« April 2006 | Main | June 2006 »

May 31, 2006

At least they left the foie gras out of it

Megnut: Wondering how come it's so expensive to go organic?

Grist Magazine tells you why, but they can't resist slipping in some advice at the end with, "You know, going veggie is a very useful, highly effective environmental step. And it can be cheaper than going organic." I didn't like that.

The truth is often unpleasant.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Posted by John at 1:15 PM |

May 17, 2006

Journalism is doomed

A sop to lazy tech journalists:

But to mention the existence and subsequent failure of all these previous iTunes/iPod killers would be to provide context, and as a useful tool for understanding the value and worth of news, context is something journalists are very careful to not include in their stories.

1. The article says "challenge" iTunes. Nowhere do we get 'iTunes doomed', except in your hysteria. As a matter of fact, the people quoted in the article take great pains to avoid overreaching claims.

2. WRT journalism, give it a rest. What the "tech press" never gets is that the rest of journalism is under no obligation to practice the same sort of crony-ridden, undisclosed relationship-fostering, press-release regurgitating, back-scratching horseshit that passes for "reporting" on the tech beat. Sorry.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Posted by John at 12:01 PM |

May 16, 2006

How humane is dead?

SUSTAINABLE TABLE BLOG:

The point is: ask. Know where your meal comes from despite what the menu, newspaper review, or grocery store billboard says. More and more restaurants and retailers are going to want to cash in on the growing sustainable food movement, so chances are this kind of mislabeling will grow with it.

This sort of "concern" among foodies regarding terms like "free-range" vs "free-roam" is how they can cash in on the "growing sustainable food movement." Eating meat is not sustainable. Fully a third of the world's fossil fuel production goes towards animal production. So how do you get around this? Talk about things like "humane slaughter" and "factory farms" when in the end, you're still guilty of the ultimate cruelty, no matter how many days the chicken spent "on the outside."

Posted by John at 10:46 PM |

High-fructose attention syrup

The attention surplus and relevance deficit:

I disagree. I don’t have an attention deficit. I have an attention surplus. I have way too much attention devoted to stuff I don’t care about: billboards intruding on every view, ads I don’t care about, crappy content, emails I never asked for, boring conversations. Oh, from my perspective, I have plenty of attention to share. From a marketer’s perspective, they are the ones suffering from an attention deficit — a shortage of my attention. But that’s their issue, not mine.


What I’m really suffering from is a relevance deficit. I want the means to discover and use the content I find interesting and good, the conversations I find worthwhile, the ads that help me get what I want to get, the emails that are worth answering.

Calvinist much?

Technorati Tags: , ,

Posted by John at 4:07 PM |

May 15, 2006

Who's this Mort guy?

Emacs Est Mort, Vive Le TextMate! - O'Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog:

The idea is so simple that it borders on genius. Every function in TextMate is bound not only to a key combination, but also to a context. cmd-R may reload the current browser when editing an HTML document, but it compiles and runs your program when editing ObjC files. Depending on the context (which file is loaded), the same key combination (cmd-R) performs different functions.
So far, this is not new — Emacs supports something akin to this using hooks to load minor modes for certain file extensions. But TextMate makes it revolutionary by increasing granularity. Not only are key combinations sensitive to what types of files are loaded, they are also aware of language grammar.

Funny how an "avid Emacs user since college" missed that whole mode-keymap thing. Musta been that it wasn't called a "context" and weren't sporting as much HIG chrome as you can handle, baby! Oh YEAH!

Then a bit later, we get why:

Don’t get me wrong, being fluent in a programing language from 1958 gets me plenty of trim at parties. But apart from its outdated syntax and the fact that Emacs is the only reason I ever have to dust off my lambda calculus hat anymore, Lisp is just not well-suited to the task of munging text. And what do you to all day in a text editor? Munge text! So why use Lisp as the backbone of your editor when a modern scripting language like, say, perl makes so much more sense?

That lisp is SQUARESVILLE, Daddy-o! That's why The O'Reilly Group Media Interactive 2.0 doesn't publish any books on it, man! All the hip kids 'n' kittens are using that hot new scripting language called...(wait for it).. perl.

TextMate is a fine editor. I use it sometimes myself. But Jesus, I hope we're not going to see it develop its own branch of "BBEdit Historical Myopia," where those who are ignorant of editor feature history are doomed to think their favorite program invented it.


Technorati Tags: , ,

Posted by John at 4:43 PM | | Comments (1)

And he should know

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Exception makes rule:

And some big media will disappear noticed but frankly unmissed as well. Especially the snotty ones.

Mr. Pot, Mr. Kettle is on line two about the black project.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Posted by John at 12:15 PM |

May 9, 2006

Die, puny influentials.

The Influentials, "the people whose ideas, power, and sheer will are changing New York" (kottke.org):

No offense to anyone who made the list, but NYC is unsurprisingly light on technology.

Translation: How come I'm not on this list?

Technorati Tags: ,

Posted by John at 9:32 AM |

May 8, 2006

Mixed nuts

The last mix will include less marketing:

The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don't need advertising to make them.
The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don't need marketing to make Intention Markets.

This kind of thing is the economic equivalent of "humane slaughter" - it's a lie you tell yourself to ameliorate the cognitive dissonance underneath. At base it's still all about creating unnecessary desires disguised as needs. This just tries to call it a "conversation" rather than a mugging.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Posted by John at 2:56 PM | | Comments (3)

May 4, 2006

What's this We, pal?

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » We Media, continued:

In other words, he’s asking whether citizens’ media is becoming a proxy for civic participation. I’m not sure voting is the only gauge of civic engagement; it’s an important one, but it’s not the only way to participate.

And besides, you can't monetize it in any significant way. Not only that, pretty much anybody can vote. Definitely not So-called A-Pop-U-List.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Posted by John at 9:35 AM |