News for Dead Heads. Three new items (two serious announcements and one forwarded piece of satire) up at Uncle John's Blog. (Archive of today's latest post at Other Ones to Play Oakland 12/5 and 12/6.)
categories: x-pollen
6:17:05 PM 
say what []
Taking it on the chin. Kitty Bukkake watches a porn flick while listening to NPR and writes a wickedly accurate, down-to-earth blog entry entitled A Bukkake Home Companion
(Contains frank descriptions of pornography, bodily fluids, and Garrison Keiller.)
This continues a trend of great writing about a formerly unmentionable body fluid, such as Paul Ford's startling, and crisply written, Colgate Money Shot.
categories: x-pollen
5:17:31 PM say what []
Driver 8 is asking whether Salon's retracting the Tom White story is inconsistent with a past position taken editorially:
To quote Scott, "That sounds good, but it gives the magazine a convenient out, a chance to bury the embarrassing incident. There's no reason the magazine couldn't 'continuously publish' the stories with an explicit statement that they're not honest and truthful. Time's approach is what the New Republic should have adopted: Leave the stories up, leave the historical record intact and append a note to readers (with appropriate links) explaining the subsequent history. With this method of dealing with errors, journalists can actually make the Web function better than print: After all, you don't find magazines going into the library stacks inserting notes of retraction into bound volumes.It's a tough call either way, but I imagine the article will be preserved by the wayback machine and its ilk
categories: salonika
4:15:20 PM say what []
Tom Coates says at plasticbag
There's only one line I don't agree with - "the people who have profited most from weblogs are the people who've written books about weblogging". In fact I suspect these people have made almost no money at all, unless they've been added to University book-lists. More likely, the people who've made money are freelance web-savvy journalists publishing for mainstream press...(via Hylton Jolliffe)
categories: metablog
4:01:22 PM say what []
I'm not aware of the sales figures for any of the handful of books out now about weblogging, but I sort of doubt that these authors have profited most, based on what I know about book deals, advances, royalties, and so on.
I suspect the people who've benefitted most financially from weblogging so far are people who already had professional writing careers but who have gained more attention or "bookings" from the self-promotional benefits of doing the blog.
categories: metablog
3:57:01 PM say what []
I overheard myself just now saying "shift-printscreen! shift-printscreen" when actually looking for the Grab application on this Mac. (Shift-printscreen is PC jargon.)
Last night while watching Frasier typing up copy for his "Wine Corner" segment on the restaurant reviewer's show on a strangely small chunky looking off-white laptop, as he leapt from the table to respond to noises from his dad's bedroom, I blurted out "Save your work!"
categories: x-pollen
2:17:42 PM say what []
(via Vincent Flanders) Clay Shirky comments on the mass amateurization of publishing; that is, how weblogs undermine the norms of commercial, professional publishing models.
A lot of people in the weblog world are asking "How can we make money doing this?" The answer is that most of us can't.His deeper point is that this is not a bad thing. It's a price to be paid for the ease of low thresholds that have invited so many more people into the public conversation. He's just saying that looking for a monetary reward for most bloggers is barking up the wrong tree.
I would wonder whether this same form of mass-amateurization will also sweep through the music world.
categories: metablog
1:58:32 PM say what []
Got my first subscription mail this morning from Bloglet and it appeared that I've subscribed to my own x-pollen feed and not to the main thread of this blog. (I always subscribe to my own mailings, to see how they appear to end users.)
I don't know if this is because I signed up at Bloglet.com or whether in fact I put the wrong subscription form on my home page.
I attempted to test the form, but Bloglet appears to be down right now (and the error messages show that the ASP application runs on a D: drive at Xanga.com).
I'll keep trying it during the day to see when it's back up again.
Note: It appeared to working just fine again by midday today.
categories: metablog
9:27:22 AM say what []
