I'm a Pig at Breakfast
I turned in a feature story on Tuesday, the first paid journalism I've done for a publication since leaving the Ask Ed Brice column at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2000.Like many bloggers, I've had a lot to say about journalism over the years, and I internalized the self-glorifying notion that I practice a form of it here on Workbench. But after a few days of conducting interviews, checking facts and documenting all of my sources for an editor, I was reminded of a substantial difference between journalism and blogging that I had completely forgotten.
Risk.
A blogger can feel good about his own standards of ethics and accuracy, but there's no cost for failing to meet them. Nobody gets drummed out of the blogosphere for getting something wrong, screwing over a source or writing things that bring shame upon your family. Making matters worse, your biggest mistakes may be rewarded by as much traffic as your best successes.
A working journalist has to worry about ethics and accuracy because your ass is on the line, along with that of your editors and the publication.
I can't think of a single blogger sued for libel or fired from a site over something he reported, and I've never read about one who did something fubar and thought to myself, "that poor sap will never blog again."
But as any reader of James Romenesko knows, professional journalists commit acts of career suicide on a daily basis.
There are obviously exceptions -- bloggers working for Nick Denton can blunder themselves out of a job and the journalist Susan Schmidt clearly has blackmail material over the editors of Washington Post.
To borrow one of my favorite cornpone Texas sayings, the difference between a blogger and a journalist is the difference between a chicken and a pig at breakfast.
The chicken's involved.
The pig's committed.
Turning Off a Radio UserLand Scripter
Last June, I published a 23-minute podcast of Juan Cole being interviewed on the Alan Colmes radio show.A Radio UserLand user on Comcast in Monterey, Calif., is apparently a big fan of Cole. His copy of Radio keeps requesting that 5.5-megabyte podcast over and over, as frequently as every 10 seconds. In the last week alone, he's consumed 12.13 gigabytes of my server's bandwidth by downloading the file 2,365 times.
I don't know why this is happening -- it could be a bug in Radio UserLand or a UserTalk script run amok, either by accident or by design. The fact that it's coming from a fixed IP address suggests it's not malicious.
I renamed the audio file and blocked the offending address with iptables:
The problem illustrates an aspect of Radio and the OPML Editor that casual users should keep in mind when they begin writing scripts in these programming environments. You need to know exactly what the script's doing, especially when you schedule it to run regularly.
These repeated downloads amount to a denial of service attack, and the 56 gigabytes of traffic he's consuming per month is larger than the transfer limit on many servers, subjecting the publisher to excess bandwidth charges.
If this user needs to learn how to write scripts in Radio, there's a book I can recommend.
Columnist: 'Blacks are No Longer Rioting'
In the Washington Post this morning, columnist David Ignatius makes a few jaw-dropping racial generalizations in a piece comparing Muslim outrage over the Muhammad cartoons to African-American reaction to the N word:I think the Muslim world could learn something about tolerance from African Americans. The United States still abounds with racist images, but blacks are no longer rioting in the streets or burning down buildings. ...
We haven't abolished racism, but by working honestly at the problem, we've made real progress. Along the way, we experienced rage and violence. ...
We're in the rage phase -- the part of the story where black folks are torching cities, white governors are sending in the National Guard and the problems seem insoluble.
I admire writers for discussing race, because the volatile subject's so likely to provoke people, but Ignatius blunders into it thoughtlessly here. The claim that "blacks are no longer rioting in the streets or burning down buildings" is offensively broad, and he repeats it twice. Would he write that white people are no longer lynching blacks, or qualify the statement by putting the crime on "white racists" rather than an entire group?
Additionally, his assertion that the U.S. has solved its racial problems and become a "place where black folks and white folks pretty much get along" comes only five months after Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans, a disaster that exposed deep racial divisions that still exist in this country. A past Workbench entry on the Gretna Bridge blockade continues to draw responses like this:
You people have no idea how life in New Orleans is. Blacks feel they are owed everything, and the black government makes sure the working white man supports them. How else would lazy blacks survive. Work or leave. They refuse to work, have kids so the government pays them more, I have clients from all over the country and world, who all say the same thing, "I wasn't racist until I came here". You people should shut the ---- up unless you know the entire story, not saw cnn or heard the poor black guy tell his sad story on tv. I personally know Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson, he has more balls than most people in the spotlight, and is a GOD in my eyes. I love this man. What higher ground is there than the bridge? Where were they going to go? In the white mans neighborhood, where he has worked hard all his life for what he has. Stop being cowards and see the fact that blacks in New Orleans are different from blacks in other parts of the country. Thats the way it is.
Before Ignatius proclaims racial harmony in this country, he should go to Gretna and see how many people view the Katrina disaster in terms of black and white.
St. Augustine Cages Tiger
A local man in a Bengal tiger costume climbed atop the 165-foot-tall St. Augustine lighthouse Tuesday morning, stayed up there four hours and placed a 4Myduke.Com flag on a lightning rod to protest Internet pornography and publicize his children's book.
Frank Feldmann, who's selling a self-published book about Myduke the magic tiger under the pen name Dusty L. Cage, published a "Legal Defense Fund" page on his web site before storming the lighthouse:
If you are visiting this page Myduke probably needs your HELP! As you know cats, even BIG cats, get into trouble and trouble usually means LEGAL EXPENSES! That is usually what happens when someone stands up for what is right. LEGAL EXPENSES. Many Legal Expenses.
If you support Myduke in his quest for Porn and Agenda Free children's entertainment, you can help two ways. Straight out contribution or the purchase of Dusty L. Cage's books. ...
Simply put. In the society we live in, sometimes it is necessary to do things to raise attention that some may see as a nuisance. When in the battle against child porn, unnecessary violence, and popular political agendas it is at times necessary to speak out in ways that may hold a progressively uncaring public's attention.
A parents section on his site contains examples of the porn he's protesting -- sexually explicit illustrations of Disney characters, over which he's added Mickey Mouse in some places to preserve what's left of their dignity:
We together as families, I believe we can stop this. Not only for the protection of our children, but for the protection of our own childhood memories. ...Don't be mad at me for showing this, I'm risking my life to stop this. What are you doing?
Feldmann's been charged with felony burglary and possession of burglary tools over the stunt. His flag's still flying over the lighthouse.
In 2003, he rode a local carousel 52 hours and 15 minutes to support the troops, raise money for the March of Dimes and publicize his children's book.
Mark Pilgrim's Not on Board
Mark Pilgrim offers his long bet on the newly public RSS Advisory Board:I assume the group won't actually accomplish anything; they'll just stumble around like small children running with scissors to catch the short bus until they quietly disband, and we can look forward to doing all of this over again in 2 years. But in the meantime, I regard it as inevitable that the group will eventually try (and fail) to tackle every single one of these issues. (I believe Rogers once called this "the most well-researched flame on the Internet," which is about as close to a compliment as I'm likely to get from him.) But no one will actually dare to link to the article itself, and those who haven't read it (or couldn't finish it because they were too busy spitting bile at their monitor) will wonder where all these test cases came from, and why everyone seems to know so much about this ragtag collection of esoteric issues, and wouldn't it be nice if someone could write all of them down in one place, and someone will volunteer to do exactly that, except he'll want to be all clever-like and do it in OPML, and it will only validate in one of the three OPML validators, and the thread will go off on a long tangent about which validator is "correct", which will itself spawn a separate mailing list, blog, wiki, discussion forum, and advisory board to be hosted at opmlboard.org, which will fork each existing OPML validator and host it locally and then never update it, so they will slowly go out of sync with each original version, which will lead to a total of six OPML validators and a bitter Google PageRank war and lots of wringing of hands about how Google is favoring OPML validators that are not The One True OPML Validator, which is, of course, Radio.
But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
I don't know how much the board will accomplish, and I'm reluctant to saddle the new members with my own expectations, but I'm encouraged by the early progress on a proposed specification, which if written properly ought to resolve some long-standing issues.
Ultimately, the reason I was eager to see the group go forward (and go public) is because Really Simple Syndication is a ginormously successful format that's going to become more popular after the release of Internet Explorer 7. Thousands of sites use RSS. Businesses are banking on it, including the largest software company in the world.
Considering all of that, how could anyone favor the dissolution of a group that publishes the format's specification and tries to make RSS easier for developers to support?
RSS already lost one patron when Netscape abandoned interest just as syndication was starting to take off six years ago. Losing another today, when syndication formats are about to be introduced to millions of users through Internet Explorer, doesn't make sense.
My Lunch With Tyson Tomko
When I took the kids to Chick-fil-a for lunch yesterday, we sat down next to this imposing looking man and his family. With his bald head, six-inch-long Fu Manchu goatee and bad-ass tattoos running from wrist to wrist over tree-trunk arms, I'm thinking he had to be one of three things: professional wrestler, rock musician or crazed South Floridian drug lord.
The latter was admittedly a long shot -- my only experience with South Floridian drug lords comes from Miami Vice and he was eating with a woman and two kids -- but it still kept me from approaching him.
"Oh, so you run coke up and down I-95? Does this mean an autograph is out of the question?"
For those who don't have Chick-fil-a in their area, it's a fast-food chain of chicken restaurants based in the South where every meal comes with a side order of ostentatious love for the Lord. The restaurants are closed Sundays, and on all other days employees constantly wish people to "have a blessed day."
I scored around five blessings in one visit, which is five more times than McDonald's or Taco Bell has ever expressed interest in my personal salvation.
As religious songs like "I Could Sing of His Love Forever" and "Shine Jesus Shine" played in the restaurant, my children were hanging with his in the Kid's Zone play area and I kept sneaking occasional Secret Service glanceovers, looking for some kind of clue that explained his appearance.
There was only one: He was dressed in shorts and had shaved legs, which suggested either a career in the entertainment business or a metrosexual lifestyle.
After he left, another patron clued me in: The guy was Tyson Tomko, a 29-year-old WWE wrestler from Jacksonville who has his own action figure.
Considering all the time I spent exhibiting an unhealthy interest in Tomko and his attractive female companion, I'm very lucky I didn't get an inverted spinning crucifix neckbreaker.
RSS Advisory Board Goes Public
A new era begins today for the RSS Advisory Board, an independent organization formed in 2003 that publishes the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) specification, helps developers create RSS applications and broadens public understanding of the format.The board is taking on eight new members: Meg Hourihan, Loic Le Meur, Eric Lunt, Ross Mayfield, Jenny Levine, Randy Charles Morin, Greg Reinacker and Dave Sifry. I'm serving as chairman this year unless they kick me to the curb.
The new members are an accomplished group that includes software developers, tech execs, educators and writers, all of them outspoken on the subjects of syndication and related technology, and all of them avid bloggers.
Under the board's charter, the organization holds its deliberations on RSS-Board and encourages feedback from RSS publishers, software developers and users on RSS-Public.
I'm bringing the first item to the board: a proposed specification for RSS that represents completely new documentation for the existing RSS 2.0 format.
This new specification is dubbed "Rss-Draft-1" and has not been adopted by the board. It's offered to encourage public review for at least 60 days. The goal of the spec is to make RSS simpler to implement by providing examples for all elements, better presentation and a more formal approach.
As an RSS Advisory Board member since May 2004, I'm glad to see the organization continue in a manner that encourages the public to take an active role in the effort.
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