In Network Computing's BuzzCut column, Mike DeMaria talks about blogs as an improvement over e-mail for project updating but as an imperfect solution, at best, for archiving and retrieving links:
Until blog developers address the issues of archive classification and sorting, blogs can't possibly live up to their potential.
5:45:26 PM 
say what []
One odd thing is the rule against going back into your seat while a batter is up. There is a little petty tyrant at the top of the steps with a little sign who holds you up (but, of course, lets the vendors pass) till the batter gets on base or gets put out, even if there's a conference on the mound and the (way too loud) PA is playing the theme from Three's Company.
The architecture is half the fun. Very open-air, with a promenade overlooking China Basin (I think, or is it McCovey Cove?), and thematic activities for the kiddies. The food was so-so but more varied than in the old days. Apparently there's an exclusive club level with even more elite food.
I'd go again but, like I said, next time during the day to avoid the falling damps.
categories: x-pollen
5:17:04 PM say what []
In New Media Musings, J.D. Lasica writes:
Hadn't realized this, but yesterday OJR published my column on weblogs and journalism — or, more accurately, a partial transcript of the panel at UC Berkeley last week...He quotes an excerpt on journalistic ethics and blogging from Rebecca Blood that I want to repeat here because my loose paraphrase in my subjective transcript is much weaker (I will, in fact, update the transcript after reviewing J.D.'s version):
Blood: Journalistic ethics hold to an ideal of fairness and accuracy. I don't know of any personal weblogs that are trying to do anything like presenting a complete and balanced story. We need to distinguish between journalists doing personal weblogs and journalists doing weblogs for their publication. If I'm a journalist doing a weblog for my publication, do standards of fairness and accuracy apply? How much do I need to know about something before I put it up? I can't just put an e-mail I get up there, or can I?Lasica did a great job of peppering the transcript with pithy links. Reading the (more accurate than my own) transcript is an interesting experience. Besides enabling me to relive the panel, it also reveals to me some of my biases and what I projected on as well as what I took away from panel discussion.
categories: metablog
3:21:10 PM say what []
"The biologists told me that many of these dead fish are very bright and healthy looking, except for the part about them being dead."
—Paul Wertz, an information officer with the California Department of [Dead] Fish and Game.
categories: x-pollen
3:17:19 PM say what []
Call it blowing off steam. Time to reboot. But why is this happening?
...
Well, that didn't do the trick. I looked at the files on the local Radio server and they look as they should. You can even go to today's archive page and see at least some of the missing posts, but I still don't see them on the home page no matter how often Radio claims to have upstreamed the local version.
This is maddening. It's antiblogging.
categories: radioactive
2:30:17 PM say what []
Towers excised from Sopranos' opening credits. I was wondering about this while racing through the Sopranos' season three on VHS (no cable), the shot of the twin towers in Tony's rearview mirror during the popular opening-credits sequence. I assumed they'd take it out or replace it, and Nick Denton has the scoop.
categories: x-pollen
2:18:04 PM say what []
The most useful thing in the aforementioned article was a link to Weblogs Compendium, another good central clearinghouse of blog information and resources, today featuring pointers to useful third-party services such as myMediaList (for adding lists of books, music, and other media to your blog or web page) and blogLinker (for managing a modular link list, much like blogrolling.com).
Naturally, there is a Compediumblog as well.
categories: metablog
2:10:08 PM say what []
Enterpreneur.com publishes a light article called Who Let the Blogs Out?:
With a blog, you can answer questions, post business updates, link to similar sites and receive commentary from users. A collaborative company blog could give your employees one place to go to keep up on business happenings, memos and announcements.
2:03:39 PM say what []
An odd referrer led me to Dive into Mark's weblog neighborhood deriver (written in Python).
My neighborhood is fairly star-spangled. As usual, I'll chalk this up mostly to generous linkage from Scripting News, along with some recent links to and from megnut and Rebecca's Pocket.
categories: metablog
1:31:16 PM say what []
Charly Z also hepped me to Daniel Danilov's Reflections, where he recently posted a think-piece about how blogs help impose a mental grid on raw data, part of the process the mind uses to turn that data into relevant information:
Anyone who complains about blogs being a waste of space or anything of the sort is probably completely non-discriminating in their approach to reading this vast store of material, or is completely dense, or both.
categories: salonika knowhow metablog
11:00:41 AM say what []
Also on the Driver 8 tip, another entry notes that Phil Pearson has "a new version of his comment monitor ... that will update me on new comments on my blog... through the RSS aggregator."
categories: salonika metablog radioactive
10:56:54 AM say what []
Charly Z of Driver 8 tipped me off this morning to a few interesting threads. First is this biting essay called either "Why I Fucking Hate Weblogs!" (according to its top header), "Why I Hate WebLogs" according to its filename, or the punch-pulling "Why I Hate (Personal) Weblogs" used in its title bar.
It veers from incisive observation to silly scatalogical excess (may not be suitable for all readers), but manages for the most part to tweak the blog "movement" for its foibles and raise a few chuckles along the way.
The essay is divided into chapters of varying length. The first chapter gives a reasonably accurate history of weblogs, and the second, "Why do they do it?" is probably the genesis of the essay, as it lists a series of blogger-loser stereotype: The Reverse Voyeur, The Exhibitionist, The Self-Important Moron, The Obsessive-Delusional Ranter, The Town Crier, The Tragically Geek ("typically known by aliases like 'warzd00d' or 'Ph33rFr33k' or 'No><ius' "), The Ego Stroker, The Crossover Poster, The Aspiring Writer, and The Pedant (a subclassification of Self-Important Moron).
Chapter 4 stakes out a serious argument with weblogs, positing that they represent a step backward from the one-on-one forms of communication available online:
Communication mediums like IRC/chat, email, instant messaging, ... all facilitate direct electronic human/human interaction. They directly imitate, by design, communication channels used in the real world, such as telephones, direct in-person conversation... [T]hese are the methods of communication that have risen to the top of the usefulness list. People communicate and socialize much more effectively when communication happens in real-time .... Weblogs take us away from that. They are designed to mimic mass-communication channels where realtime communication is not possible or practical because of the large number of audience members, such as news sites, magazines, newspapers, etc.Now I don't personally agree that e-mail is a real-time form of communication, for example, nor that weblogs "take away" any other options (except in the sense of outcompeting them among some users, perhaps), but it's still an interesting thesis.
They take communication back to an 'announcement' mode of communication, where comments are the only feedback given, if any, and the original speaker doesn't even know who their audience is until after feedback returns. It decentralizes small group communication and decreases it's efficiency, which is ironic, considering that the vast majority of weblogs are only read by a few people.
Chapter 5 takes on the word "blog" itself, and Chapter 6 delineates some "Acceptable Uses of Weblogs." As far as I can tell, only famous or important people should keep weblogs according to this advice. Everyone else is a "looser."
Much of the essay is based on the idea that (most) (personal) weblogs are written by "wannabes" without real fame, accomplishment, or other worth in the eyes of the essayist.
Finally, the author offers a "WebLog Author Survey."
(Cross-posted under memewatch as a matter of antimeme backlash-tracking.)
categories: memewatch metablog
10:54:42 AM say what []
