Just noticed today that Ev's hiatus was remarkably short. A new design for his blog includes a disclaimer that he is not speaking for his employer. Anyway, as we speculated here a few days ago, Google is indeed targeting ads on Blogspot pages. Makes sense.
9:21:08 PM 
say what []
The original concept for memewatch involved a lot more than me just blogging trends, fads, and popular terms of expression. I was hoping to do some analysis of the rise and fall of expressions in various net domains. (The example I always pitched people was tracking the appearance of the phrase "six degrees of kevin bacon" month by month through usenet in the late '90s.) I wasn't sure how to do this automatically, but I figured it could be graphed and people could come in and give search terms and get them graphed.
For a while we had a mailing list but it was going nowhere. Since then the Lycos 50 and Google Zeitgeist and Tensegrity's zeitgeist page and Daypop and Blogdex and Blogpop and Technorati and Lafayette all purport to notice what words are hot online in speech on any given day. (I should of course be making a sidebar or link list with sites like that, if I'm not going to do the work myself, but I'm too lazyweb to even do that yet.)
So now the metameme of the moment is word bursts. Some scientist publishes something, the New Yorker writes about an artwork version of echelon, and Daypop follows its recent addition of a blogrank listing (we're number 83!) with a page called Daypop Top Word Bursts. [UPDATE: It appears that this blog is on that list today, thanks once again to the reverse cowgirl, for getting me to use word No. 18 in today's burst, "beaver."]
As usual, Phil Gyford beat everyone to the punch.
categories: x-syndicate
4:17:21 PM say what []
On November 22, last year, I wrote:
I love J.Ro's weblog ... but sometimes his inside-the-company voice gets distracting. I was picturing him commenting on NASA's new space planes, by posting something like: "Those bureaucrats are crazy building a new round of smaller space shuttles. What they really need is a Manila server and just give all the astronauts Radio weblogs and bang, zoom[~] off to the moon!"
Today, John writes:
Today, NASA released details of the e-mail exchanges (that occured days before the failed re-entry of STS-107) between NASA engineers on whether the shuttle would come apart on re-entry. In my view, if NASA was using weblogs throughout on their organization's Intranet, it would have helped surface the concerns of these smart engineers. In reality, the relevant decision makers were operating in a vaccum. A simple Intranet search on "wing or wheel well damage" before making the decision to recover the vehicle would have pulled up a plethora of interesting information and viewpoints that weren't considered.
categories: metablog
4:12:38 PM say what []
Here's a neat trick, for those of you using Safari. If you want to see the debug menu (which includes goodies like a DOM tree viewer and a "snippet viewer", which lets you take a snippet of HTML and view it as Safari will render it, sort of like a split-screen WYSIWYG editor) just shut down Safari, open up Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
And start Safari again. To turn it off again, run the same command with a 0 instead of a 1.
categories: fireweaver
8:25:03 AM say what []
