CNN Report: We Suck

A front-page story on CNN.Com today derides cable news networks for dumping serious news coverage in favor of talk and fluff, reserving special criticism for CNN:

The notion that people can work late, skip the broadcast evening news and catch up later on cable isn't necessarily true. Try to find a serious newscast on these networks in prime time, at least before Aaron Brown on CNN at 10 p.m. Eastern time, and you'll be out of luck.

Even CNN Headline News -- a dependable network that rotates newscasts every half-hour -- plans to experiment with prime-time talk shows in the next year.

The story, written by Associated Press TV reporter David Bauder, also shows up on MSNBC, another network criticized in the piece.

Journalism · 2004/11/30 · Comment · Link

Closing Movable Type Comments

I'm winning the war on comment spam on Wordzilla, my homebrew weblog software, thanks to PHP code that rejects link-heavy comments and submissions from banned IP addresses.

I'm losing on Movable Type and Manila. Both programs are being flooded with spam that has to be hand-deleted, a chore that's miserably time consuming in each. Six Apart enhanced Movable Type's comment-management features in version 3.1, but it can take up to five minutes to delete a group of spam comments on the Drudge Retort, which has 107,000 comments and 2,600 entries.

Both programs could use a configuration setting that closes weblog entries to new comments and trackback after a user-designated period, such as a week. Most comment spam that I receive comes from older entries -- I'm guessing that their webcrawling robots rely on search engines, so they're slow to find new entries.

Because Movable Type is backed by a database, you can run queries on that database to edit entries. As an experiment, on Nov. 25 I used the following MySQL query to close comments and trackback on all Drudge Retort entries older than a week:

UPDATE mt_entry SET entry_allow_comments = 2, entry_allow_pings = 0 WHERE entry_created_on < date_add(curdate(), interval -7 day)

I had to rebuild the entire site after running this command so that entry archives reflected the change.

Comment spam has all but disappeared. A propecia shill who hits the site constantly hasn't successfully posted a spam in days.

I'm working on a PHP script that makes this automatic, closing comments and trackback in Movable Type weblog's entries after one week. Manipulating the database is easy, but finding a good way to tell Movable Type to rebuild an entry from PHP has been tough.

I was hoping to execute a simple Perl script using PHP's system command, but attempts to rebuild an entry like this have failed:

/usr/bin/perl -I'/path_to_mt/lib' -I'/path_to_mt/extlib' -mMT -e 'my $mt = MT->new; $mt->rebuild_entry(BlogID => 2, Entry => 3000) or die $mt->errstr'

Wordzilla · Php · Mysql · Movable Type · Manila · 2004/11/30 · 12 COMMENTS · Link

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

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