, might do a better job. I'll see if Blogdex is searchable again, and Daypop. Meanwhile, ">the earliest Usenet cite I could find by its very nature testifies to...
Bastard stepchild of the buddy list and the old link-exchange, with intimations of what I'm reading and who I think you should be reading, blogrolls are usually lists of recommended or favorite blogs, sometime in multiple categories, usually listed in the navigation panel of a blog, when it has one. Blogrolling.com...
new at bodega: brown bananas, rageboy flowcharts, and iTunes. [xian] [Ugh, I hate the way LiveJournal renders my URLs in its RSS feed. It defaults to a hit on their database with their look-and-feel instead of the direct day link I manually substituted above that gets my fonts and colors, and...
Finding what looks like a PyRad .jsp URL in my referer log, I assume I've used one of my 8000 impressions. It's too late to welcome that ad follower but welcome! to thet next. Trying to catch my add on the blogger page, I found this one instead. I love the...
It's interesting to look at who's been googlin' at my door. My referer logs each day list about 5-7 hits from google searches. They've included so far today: blogistan salon blogistan blogistan salon livejournal templates templates livejournal php mysql how to bloggers where to find lj livejournal templates Anyway, I've started...
If you want edit or tweak the various templates that most blog programs use to render web pages from the content stored in their databases, consider using a third-party web design tool. Even if you prefer to work directly with code, an editor such as BB Edit or HomeSite (or TextEdit...
Blunt Force Trauma cites this Seattle Times article on corporate blogging....
Rick Klau links to thedownsideofknowledgemanagement.com, regarding the hurdles involved in using blogs for KM (or "knowledge sharing"), adding: In any event, I like the recognition that there's more to KM than just software - that unless someone is committed, responsible and incented to make the thing work, it will be hard...
August 1, 2002
High-larious or Sad? You Decide [xian]...
Not that Rebecca Blood needs any more links from me, but as I start to put together a blogging directory, some choices for the online library are obvious, such as Rebecca's Weblog History essay....
Just stumbled across this post in Mark Bernstein's blog about the differences between foreground and background material in blog writing: Background material forms part of the weblog gift economy. Blogrolls, gift lists, book notes, music links -- none of these are compelling in isolation, but together the form a base for...
The indefatigable dws has launched a dynamic Radio FAQ channel. To participate, he says, start a RadioQuestions channel on your blog and tell him about it. He's aggregating the questions, answering them when he can, and other wise putting out word so that others can answer what's left. My first question...
Jerry would have turned 60 today. [xian]...
When I get a moment I'd like to discuss the issue of collaboration, whether through team posting as Blogger permits or through collaborative weblogs such as Metafilter, Slashdot, and Plastic. (It amused me that some of the Slashdot folks object to the popularity of blogging without realizing that their own home...
This morning Radio is stripping the headings off my posts (probably messing up the mirror too), and generating this error: [Macro error: The file "08" wasn't found.] Guessing that this has something to do with the change of month and the fact that Radio's been running continually on my desktop through...
bOing bOing features a pointer today to the "Cult of the Dead Cow" hax0r blog. Find out how Rush Limbaugh avoided service in Vietnam! Say, don't these guys have a book deal with No Starch?...
Scripting News reports that Burning Bird is back. This may be a record for shortest "I quit" hiatus. What I find interesting is that we can become prisoners of our habits, good and bad. BB listed several reasons why she has resumed blogging and quoted from a piece of advice she...