Publishing

Church of the Risen Elvis

Because Atlanta courtroom killer Brian Nichols was read parts of The Purpose-Driven Life by his last hostage, CNN is republishing an interview the book's author did last November on Larry King Live. The book sounds like 336 pages of merciless flogging, based on the simplistic platitudes that the author, Rev. Rick Warren, inflicts on King ("The middle letter of pride is I, and the middle letter of sin is I"). The middle letter of tripe is I, too, reverend. But I'm linking to call attention to ... (read more)

2005/03/15

Mark Pilgrim Monkeys Around

Mark Pilgrim's half-year search for a hobby that doesn't involve electricity appears to have been as fruitless as O.J. Simpson's hunt for the "real killers." Pilgrim, who's being Michael Corleoned back into blogging on IBM's new PHP weblog, has recently released a script for GreaseMonkey, the Firefox plug-in for editing web content a la autolink. The script removes everything but links on sites published by Robert Scoble. Pilgrim also has released a new open source beloved butler that does to ... (read more)

2005/03/14

By using a custom style that makes nofollow links blink lime, Phil Ringnalda can see how sites are using the attribute: I'm surprised by how little use of rel="nofollow" I'm seeing (in blinking lime) on non-blog, non-wiki sites. It seemed like such an obvious tool to use, to micro-manage how you transfer PageRank within your site and to other people. One of these days, I'm going to sue Phil for usurping the color I've chosen for my links and monkeying around with my content to make it more ... (read more)

2005/03/13

I Blog For Short

New York Times: On the Web log, or blog, he chronicles his daily life, his small victories, his disappointments, his liberal views on politics and the health of his pets. Washington Post: Mosteller's supervisors and co-workers at the Durham, N.C., Herald-Sun were well aware of her Weblog, or blog. ABC News (Australia): The lanky, sandy-haired writer composes a frequently updated Internet journal -- weblog, or blog for short ... Maine Today: Hands-on science experiments, creating an online ... (read more)

2005/03/10

Eric Goldman has expanded his thoughts on whether Google Toolbar violates copyright law: I'd be delighted to be wrong on the legal question. But we have to answer the positive question based on the law today, not as we wish it were. ... (read more)

2005/03/08

The Heritage Foundation has declared that I am a tech-elite busybody for criticizing the Google Toolbar: This week's busybody pushback is the same sort of reaction we've seen in response to every half-innovative feature that Google's offered in recent years, from its Adwords advertising program to advertising-supported Gmail. Oddly enough, the tech elite still seem to respect the company's technological prowess and innovation. They're wary, however, that Google intends to profit from these ... (read more)

2005/03/08

The First Blogger Died in 1794

The patron saint of weblogging is Harbottle Dorr, a little-known figure from early America who was writing a hyperlinked daily journal on current events two centuries before the technology existed: On January 7, 1765, in the middle of the Stamp Act controversy, Boston shopkeeper Harbottle Dorr took the current issue of the Boston Evening-Post and commented on its contents in the margins. Every week thereafter, he collected one or both of the Evening-Post or the Boston Gazette, (sometimes adding ... (read more)

2005/03/08

Java Has Me Outnumbered

I spent this afternoon working on several hundred mostly minor edits for the next printing of Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 21 Days, Fourth Edition. There was one major change: The javac compiler defaults to support for new features such as generics, autoboxing, and the data structure-crawling for loop. The default was originally to turn these off unless the -source 1.5 command-line option was employed. It's no longer necessary, though you can use -source 1.4 to turn off the new features and ... (read more)

2005/03/07

Here's how James Bennett summarizes the Google Toolbar controversy on Kuro5hin: While Winer et al. have been attacking AutoLink, a number of people have been calmly debunking their arguments, often in amusing ways. Anyone want to venture a guess as to which side he's on? Bennett, a veritable eddy of calm in angry seas, believes that anyone opposed to the autolink feature hates his users and Google isn't doing this to make money. ... (read more)

2005/03/07

My favorite panelist on BetterBadNews has a message for Larry Page and Sergey Brin: Get off of my couch! ... I look over my shoulder and I see Larry and Sergey looking at my blog. They are editing something on my blog. They are overriding my link on the word "goose" and substituting their own link to a site where I can buy a cookbook I already have, because I wrote it. But I prefer to sell it directly from my blog to help pay for my poultry podcasts. So they sit there, Larry and Sergey, on my ... (read more)

2005/03/07

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