But hey, it could have been worse. Could have been bloog.
categories: memewatch metablog
3:16:37 PM 
say what []
Elizabeth Spiers writes in her Capital Influx blog about the end of cool for bloggers, or the inherent uncoolness of blogging, or how cool it is to be uncool, or something like that:
The uncool result of the cross-linking is that something weird or interesting happens and you and fellow blogger look at each other at the same time and cry in delight, "ooh! blog post!" Trust me, it happens. Then you go and read your friend's blog and snicker at the resulting post because of the earlier conversation. You send a snarky email to said friend, and probably end up linking to their post or doing some variation of it. You end up with these little micro-memes that get stretched across a handful of blogs and none of your online readers know what the big deal is with the stupid Ukrainian band.
categories: memewatch metablog
12:20:27 PM say what []
So, I grabbed a graphic from someone's page and put it in my images folder, and then edited the reference in the subs.txt file to point to the correct file name and to include the width and height attributes.
But then Radio never seemed to upstream the changed file, no matter what I tried. I even ended up making a new file (feeds.txt) and changing the SOAP call to look for feeds but I made another typo, leaving in a reference to subs( ) at the beginning of the feeds.txt script, resulting in an error and another file I don't know how to edit and then upstream in its fixed form.
So, I'm trying another method now, recommended by dws. I can't brag about using web services but it seems more straightforward.
categories: metablog
10:39:43 AM say what []
All this talk of Knowledge Logs generally presupposes a corporate (or to be a little more neutral, an enterprise) environment, but educational institutions are the prime focus of knowledge sharing in society, no? John Robb points to Weblogg-ed, a Radio blog, and Lincoln Public Schools, a crisp-looking Manila-managed site.
categories: memewatch metablog
10:20:57 AM say what []
Seems ridiculous that the media would continue to confuse a powerful horizontal tool (very much like desktop word processing) with how it is used by a few people. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]I've always found that the Internet is a sort of mirror pool (or maybe a Rorschach blob?). Everyone sees something different in it. Usually what they see is themself, or their interests, reflected back at them.
I found it extremely amusing in the early days of the 'net boom when journalists would get online to do their story and come back with a lede about how much pornography there was on the net at the touch of a button. I would think gee, I wonder what search terms you fed into the box.
So I'm not surprised that journalists see blogging as a form (or bastardization) of journalism, that an essayist would see it as a platform for pamphleteers, and so on. I'm not really sure why "what it is" and "what it's being used for" are so easily confused. Maybe it has something to do with how malleable—how plastic—computer-modulated media really are.
Certainly, like any good meme, the idea of blogging involves a lot of imitation. Fashions are inevitable in any living culture, and it takes innovators to separate out how things have to be from how they can be. And there's nothing wrong with imitation. We can't all be inventing or reinventing ourselves and our modes of expression all day long. Sometimes you have to do something that you already know will work.
Plus, copying others is a great way to learn. Think of how many people learned HTML in the early days by viewing source and hacking apart the markup they found that way. There's nothing wrong with (showing my age here) slowing down an LP to learn the fingering on some intricate guitar solo.
The first time for anything is always the most difficult, so any thing you can do to lower the threshold or vault yourself over the hurdle is fair game. There's time enough for pushing the envelope once you're in play.
categories: memewatch metablog
1:54:08 AM say what []
1:43:21 AM say what []
Just followed Jenny Levine (The Shifted Librarian)'s very clear instructions for listing my subscribed aggregator feeds in the navigation column of my home page. Publishing this entry should update my template and show who I'm scanning every day.
categories: metablog
1:30:49 AM say what []
