Publishing

The Too-Much-Information Superhighway

Just like my brother said he would he texted Wensday night begging... I mean really pleading just for a chance to be with me again... It took everything in me not to break shake and open my legs and heart to him again. People who think that weblogging is dominated by octogenarian white male computer geeks like me should spend some time trolling Feedster for weblog posts about cities in their area. I use the site's RSS search results to keep up with events in North Florida, wading through a ... (read more)

2005/03/20

May Diverse Be With You

The ongoing debate over weblogger diversity leaves me wishing there were better tools to find new voices making their way up the long tail. I'm too lazy to find them on my own (with the exception of new bloggers in Jacksonville and St. Augustine), so I link to the same people often -- mostly the crowd of plugged-in web technologists who I have read for years. They are admittedly a largely white and male group, but I assuage my liberal guilt by linking often to Bill Lazar, who as you may not ... (read more)

2005/03/18

Church of the Risen Elvis

Because Atlanta courtroom killer Brian Nichols was read parts of The Purpose-Driven Life by his last hostage, CNN is republishing an interview the book's author did last November on Larry King Live. The book sounds like 336 pages of merciless flogging, based on the simplistic platitudes that the author, Rev. Rick Warren, inflicts on King ("The middle letter of pride is I, and the middle letter of sin is I"). The middle letter of tripe is I, too, reverend. But I'm linking to call attention to ... (read more)

2005/03/15

Mark Pilgrim Monkeys Around

Mark Pilgrim's half-year search for a hobby that doesn't involve electricity appears to have been as fruitless as O.J. Simpson's hunt for the "real killers." Pilgrim, who's being Michael Corleoned back into blogging on IBM's new PHP weblog, has recently released a script for GreaseMonkey, the Firefox plug-in for editing web content a la autolink. The script removes everything but links on sites published by Robert Scoble. Pilgrim also has released a new open source beloved butler that does to ... (read more)

2005/03/14

By using a custom style that makes nofollow links blink lime, Phil Ringnalda can see how sites are using the attribute: I'm surprised by how little use of rel="nofollow" I'm seeing (in blinking lime) on non-blog, non-wiki sites. It seemed like such an obvious tool to use, to micro-manage how you transfer PageRank within your site and to other people. One of these days, I'm going to sue Phil for usurping the color I've chosen for my links and monkeying around with my content to make it more ... (read more)

2005/03/13

I Blog For Short

New York Times: On the Web log, or blog, he chronicles his daily life, his small victories, his disappointments, his liberal views on politics and the health of his pets. Washington Post: Mosteller's supervisors and co-workers at the Durham, N.C., Herald-Sun were well aware of her Weblog, or blog. ABC News (Australia): The lanky, sandy-haired writer composes a frequently updated Internet journal -- weblog, or blog for short ... Maine Today: Hands-on science experiments, creating an online ... (read more)

2005/03/10

Eric Goldman has expanded his thoughts on whether Google Toolbar violates copyright law: I'd be delighted to be wrong on the legal question. But we have to answer the positive question based on the law today, not as we wish it were. ... (read more)

2005/03/08

The Heritage Foundation has declared that I am a tech-elite busybody for criticizing the Google Toolbar: This week's busybody pushback is the same sort of reaction we've seen in response to every half-innovative feature that Google's offered in recent years, from its Adwords advertising program to advertising-supported Gmail. Oddly enough, the tech elite still seem to respect the company's technological prowess and innovation. They're wary, however, that Google intends to profit from these ... (read more)

2005/03/08

The First Blogger Died in 1794

The patron saint of weblogging is Harbottle Dorr, a little-known figure from early America who was writing a hyperlinked daily journal on current events two centuries before the technology existed: On January 7, 1765, in the middle of the Stamp Act controversy, Boston shopkeeper Harbottle Dorr took the current issue of the Boston Evening-Post and commented on its contents in the margins. Every week thereafter, he collected one or both of the Evening-Post or the Boston Gazette, (sometimes adding ... (read more)

2005/03/08

Java Has Me Outnumbered

I spent this afternoon working on several hundred mostly minor edits for the next printing of Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 21 Days, Fourth Edition. There was one major change: The javac compiler defaults to support for new features such as generics, autoboxing, and the data structure-crawling for loop. The default was originally to turn these off unless the -source 1.5 command-line option was employed. It's no longer necessary, though you can use -source 1.4 to turn off the new features and ... (read more)

2005/03/07

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