Larry the High Voltage Cable Guy

Movies · 2007/05/12 · Comment · Link

My Guess: Opie and Anthony are Screwed

I put the transcript and audio up on Watching the Watchers, so people can judge for themselves. I don't listen to the show, so I can't judge the comments in the context of what they do every day. I have trouble imagining a context in which the sentiments aren't ugly as hell, especially the part where host Anthony Cumia plays along and chimes in.

Although the comments aired on XM, which requires a subscription and doesn't answer to the FCC, the pending XM/Sirius merger requires federal approval and gives Washington another reason to go after satellite radio for indecency.

Because of the merger plans and the recent Don Imus firing, I expect that Opie and Anthony will be out of work within a week.

I'm not in favor of it, since I don't know the show and think we're encouraging media gutlessness by letting outside groups hound targets off the air. But as a longtime XM subscriber, I must have heard 1,000 ads promoting these shock jocks over the years, and I've never understood why they're two of XM's marquee names.

Radio · Politics · Journalism · 2007/05/11 · 35 COMMENTS · Link

Down Syndrome Parents Wrestle with Extinction

There's an interesting hot-button issue on the Drudge Retort this morning: Parents of children with Down syndrome are concerned about a new trend some liken to eugenics -- 9-in-10 prospective parents, equipped with safe tests that detect the condition in the womb, choose to abort rather than raise such a child. "We want people who make this decision to know our kids," said Lucy Talbot, the president of a support group. "We want them to talk to us."

From what I've learned through limited experience with people who have Down syndrome, some of them function at a high level with a measure of independence and undeniable quality of life. This is a very complex issue, but I think its valuable to convey that message to prospective parents after a positive Down test.

I vivid recall a relative's experience when a prenatal test detected a possibility of severe abnormalities in her first child (unrelated to Down). Researching the worst-case scenario on Google, based on what she'd heard from her doctor, was a gut-wrench for me, and it had to be a hundred times worst for her. It proved to be a false alarm, thankfully, but it underscored the difficult decision faced here by any parent in such circumstance. We're flying blind on this, as the first generation of breeders equipped with genetic screening.

I've learned enough about Down syndrome that faced with such a decision, I'd oppose abortion because it was detected in the womb. But unlike most of the Republican field in the next presidential election, I would not force that choice on others.

Parenting · Politics · 2007/05/09 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Free the Presidential Debates

Barack Obama and John Edwards have both written letters this week calling on presidential debates to be released under a Creative Commons license.

Edwards' take:

The Creative Commons license terms offer an easy way to ensure that the networks' rights are protected. Much of the content on my own campaign web site is available under just such a license.

Commercial constraints are severe enough in their effect in diluting the substance of our campaigns. Limiting access to long-form televised debates makes matters worse.

I didn't expect a copyright licensing issue to get this kind of attention, but Creative Commons has become an effective lever to pry open content that should rightfully be shared. There's a rising expectation among the public that we should be able to reuse and remix material like this -- C-Span responded to the same pressure in March by allowing non-commercial reuse of the videos it produces at Congressional hearings, federal agency briefings, and White House events.

Politics · Creative Commons · 2007/05/04 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Make Google Happy: Weed Out Duplicate Content

I spend a lot of time these days trying to master search engine optimization, the practice of making Google's great and terrible algorithm give you the love you never received from your emotionally closed off, impossible to please father¹. A commercial venture like Wargames.Com, which I'm running as a bootstrap with no advertising budget, would be utterly hopeless without search traffic.

Towards this end, I've created a sitemap for each of my sites -- an XML file that tells Google and other search engines where to find new and updated content. Here's the Wargames.Com sitemap, which lists the URLs of each of the store's products along with the date the pages were last edited. (Have I mentioned that large-scale combat simulations make an excellent gift for Mother's Day?)

The process of creating these maps taught me that I was making a huge mistake in the design of my sites: Offering the same content on multiple pages, all of which were indexed by Google.

A lot of sites make this blunder. You can see an example from The Onion fake news site with this search. A column by Ben Tiedemann explaining why he blogs has been picked up a bunch of different times by Google.

Google's algorithm aggressively hunts down duplicate content, relegating it to a supplemental index where it gets no love at all from searchers. Another Google search shows that all but one copy of the blogger column are considered dupes.

If you want to maximize a page's prominence in Google, make one copy available to Google and hide the rest by adding the following header to their pages:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

The noindex keyword tells search engines not to index the page, and follow says the engine should crawl the page's links to find other pages.

If possible, you also should redirect URL requests so that each of your pages is loaded at its main URL, which for The Onion appears to be links in the form content/node/number. A page that can be loaded a bunch of different ways will be bookmarked at each of those different URLs, reducing the amount of Google juice it receives for being linked.

Employing these techniques on Wargames.Com has produced search results that are a lot more likely to be useful, reaching specific product pages. I'm not seeing an uptick in sales yet, but the Google results for the site were so useless 90 days ago I was afraid the other search engine optimizers would find out and make fun of me.

P.s. Just kidding, dad!

Seo · Xml · Google · 2007/05/03 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Mystery Solved: House is Like Holmes

It took me two-and-a-half years, but I finally figured out that the Fox medical drama House has patterned the title character, an arrogant doctor who solves sadistic medical mysteries, after Sherlock Holmes.

Beyond the similarity of the names Holmes and House, both feature characters who are arrogant and addicted to drugs (Holmes abuses cocaine and morphine; House takes Vicodin for a leg ailment). They're both incredibly difficult to get along with and have only close friend and confidante -- Holmes has Dr. Watson, House has Dr. Wilson.

In an overt nod to Holmes on this week's episode, House was shopping for a cane when he put a curled Baskerville pipe in his mouth. (You'd think a guy whose patients regularly develop excruciating maladies from exposure to exotic toxins would have the sense not to do that.)

A House fan site runs down all of their similarities, which include another obvious clue that I missed: House's house has the address 221-B.

My favorite connection is that both characters love lowbrow culture. Holmes is a regular reader of "agony columns," melodramatic Dear Abby-style advice features for the lovelorn and desperate, and House is a regular viewer of General Hospital who once used the pseudonym Luke N. Laura.

Television · Books · 2007/05/02 · 1 COMMENT · Link

NBC Buys RSS-to-Email Service R-Mail

The largest email-based RSS service was sold to NBC Universal this week, an event that's curiously absent from the tech press. Randy Charles Morin's R-Mail was purchased by the entertainment network for an undisclosed amount.

The service has 50,000 users, 100,000 subscriptions and sends out more than 50,000 e-mails per day, according to DMW Daily, though I suspect a zero's missing from the last figure. When I wrote about R-Mail last August, it had 20,000 users.

R-Mail makes it possible to receive web site updates by email for any site that offers an RSS or Atom feed. I didn't realize that reading feeds by mail was so popular until I offered subscriptions to users of the Drudge Retort. Within a few weeks, more than 600 people were getting each news update from the site in e-mail.

Morin, a member of the RSS Advisory Board and a longtime advocate of RSS, began R-Mail as a personal project to suit his own needs. He turned it pro when the site grew by 15,000 users over a 90-day period in 2006.

Normally, you'd expect an RSS startup that attracted more than 45,000 new users in a year to get the attention of TechCrunch and the other sites that obsess over Web 2.0. But while Michael Arrington was wishing for somebody to launch a blog-to-email startup and covering the launch and fire sale of a small RSS-email service called Zookoda, he completely missed the one that grew into a successful business.

Rss · Business · 2007/04/27 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

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