Keep Your Eye on Jason Kottke
Jason Kottke found something unexpected in an Online Journalism Review article about page design that used eye-tracking tests on 255 people. When looking at a photo of baseball player George Brett standing at home plate while batting, men and women had different points of attention. Women focused on the area around Brett's face, while men divided their time between the Hall of Famer's face and his crotch.
I've added eye-tracking capabilities to Workbench to determine if these results are limited to athletic supporters or extend to other photographic subjects.
Look at this photo of Kottke modeling a Defunker T-shirt, then hover your mouse over the image to see real-time eye-tracking data for visitors to this weblog.
You people are sick.
Chris Finke Joins RSS Advisory Board
Chris Finke, a senior engineer at Netscape, has joined the RSS Advisory Board.
Finke's a Netscape.Com and Netscape 9 browser developer as well as the creator of the Mozilla Firefox extensions RSS Ticker and OPML Support.
Netscape played a formative role in the development of RSS, publishing the first RSS specification in 1999 and spurring adoption by encouraging publishers to create feeds for the first aggregator -- the recently relaunched My.Netscape. Netscape published RSS 0.90, the common ancestor of both RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. For the past eight years, Netscape has hosted the RSS 0.91 DTD, a document type definition that receives four million hits a day.
Welcome to the board!
Putting a Blogger's Identity on the Record
Network World blogger Paul McNamara covers the St. Augustine Record's attempt to out a local blogger, calling me a "former newspaperman ... who appears to have forgotten a lot about the journalism business."
The Record, believing Padgett to be part of an organized political group out to unseat Rich, not merely a lonely pamphleteer voicing his displeasure with a public official, decided that making public Padgett's identity was the right to do.
They were correct. While there may be a long-held and cherished right to publish anonymously in this country, it isn't any more absolute than other First Amendment rights and should never be confused with a right to remain anonymous. After all, there was never anything stopping the lonely pamphleteer's neighbors from saying, "Hey, that looks a lot like farmer Ben's handwriting."
Truth be told, the Record didn't need a high-minded rational for outing Padgett. The mere fact that the man had kicked up public attention -- made himself a person of public interest -- makes him fair game for being identified (if not the video treatment).
I don't object to the Record seeking to identify Lee Padgett, whose LocalSafety blog came back online yesterday. I object to the paper treating him like a criminal by releasing video surveillance footage, not even explaining that his activities at its office were innocuous.
Although Record Editor Peter Ellis continues to tell people that Padgett's a front for an organized group, he has yet to feel confident enough in this fact to report it to his readers. No story has run about him since a Feb. 6 article in which Peter Guinta, its most experienced reporter, couldn't find his identity.
Ellis and McNamara appear to believe that if the press suspects a person of something, it's OK to call on the public to send in tips that might confirm its suspicions. Since when does reporting involve tossing out rumors in the hopes they'll be proven true by the public? If they want to do that, they should become bloggers.
Newspaper Asks Public to Identify Local Blogger
A Florida newspaper appears to have hit an all-time low in the relationship between bloggers and the media. The St. Augustine Record is asking the public to help expose the identity of a local blogger who recently started a site critical of county politicians. This evening, the paper's home page has a grainy surveillance photo of a man accompanied by this text:
Believed to be connected to a politically charged but anonymously-run Web site targeting the character of members of the St. Johns County Commission. Help us determine his identity. Start by watching these four movies featuring footage from surveillance cameras.
The Record published video taken inside and outside its offices March 1 that show a man dropping something off at the front desk. There's no explanation of what he's doing, making it look like some kind of threat was delivered, but I found the details on the paper's message board. He was at the newspaper buying an ad.
The ad, which the paper ran, criticized County Commissioner Ben Rich for comments he made during a televised meeting:
Unbelievably, Rich went on to say that he was angered by the police officer first responding to the Columbine school tragedy in Colorado. He actually remarked in the televised meeting that watching the police officer who was outside the school awaiting the SWAT team made him "want to go down there and shoot the cop and go in".
Mr. Rich, you should resign as an elected official, you do not deserve to serve. All of us know that in reality Rich is mad because the firefighters union supported candidates in the last election that Mr. Rich did not support. Rich has been trying to take his revenge against the firefighters publicly for months. Mr. Rich, we will not allow you to play politics with our local safety any longer.
The blogger's site, LocalSafety.org, is offline but I fished several pages from Google's cache. Allegations made by blogger Lee Padgett, as he's identified in the site's whois record and messages on the paper's message board, are backed up by the Record: Rich really did make the "shoot the cop" remark and disparage firefighters, drawing an angry response. This week, Rich filed for re-election early, hoping it would cause the site to be judged an excessive campaign contribution by local election officials and shut down.
"I find cowardice in any form repugnant," [Rich] said. "But in the political arena, where cowardice has become socially acceptable, I find it doubly repugnant." ...
"It's obvious to me that my political opponents have declared war and are using the unfair advantage of not registering as a political action committee," Rich said.
"Through the declaration of my candidacy, they'll no longer be able to operate in the shadows of anonymity. They will be forced into the open where they'll have their names and faces known to those they attack."
I don't know Padgett, but he has the right to speak his mind on the web without intimidation by politicians and the press, whether or not he's writing under his real name.
I've been reading the Record for a decade. I can't recall a single time where it conducted an effort to catch a rapist, robber or murderer anywhere near the scope of this manhunt for a blogger.
Ethereal Photo of Comerica Park
I was doing research for a SportsFilter post on Comerica leaving Detroit for Dallas when I found an incredible photo of a Tigers/Yankees game at Comerica Park:
Ryan Southen, a photography student at Oakland University, has been experimenting with photo manipulation through something called HDR, which I lack the PhotoShop chops to properly understand.
But judging by his work so far, I'd say the experiment is a success.
Judge Censors Stories on Kansas City Power Company
A circuit court judge in Kansas City has issued a temporary injunction ordering two news sites to remove articles from their web sites published Friday about the city's Board of Public Utilities on the grounds the power company would be "irreparably harmed" by their publication.
The articles, published by the Kansas City Star and The Pitch, describe a confidential document produced for the company in November 2004 that evaluates whether to tell the EPA that power plant upgrades did not comply with the federal Clean Air Act.
Attorney Stanley A. Reigel, in a 15-page document, identified 73 repairs or upgrades that were constructed without permits required under the Clean Air Act passed in 1977, according to The Pitch.
The work was done at the utility's three power plants: Nearman Creek Power Station, Quindaro Power Station and the now-closed Kaw Power Station. The work was completed between January 1980 and November 2004. Reigel determined that 15 of those repairs and upgrades were "questionable" and another 15 projects would be "probably not defensible" if the EPA conducted an audit.
Any one of those projects "puts BPU at risk" for an audit by the EPA, Reigel warned. Fines for utility companies in similar cases amounted to $1,000 for each megawatt of energy produced by the plant. Together, the Nearman and Quindaro plants produce 631 megawatts.
The stories had been cached on Google and elsewhere by the time Judge Kelly Moorhouse issued the unconstitutional order, making her actions utterly futile. Bloggers Brad Friedman and Justin McLachlan have reprinted them on First Amendment grounds.
Ironically, Judge Moorhouse graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia, home to one of the country's most prestigious schools of journalism
.XFN: Mark Up Your Friends
I added XFN support to Workbench this morning, putting keywords like "friend", "acquaintance", "met", and "colleague" inside the links on my blogroll. This tells XFN-aware software how I know people, which can be used to build distributed MySpace-style social networks across the web.
I'm a generation too old for this kind of thing to seem normal, but I'm curious to see whether anyone's doing interesting stuff with this data.
WordPress MU also supports XFN. Any time you add a link to your blogroll, click the Link Relationship pane to expand it and define how you know the linked site's author:
My newly codified relationships should be picked up soon by RubHub, an XFN search engine with a disturbing name. I do not plan to rub anyone on my blogroll, no matter how close we seem in this site's markup.
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