Feedster Contest: Music To My Ears

Workbench is dangerously close to winning an iPod in the Feedster Feed of the Year contest.

I was told recently that my weblog was one of the top 10 finalists in the judging, which rates sites not for the size of their traffic, but what they do with it:

Most blog awards consist of nominations, reviews, and voting so naturally, the more popular blogs always rise to the top. Instead, a panel of independent judges rated blogs across a range of criteria, not just number of links or traffic.

Feedster is counting up to the winner one day at a time, so each morning I check the site like a 20-year-old watching the Vietnam Draft Lottery in 1969, hoping my number doesn't come up.

Four sites remain in a contest that awards an iPod Video for first place and iPod Nanos for second and third -- Grant Barrett's Double-Tongued Word-Wrester Dictionary, Andrew Moere's Information Aesthetics, the group-authored Treehugger and Me! Me! Me! Pick Me!

If the contest was played by Deal or No Deal rules, I would have panicked by now and accepted an offer of something like the Dell DJ Ditty rather than risk going home empty-handed.

2005/12/28 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Student's Little Red Hoax Circles the Globe

The Drudge Retort fell for a hoax earlier this month, passing along a newspaper's report that a college student was investigated by the Department of Homeland Security for requesting Mao Zedong's Little Red Book on interlibrary loan. The student admitted on Friday it was a little red lie.

I hate falling for stuff like this, because I like to think I was occasionally listening in class when I earned a journalism degree from the University of North Texas. In hindsight there were strong reasons to be skeptical: The claim was reported by a small newspaper, the New Bedford Standard-Times, based entirely on the account of a student who asked the paper not to reveal his name.

Other suckers include Slashdot, Molly Ivins, Sen. Ted Kennedy, NewsMax and several hundred blogs.

The newspaper that originally reported the story hasn't come close to apologizing. Reporter Aaron Nicodemus blames the world for wanting to believe his story was true:

The story's release came at a perfect storm in the news cycle. Only a day before, The New York Times had reported that President Bush had allowed the National Security Agency to conduct wiretaps on international phone calls from the United States without a warrant. The Patriot Act, created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to allow the government greater authority to monitor for possible terrorism activities, was up for re-authorization in Congress.

There was an increased sense among some Americans that the U.S. government was overstepping its bounds and trampling on civil liberties in order to thwart future attacks of terrorism. The story of a college student being questioned for requesting a 40-year old book on Communism fed right into that atmosphere.

The newpaper's opinion page apportions 100 percent of the blame to the student:

Student should be ashamed: Thumbs down for the UMass student who lied to professors and The Standard-Times about being visited by federal agents after he ordered a copy of Mao Tse Tung's Little Red Book through the inter-library loan system. This bogus story went around the nation and gave the public a false impression of our government at a time whenour government is under intense pressure to defend the homeland from terrorism and does not need the public to turn against it.

The paper continues to honor a confidentiality agreement with the student who lied to them, a journalistic practice I've never understood.

Journalism · Politics · 2005/12/27 · 28 COMMENTS · Link

Handshake or No Handshake

NBC's web site offers a Flash version of Deal or No Deal, an odd new game show that pits a player's greed against the arithmetic mean.

I've only caught a few minutes of the show, which aired last week and will be repeated Monday on CNBC, but I may start watching to see Howie Mandel not shake hands with the contestants.

Mandel's a germophobe, writes Mark Evanier:

I think it's weird that NBC has one reality show where the contestants are expected to eat rat --------- but they also have two -- this and Mr. Trump's Apprentice -- where the stars are terrified of germs. You know, Howie and Donald, touching other people is a great way to maintain good, healthy hair. Look at the difference between the scalps of Leno and Letterman.

That's a far cry from Richard Dawson, who used to grout the esophagus of every female contestant on Family Feud.

Television · 2005/12/25 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Wikipedia Needs Women

Shelley Powers believes that well-known female technologists are less likely to find themselves in Wikipedia than their male counterparts:

Why are there significantly fewer women? I think one reason is that we women are taught not to put ourselves forward. Men are complimented for tooting their own horn; making known their wishes; noting their own accomplishments. Women, however, are expected to be sweet, demure, and most of all, stay ever so slightly in the shadow.

My take on her observation is that men are more strongly rewarded for being assertive, a group dynamic you can see in play often if you look for it. A few years ago I lost a bunch of weight by following Weight Watchers, and the weekly meetings I attended were an intrusion into a world that had as many males in it as an Oprah Winfrey taping. Even in a crowd that was 20-to-1 female, I was amazed at how often male dieters dominated the discussions.

(Personally, I was afraid to speak, fearing that some of the dieters starving themselves for the weekly weigh-in might had sublimated their hunger with inchoate rage.)

I'm fishing around for underrepresented subjects in Wikipedia, so I added a biography this morning for one of those overlooked technologists -- new-media guru and former Netscape exec Susan Mernit:

Susan Mernit (b. January 23) is a technology and media consultant based in Palo Alto, California and a former vice president of Netscape and America Online.

As an executive, Mernit launched several corporate media sites since introducing Scholastic Press on America Online in 1992. She developed the childrens educational site Yuckiest Site on the Internet with Jeff Jarvis and served as the editor of New Jersey Online.

She was a vice president of programming, design and production at Netscape from 1999-2001, leading a redesign of the site to coincide with the release of Netscape Navigator 6.0, and was vice president of programming at America Online from 2001-2003.

Today, she's a founding partner of the consulting firm 5ive Corp and a frequent speaker at online media and technology conferences, personally organizing the "social media" gathering BlogOn in 2004. She is a senior fellow at the Media Center, a think tank established by the American Press Institute, and an advisory board member of the the digital media archive Ourmedia.

Mernit originally pursued a career in literature, writing two collections of poetry and serving as writer-in-residence for the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Her short story "Bella" was adapted into a TV movie in 1982. She has a bachelor of arts in English and writing from Bard College and a master's in creative writing and English literature from Ohio State University.

She was married to musician Spencer Jarrett and has a son, Zack, who attends Michigan State University.

Bibliography

• Everything You Need to Know About Changing Schools (Rosen Publishing, 1992) ISBN 0823913260
• Tree Climbing (Membrane Press, 1981) ISBN 0879240369
• The Angelic Alphabet (Tree Books, 1976) ISBN 8267436752

External links

• Mernit's personal weblog
• Her photos on Flickr
• 5ive Corp.
• Poems from Tree Climbing.

Putting together a biography based only from the information you can find on the web is an interesting literary exercise -- I once frightened people on MetaFilter by compiling one entirely from a member's comments.

Programming · Wikipedia · 2005/12/23 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

The Lion, The Witch and The Arms Dealer

I took the boys last night to see Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Film Franchise We Hope Will Be a Cash Machine Like Harry Potter.

The film's a wonderfully realized vision of the book, at least through my hazy recollection of tearing through all seven novels 25 years ago in the Collier boxed set, which I've kept all of these years. But the logic of the C.S. Lewis novel makes less sense than it did when I was a child.

I don't care if they're just a bunch of dissident animals and sympathetic creatures from British folklore. They should have more sense than to create a system of government dependent upon the accidental arrival of children who will serve as monarchs without a clear line of succession.

Even worse, Narnia relies on these minors for military leadership and front-line combat, sending them into battle against such opponents as this giant minotaur.

As a child, I thought it made perfect sense for Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy to be equipped with swords, bows and chainmail the moment they acquiesce to the beaver's badgering and agree to overthrow the White Witch.

The second time around, I was a bit squeamish when Santa Claus showed up unexpectedly and gave Lucy two Christmas presents: a dagger and a potion to heal mortal wounds.

Santa's only word of advice before he takes his leave of the six-year-old and the rest of her newly armed siblings? "Battles are ugly affairs."

Publishing · Movies · 2005/12/22 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

A Toast to Computer Book Authors

Whenever a new biography is added to Wikipedia, an "articles for deletion" debate is likely to happen on whether the subject is notable enough to merit inclusion.

If the subject's a computer book author, you invariably get a comment from a Wikipedia editor like the one that was just made about best-selling O'Reilly author Shelley Powers:

I really don't believe that authoring a how-to technology book makes one a notable author. We might as well have articles for writers of toaster manuals.

He has a good point. I'm nine years into the profession of computer book authorship and still waiting for my first groupie. We might be the category of authors with the lowest adoring-fan to copies-sold ratio in publishing.

Publishing · Wikipedia · 2005/12/22 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

The Story of Jimmy Wales and Bomis Babes

In an interview with Wired News, Wikipedia leader Jimmy Wales renewed his objection to the statement that Bomis Babes was pornographic:

If R-rated movies are soft porn, it was porn. In other words, no, it was not. That description is inaccurate.

If you're not exceptionally proud of the erotic web site you ran before the dot-com bust, a defense that hinges on the definition of soft pornography probably won't help matters.

As someone who grew up after cable television and before the web, I thought "soft porn" described the late-night movies on pay cable that stop your channel surfing dead in its tracks. "Look, Shannon Tweed caught a burglar and now she's giving her a hot-oil massage!"

It's tough to judge Bomis Babes fairly, because at some point it was removed from the web along with the Internet Archive cache and other not-porn on the site. I know this because I did a comprehensive Google image search last night on the term Bomis looking for smut, clicking through page after page of results.

And people say bloggers don't do any original reporting. My right wrist is killing me.

The Bomis Babes homepage now contains nothing but the message "Hi, mom!" I could find only one babe -- the site's 404 error page contains porn actress Sylvia Saint in a company T-shirt.

Saint appears on the Bomis entry of the French and Luxembourgian editions of Wikipedia. The picture was released with Wales' consent, as he acknowledged in a 2003 Wikipedia edit:

Bomis owns the copyright to that photo, and while we don't release all of our promotional photos under the GNU FDL, that one is fine. I always wonder what happened to the photo of Aria Giovanni on my Ferrari. Hmm ... the mysteries of Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, Giovanni is an actress who posed on a Ferrari given away by Bomis in 2000 (though the winner reportedly took cash instead). "She has gained particular respect for being among relatively few large-chested models working in the field who have not undergone cosmetic surgery."

The last vestiges of Bomis Babes on the web are several hundred thumbnail images and cached pages that haven't disappeared from Google yet. (Some may be excluded by Google SafeSearch.)

My guess is that Bomis Babes depicted nude models comparable to Playboy magazine, so it would be smut by the standards of the American Family Association but not the Clinton administration. But Bomis was eagerly associating itself with porn stars, stuffing them in poorly sized company T-shirts and filing reports from events such as the 2003 Adult Entertainment Expo:

There was lots of cleavage at the show. We just happen to like Stormy's the best.

Brian Lamb asked Wales about Bomis content in a Sept. 24, 2005, C-Span interview:

LAMB: Well, what's the dirty picture thing?

WALES: Well, Bomis is -- it's a search engine so there's all kinds of content on there. And Bomis always had a market similar to say Maxim magazine. So it's kind of a guy-oriented search engine. But, yes, no. The story is much exaggerated by -- through history so.

LAMB: So ...

WALES: Something I struggle with constantly by the ...

LAMB: At some point somebody said you drove a Hyundai but then there was a parenthesis around it, no, he actually has a Ferrari.

WALES: Well, I do actually have a Ferrari. It doesn't work at the moment and my Ferrari cost less than most people's SUVs.

Update: I suggested a compromise to end a ferocious war of the editors currently taking place on Wikipedia about whether Bomis Babes was porn.

Journalism · Wikipedia · 2005/12/20 · 16 COMMENTS · Link

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