even though i've never been particularly fond of the mental effort required, i'm pondering adding titles to posts.

at the risk of being accused of linkslutting top 40 news, i think most people are thinking small about audioblogger in particular and audio blogging in general. rather than audio posting the equivalent of what you ate for breakfast, i think audiblefrequency is a fantastic glimpse at what can happen when you complement a blog with audio.

PBSKids: Talking with children about Fred Rogers' death :

"In this time of great sadness about Fred Rogers' death, we understand that parents may be concerned about how to approach the Mister Rogers' Neighborhood series and our Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Website with their children. We here at Family Communications have given this a great deal of thought and have talked with our colleagues in child development and mental health. We'd like to share our thoughts with you."

[ via dangerousmeta ]

i don't see "Google's search for new ad revenue" at any of the usual suspects , but i'm guessing that won't last long:

"Its new Content-Targeted Advertising program takes the idea a step further. According to a promotional page for the program, advertisers can now also have their AdWords ads placed on relevant pages of Google partner sites, including HowStuffWorks, Weather Underground and Blogger, whose parent company, Pyra Networks, was acquired by Google last week. The pages on which the ads appear are tied to the keywords associated with the sponsored links. The promo page says Google plans to sign up other sites to display the Content-Targeted Advertising."

surprise! no squishy value proposition here. the first visible result of the blogger acquisition fits well as a product line extension to their current advertising programs. i'd have been disappointed if it had been anything else.

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments :

"People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it."

[ via langreiter ]

How to block spambots, ban spybots, and tell unwanted robots to go to hell :

"Some will say that the Internet is a public place, and if I don't want something abused, I shouldn't put it on the Internet. Well, that's true. It is also true that if I don't want to get mugged, I shouldn't leave my house, and if I don't want calls from telemarketers, I shouldn't have a phone. But I like leaving my house, I like having a phone, and I like having this web site. I fight back against telemarketers who abuse my phone (you can too), and now I'm fighting back against robots who abuse my web site."

from the man-on-the-street dept. garret p vreeland on the news that "Nuke Lab Can't Keep Snoops Out" :

"not again. this chucklehead's joking, right? i mean, you visit a ghost town, you don't expect the sheriff to show up. "black operations" ... pfft. this area hasn't been in use since 1952 [except for relatively low-level science experiments and bacteriological releases]. his own pictures illustrated the abandonment of the site. your grandmother could walk in, if she cared to glow in the dark afterwards. since it was snowing, i'd wager the guard had tucked his gun and electronic gear under his coat;"

from the shooting-fish-at-the-beta-software-barrel dept. the reviews are in for three degrees and they're much more fun to read than actually going through the process of installing the software, which is a mute point for me since i the only copy of xp i own came with virtual pc which is on my ibook in some kind of apple repair alternate universe. but i digress.

i strongly suspect that microsoft is on to something with three degrees , but that doesn't mean it's not fun to harangue them as they give us a glimpse of the lengths to which microsoft would like to fiddle with everyone's computer:

"It's part of a worrying trend MS have been displaying recently that I'll call (for want of something wittier) feature-creep-away. Version 7.0 of Windows Media Player (a.k.a The Huge Blue Useless One) removed the ability to install .mov support. Now the latest version has removed streaming MP3 and AVI support (i.e. play during download). The lockdown has started. It's more than just "Trusted Computing"; they're trying to be Apple '90."

say what you want, i give them credit for putting up message boards for all the world to fawn over the ugly warts of an early release, although it looks like they might need to work on polishing their support skills in the coming weeks:

"Re: Messed up my internet
Posted: 24 Feb 2003 07:51 PM
this is so gay. my computer's network settings are completely screwed up. thank you three degrees team. i can't blame microsoft completely on this one. i'd have thought a group of young bright kids from princeton, harvard, etc could atleast respond to my messages or email. im hoping to hear something from them before the morning, hopefully something that could undo everything. "

we got the results back from kris' first skin cancer tests and they are negative, which is a huge relief. she still has a few more moles to be removed but these results were for one of the more abnormal looking ones, so we're very happy.

happy belated fifth birthday to mozilla . five years. in grumpy old man voice: when i was young, we didn't have nuttin'. we didn't have no mozilla or galeon or safari. it was a big black abyss filled with non-standards compliant html.

i know this is getting tired, but i don't care if the new york times buys into the "deal may freshen up google's links" theory - i'm still not having any of it and the rationale is extremely quishy technically and value propositiony. google can certainly handle polling the number of blogs in question. maybe, just maybe you could make the argument that it might be rude for google to poll frequently updated sites as frequently as might be required to instantaneously know what's in the inner folds of the blogmind, but that ignores the fact that the value proposition of knowing the instantaneous state of the blogmind is nonexistent [ and besides it'd be trivial for them to use or create something like changes.xml as per weblogs.com ].

i'm talking real value here, not some flim-flammy academic argument about meme propogation. nope. google is run by smart people interested in increasing revenue for things that people will pay them for. i still think the fresh links theory is a secondary benefit.

"A music industry case study" claims that a member of a 4 person band which sells 500,000 copies of an album [ sic ] can except to pull in the a whopping $40,477.25, thanks to recording industry contractual math.

this reminds me of an anectode from steve albini which highlights the fun and games you have to go through on the road to modern music riches:

"Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke."

interesting. jim "newshour" lehrer apparently showed up at the dc blog meetup to interview the participants.

burningbird is on fire [sorry] with a screed that has a title that virtually guarantees it will rocket up the daypop top 40 - Google is not God, Webloggers are not Capital-J Journalists, the only thing emerging is my fear of war, and a headache :

"When it comes to world news and opinion, he or she who gets the most links, wins in the world of weblogging. Those with the pareto charts and your esoteric algorithims of popularity tend to prove this out. According to the charts, rather than a new form of connectivity, we're really just another instance typical of medieval community: with the indifferent, smug supremacy of the elite at the top and rule by the mob at the bottom (we know about the viablity of mob rule for fair and ethical treatment of either person or subject).

Within this view, occasionally the mob and the elite might join forces, briefly, and we might help with a story, such as Trent Lott and his big mouth. For the most part, though, we're a bunch of editorialists without much concern for research, fact checking, or accuracy."

i'm probably being a dolt, but i don't understand the analysis that google bought pyra/blogger to improve it's search results:

" Cleveland said Google's acquisition of Pyra would, quite simply, help Google create a more accurate search engine by adding rich new sources of data gleaned from weblogs.

The secret, Cleveland said, is in the scores of links webloggers create every day to content on the Web. :

the article cites a credible source, but i'm still not getting it. i don't understand what google gets with cozier access to blogger's database that it couldn't get by indexing pages by themselves. most reports indicate that there are "only" 200,000 frequently updated blogger blogs and presumably only a smallish percentage of those are linking to things that could help google improve its search results. these are all numbers that google should handle without breaking a sweat.

sure it might get a better feel for when exactly a blog gets updated by having access to the database, but it seems like there are ways around this using a variety of algorithms.

if you're keeping track, i ran 11 miles today. hooohaaaaaah!

d'oh! bekkers doesn't work at groove , but he does own a guitar so maybe bekkers, burkhardt and pope will be playing in your town soon.

maybe they'd let me open for them. time to replace the crusty strings on my 1975 martin d35 . it's hard to believe she's almost 30 years old. all these years and she's still got the best tone i've ever heard. not that i'm biased or anything.

nearly everyday i look towards the groove constellation of links in my "blogroll" and laugh a little laugh to myself when i see bekkers , burkhardt and pope . rather than work at groove , i think they need to form a prog rock band named "bekkers, burkhardt and pope" and start touring with king crimson.

while certainly an unscientific poll, rebecca asks a .mil reader for a view of the situation with Iraq from where he sits - and gets a surprise:

"...I'll say that those that I know of and work with in the base operations and training communities view Iraq as an enormous waste of time, money and resources. We're all praying that it gets put off past the summer, so that the funds for our projects aren't sucked back into the black hole that is Desert Storm II or whatever they're calling it. The political leadership is not held in esteem. No one is planning on them being around past 20 January 2005."

the video footage of the nightclub fire is absolutely horrifying. it's obvious that there will be louder calls for night club regulation, but will it really do any good?

every wondered about the difference between a user agent and a robot? or whether the "Offline Web Pages" feature of Internet Explorer makes it more like a robot or a user agent? i thought you did. watch the debate ensue as the "newsmonster cometh".

Opportunities for Covad, Earthlink in FCC Decision:

"The knowledge you're to die in the morning is a great motivator."

despite the fact that i don't actually live in chicago, i infiltrated the chicago blogger meetup with matt [ hmmm. hint ] and had the opportunity to meet leigh , andrew and paul , while unsuspectingly drinking the world's most expensive beer on the planet courtesy of dave and buster . it's always good to engage in some old school conversatin', made all the more fun when people smile and tolerate my obtuse segues.

well, alrighty then. i'm obscure, but interesting. story of my life.

for whatever reason, coffee has been not treating me kindly lately, so i've been drinking more tea. i'm an unwashed heathen when it comes to teas, which is why i'm happy to see caterina's tea recommendations.

not that i'm trying to turn this into all-bloggle-all-the-time, but it's interesting to note that search engine watch is also talking about the bloggle geolocation services that i was stammering on about yesterday - i forgot about the winner of the programming contest:

"A recent trend with weblogs has been geolocation: publishing the coordinates of the blog author. Last year's Google Programming Contest winner created a geographic search program that enables users to search for web pages within a specified geographic area."

i'm sure he's busy and everything, but isn't it ironic that ev has gone offline?

so, it turns out that google's founders originally aspired to build a web site annotation system :

""It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank."

obviously this is interesting in light of their purchase of blogger, but take it a step further and throw in geographic information. imagine, if you will, that blogger suddenly supports a geourl -like mechanism for embedding geographic data in a blog or even individual posts, similar in style to the movabletype geourl plugin. imagine if google takes advantage of that information to give you pageranked posts and advertising about locations. they already give you a map when you search for an address. it's the next logical step in geo-location services and pagerank minimizes the signal-to-noise issues that will happen when everyone and their brother is annotation their neighborhood.

maybe i won't need to work on the geourl foaf filter.

this thought experiment highlights an important role that blogger will play in future - rightly or wrongly it will be in a position to set de facto standards that google can take advantage of.

wierd. i happened upon jd lasica's article on rss feeds, "news that comes to you" and discovered that the vast wasteland is "obscure":

"Ehud Lamm, a professor at the Open University of Israel, subscribes to 120 feeds and checks his news aggregator three to five times a day. He cherry-picks from a variety of feeds: foreign news (International Herald Tribune, BBC), bloggers (InstaPundit, Scripting News), obscure sites like Snowdeal.org, and sites that plumb niche subjects like linguistics and sociology."

i guess i've been called worse. interestingly, even though i thought i've been blogging for all these years, i guess i'm not really a blogger. hi. ho.

after wading through scads of cruft in the comments on anil's thoughts on the google/pyra thing, bill lazar hits the nail solidly and squarely on the head, at least for the corporate side of things:

"The one thing all the commentary so far is focused on are the effect on personal blogs and Google's current provision of all 'personal' services at no charge.

But what no one has mmentioned, and may really be the key, is that Pyra has/is about to have a version of Blogger written more or less completely in Java that can be deployed on any server. The Globo deal was just the tip of the iceberg, they (Ev and Jason) wanted to sell this into corporations for a few $k per server. Combine that with Google search appliance and maybe another odd piece or two and you have a very sophisticated, valuable Intranet addition."

on the general consumer side, my bet is that news.blogger.com is going to stop 404ing real soon now - the resurrection of the moreover/blogger newsblogger project is a certainty.

sweet jesus. Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time. and it's not even april 1st. congratulations to ev and all the other pyrates. this is big news.

yeehaaaaaw! i ran 10 miles today! and my leg joint is still connected to my hip joint :-)

more signs that my unending faith in the general goodness of humanity is not pollyannish:

"D.C. police released a startling surveillance tape yesterday that shows a daylight killing at a Northeast Washington gas station and witnesses doing nothing to report the crime or tend to the victim as he lay bleeding on the concrete."

Is the world that much different than when you were young?

" Or are you just older and (hopefully) wiser and are just getting to see things through a different set of eyes?

Now that we seem to be on the brink of a massive war, we are hearing talks about nukes, warnings of biological and chemical attacks and terrorist threat levels. These are things that don't seem to fit in to well with what my vision of the world was when I was young."

i talked with apple today. it looks like the ibook is getting yet another logic board and a new internal anntena. sigh

i almost missed the fact that mozilla 1.3b was released a few days ago with lots of niceties, including nearly complete junk-mail classification and a mind boggling number of mozilla's preference settings is now editable by typing about:config in the location bar. good stuff.

i had no idea that sending drunken pictures of yourself was the new, new thing with camera phones. in any case, "photo messaging tries to rival txt" does raise some interesting points. i think in one-to-one scenarios that the novelty of simply shooting pictures will always be secondary in popularity to to texting. it's the power of conversation. i've been wrong before, but i don't think contrived efforts to develop a "visual language" for camera phones are going anywhere:

"Vodafone has come up with The Little Book of Picture Messaging, which is full of ideas for how everyday objects can become significant messages.

So a door knob indicates an idiot, the back of a bus an ugly date, a thumb says "I can't come out tonight" and ice cubes are shorthand for cool. "

one-to-many scenarios might be a little different. i like what mena is doing with dollarshort and "moblog" photos in that they add context and feeling to the site as a whole.

if i were witty enough and had enough time, i'd like to believe i could write a rant about that dumb-ass levi's buffalo stampede commercial similar to "i've got this great new idea for a bold new ad" :

"So these bison are tearing the place up, there are like a gazillion of them. And glass is breaking and things are crumbling, you know, it's a disaster. It's chaos. It's a metaphor for the world we live in, you know. And the people watching the commercial are like, get out of the way, you two pretty people! The huge herd of bison are headed straight for Mr. and Ms. Disaffected, and they show no signs of slowing or stopping to graze."

[ via rick klau ]

iScrobbler :

"iScrobbler is an application that creates a simple menu extra that submits your "currently playing" info from iTunes to AudioScrobbler. AudioScrobbler is a project similar to the CDNow project that suggests music you might like based on what other people are listening to. The difference is that while CDNow makes suggestions based on what people buy, AudioScrobbler makes suggestions based on what people are actually listening to."

[ via boingboing ]

i'm probably going to regret revealing my stupidity right after i hit the publish button, but for the life of me i can't figure out how to get jwz's webcollage to create a nice image map with links like he has running . i just get a static image. prolly something dopey.

i guess the real question is whether or not john pointdexter has a total information awareness thong.

ross mayfield serves up a great post on "power laws, weblogs, and inequality" that's filled with link love and value-added commentary:

"Given the ubiquity of power law distributions, asking whether there is inequality in the weblog world (or indeed almost any social system) is the wrong question, since the answer will always be yes. The question to ask is "Is the inequality fair?" Four things suggest that the current inequality is mostly fair."

2003 is conspiring to be as full of unwanted surprises as 2002. kris went in for the first in a series of doctors visits to have moles removed that show signs of possible skin cancer.

there's not much to do but wait about a week for the results of the lab tests.

maybe a few of you will think happy thoughts for kris and i over the next few weeks.

Presentation: A Comparison of Service-Oriented, Resource-Oriented, and Object-Oriented Architecture Styles :

"This talk compares and contrasts the three common software architecture styles used in distributed systems and XML Web Services. In particular, the key differences between traditional SOAP and REST styles are explored. Guidelines are presented on which style is most applicable for certain application scenarios, and when a combination of styles is necessary."

[ via afroginthevalley ]

Shipping the prototype :

"Computers are getting faster and platforms are getting smarter, but the human brain is on a very different upgrade cycle. We need to keep finding ways to help programmers pack more software behavior into fewer lines of code."

sounds good, but there's always a sense of diminishing returns, as evidenced by the double-edged sword known as the one-liner .

maximal behavior. minimal lineage. and usually a debugging nightmare.

a few days ago mark pilgrim created a bit of a hullabaloo by taking kevin burton to task for a variety of issues. i'm not really interested in the specifics of the argument or to who was "right" or "wrong", but i do think a few of mark's comments regarding kellan's take on the issues highlight an important aspect of the "conversational" nature of blogging [ or lack thereof, depending on your perspective ]:

"Another problem is that I think we each end up constructing our own private dialect after a while. I was going to say "I need to write more about lighthouses", until I realized that that probably wouldn't make the slightest bit of sense to you or your readers. (It's explained in that previous link.) After writing publicly for a while, you begin to develop these catchphrases or abbreviations for concepts you've already worked out, positions you've previously taken, things you've previously written. You write new stuff and refer to these catchphrases, forgetting that the audience of any given post is mostly new and doesn't get the reference.

This bugs the hell out of me all the time whenever I read Winer. He's been writing publicly, continuously, for like 8 years; he's become his own little Darmok (which is itself an obscure Star Trek reference), full of references so familiar to him that he doesn't bother to explain them anymore, relying on a shared context that doesn't exist."

yeeeeehaaaaaw! i ran 8 miles today .

is there a marathon in my future? perhaps.

please tell me that this is a case of lies, damn lies and statistics. please tell me that a recent poll which determined that forty-four percent of Americans believe that most or some of the hijackers were iraqi is just a result of questionnaire bias.

i know it's fashionable to remark on the general dumbness of the american public, but we can't really be that collectively dumb, can we? [ via steven berlin johnson ]

sometimes life is unspeakably cruel.

after attempting to have children for some time, including a miscarriage, a couple that kris and i know gave birth to a severely disabled baby girl last night.

today they learned that she will likely not live to see her first birthday.

i really don't have the capacity to come close to understanding what they must be going through. in one of life's horrendous ironies, the couple has dedicated their lives to serving the disabled and their families.

my heart goes out to them in what will undoubtably be the most difficult and trying year that any parent should endure.

adina levin expands on the etiquette of friendship declaration and makes a simple, but powerful observation regarding digital insecurity and group-forming :

"Kellan, Snowdeal, deus_x, and raster write about digital insecurity -- the anxiety you feel about asking a colleague to be your "friend" or "contact" on Ryze and similar systems.

The reason is that there is no context for asking. The question doesn't correspond to a social form in real life."

i also agree with her that rules for formalizing types of relationships aren't going to help the problem:

"I don't think we need better FOAF metadata descriptions of the nuances of relationship. "I have now moved Bob from the category of FriendlyAquaintance to ModeratelyGoodFriend". Instead, we need better groupforming mechanisms, so people can become friends naturally."

i think that in a small way, this is precisely what mark pilgrim has done by simple offering an open invitation to be his foaf friend:

"If you have a FOAF file (or this post inspires you to make a FOAF file, using the FOAF-a-matic), please email me at f8dy@diveintomark.org so I can add you to my FOAF profile. Any friend of FOAF is a friend of mine."

"when ibooks attack!" sounds depressingly familiar:

"As some of you may know I've had somed issues with my previous ibook. Well during the huge icestorm that left us without power, cable (internet), and telephone I and one of the folks staying with us to keep warm decided to take a peek inside the old ibook.

*Before going into a rage please note that this thing has had the motherboard/logicboard replaced twice and blew a third time prior to being replaced outright. It does not work reliably at all! "

great. at least there's hope that i can get a replacement rather than just sending it in every month.

the ibook is back in the shop. again.

congratulations, apple. you now have the dubious distinction of producing the most unreliable piece of hardware i've ever owned. ever. you should be proud. this is not meant to be an unfounded flame. it's an objective fact.

i've owned loads and loads of hardware and yours is the worst. and i will note for the record that two friends have also returned and replaced their ibooks due to a variety of problems, so it's not like i'm a freakish anomaly.

i'm fairly certain that i'm the last to know - writetheweb has relaunched.

xml::rss v1.01 is out. changes:

"this is the last major release in this track. we are going to completely rewrite XML::RSS as something more extendable."