RSS Advisory Board Becomes Publisher of Media RSS
Last night, I finished creating a copy of the Media RSS Specification as part of its move from Yahoo to the RSS Advisory Board. We found out 21 months ago that Yahoo was amenable to the idea of finding a custodian to publish the spec, so several board members and I have been working with them to make it happen.
Media RSS is a namespace that extends RSS to support sophisticated distribution of audio, video and image files. In the five years since it was created by Yahoo, it has become extremely popular with podcasters and other multimedia publishers. It is supported by Yahoo Search, Bing, Wikipedia, Flock, Picasa and a lot of other sites and software.
Because version 1.5 of the specification was just released in October, I expect the first priority of the board will be to help developers implement the new features such as user ratings of media content, the ability to define scenes, Creative Commons licensing and support for geolocation. Our first job should be to ensure that the Feed Validator for Atom and RSS can validate all of the elements in a Media RSS feed.
This move wouldn't have happened without Sapna Chandiramani and Nilesh Gattani at Yahoo and Randy Charles Morin and Ryan Parman on the board, so I'd like to thank them for their efforts.
In the nearly four years since the board went public with its votes and deliberations, we've been entrusted by Netscape to publish the first two versions of RSS -- RSS 0.90 and RSS 0.91 -- and now by Yahoo to publish Media RSS. I'm glad that we've gained the trust of the RSS development community for projects of this kind. The board can assure the permanent availability of any namespaces, documentation or services related to syndication, and we are an independent group with members who have been involved in syndication going all the way back to its creation in 1999.
Before I worked on moving the Media RSS spec this week, I didn't notice that it contained an example that only would make sense to people who grew up in Texas in the '80s:
<media:title type="plain">The Judy's -- The Moo Song</media:title>
The Judys were a twisted bubblegum pop band that toured Dallas, Austin and Nacogdoches when I was in college and had no money to see them. A few of their songs, though not "Moo," can be heard on MySpace. The Judys fan at Yahoo turns out to be David Hall, the author of the original version of the spec. He graduated from Berkner High School in Richardson, Texas, seven years after I did.
Photographer Makes Weighty Request
Philip Greenspun, an MIT computer science teacher who founded the photographic community Photo.Net, has posted an unusual request on his weblog:
I'd like to get some pictures of fat people eating (example1; example2). I'm in Orlando and it seems like an ideal opportunity to combine two quintessentially American themes: obesity and theme parks. Also, a theme park is a great place to walk around with a big camera and lens without attracting attention. I would like to find a theme park where there are a lot of restaurants, a lot of fat people (aside from myself), and most of the restaurants have outdoor seating.
He believes that diet pills will emerge in the future that make today's fat people a historical curiosity in the year 2100.
I've been to Orlando dozens of times. When you need to add blubber to prepare for the harsh Florida winter, the best places I've found are the Chevy's Tex-Mex at the Crossroads shopping center on State Road 535, the Wolfgang Puck Cafe at Downtown Disney and the Rainforest Cafe outside Animal Kingdom.
Crash Kills 2 Teens in Jacksonville
There was a terrible two-car accident in Jacksonville Sunday night that left two teens dead and five other people hospitalized with serious injuries. Around 8:30 p.m., a Chevy Silverado going north on Phillips Highway near the Avenues Mall collided with a southbound private ambulance turning left near Interstate 95. The truck's driver, 19-year-old Michael Linder, and his 18-year-old girlfriend Megan Bunn died from injuries sustained in the accident. Florida State Highway troopers told News4Jax that no one in the truck was wearing a seat belt.
I was driving north on Phillips Highway at the same time as the teens, and at around 8:30 I was turning onto Southside Boulevard no more than 1,200 feet before the intersection where the crash occurred. I didn't see or hear a collision. When I returned to the highway 30 minutes later after an errand, the road was completely shut down and police and ambulances were all over the place.
Megan Bunn had an active MySpace page with lots of pictures of a person just getting started in her life. One titled Me and You is presumably her and Linder. The page records her last login as 11/29/2009, the day of the accident. One of her recent status messages reads "my life makes me laugh till the day im dead."
The cause of Sunday's crash has yet to be determined. The ambulance driver has reportedly told police he had a green light when he turned and the damage to the truck indicates that it must have been going pretty fast. Police are looking for eyewitnesses, but I did not notice any vehicles driving in an unusual manner.
I used to read about tragedies like this and see myself in the participants. Now I think more about how my oldest son is two years from legal driving age. I don't know how parents muster the courage to send their children out in motor vehicles. When you are a teen, it's difficult to let go of the idea that you are indestructible. I'm a neurotic person with a highly developed sense of caution, but at age 18 I can recall being stupid a few times behind the wheel. One incident in particular -- when I was leaving the Starck Club in Dallas and had a near-miss accident on Interstate 30 in the middle of the night -- convinced me to never drink as much as a single beer if I'm going to be driving. My heart goes out to the families of the people involved in this accident.
The First Coast News story I linked contains a lot of unkind speculation from readers, which seems to be the norm on newspaper and TV station web sites. I don't understand why there's so little humanity in the reader forums of local media. Even though several friends of Been and Linder have participated in the discussion, it hasn't stopped some people from being incredibly cruel.
Media sites attract vicious commenters. When my college friend Bill Muller died two years ago, he was the longtime film critic for the Arizona Republic and the paper ran a feature obituary about his many accomplishments in journalism. Here's the first comment it received, which is still online today:
While my sincere condolences go out to Mr. Muller's family & friends, it is my greatest hope that the paper will replace him with a film "critic" who actually LIKES movies that normal people go to see rather than the "artsy-craftsy" c-r-a-p that always get rave reviews. ...
I don't understand why blogs like this one attract kinder communities than the ones on local newspapers, where the audience is an actual community. You'd think people would be nicer to their neighbors.
I Ruined Blogging for the St. Augustine Record
Peter Ellis, the editor of the St. Augustine Record, recently began a blog with an angry post that suggests he is starting his new site under duress:
My first encounter with a blogger was a miserable experience. He reported stuff on his blog about The Record that was wrong and then urged bloggers across the country to write me to complain. Many of them did, even though most of them had never heard of the St. Augustine Record.
That left a bad taste in my mouth about bloggers. Since then, I've read quite a few blogs and, with some delightful exceptions, most are awful. So I enter the world of blogging gently, knowing that many who have gone before me have failed.
My goal is to write about what happens in the newsroom, why we make the decisions we do and, I hope, get into a conversation with you about The Record and our work. I won't write about my family, my dog, my old convertible and my golf game. They all fascinate me, but I'm pretty sure they won't do the same for you.
What I will talk about is journalism at The Record. I hope you'll join me in the conversation.
He's talking about me. In 2007, I wrote about the Record when it tried to expose the identity of a local blogger who was critical of a county commissioner, and my story was linked by Romenesko, attracting attention from some journalists and bloggers across the country. I posted a follow-up about how Ellis was telling people that the blogger was a front for an organized group but the paper never ran a story revealing his identity or that of the supposed group.
As a longtime reader of the Record, I thought it was inappropriate for the paper to release its own security video of the unnamed blogger, who had bought a display ad in the paper to get his message out, and conduct a manhunt as if he was a criminal. The factual basis for the ad was backed up by the paper's own reporting.
When Ellis posted a comment on my blog, I contacted him to confirm his identity and we got into a bitchy email exchange. He told me "you don't have a lot of credibility with me," I responded that my web traffic could beat up his web traffic and he kept telling me that my blog was incorrect without pointing out any actual error. He finished the exchange with this comment: "You're wrong across the board, and you know it. Please don't write to me anymore."
So now I learn that not only was I wrong in some still-unspecified way, but my wrongness proved to be a formative experience for him.
This isn't the first time I've made a professional journalist mad about what I wrote on Workbench, which I enjoy because turnabout is fair play. But I didn't encourage people to complain to Ellis. I just related the facts as I knew them, gave my own opinion and some bloggers evidently contacted him because they objected to what his paper was doing. It's ironic that a journalist with 37 years experience would play shoot the messenger when he doesn't like the consequences of somebody else's reporting.
Although this would appear to be another battle in the war between journalists and bloggers, as I begin my eleventh year of blogging I don't think the distinctions matter any more. He appears to see bloggers as a self-fascinated and awful group, but these days millions of people have blogs, Twitter accounts and social media sites. Everybody gathers and shares information. The world I went to college for, in which a trained priesthood of journalism school graduates are the primary dispensers of the news, doesn't exist any more.
I enjoyed the days when profits were fat and journalism jobs were plentiful, but I'm glad to live at a time when any outspoken person with a web site has the opportunity to put the local newspaper editor on the defensive.
CDC Official: Vaccine Distribution Remains 'Bumpy'
The shortage of H1N1 swine flu vaccine in some parts of the country continues to be a concern of the federal government's vaccination authorities, immunologist Anne Schuchat said this afternoon during a briefing for bloggers on the pandemic. "This has really been bumpy," Schuchat said as she fielded questions from California and other places where supplies of the vaccine has been extremely difficult for people to find. "As of today, 58.9 million doses of H1N1 vaccine have become available for the states to order."
I participated in the hour-long "bloginar," which was held by the Department of Health and Human Services. Schuchat, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, answered questions for an hour submitted over email and Twitter.
There are 43 states in which influenza is categorized as widespread, compared to zero at this time in a normal year, she said. Children, pregnant women and health care professionals are among the high-risk groups urged to get vaccinated. She encouraged bloggers to share a Flu Vaccine Locator widget from its Flu.Gov web site, which helps people find the vaccine in their area.
When asked about the safety of the swine flu vaccine, Schuchat said that it's no different than the seasonal flu vaccines that have been offered for years. "It is produced exactly the same way," she said. The companies that are producing the vaccine use the same production process and undergo "the same kind of oversight with FDA inspections and visits."
Another blogger asked about the decision not to include an adjuvant in the vaccine. Adjuvants are "substances that are put in vaccines to improve the immune response," Schuchat explained. The federal government bought adjuvant to store in case it was needed, but has found that the normal 15-microgram dose of antigen in the current swine flu vaccine has been sufficient.
Current vaccine producers are not licensed to include an adjuvant in the United States, she said. This means that an "emergency use authorization" would have been required to make use of them to fight swine flu. "We worried that the use of adjuvants at this point wouldn't be acceptable to people," she said.
I posed this question to Schuchat: What can you say to address the concerns of people who believe the long-term health effects of flu vaccines have not been adequately studied?
Schuchat replied that "influenza vaccines have a very good safety track record," pointing out that 100 million doses are dispensed per year. "I'm not aware of any problems about long-term safety." The National Institutes of Health are funding studies to observe whether any concerns arise for pregnant women who have been given the swine flu vaccine this year.
As someone who's gotten vaccinated along with my wife and children, I was passing along a concern raised by a reader on the Drudge Retort. I've been surprised by the number of people who get the yearly flu shot but have been hesitant to get the swine flu vaccine. The vaccine is currently available in several places here in St. Augustine and Jacksonville, though I have friends and family in Texas and California who can't find it anywhere.
An archived broadcast of the briefing can be viewed on Flu.Gov, which has other resources for people who have questions about the flu pandemic and vaccine. The site has a self-evaluation tool for people who are battling flu-like symptoms and a fraudulent H1N1 products widget that a DHHS official urged bloggers and social networking users to share.
The Danger of Employing Redskins as Movie Actors
Although it's getting a lot of flak from publishers and authors, Google Books is one of the most amazing contributions to world knowledge launched on the web in years. The ability to search the full text of thousands of books published prior to 1923 -- and hence in the public domain -- is amazing. I've been poking around it for a while, and I found something today while studying how Americans used the term "redskins" before Washington's NFL team chose that repulsive racist mascot in 1933.In the 1915 book Making the Movies, author Ernest Alfred Dench wrote a section giving advice to filmmakers on hiring Native Americans as actors. Here it is in full:
The Dangers of Employing Redskins as Movie Actors
It is only within the last two or three years that genuine Redskins have been employed in pictures. Before then these parts were taken by white actors made up for the occasion. But this method was not realistic enough to satisfy the progressive spirit of the producer.
The Red Indians who have been fortunate enough to secure permanent engagements with the several Western film companies are paid a salary that keeps them well provided with tobacco and their worshipped "fire water."
It might be thought that this would civilise them completely, but it has had a quite reverse effect, for the work affords them an opportunity to live their savage days over again, and they are not slow to take advantage of it.
They put their heart and soul into the work, especially in battles with the whites, and it is necessary to have armed guards watch over their movements for the least sign of treachery. They naturally object to acting in pictures where they are defeated, and it requires a good deal of coaxing to induce them to take on such objectionable parts.
Once a white player was seriously wounded when the Indians indulged in a bit too much realism with their clubs and tomahawks. After this activity they had their weapons padded to prevent further injurious use of them.
With all the precautions that are taken, the Redskins occasionally manage to smuggle real bullets into action; but happily they have always been detected in the nick of time, though on one occasion some cowboys had a narrow escape during the producing of a Bison film.
Even to-day a few white players specialise in Indian parts. They are pastmasters in such roles, for they have made a complete study of Indian life, and by clever make-up they are hard to tell from real redskins. They take leading parts, for which Indians are seldom adaptable.
To act as an Indian is the easiest thing possible, for the Redskin is practically motionless.
Predicting the Next Hugo Award-Winning Novel
For the last two years I've voted in the Hugo Awards, yearly literary honors for science fiction and fantasy (but mostly science fiction). I skipped the best novel category because I hadn't read most of the works, which is no fun at all since that's the biggest award. So when the 2010 Hugos are decided next spring, I'd like to have completed enough of the nominated novels to make an informed vote.
This won't be easy, since I only read around one book a month. But after digging into the history of the awards, I've found that most best-novel nominated authors have been there before. If you're nominated for one novel, you have a pretty good shot that your next will be nominated as well. During the past decade, 34 out of 50 nominees were retreads. Here are the only first-timers over that period:
- 2000: J.K. Rowling
- 2001: Nalo Hopkinson, Ken McLeod, George R.R. Martin
- 2002: Neil Gaiman, China Mieville
- 2003: None
- 2004: Charles Stross
- 2005: Iain M. Banks, Susanna Clarke, Ian McDonald
- 2006: John Scalzi
- 2007: Michael F. Flynn, Naomi Novik, Peter Watts
- 2008: Michael Chabon
- 2009: Cory Doctorow
There are currently 68 living Hugo-nominated best novel authors, ranging in age from Naomi Novik at 36 to Frederik Pohl, who turns 90 next week on Nov. 26 and recently began his own blog. I put together an Amazon wish list of 22 novels by these authors coming out this year, leaving off some books that have no shot at all, such as book five in a genre series and every co-authored novel except for David Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Escape from Hell, the sequel to their 1976 Hugo-nominated novel Inferno.
I'm guessing that four out of five Hugo nominees and the eventual winner are on this list. I recently finished Transition by Iain M. Banks and began reading This is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams, who was nominated 11 years ago for the novel City on Fire.
If you'd like to vote in the Hugos, all that's required is to become a supporting member of the next WorldCon science fiction convention before voting begins. A supporting membership in AussieCon 4, the 2010 WorldCon in Melbourne, Australia, currently costs $50 and can be upgraded later if you decide to attend. One cool perk of being a Hugo voter is that you're sent ebook copies of most nominated novels and many other nominated works for private review. Unfortunately, by the time they arrive you only have a few weeks in which to read them.
I'll be posting a review of Transition later this week.
Credit: The photo of a 2007 Hugo Award statue was derived from a photo taken by Doctorow available under a Creative Commons license.
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