My Favorite Coke is Pepsi

Alan McConchie has created the Pop vs. Soda page, an Internet database that maps the regional differences in how Americans refer to soft drinks.

Looking at the large number of people in the south who call all sodas "coke," regardless of brand, doesn't that suggest one of the world's most lucrative trademarks has become a generic term and should lose its protected status?

Aspirin, cellophane, escalator, nylon, and thermos all were once trademarks lost by their companies through generic use.

On BusinessPundit, a southern cokehead named Alan Ruff writes:

... when I first moved to Iowa from North Carolina, people looked at me with the weirdest face when I would say, "I'll have a Coke, make it a Dr. Pepper."

Jargon · 2004/11/29 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

MEMRI is Being Repressed

The Middle East Media Research Institute, a group that cherry-picks articles by bigots and extremists in the Arabic language press and publishes translations, has threatened to sue Juan Cole for libel.

Cole, a Middle East scholar at the University of Michigan who represents one of the rare voices of reason among webloggers who focus on the subject, rejected MEMRI official Yigal Carmon's demand for a retraction:

Israeli military intelligence is used to being able to censor the Israeli press and to intimidate journalists, and it is a bit shocking that Carmon should imagine that such intimidation would work in a free society.

Politics · 2004/11/24 · Comment · Link

Tracking Weblog Updates in Manila

Since adopting 3,000 webloggers from Weblogs.Com last June, I've had a huge amount of trouble tracking site activity on the new Manila server I set up to house these sites. An elusive bug prevented the recent updates page from working correctly.

During the Weblogs.Com server outage, the media went nuts over the 3,000-weblog figure, making the story front page news.

As I have since discovered, that number was inflated by a bunch of dead sites on the server. I deleted more than 1,200 weblogs this week that were never updated after a new user signed up and saw the "It Worked!" page.

Buzzword.Com now has a new recent updates page that lists all weblogs updated within the last month. I wrote a UserTalk script to create this page, which I'll be documenting soon on Workbench.

There's also a big news announcement coming up, which a few users may have already figured out, but it will have to wait. The weekend beckons.

Manila · 2004/11/19 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Dying to Cover the Iraq War

Knight-Ridder Baghdad bureau chief Hannah Allam has penned a bloglike first-person piece on what it's like to report from Iraq:

My 26th birthday party was perfect.

Stars glittered over the Baghdad hotel where I blew out the candles on a cake decorated by my four closest Iraqi friends. We stayed up until the dawn call to prayer rang from a nearby mosque, telling stories and debating the future of a country I'd grown to cherish.

A year later, only one of those friends is still alive. The poolside patio where they sang "Happy Birthday" in Arabic is empty most days, because foreign guests are afraid of snipers and mortars. The hotel has become a prison, and every foray outside its fortified gates is tinged with anxiety about returning in one piece.

Journalism · 2004/11/18 · Comment · Link

Peggy Noonan's Sparks of Sexuality

Now that the election is over and there's nothing to be gained from rank partisanship, I have a confession to make: I love Peggy Noonan.

If you can abandon the attempt to derive meaning from her columns in the Wall Street Journal or her blatherings on television, Noonan may be the most bewitchingly mad arranger of words on the planet, a Kurt Vonnegut character come to life. Kilgore Trout would envy a passage like this, Noonan's description of her first meeting with Ronald Reagan in What I Saw at the Revolution:

I first saw him as a foot, a highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock. I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek. Such casual elegance and clean lines. But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe even a little ... frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads ...

Here's her take on Condoleezza Rice from today's Journal:

"I think she is extremely ladylike in her bearing and manner," I said. "Soft voice, pastel suits, heels, not a hair out of place."

"Yes," my friend said, "but she doesn't give off any sparks of sexuality."

"That's another thing I like about her", I said. We don't want a secretary of state running around giving off sparks of sexuality, do we. We don't want a secretary of state giving off sparks at all. We want a nice, quiet, calming, competent, sophisticated, even-keeled person to do a good, solid, nonshowy job.

I know that she's wrong in just about every way that counts, but I want to cradle Peggy's foot on unsmooth roads.

Politics · 2004/11/18 · 1 COMMENT · Link

SmartDownload Users Have No Class

A four-year class action lawsuit over privacy violations in Netscape SmartDownload has ended with a thud.

For several years, Netscape transmitted user cookies and file URLs to its servers whenever a user downloaded a file with SmartDownload. Because some people would be uncomfortable sharing how many times they downloaded pam-anderson-home-movie.avi, several suits were filed over violations of the Electronic Communication Privacy Act, including one by Christopher Specht, a legal photographer in New York who offered files for download on LawPhoto.Com (now defunct).

Members of the class action included anyone who offered a file for download on the Web or used Netscape SmartDownload versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2. Millions of Web publishers and SmartDownload users could have been looking forward to a payday like the CD price-fixing settlement that netted $12.63 checks for 3.5 million music buyers (myself included).

Unfortunately, Netscape screwed up the plan by removing the feature and neglecting to do anything with the data it collected. As explained in the proposed settlement, the company can avoid paying any money with a simple promise to never to do it again:

Discovery disclosed no evidence that Netscape had ever analyzed, sold, traded, or otherwise in any way used or derived any benefit from any of the URL or Key Code information that it received from the Covered Versions of SmartDownload.

Absent such use, Plaintiffs believe that there would be no legal "actual damages" that could be compensated.

Bummer.

2004/11/17 · Comment · Link

Sign of the times: "although there were metal detectors at the door, performers aren't typically searched when they enter an awards show."

2004/11/17 · Comment · Link

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