Sportus interruptus

Sportus interruptus: Three miles from the finish, the leader in the men's marathon was knocked to the ground by a spectator and was subsequently passed by two runners. The attacker has attempted similar stunts at other events to promote his apocalyptic religious books.

Sports · 2004/08/29 · Comment · Link

The Too-Much-Information Age?

A longtime Jacksonville weblogger normally devoted to wonky subjects like his blogging software made a frank public admission on his weblog recently: "I had an affair with another woman. My wife was a severe depressive and I was uncaring and unfeeling towards her when she needed me the most."

Metafilter · 2004/07/29 · Comment · Link

Convention Bloggers Pick Up Speed

After a slow start, the webloggers at the Democratic National Convention have managed to produce more good material this week than I have time to read.

Some scattered finds:

John Kerry solicited Ron Reagan's speech about embryonic stem-cell research, telling him that he would reverse Bush policy and allow federal funding.

A bad idea: Scanning in your convention credential.

A nice photo of youngest delegate Sarah Bender, taken by one of the college journalists from the wireless group moblog Newsplex.

At BOPNews, Stirling Newberry has been offering some of the best-produced and most interesting audioblog commentaries. That's not much of a compliment, given the rough quality of most weblog audio, but his response to Barack Obama's speech sounds like something you'd hear on NPR.

After sitting down with Sean Hannity at the Fleet Center, Matt Stoller asks a good question: Why would the Democrats invite the Republican machine into the building?

Without credit, Matt Drudge ran Tom Tomorrow's photo of Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore that was flopped and edited to hide its origins.

Suggestions for the next group to implement a special-event aggregator like ConventionBloggers.Com: There ought to be a search engine, schedule of upcoming events, and past schedule with permalinks to speech transcripts and multimedia.

Webloggers and people reading them with services like Technorati need unique URLs to material they're commenting on (such as a link to this Obama speech video and transcript).

Media liaisons working for the convention ought to be churning out an index of links to everything they'd like these overwhelmed webloggers to see during the event.

2004/07/29 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Day One in Boston: Too Conventional

My reaction to day one of the convention bloggers experiment has been similar to that of Michael Markman and B.K. DeLong: too much awe, too little blog.

I've been watching the convention with heightened interest because of the weblogger invite, but many of them appear overwhelmed by the experience and their moment of media celebrity. I hope they're not going to be stuck in a cranny of the Fleet Center with poor Net access, because they won't have a chance to do what webloggers do best: Poke around the fringes of an event finding things the mainstream media overlooks.

Contrary to what some journalists have argued, webloggers are valuable in situations like this because of their personal perspective, not in spite of it. I want the idiosyncratic views of software pioneers, librarians, and other real people as a contrast to the polished, safe and jaded coverage of professional reporters.

Here's an example of the kind of post I'm hoping to read: Electablog author Dave Pell's take on the declining importance of urban issues in politics, inspired by his encounter with Jerry Brown.

2004/07/27 · Comment · Link

Waiting 79 Years to Build a Home

My wife M.C. Moewe wrote this week's cover story for Folio Weekly, Jacksonville's alternative paper. While looking at real estate in the St. Augustine area, she found Vermont Heights, a failed land development off Interstate Highway 95 that continues to attract and disappoint new buyers, 79 years after it was launched.

The Vermont Heights neighborhood has 600 residential lots within 10 minutes of the Atlantic Ocean and some of the best beaches in Florida. But no one can build there because they have no roads. (Today, a developer would never be allowed to sell lots without roads and utilities.)

She interviewed the daughter of the original developer, who lives in one of the handful of houses that were built back in the 1920s, and found a July 14, 1925, newspaper ad touting the development and its lot prices from $75 to $300:

"Lots high and dry, an abundance of oak and pine trees. Electric lights, telephones and soft water, 5-8 miles off Dixie Highway, both sides ... Highest point in St. Johns County -- wide streets, 12 parks and 80-foot boulevard. An ideal place to establish a home and offers golden opportunity for investment. Prices will advance rapidly as sales increase."

How old is this still-unfulfilled project? The same newspaper had a story from the Scopes Monkey Trial.

2004/07/26 · Comment · Link

Famous anus

Famous anus:: In sports world medical news reminiscent of George Brett's hemorrhoidal issue during the 1980 World Series, an exhausted Jason Giambi is being tested for entamoeba histolytica, a parasite that embeds itself in the intestinal lining and can cause fatal illness.

Sports · 2004/07/26 · Comment · Link

Squashing Link Spammers in Movable Type

I'm finishing a new book, Movable Type Bible Desktop Edition, by covering the subject I've been most eager to cover: plug-in programming.

As you can do with UserTalk scripts in Radio UserLand, you can write scripts that enhance the functionality of Movable Type. The software can be extended with Perl scripts that are executed by placing HTML-style tags and attributes in templates, the same technique employed by the software itself. The script output appears in the rendered file.

Plug-ins also can filter text on any Movable Type template tag. I wrote one this afternoon that tackles an obnoxious form of comment abuse: Posting a bogus comment packed with spam links.

The RemoveExcessiveLinks filter sets the number of links you're willing to tolerate in a user-submitted comment. When a comment hits or exceeds the number, all links are removed from the comment.

To use it, place the RemoveExcessiveLinks.pl script in Movable Type's plugins directory. Use it with a tag by adding a remove_excessive_links attribute with the number of comments to trigger your wrath, like so:

<MTCommentBody remove_excessive_links="5">

With this example, any comment with five or more links will be sanitized to remove all of its links.

Movable Type · 2004/07/22 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

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