Meme13: Finding New Bloggers in Tech

Steven Hodson writes:

I get a real kick out of it when people start pontificating on why the tech blogosphere is becoming nothing more than [a] self-fulfilling chamber filled with the dull echos of me-too posting that attach themselves like leeches to the supposed brilliant writings of the blogosphere mucky mucks.

Me too.

Every six months or so, techbloggers reach the joint realization that we're all linking to the same people having the same thoughts about the same subjects. Somebody blames Techmeme, a site that collects the most popular links, and we all link to that guy. The resulting argument shows up on Techmeme. A good time is had by all. Last time around, I said I wanted a Techmeme that pretends the most-linked tech sources don't exist, then looks at what's being linked by everybody else. The top bloggers link to each other constantly. You have to look elsewhere for up-and-coming bloggers who are still working in the sweet spot that lies between obscure and insufferable.

This morning, I'm launching a new site, Meme13, to find those bloggers.

Meme13 mashes together the last 13 sites that made their first appearance on the Techmeme Leaderboard. You can read these sites by visiting Meme13 or subscribing to its feed, which contains the latest entries from all of them.

I've been tracking the leaderboard since Feb. 4. In that time, 175 different sites have made an appearance on the top-100 list. The current Meme13 made their Techmeme debut in the past two weeks:

• Amazon Web Services
• Big Tech
• ProBlogger Blog Tips
• Deep Jive Interests
• Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection
• New Scientist Technology Headlines
• DVLabs
• Blog Maverick
• The Iconoclast
• 9 to 5 Mac
• Futuristic Play
• Web Strategy by Jeremiah
• Coop's Corner

When a new site appears, the oldest Meme13 site drops off. So far, sites have stuck around for approximately two weeks. Over time Meme13 should get better at finding lesser-known sites as its database grows.

Meme13's an XML hack that downloads OPML data using a XOM-based Java application, stores the elements in a MySQL database and uses Planet Planet to publish the feeds as a web site and Atom feed. It's updated hourly and published automatically.

The site needs a lot of work, particularly on the interface, but I figured it was time to loose this experiment upon the world.

Rss · Programming · 2008/04/15 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

When Animals Attack

As I spend the day being pecked by journalists, an aggressive and territorial species, Primate Brow Flash reminds me that it could be much worse:

The past two mornings, the same goose has attacked me as I ride by, yesterday attacking me from the side and beating his wings against me, this morning sneaking up silently from behind and crashing into my helmet. I always scream like a chimp when it happens.

When an animal gets this aggressive, my first thought is that it is going to wear itself out and die. Animals, especially in early spring, don’t have all this excess energy to spend against perceived threats."

I was startled once by an opossum in my trash can. After I ran out of my driveway screaming "mommy help me!" a neighbor told me it was more afraid of me than I was of it.

· 2008/04/09 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Washington Post Wins Another Phony Pulitzer

Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten, one of the funniest journalists I've ever read, won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing yesterday, honored for a piece in which world-class violinist Joshua Bell played incognito at a DC Metro station and drew little reaction among most of the philistine passers-by.

No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. ...

In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

It's an entertaining piece that's completely unworthy of a Pulitzer Prize because Weingarten engineered the entire stunt after seeing a talented keyboardist ignored in similar circumstances.

He was quite remarkably good, and no one seemed to be noticing him. He had maybe a buck or two in change in his open case.

I walked away kind of angry. I thought, "I bet Yo Yo Ma himself, if he were in disguise, couldn't get through to these deadheads." When I got to the office, I actually tried to reach Mr. Ma's agent.

Life intervened. Time went by, but this story idea always stayed with me. It was my friend Tim Page, The Post's brilliant classical music critic, who eventually suggested Joshua Bell.

Weingarten, who stumbled upon a decent feature story in that wrongly unappreciated keyboardist, made it a better one by recruiting a classical music virtuoso, picking a better location and staging hidden cameras and reporters to better capture reactions. Journalism, meet reality TV.

His story beat two others honored as finalists. Thomas Curwen of the Los Angeles Times wrote about two victims of a grizzly bear attack and Kevin Vaughan of the Rocky Mountain News wrote a 34-part series recalling a Greeley, Colo., school bus-train accident that killed 20 children in 1961.

Curwen did not recruit the bear. Vaughan wasn't born yet in 1961.

Twenty seven years ago, another reporter at the Post, Janet Cooke, won the same prize for a feature story about an eight-year-old heroin addict. Two days after winning she admitted the entire story was phony and there was no Jimmy.

Joshua Bell exists, but in its own way, Weingarten's Pulitzer-winning feature is just as fabricated as Cooke's.

Journalism · 2008/04/08 · 22 COMMENTS · Link

This One's for the Ladies

A comment posted on The New Republic's weblog:

kevincollins said:

Well, as a lifelong bachelor for 37 years, I'd say I stopped going into restaurants where you tip a waiter or waitress about 10 years ago. I've always averred that it's woefully wasteful. Why the hell should I pay extra just for someone to bring my food to the table? I'm perfectly capable of doing that myself. And the way I see it, food is just something I need to survive. That's why I either get 99-cent items at Burger King, Jack in the Box, or McDonalds or buy 99-cent microwavable items from the grocery store -- I don't need overpriced baby-back ribs from Chili's and the like. It's just frigging food any way you slice it. What really cracks me up are elderly people who go to overpriced cafeterias for food they're perfectly capable of fixing at home, because they're the ones who gripe that Social Security isn't enough income yet blow crucial dollars of their income for eating out. Nowhere in the Constitution is it written that they're entitled the money to eat out, nor is it written that a family of 4 is equally entitled to eat at Appleby's and T.G.I. Fridays and the like every weekend like so many families robotically do as if they're all pod people. So bravo to fast-food places that are getting improved business nowadays. They offer nondescript food at good prices that may not be as tasty as meat at Outback Steakhouse but are perfectly fine nevertheless.

I'd tune in if this guy was the next Bachelor.

· 2008/04/03 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Judging Annie Leibovitz By Her Cover

In a column this morning for TownHall.Com, David W. Almasi calls me a "race-monger" for pointing out the racial implications of the LeBron James/Gisele Bundchen Vogue magazine cover. Annie Leibovitz's photo was a recreation of a famous World War I military recruitment poster, with James in the role of the woman-lusting gorilla and Bundchen as his prey. People who see King Kong in the cover are not far off the mark.

Citing Chris Rock's Saturday Night Live character Nat X, Almasi, the executive director of the right-wing National Center for Public Policy Research, races to this conclusion:

Rather than judging James -- and, by extension, other blacks -- by the content of their character, skills or intellect as Vogue intended, the race-mongers instead seem more interested in bringing things down to the lowest common denominator. There never seems to be a party where they don't want to be a skunk.

After all, Nat X said that's what we wanted to see.

I contacted Almasi last week after his think tank issued a press release declaring there was "no racial double-meaning" in the cover. I wanted to see if his opinion would change after he saw the poster, which Leibovitz was clearly referencing in her shot.

As you might expect of a person who makes his living holding a rigid ideological position, Almasi didn't budge an inch. He scoffed in email at the notion there's anything racial going on, since the poster's gorilla is a German kaiser.

Surely Almasi knows that the portrayal of a black athlete as a simian is a racially provocative statement. Less than a year after Howard Cosell called an athlete a "little monkey" on Monday Night Football in 1983, a comparison he made previously of other non-black athletes, he was gone from the program. Less innocently, racists have often compared blacks to monkeys and apes.

If Leibovitz had not worked directly from an iconic gorilla/woman poster, we could have the argument Almasi wants to have about how controversies like this are drummed up by people seeing racism in places it doesn't exist. I think he'd still be wrong -- the black journalists who first spoke out against the Vogue cover have a right to find it offensive -- but it's more open to debate.

Instead, Almasi finds himself in the position of pretending there's nothing racial going on when Leibovitz intentionally cast LeBron James in the role of a gorilla.

To paraphrase Nat X, that's what she wanted us to see.

Sports · Politics · 2008/04/02 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Doug Glanville: From The Show to The Times

As I mentally prepare myself for the season in which the Texas Rangers will finally win the World Series, I posted Doug Glanville's latest essay on SportsFilter to mark baseball's opening night:

Doug Glanville: Baseball and the Plankton of Opportunity: "Since a baseball player has the memory of an elephant, my first spring training with the Chicago Cubs might as well have happened yesterday," nine-year Major Leaguer Doug Glanville writes in today's New York Times. "My first roommate was a sleepwalker. He woke up in the middle of the night yelling at shadows; once he crawled into my twin bed after a late-night rant. After that I slept with one eye open and a Pro Stock model M159 baseball bat nearby." More wordsmithing to mark opening night comes from George Will and William Ecenbarger.

In January, Glanville humanized the steroid controversy by explaining how fear drove some players to juice up.

Sports · 2008/03/30 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Vogue Makes King James Look Like King Kong

Today on SportsFilter:

Critics Go Ape Over Lebron James Magazine Cover: A picture of NBA star Lebron James and the model Gisele on the cover of April's Vogue is attracting controversy over their pose. The shot taken by renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz has been compared by some detractors to King Kong holding Fay Wray. ESPN.Com columnist Jemele Hill called it "memorable for all the wrong reasons." The photo is remarkably similar to "Destroy This Mad Brute" a famous World War I recruitment poster.

Update: I took a second pass at this issue for Watching the Watchers. I'm being driven mad this morning by the media's inability to discover the gorilla poster that's a clear and unmistakable inspiration for Leibovitz's photo.

Sports · 2008/03/27 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

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