not much going on, other than running 12 miles. time for ice

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."