Baseball deal reached, games on [USA Today]
categories: memewatch x-pollen
2:19:36 PM 
say what []
Don't feel bad, Salon Blog writers, when you look at the rankings and see Scott's traffic dwarfing that of the rest of us. I just took a look at his referrer log for the first time and a quick count showed over 1000 of the hits coming directly from salon.com and its variants.
Another blogger, not being as recognizable a name to Salon readers, would surely gain fewer hits from a direct page link, but a little of that flow, perhaps on a rotating basis, to the other bloggers here would probably be appreciated.
Or Scott could extend his current editorial judgement when applied to linking to Salon blogs in his blog and perhaps nominate a blog or two for a homepage link.
I frankly think RFB is a little too inside baseball for Salon's mainstream readers, but there are some really good blogs, much less meta-recursive-infinite-regressive here that I think would benefit from a larger share of the curious Salon readership.
I wonder if Salon will ever give any of its paying bloggers a direct link from the Salon home page.
That word frankly back there still brings to mind Newt Gingrich saying it.
2:01:18 PM say what []
Darwin Magazine offers some conventional wisdom on this moment in hype/backlash about blogging. (That doesn't look like a permalink.) Mentions Andrew's Dreaming of China blog.
categories: salonika memewatch metablog
1:08:11 PM say what []
Fight, fight! The writer artist behind Textism (forgot to check his name and pretend to know him personally), in a single serving called Please Like Me reports on a Lileks bleat with a slow rolling boil:
James Lileks, a harmless, affable bumpkin ... takes yet another drag-queen-on-poppers free-association bitch-lurch.... Sniggering like a demented janitor paging through a stroke mag found in the trash, James burbles along ... for an ocean of idiots nodding right along, lapping up the know-nothing rhetoric and girlish titters like sweet rice pap.
categories: metablog
12:53:24 PM say what []
Let the religious war end. With the wit and panache we've become accustomed to, Zeldman discusses real-world pragmatic choice for commercial web design or the development of any site that wishes to be presentable and accessible to as wide an audience as possible.
As ugly as hacking and debugging nested tables can get, let's admit that most sophisticated CSS layouts urrently requires some hacking in every environment.
Here's Zeldman's prescription and some ways you can learn from him to bam! kick it up a notch:
More and more, we find ourselves creating transitional layouts that incorporate simplified table structures; use sophisticated CSS to add the kind of details that formerly required nested tables, spacer gifs, and other presentational hacks; and serve a basic style sheet to 4.0 browsers that approximates the display in modern ones.
We find that with these techniques we can create attractive sites that conserve bandwidth and look almost as good in Netscape 4.x as they do in modern browsers. We can't achieve the same results using pure CSS methods.
Table layouts are harder to maintain and somewhat less forward compatible than CSS layouts. But the combination of simple tables, sophisticated CSS for modern browsers, and basic CSS for old ones has enabled us to produce marketable work that validates ... work that is accessible in every sense of the word.
We'll be sharing our techniques at the Builder conference and writing about them in our upcoming book for New Riders.All my years in computer-book publishing and I've never worked with New Riders. Meanwhile, they've built a very strong list of web design and development thought leadership titles, such as Powazek's Design for Community and many others. I wonder what happened to Bob Slote's book? He had one coming out a while back, I thought.
Apparently, they've even signed PeterMe to write a book about coining the word blog. It's got meme in the title, as I recall. Also on the blog book watch, I saw a link to an Amazon UK listing for an Osborne/McGraw book called Blog On due out in October, from one of the authors of the "How to Do Everything with..." series. I'll have to add it to my Amazon Listmania list.
Which bugs me, that list, because their doesn't seem to be any easy way to get my store affiilation into the URLs it generates. I'm going to grab the page and hack it and make it a Story here, I think. Then I can add these new books as they come up. I wish there was an Amazon API plug-in for Radio!
Good discussion of shilling books in the comments to an earlier entry today. I may promote them to "first-class" content.
categories: fireweaver memewatch
12:19:56 PM say what []
Sure, some things are private or proprietary. Not every log (blog, k-log, or any kind of log) needs to be published on the unsecured public Internet byways. Not everything needs to go out over TCP/IP. Not everything, for that matter needs to be entered into a computer or even written in a notebook, if you want ot take the thought to its conclusion.
But it seems to me that just about everything that passes through my computer (and a number of things that sit on post-its around my desk) should be logged somewhere. One big place or some small specific place. I need to keep track of what I just finished, what I didn't have time to get to, what new items have just occurred to me.
Every to do list grows and drifts (for me). Instead of fear of a growing list of shoulds, I'd rather relax knowing that nothing is being lost or forgot, and everything is findable when I need it, or when I make it a priority, or when external circumstances make it a priority.
11:37:16 AM say what []
I lost count of the number of times I used the word I in the previous entry.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that overuse of the word I is a sign of bad writing. There may even be blog advice people saying not to talk about I so much.
But then again isn't this a one-person blog. Should I give I-self a nickname and save "blinky had a nother thought today?" to give appearance of not talking about I so much? (Aside, I have always hated the word me-zine or mezine—it smacks of journalistic invention and as a word it inspires antilust in me.)
Or should I reverse-engineer and rewrite I sentences so they say the same thing but more artfully allide I presence in the thought process? Wouldn't that just be hiding the I?
Or is I like a fnord that just vanishes from the ear of most readers and thus no foul at all?
The publisher of Coffeehouse made us rewrite the introduction and interstitial material because it was written all in first person (singular and plural). The backlash against memoirs and first-person nonfiction writing of all kinds (such as the {fray}) generally criticizes the I speaking as self-involved or solipsistic.
Comes with the territory, I say.
categories: memewatch
11:29:43 AM say what []
Well, coincidentally, I was just dipping into my RSS aggregator news feed when I got a note from Charly Z encouraging me to check out a discussion about RSS syndication going on among some other Salon Blogs.
Scott Rosenberg's Links and Comment picks up on a complaint from the author of FarrFeed on discovering his entire blog being reproduced (in an inferior form) with someone else's copyright attached:
I've been working my freaking butt off pitching my writing anywhere I can, so when I saw my words and images gracelessly splashed across another site's pages, I declared war. The site which had subscribed to FarrFeed had also mangled the layout and tossed out my text formatting so that the page looked like garbage. But what really made me angry was seeing the other site's copyright declaration centered underneath my work. Oh, my copyright notice (linked to this page) was also there, but off to the left and not nearly as prominent as the subscriber's. BAD BOOJUM!
Here's part of Scott's take:
I also think that, legally and morally, it falls in the category of "fair use" — which means that it becomes increasingly more problematic when others take and reuse more and more material. In the case of Farr and other blogs that are reposted on this other site, the postings are resupplied by a third party without any value added — there are no new comments from the site's proprietor — and in fact with value subtracted, since many of the features of the original blogger's site (layout, comments, whatever else the blogger has done to personalize the page) are gone.
Here's my value add. It relates to the discussion about Daily Pundit Premium from yesterday. One the one hand, I want to benefit from the freeness of the web. I want my blog to be read far and wide. I'd like to be able to track who's reading, and naturally I love to receive filthy lucre whenever possible for my efforts, but I'm probably doing this more to build reputation than for any other single reason. For the moment, I expect to extract my vig from the rest of the life, which should benefit indirectly from my contributions here.
(This reminds me of the whole "give something back to the Web" idea that was big in the mid '90s. It was understood that we each reap huge benefits from the freely shared common spaces of the Web, so there is something of a moral imperative, or at least exhortative, to contribute something back to the common weal.)
So, in the interests of info lubrication, I have all my RSS feeds turned on and I am happy to have them promiscuously seed my posts far and wide at this time.
Nonetheless, I wouldn't mind being a columnist somewhere, and if I start writing column-length work on, say, a weekly basis, I can imagine wanting to be paid for syndication the way some print journalists are (such as, for a random example, Mark Shields). Thus I can imagine not always freely syndicating all of the writing I put online, maybe even incorporating some kind of password or scramble/descramble security for information that's being sold instead of given away. This bears more thought.
I can also imagine saying: feel free to use my syndicated content but please link back to me in thus and such a way.
I still remember from the late '60s or early '70s when "the syndicate" was a typical kind of euphemism either for "the establishment" or "the mob" (depending on context), something like Chief Broom's "the combine" in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Hey, when I mention a book, should I always slap my Amazon store tag on it? What's the theory on that? Am I lazy or principled for not always shilling every book I mention?
categories: salonika metablog radioactive
11:18:40 AM say what []
Onward toward the semantic web! Here's an article proposing methods to make the Web more structured and more personalized. Any article that includes the concept of meta-meta-services is all right by me, even when the author's first name isn't Christian.
Here's the tip of the iceberg:
- Users (other than the author) and groups of users must be able to create and manage their own sets of metadata and structures for their specific purposes.
- This implicitly requires that metadata must be manageable in a distributed environment (independent of the related document).
- Different sets of Quality metadata — dependent on the special needs — must be provided for the users.
- Existing geographical distributed metadata (services) must be easy detectable and selectable by the users. Both requirements are only partially fulfilled at the time of writing.
- A variety of pre-existing and new services have to be manageable to meet users needs. A proper framework has to provide mechanism to also integrate commercial services. That means that a kind of micro payment has been taken into account.
categories: memewatch
10:27:34 AM say what []
Much of my browsing these days start in my referrer logs. If someone has linked to Radio Free Blogistan then there's a chance they're writing about stuff I'd be interested in.
Today this practice took me to Seb's Open Research, an immediate keeper, with links to good pieces about why certain professions (journalists, educators) have taken to blogging and some thoughts about how to manage bookmarks.
Seb picked up my link to Adam Barr's kuro5hin article (The Legacy of Eve Andersson) and corrected an intentional typo on my part. I deliberately referred to a "hypocracy," a neologism, as far as I know, meaning a hypocritical -ocracy, or ruling class. Seb, reasonably, figured I had made a spelling error and "corrected" it when quoting me to "hypocrisy":
Adam Barr takes to task the insider-y side of the blogosphere's hypocrisyI often fix typos when quoting and sometimes change or clean up punctuation (if only to insert true em spaces where double-hyphens, which can break badly across lines, had been). It gets trickier when the writer may have made the "mistake" deliberately.
Further down I see that Seb has passed along the memetic experiment, but without my attribution. This may mean that it was picked up upstream from my post, or that I did a poor job of putting my own spin on the meme.
categories: memewatch metablog
10:16:21 AM say what []
categories: memewatch metablog
9:59:55 AM say what []
One of the most popular blogs here at Salon has been the Pornographer's Picks weblog that basically links to porn sites. More interesting by far is the reverse cowgirl's blog, which is also about pornography but offers more than just pointers to stroke material and is written from a female perspective:
in this manner, awhile back, i went out for an audition. there i was, as so many of us have found ourselves at some point in our lives, setting off to audition to be the voice of a porn star puppet. yes, you do know what i'm talking about, don't you? it is a challenge, mais oui?
9:30:20 AM say what []
