« May 2003 | Main | July 2003 »
Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - AOL Time
Dan Gillmor on AOL TW using Time magazine for self-promotion purposes. The idea of anyone in the Silicon Valley tech press making this sort of accusation is pot and kettlism of a high order. Can you say "Industry Standard?"
Jorn Barger's Bloomsday page.
The Joyce Centre's.
Ireland.com's site
Good Lord, next year will be the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday. May have to go to Dublin for that one.
Bruce Eckel's MindView, Inc: 6-12-03 The Computer Job Economy
Bruce Eckel discussing future IT employment prospects, the upshot being that things are bad but not as bad as you think and probably still tending towards growth. That aside, what struck me about this passage as I read it was what a change it was from the hype I see on most weblogs these days. It's not the usual overblown extreme rhetoric; it's a professional making levelheaded evaluations of a technology based on practical experience. It was good to be reminded that sort of thing does still actually happen in this business. I for one am rapidly approaching the point where I never want to hear "RSS" again.
tima thinking outloud. > A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.
More on the "comments crisis:"
I am increasingly seeing this elitist attitude from the ostensibly useful members of the "core group." The productive, worthwhile group must be defended from those who would seek to "derail" them. Thus editing and, by extension, outright deletion of their comments is justified. This is the only way to avoid the excesses of Usenet and the "cesspool" of Slashdot with all their messy, democratic, inefficient voices. Finally, conversations can be sanitized, marked off as unproductive, tightly controlled. Dissent can be neatly stigmatized and distilled to a CSS selector.
Now we have Mark Pilgrim stating in his new comments "policy" that his sphere of control over comments extends to trackback pings, since they "are remote comments and are subject to these same rules." No flames even on your own weblog, if they ping back to mine. No links for you!
What bothers me about this is the air of predestination about it all. The core group is the core group and that is that. It's a power law distribution - you can't fight that. It's nature. It's as inevitable as science. The core group is naturally deserving, since it arises out of a meritocracy, which is intrinsically unequal.
The strange logical end of all this is that those of us not in the core group become little more than advertisement and link fodder for the core. What is your purpose? Leave "constructive" comments and provide a steady stream of inbound links.
If a weblog is not a democracy, as has been stated in several comments I have seen, then how is it moving us towards the "emergent democracy" its proponents tout so often?
I am troubled by all this.
Reading a bunch of blogs today, where we are presented with edited comments as an expression of property rights, invitation-only mailing lists run by PR firms (yes, yes, I know, whiny and envious,) mean-spirited stories of drunken neighbors, plus the usual careerist condemnations of big-J journalism couched in revolutionary bullshit language, it occurs to me that what we really need is to have Lester Bangs to come back from the dead and start a blog.
Yahoo! News - Top New York Times Editors Resign Amid Scandal
To be expected, I guess, but somehow still surprising. How much this will change the institutional culture at the Times remains to be seen. This is also hardly the end of it; there's going to be fallout from this for a while, which will undoubtedly have far-reaching effects on the paper. It would be a good thing if this meant an end to what sounds like what was a very frustrating star-system for the majority of the editorial staff at the Times.
You'd also think that Slate, given the various sharks they've had gleefully circling the story, would be all over this. But nary a mention. Only thing I can see different is an error in their browser detection code on the home page.
Meanwhile, over at MeFi, they're debating whether blogs had anything to do with forcing Raines' resignation. I'm sure they added fuel to the firestorm, but I don't know if they're the primary motivation. Someone on that page compares this situation to the Trent Lott debacle, but I'm not sure that holds; it's not like this story was even close to going away and needed someone to keep it alive.
I'll be interested to hear more about this. How exactly will it be implemented? Off the top of my head, it sounds like checking to see if the referrer is registered with weblogs.com. I guess this is a good as an arbiter as any, though it raises gatekeeper issues I don't know that I'm entirely comfortable with. OTOH, since I am just speculating, i could be talking through my hat. I'll be interested to see how it shakes out.
Disclaimer: I was a NY Times employee, on the production side, from 1996-1999.
OK, I've looked everywhere I can think of and I cannot figure this one out.
What would make Firebird running on Win 2K pop up an alert with what looks like the form URL just about every time I click a submit button? This seems to happen when there's javascript involved in the form, and sometimes after I dismiss the alert, the action still gets posted, sometimes not. Repeated clicking can sometimes get the action to go through, sometimes not; I haven't seen a recognizable pattern. I've done a Google search, read over the prefs.js and user.js file, and haven't been able to dig up anything that seems relevant to the problem. It's very annoying. I unfortunately can't remember when exactly it started happening, because I've been using my iBook at work for a while and Safari didn't give me this trouble. Any light anyone could shed on this would be much appreciated.
Be careful with what you write | Metafilter
Via Mefi and the Times, a West Palm Beach circuit court judge is forbidding a man named Tucker Max to write about Katy Johnson, a former Miss Vermont, on his website. He cannot even mention her name or link to her website. Though at least for the time being you can see Google's cache of the page in question here. I don't see how the judge can arrive at this judgement - it's a clear First Amendment issue. If Max is publishing inaccurate information then Ms. Johnson has recourse to a libel suit against him. I am not defending this guy - he appears to be a misogynist alcoholic frat boy. But I am defending his right to write about it. Very weird situation.
F.C.C. Votes to Relax Rules Limiting Media Ownership
Welcome to All Rupert All the Time.