Tony Kornheiser vs. Jacksonville

Tony Kornheiser wrote a column in the Washington Post ripping Jacksonville as a Hooters-loving, foul-smelling, remote city of doublewides that only got the Super Bowl because Tuscaloosa was booked:

Jacksonville is where Pat Boone was born (sometime around the Martin Van Buren presidency), and where the Southern hair band .38 Special got together. Somehow it doesn't sound like hip-hop. It's more like I-Hop.

As a seven-year resident, I'm more offended by Kornheiser's laziness than anything he wrote about Jacksonville (though he should have included St. Augustine along with No. 17 at Sawgrass as the best perks of living here).

A recent Slate article maligned Kornheiser as one of the phone-it-in sports columnists who has been ruined by TV gigs. His column hasn't quoted a single source in four months, according to Slate, and you'd be hard-pressed to find anything resembling a work ethic in his anti-Jacksonville rant.

Kornheiser didn't even bother to skim the Super Bowl XXXIV Media Guide, where he could have found four much better local targets for ridicule: We gave the world Lynyrd Skynyrd, Limp Biskit, Slim Whitman, and David Hasselhoff.

Sports · Journalism · Jacksonville · 2005/01/28 · 19 COMMENTS · Link

RSS Begat RSS Begat RSS

Sean Palmer and Christopher Schmidt have released a new draft of RSS 1.1, an independent effort to replace the RDF-based syndication format RSS 1.0.

When I covered this subject originally, the spec's subtitle -- which dubbed it an "initial draft" -- threw me off about how long it has been under development.

As the Rough Guide to RSS 1.1 explains, Palmer has been working on his proposal since at least September 2002.

I don't heart RDF, so I have no opinion on whether 1.1 should replace 1.0. I just hope that if Palmer and Schmidt cannot ultimately reach an agreement with the RSS-DEV Working Group to mothball 1.0, they will withdraw their spec rather than put three active, competing RSS formats in circulation.

Rss · 2005/01/27 · Comment · Link

The Lord Works in Mysterious Weblogs

Two years ago, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Ron Martz was embedded as a journalist in Iraq when two soldiers travelling with him were shot. He wrote a first-person column that thanks God for providing him with human shields:

I prefer to believe it was the hand of God that put them there, one behind me, one to my left. They were there to protect me. ...

Had they not been there, I most likely would not be now typing this.

Less than 30 minutes after the two soldiers joined me, both were wounded by bullets that could have hit me. The soldier behind me was hit in the left wrist and the left eye by a bullet that struck the side of the armored personnel carrier and shattered. A bullet hit the soldier to my immediate left in the right arm, just a few inches from my left arm. The bullet broke his arm, entered his body just below his armpit and came out his back.

This kind of reductive, God-picked-sides reasoning creeps me out, whether it's a journalist crediting God for bullets hitting someone else or a quarterback who thanks God in victory but never makes Him catch Hell in defeat.

Because I leave comments open on Workbench, the discussion of Martz's column has become a debate between his current and former wives, now that Cynthia Martz has dropped by:

Mary Warren is Ron Martz's current wife. No wonder she supports him! As his ex-wife of 25+ yrs. I think I know Ron Martz a bit better.

Though I don't know which one is the better authority on Martz, I know who to thank for sending Cynthia to my weblog.

Journalism · 2005/01/27 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Nofollow: Think Before You Link

Workbench visitor David Lewis shares my pessimism about the new nofollow link attribute supported by Google.

I predict that lots of people will be clamoring to get rid of "nofollow" within, say, 3 months, if not sooner. It really does little or nothing to eliminate comment spam -- you need a proactive approach for that -- but only solves a problem for Google, namely to get rid of what, for them, are lots of unwashed links.

Unless I misunderstand search engine optimization, there could be negative consequences for Google also, because the attribute gives publishers an economic incentive to use nofollow on all external links, boosting the PageRank of internal links.

Every profit-minded publisher who does this will weaken the effectiveness of Google's ranking algorithm, especially within the commercial subset of the Web. The publisher of a large, popular site like the 500,000-page New York Times could run a script to add the attribute to all external links, bestowing the benefits of its high PageRank exclusively on its own corporate properties.

Search Engine Watch Publisher Danny Sullivan goes into more detail about the issues raised by link condoms on his weblog.

· 2005/01/25 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Making Buzzword.Com More Available

Manila, the software running Buzzword.Com, stores most weblog content and server data in Frontier's object database, a flexible and powerful database that I covered in Radio UserLand Kick Start.

As objects are deleted, Frontier monitors their freed-up blocks so they can be reused, as Matt Neuberg describes in Frontier: The Definitive Guide:

... as the database is used, free space opens up in it, and pointers to the free blocks are added to a list called the "avail list," which must be traversed each time Frontier searches the database. This strategy makes saving and accessing the database rapid and robust in the short term, but over time its accumulated effects reduce the database's efficiency.

I took Buzzword.Com offline this evening for 90 minutes to compact all object database files and wipe out these avail lists. I'm hoping that it improves the server speed; users should let me know if it's making a difference.

Update from Craig Jensen: "Longtime blogging friend Garret Vreeland says he can connect to BookNotes in less than 5 minutes. That's progress!"

Radio Userland · Manila · Frontier · 2005/01/25 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

A sneer from political reporter David Halbfinger about Bob Somerby, the publisher of the media criticism site Daily Howler:

I've never followed this blog, and am pretty sure I don't know anyone who does.

You gotta love a New York Times reporter who concludes that if he doesn't know something, no one else does either.

Journalism · 2005/01/22 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Democratic Podcast: Make Bush Pay

Newly elected Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington delivered the Democratic response to the presidential radio address today.

Gregoire, whose 129-vote margin of victory was determined by a recount, took office Jan. 12. Her opponent, Republican Dino Rossi, is asking courts to overturn the result and call a new election.

Selected by the Democratic Governors' Association to give the speech, Gregoire criticized President Bush for shortchanging state funding on expensive federal programs in education, transportation, and homeland security.

The transcript of her remarks:

Good morning. I'm Governor Christine Gregoire from the state of Washington.

I want to congratulate President Bush on his inauguration. The time-honored pageantry and ceremonies of an inauguration remind us we are part of a democracy with a rich and long history.

Our nation faces many challenges, both abroad and at home. I know I join all Americans in wishing President Bush well as he embarks upon his second term and sets a course to face these challenges.

I also was recently inaugurated as Washington state's governor. Our state's inaugural ceremonies aren't as extravagant as those in the other Washington, but the ceremonies are meaningful and honor the durability of our governmental institutions.

Like other governors, we face tough challenges here in Washington state, challenges that frequently require a partnership with the federal government. But too often, the states feel the federal partnership is more promise than reality.

I'd, therefore, like to urge that we make this week an inaugural for President Bush's new term as well as a new federal-state partnership.

Let me give you some examples of the need for a stronger partnership.

Consider our relations with the federal Homeland Security Department in our nation's war against terrorism.

The federal government is imposing new security requirements on our cities and counties without providing the necessary financial assistance to local law enforcement -- cops and firefighters, whose resources are already stretched too thin.

Our highways and other transportation infrastructure represent the nation's economic future, yet we can't get a transportation bill out of Congress that provides funding for the states. President Bush could help us all if he would insist Congress pass this legislation.

It's been said that the best social program is a job. The state of Washington lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs in the last recession, most of them going overseas.

We need to get our country back to work, and this transportation bill would be a great stimulus. Every billion dollars in new transportation spending creates 47,000 new jobs.

The states have another partnership with the federal government that is under tremendous strain, including here in Washington state. Skyrocketing health-care costs are already stretching state budgets to the breaking point. In our state, health-care costs represent 20 percent of Washington state's budget. And health-care costs have been increasing by double digits for the past four years.

This is not the time for the administration to abandon its responsibility to address the health-care crisis facing our nation. We must forge a renewed partnership to address this issue.

Educating our children calls out for another key partnership between the state and federal government. President Bush's No Child Left Behind initiative had laudable goals but has never been adequately funded. We must do better for our children.

The states are on the front lines. Governors and legislatures work directly with the problems facing our communities, and they have to balance competing needs and budgets in creative and innovative ways.

I urge President Bush to use his new term to open the doors to the states and form lasting partnerships, which will help us make our people safer, bolster our economy and improve the future for all our children.

I'm Christine Gregoire, governor from the state of Washington.

Thank you for listening.

States are struggling to meet huge federal mandates like the No Child Left Behind act, which puts extensive new testing requirements on schools without bothering to pay for them.

U.S. Rep. Ed Case of Hawaii, writing in the Honolulu Advertiser in April 2004, said the law is the poster child for the failure of federal involvement in public schools:

The No Child Left Behind Act is today an immense unfinanced federal mandate. For the current fiscal year, this law set federal compliance costs at $32 billion, but the current administration only asked for $22 billion. For the upcoming year, the figures are $34 billion and $25 billion, respectively. The message is simple: We don't mind requiring it, but we can't afford it all, so you, states and localities, make up the difference.

Politics · Podcasts · 2005/01/22 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

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