Ouch: In Jacksonville Wednesday, Minnesota Vikings quarterback Daunte Culpepper spontaneously gave a paralyzed local athlete two diamond necklaces worth about $75,000 during an NFL awards ceremony Wednesday, then subsequently took them back.
Wikipedia's Rank Decision
I haven't had much luck calling attention to the downside of the nofollow attribute, but one of my scenarios is quickly coming true: a large Internet site is hoarding its Google PageRank by using nofollow throughout the site.Wikipedia has placed nofollow on all external links, based on my spot check of random entries such as Gregorian calendar, MacGuffin, and Albert R. Broccoli. This change was made with little if any discussion, though there appears to be an effort now to decide whether it should be rescinded.
If this becomes Wikipedia policy, several million external links on 1.2 million pages will no longer contribute to Google's ranking algorithm, and Wikipedia's own pages will get a boost, as Phil Ringnalda describes:
Previously, if you were a certain well-known encyclopedia written as a wiki, you would generate a lot of PR just by having half a million pages, and that PR, along with any from external links, would be distributed around the site by internal links, and would also be distributed to any external sites you felt were important enough to link from your encyclopedia articles.
Now, as a byproduct of antispamming, every single bit of PR that each page has to distribute will be distributed only internally, to your own other pages, since all external links are nofollowed. Net result: you are more popular than before, the sites that you pretend to call important are less popular. You will tend to come out higher in search results, they will tend to come out lower.
I'm guessing this change was motivated by a desire to avoid spam abuse, but the practical effect is a huge site that shares none of the benefit it receives from 139,000 pages that link to its site.
The Meek Shall Inherit the Press
From the New York Times:The White House official who briefed reporters on the speech said Mr. Bush would take detailed positions on Social Security in coming weeks and months, but only to the extent that doing so would help Congress move forward. The official, who spoke before an auditorium full of journalists, insisted on not being quoted by name. Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said the goal in not allowing the use of the official's name was to keep the focus on Mr. Bush.
Can anyone imagine an auditorium full of webloggers, told not to quote a public official by name, being docile enough to honor the request like the Times, Washington Post, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Detroit Free Press, and many other papers?
Atrios identifies the official as White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett.
Jacksonville: the Worst Coast
Don Russell, Philadelphia Daily News:Philadelphians headed for this town are excused if they confuse it for home. Not because of the landscape, of course; this place lacks anything approaching charm.
You know your city has a bad rep when someone from Philadelphia calls it charmless. It's like being a singer booed off the stage by Ashlee Simpson.
Now that Workbench has begun to attract random abuse about Jacksonville, I'm feeling some civic responsibility to defend the Bold New City of the South, the First Coast, the place Where Florida Begins, or as one local dubbed it: "Just Barely Florida."
However, I would prefer for the world to believe the media digs and encourage the steady tide of new Floridians to beach themselves someplace else.
So Tony Kornheiser is right: Jacksonville is a foul-smelling city where we celebrate our wedding anniversaries by scrounging the doublewide for shoes and taking the cousin-wife out to Hooter's.
Forget what you heard about smooth beaches, year-round golf, and a nine-month summer that begins in two weeks. Those are lies spread by malicious yokels who lure unsuspecting tourists deep into the pines to re-enact their favorite scenes from Deliverance.
The Revolution Will Be Podcasted
Philippe Boucher:Thank you for providing a podcast of the weekly Democratic address. Where do you pick up the MP3? I asked the governor's staff where I could find it and they were unable to tell me.
I started this project after fruitlessly looking for an official source. As far as I can tell, my podcast is the first attempt to distribute and archive the opposition party's weekly response on the Web.
I pick up the audio from one of several streaming radio stations that run the speech each Saturday. One place you can hear it is C-Span Radio, which broadcasts the president's speech and the Democratic response beginning at around 2:50 p.m. Eastern.
A week after I began doing this in January, I received an e-mail from a staffer at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who is working to set up a multimedia server for stuff like this.
I also have communicated with Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid's war room, a new "rapid-response" communications center for Senate Democrats that includes its own television and radio studio.
I've offered to help one of these groups produce regular podcasts, because it's frustrating watching Democrats struggle to get their message out without the bully pulpit of the White House, control of Congress, or its own house organ.
Linger, Oh Linger, Heffelfinger
The highlight of attending NFL Experience, the Super Bowl event near Jacksonville's Alltel Stadium, was seeing Hall of Fame exhibits on loan from Canton.
Until I saw the Birth of Pro Football display, I didn't know the first pro player had the Dickensian name of Pudge Heffelfinger.
A standout at Yale, in 1892, Heffelfinger earned $500 ($10,200 in today's dollars) to play one game as a ringer for the Allegheny Athletic Association, a cheat that wasn't confirmed until 70 years later.
He was the first pro, the first contract holdout, and the first Maurice Clarett, leaving school to play for independent clubs like Allegheny. Yale fans tried in vain to convince him to stay with the odd chant "linger, oh linger, Heffelfinger."
Read more on the event from David Knighton, who was also there on Saturday and found something I wish I had seen: Pat Tillman's locker.
Podcast Support in Weblog Pinger
I have updated Weblog-Pinger, a weblog update notification class library for PHP, to support podcasting.When a new weblog entry contains an audio enclosure, you can ping Audio.Weblogs.Com, which in turn notifies a lot of services that monitor the site, such as the podcast directory GigaDial.
One gotcha for anyone else working on Audio.Weblogs.Com notification: the site's XML-RPC server is at audiorpc.weblogs.com, not audio.weblogs.com, which I finally discovered when I read the documentation.
Update: Referring to this code as my pinger sounds disturbingly like my twanger.
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