My Guid Could Beat Up Your Guid

Workbench was named Feedster's Feed of the Year, leading Greg Knauss to send this congratulatory e-mail:

I've thought for a long time that Workbench's RSS 2.0 feed was really well-formed, and its use of optional attributes exemplary. He's got a well-designed guid format, and his output in areas where the standards document is ambiguous* is always consistent.

What? They were talking about the content, too? Even better!

* No, I couldn't resist.

I've been hoping for years that someone would peek beneath Workbench's HTML representation and notice the cut of its guid. I was so excited about the Tag URI scheme back in 2004 that I gave myself one: People may describe me unambiguously throughout the world as tag:cadenhead.org,2004-05-17:Rogers.

Under the scheme, an item in a syndicated feed can be given a globally unique identifier like this:

tag:cadenhead.org,2004:weblog.2839

The tag consists of four things:

1. The text "tag:"
2. A domain you control, followed by a comma
3. A date or year you controlled the domain, followed by a colon
4. A unique ID you don't use for an item on any other site

For this weblog, the unique ID is "weblog." followed by the entry's primary key in the MySQL database. If a service like Feedster reads this guid, it won't save the same item from Workbench more than once in its database, no matter how many feeds the entry turns up in.

In October, the TAG URI scheme was published as RFC 4151.

Journalism · 2006/01/04 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Little Red Book, Big Fat Apology

New Bedford Standard-Times Editor Bob Unger has responded to the Little Red Book hoax that ran in the newspaper, acknowledging that the original story should not have run until they interviewed the student making the claim:

We -- reporter and editors -- failed here because we put our faith in what two college professors told us. We should have held off publishing the story until we had a chance to judge the student's credibility for ourselves.

The student's name continues to be kept private, to the chagrin of bloggers calling for his head. I originally believed that he should be named, like any confidential source who burns a journalist with knowingly false information, but it's worth noting that the student didn't talk to reporter Aaron Nicodemus until after the first story ran.

Politics · Journalism · 2006/01/04 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Suck.Com Domain Hijacked by Smut Merchant

Over the holidays, Suck.Com stopped being a failed online magazine for a few days and began a new life as a porn portal. This was apparently a domain name hijack, because the portal's gone and the old site's archives are now restored.

While Suck was porn, Steve Baldwin wrote a bitter sendoff:

Given that this is certainly the end of suck.com's long journey as a project, one must ask: was suck.com ever really about anything more than the wiles and whims of its owners? Wasn't this the joke all the time -- that a couple of guys at Wired could rise to the top of the Web with nothing but a talent for inserting hyperlinks in biliously written text and the services of a talented cartoonist named Terry Colon, whose droll drawings actually produced most of the laughs?

Many have suspected that Steadman and Anuff did what they did for the money, the publicity, the women, and the influence, which Suck.com brought them. Sure, they wrote as if they were ink-stained outsiders, but they were insiders all along, and they knew it, and if you were half as smart as they were, which you weren't, you knew it too. That was the ultimate joke that lay at the heart of Suck.com; the very core of its mean-hearted humor. And if you didn't find the joke funny, well, this fact proved that you just weren't smart enough all over again.

I'm a fan of Baldwin, who spent the dot-com boom gleefully puncturing the bubbles of overhyped tech companies and their irrationally exuberant executives, reveling in each dot-casualty at Ghost Sites of the Web. His critique omits something he's admitted in the past -- he worked several months as a Plastic.Com contributor for Automatic Media, Suck's parent company, and the experience sucked.

I was a one-time contributor and day-one reader of Suck, and I think Baldwin has forgotten that site founders Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman always presented it as an elaborate doublecross on readers -- a product of the same cynical dot-com hype they were shredding five times a week. Suck ran so many self-loathing critiques over the years that his rant sounds like something it would have published. Suck writers were calling themselves frauds and sellouts long before any critics cared enough to say it:

A formulaic method to success is the grail that we're all after -- from sleazy get-rich-quick schemes to 12-step programs to kick a habit that's become just a little too familiar, we can't get enough of easy, no-brainer ways to give us maximum returns for minimal effort -- that's what it's all about, isn't it?

A comment from the back of their self-authored NetMoguls card: "Are you familiar with the term 'one-hit wonder'?"

Anuff and Steadman have no control over what happens to the domain, which is registered to Lycos, the company that had a 25 percent stake in Automatic Media.

If they did, a six- or seven-figure sale to the people who've made the most of this way-nu medium -- smut peddlers -- is surely the ignominious fate they envisioned for Suck.

Journalism · Domains · 2006/01/03 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

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

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