Outsourcing My Weblog to India

Vivek Seal, a technology journalist in India who writes for Global Services Media, has posted a comment on Workbench addressing American critics of outsourcing:

I am a reporter from India and cover outsourcing scenario. I have few points for you people to get the exact picture and then make your conclusions about sourcing McDonalds customer care business to India:

1. We do not have call centers using Skype to interact with the US or European customers. There are dedicated fiber optical lines with the apt bandwith for the communication purpose
2. If it wasnt for India, many IT companies would have been making less money (IBM, Microsoft, HP, Dell. So eventually your companies are gaining a lot as well we are gaining a lot.
3. Even if the order taking business is outsourced to India, there would be a proper training program (2/3 months) to cater to different accents and the process.
4. If a person from Bangalore is able to do a job in less than half the cost and with more efficiency then that rationally a best thing for all the parties around it. No matter what.

All I wanna say is give India a chance to improve this world.

I'm concerned about outsourcing, though I try not to get all Lou Dobbs about it. I feel like it puts huge downward pressure on American jobs and wages, both white collar and service industry, because so much of our work is capable of being performed overseas. To me, the only winners will be the corporations and enterpreneurs who figure out how to exploit the cheap, well-educated labor for as long as they can, but even those folks will eventually suffer when Americans can no longer afford our extravagant standard of living.

But I want to give Seal a chance to convince me otherwise, so I'd like to outsource this weblog to him for a week.

Workbench receives around 11,000 hits a day over the web and syndication, and many of the readers are fellow technologists who've been in the first wave of Americans affected by outsourcing. He'd have seven days to show us how outsourcing improves the world.

He also could blog on politics, the pope or anything else he likes, since this is a personal weblog written by an author with poor focusing skills.

I'll let you know if Seal accepts the offer.

Programming · Politics · 2006/05/10 · 21 COMMENTS · Link

Don Park wants to fire the RSS Advisory Board:

I don't know what the hell is going on over at the RSS Advisory Board but it is starting to make my skin crawl. Who is behind all the recent activities? Whoever it is, let me say this to that person: RSS is not your milk cow.

I know many of the newly appointed members and, although I think they are wonderful people, I suspect they are being taken advantage of because I don't see why they are needed.

Rss · 2006/05/09 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Requesting a MIME Media Type for RSS

In March, a member of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team asked the RSS Advisory Board for a recommendation on the MIME media type for RSS documents.

One of the most reliable ways for software to distinguish different kinds of files on the Internet is through a media type, an identifier that's part of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions standard.

Web servers return a Content-Type header that identifies the kind of file being returned, such as "text/html" for an HTML page, "image/gif" for a GIF graphics file, and "application/atom+xml" for Atom syndicated feeds.

RSS documents lack an an official media type.

If a media type was defined for RSS, when a user opened an RSS feed in a web browser, the browser could open the document with the user's preferred software -- just as browsers crank up an MP3 player when a link to an MP3 is clicked.

Media types must be requested from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority with a formal RFC that chooses the desired type, explains the nature of the content, and describes why the type is needed.

The advisory board is teaming up with the RSS-DEV Working Group, the developers of RSS 1.0, on a shared request for a media type.

Jon Hanna, Bill Kearney, Greg Smith and I have prepared an application to request "application/rss+xml" as the official media type for RSS documents.

We're floating a proposal to both groups to support this media type and encourage its use for all versions of RSS, whether they use RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication.

Rss · 2006/05/09 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Matthew Bookspan Joins RSS Board

Matthew Bookspan, the director of product management for the RSS aggregator developer Attensa, has joined the RSS Advisory Board.

Bookspan worked at Microsoft for nine years and was part of the company's team for Internet Explorer versions 3 and 4. His experience with web content syndication goes back to Microsoft's Channel Definition Format (CDF), an early attempt to foster XML-based content sharing that predates RSS.

He worked on user experience for Microsoft's Windows, Office and SQL Server software and holds several patents for software design. He's a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. Welcome to the board, Matthew!

Rss · 2006/05/08 · Comment · Link

Doctors Diagnose Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington did not die of syphillis, according to a review of medical records from his death in 1915.

Washington's records show that his blood pressure was 225 over 145, nearly double the 120 over 80 that is considered normal.

The records also show that a blood test ruled out syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that was widespread at the time and thought to be a particular problem among black people ...

The 91-year-old inquest was conducted for this year's Historical Clinicopathological Conference, a yearly event where doctors get together and play House with a famous person of the past who had a clinically interesting demise.

2006/05/06 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

The Washington Media are a Joke

After declaring that he is well-known for being funny, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen launches a weird snit today against Stephen Colbert for his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner:

Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.

Two years ago, President Bush appeared in a skit at the same event in which his administration's inability to find WMDs in Iraq was a bottomless source of comedy. The only journalist in attendance who objected was David Corn of The Nation:

... at one point, Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere."

The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn't the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Nope," he said. "No weapons over there." More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: "Maybe under here." Laughter again.

Disapproval must have registered upon my face, for one of my tablemates said, "Come on, David, this is funny." I wanted to reply, Over 500 Americans and literally countless Iraqis are dead because of a war that was supposedly fought to find weapons of mass destruction, and Bush is joking about it.

Washington journalists like Cohen, who didn't raise as much as a peep when Bush laughed off the false cause that sparked a war, have now spent five days haranguing a cable TV comedian for making the president huffy.

Journalism · Politics · Television · 2006/05/04 · 66 COMMENTS · Link

Writer Tells Wikipedia He Got a Divorce

I fleshed out a placeholder entry on Wikipedia this morning, giving the Richardson, Texas, high school where "Jeremy spoke in class today" enough substance to inspire future editors to work on it.

I've made around 150 edits to Wikipedia in the past year, most extensively on new bios and the unspeakably hideous "alcopop" drink Zima.

Starting new subjects is a lot more fun than defending existing ones from vandalism. My Drudge Retort coconspirator Jonathan Bourne and I worked on the Zima entry as a form of competitive sport, digging up increasingly obscure details and taunting each other with our unstoppable editing moves.

When you write a new entry in Wikipedia, it quickly becomes one of the most authoritative sources on the web about that subject. I have created seven entries in the past year. Six are now in the top 10 results for their name on Google.

One thing I find fascinating about the encyclopedia is how it accretes knowledge.

When I wrote the biography for Alexandra Shulman, a British fashion journalist who was amusingly dismissive of the site, I couldn't find concrete details on her marriage or son. In the press, she hasn't been a particularly gabby person where those topics are concerned, and I wasn't going to ask her directly because that seems like a disturbing thing to do. "Hi, I'm a complete stranger with an inordinate amount of interest in your personal life. Are you still married?"

I had to be vague, so I wrote in Wikipedia that she "has a son, Sam (b. 1994 or 1995), with the writer Paul Spike, from whom she is separated."

In March, someone in Wales edited the entry to indicate that her son was born in 1995.

In late April, "separated" was changed to "divorced" by an editor who also wrote a new Wikipedia entry on Spike. The same person uploaded a self-portrait of him, so it appears that Shulman's ex-husband has been compelled by my entry to give the world confirmation of their split.

Journalism · Music · Publishing · Wikipedia · 2006/05/04 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

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