Meme Starts and Ends With Me

Scott Eric Kaufman, a graduate student at UC-Irvine, is begging bloggers to link to one of his posts so that he can measure the speed of memes around the Internet for a talk he's giving at the 2006 Modern Language Association convention.

Asking people to do something and pass it around is too MySpacey (answer this question on your site and tell 10 people you know to do the same: "If you could borrow any living person's organ, which one would you take and what would you do with it?").

But in this case, Kaufman deserves our support because he wrote the following sentence:

Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are -- to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett's rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium -- "skyhooked" into prominence by high-traffic blogs.

I miss college.

2006/11/30 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Atom and RSS Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Bananas

When Randy Charles Morin and I were trying to wrap up the RSS Autodiscovery specification, we removed references to Atom to avoid discord. Telling Atom publishers how to implement autodiscovery while they're working on their own spec seemed like a good way to spark a war between syndication formats worse than "Dick York vs. Dick Sargent" or "let the rabbit eat Trix."

Naturally, our decision angered Atom developers.

Sam Ruby:

Push the reset button, and get a better attitude.

I thought I had the right attitude. Even though I am the chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, I love Atom so much I should marry it. They've done good work and I want the board to support it in any area where there's common ground. A unified autodiscovery specification for Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 is the best possible outcome.

I contributed three proposals this morning to the Atom autodiscovery specification currently under draft:

• Pace Restrict Type Values For Autodiscovery
• Pace Restrict Rel Values For Autodiscovery
• Pace Recommend Full URIs For Autodiscovery

Every page of the RSS board's web site includes a link to Atom and RSS 1.0. The same isn't true in reverse -- we're not getting link love from them yet -- but I felt like it was important to declare peace between our dialects.

As far as I'm concerned, the syndication wars are over and everybody won.

Atom · Rss · Xml · 2006/11/28 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Use RSS Autodiscovery to Get More Feed Subscribers

The RSS Advisory Board has published a specification for RSS Autodiscovery, the most effective way to let readers know that your web site offers an RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 feed. (A similar effort's underway for Atom.)

If you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or Mozilla Firefox 1.5 or higher, you might have noticed an orange icon on the right edge of the address bar when you load some pages.

This icon indicates that the site offers a syndicated feed. You can click it to subscribe to the feed in the browser's feedreader or another reader such as Bloglines.

This specification works in complement with the common feed icon, the icon that's become the most popular means of identifying Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 content on the web.

Rss · Atom · 2006/11/27 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Bloglines Smashed My Atom 1.0 Feed

Something has gone wrong with my Atom 1.0 feed in Bloglines. The feed's valid, but the text of each weblog item is followed by lines like this:

2006-11-22T09:07:54-05:00
2006-11-22T09:07:54-05:00
tag:cadenhead.org,2004:weblog.3071
rcade

These four lines are the contents of several Atom elements that should not be displayed to readers of the feed.

Atom · 2006/11/22 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Black Friday No Longer Consumes Me

Paul Stamatiou pens an extremely detailed article on how to make the most of Black Friday, the annual day in which Americans race to stores before dawn to resupply themselves with enough consumer goods to last the winter.

I have simpler advice for how to make the most of Black Friday: Don't go shopping.

I'm a recovering doorbuster who has been clean for two years. As I told a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, I decided that no price was too high to avoid standing armpit-deep in a crowd of unwashed computer aficionados at the Jacksonville CompUSA, each of us delicating balancing our free 100-pack of blank CDs, seven-in-one digital camera card reader and a reasonably priced name brand laser printer/scanner.

Shopping · 2006/11/22 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Stephen Colbert on D&D: 'Enjoy Your Magnificent Isolation!'

Stephen Colbert was once an 11th-level paladin who explored Barrier Peaks:

I had an eleventh-level paladin (it took me years to advance those levels) whom I took on Expedition, and he got the Power Armor, which was the big thing to get in that module. But he also went a little power mad. On the next campaign we saw merchant caravans crossing the desert, and my character flew down and landed next to a merchant and tore off the guy's head.

The DM informed me that I was not a paladin anymore.

I said, "Oh, ----, I forgot. I'm lawful good!"

He talked about his paladin again on the Colbert Report this year.

Gaming · Television · 2006/11/22 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Fired North Texas Coach in Black Mood

My alma mater, the University of North Texas, made national news this past week when a booster for its football program threatened to withhold a $1 million donation after the team fired Coach Darrell Dickey.

In nine seasons, Dickey led the Mean Green to four straight Sun Belt Conference championships and the first bowl trip since 1959. He's one of the most accomplished coaches in the school's modest football history, but two losing seasons and criticism over recruitment led to his ouster. He's receiving a buyout in excess of $540,000 for the remaining years of his contract and agreed to coach through season's end.

Two incidents that took place during Saturday's North Texas-Florida Atlantic game show how wildly things have spun out of control at UNT since the firing.

According to parents of current players, right before Saturday's game Coach Dickey snuck new black uniforms onto the team without the school's permission. The rec-league quality jerseys, pictured here, didn't contain the names of players or the school and conference logos. They weren't cleared with Athletic Director Rick Villareal or announced to the press before the game and might violate agreements with the school's uniform supplier.

During halftime of the game, one assistant coach allegedly started a physical fight with with another after being told he should play seniors because it was their final home game. The incident got so out of hand the offense received no instruction before going back out to start the third quarter.

As you might have guessed, North Texas lost the game, 17-16, and fell to 3-8.

I'm a small donor to the Mean Green Club, the school's booster program, and a longtime fan of UNT football. Because I've been digging into these incidents on the GoMeanGreen.Com message board, I've gotten independent corroboration from sources affiliated with the program. I'm withholding their names at their request.

I can't recall a situation where a head coach sprang new uniforms on a Division I college football team to "piss off" his athletic director, as Dickey reportedly acknowledged to players before the game. Combine this with a coordinator putting another coach in a chokehold until being pulled off and it's a meltdown of historic proportions.

Dickey, who also abandoned his customary attire for all-black clothes and a black cap, is photographed with the team in the Denton Record-Chronicle. He told reporters it "wasn't anything other than kids liking that color," drawing the ire of parents who didn't like the stunt being blamed on players. When I saw game photos on Sunday I thought Dickey had declared a period of mourning for his job.

I left two messages today with new UNT President Gretchen Bataille to relay these events. The departing seniors on the team deserve a better sendoff than childish stunts from coaches nursing a grudge, fans deserve better, and a school paying Dickey another half-mil not to coach deserves better.

I'll be disappointed if Dickey makes the trip Saturday to finish the season against Louisiana-Monroe. I was on the fence about Dickey's firing, but I think he's shown his true colors.

Sports · 2006/11/21 · 31 COMMENTS · Link

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