March 16, 2004

Mark Cuban, blogger.. Aside from being an HDTV and digital cinema entrepreneur, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, and the star of a new "Apprentice"-like TV show on ABC in which he hands out $1M to strangers, Mark Cuban is now a blogger. Weblogsinc founder Jason Calacanis is on something of a roll -- rumor has it he's launching several additional celeblogs soon. Link to Mark Cuban's new blog. [Boing Boing] 7:01:34 PM

Choline proven to boost brains. Some Smart Drug enthusiasts I knew in the cyberdelic early 90s raved about the cognitive effects of the nutrient choline. A new study at Duke University Medical Center seems to support their claims. In the study, pregnant rats were given three to four times their normal intake of choline. Apparently, their offspring boasted bigger neurons that fired faster and for longer than the control group. According to a New Scientist article, "behavioural studies have shown giving choline to pregnant rats improves learning and memory in their offspring." This latest study though "is the first time anyone has shown that prenatal choline supplementation actually changes the anatomy and physiology of single brain cells," one of the researchers said. Still, another scientist adds, pregnant women should continue to avoid certain foods like liver, swordfish, and tuna that are rich in choline but may be bad news for other reasons. Time to belly up to the Smart Bar? Link [Boing Boing] 7:00:58 PM

I think I gonna puke, cause the WIRED awards stink! WIRED NEEDS MORE AIR!!! They awarded David Byrne an award for his Powerpoint art. First off the guy must be on Microsoft's payroll, as they use one of this songs on the XP installation. Secondly, his art from what I saw is not big deal, you could go to any art college in North America and find better more creative art, in just about any medium. So why does WIRED give Byrne an award, why are they in love with Perry Barlow? They love old rockers that sort of get new technology!@!+_= This fits into my "I think I am gonna puke, cause the stench associated with the above stupidity is unbearable!"   6:58:50 PM

Self-made superhero Angle Grinder Man is back. Joi Ito reports that Angle Grinder Man is back and in full effect. The British homegrown hero wanders the streets of London clad in gold lame caped crusader getup, freeing illegally parked cars of parking enforcement security boots. Or, as AGM himself would put it, "Angle-Grinder Man [is] the world's first wheel-clamp and speed camera vigilante cum subversive superhero philanthropist entertainer type personage. A big welcome to all good, decent, law-unabiding citizens. Godspeed to you and your four-wheeled, petrol-driven chariots." Link to Angle Grinder Man's website (Caution: Not worksafe for villains or parking enforcement officers. Contains strong superpowers) [Boing Boing] 5:30:30 PM

This article via this blog: How News Travels on the Internet March 8th, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (65) I read the Wired article Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious, and thought it was informative. But it seemed to be lacking the big picture view of how the news travels. The Blog Epidemic Analyzer was also amusing and showed how attribution is underrated, but it too seemed sorely lacking cohesion, nor was it a very new topic. So I thought to myself: “Hey this isn’t all that complicated, I should make a visual diagram to illustrate this”. And this infographic was born. Here’s how I see news travel, I think it’s a pretty self-explanatory graphic, plus I’m too lazy to do a proper write up. Infer as you wish, maybe I will become the “source” one of these days. Miscellaneous links to sites listed: Dark Matter Glenn Reynolds called email “the dark matter of the blogosphere” in a Wired interview. Naturally I extended this phrase to IM (Instant Messaging) , IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and forums. (link via blogosphere.us) MetaNews (I wasn’t sure what else to call it, it’s like collaborative blogging, except Google News) Fark - users post news and comments, which are hand-picked by admins, TotalFark (a listing of everything submitted, huge list) is a sort of “dark matter” as well. Slashdot - the grandaddy of the genre. More technically oriented. MeFi - shorthand for MetaFilter, blogging on crack (all users can post?). Not accepting accounts. BoingBoing - similar to MetaFilter, more blogging on crack. Google News - through the magic of Google… the news. Limited sources. Greater Blogosphere - basically just a high traffic blog, sometimes the lines blur between this and MetaNews Instapundit - Glenn Reynolds again, probably the most read blog on the Internet. Waxy.org - A high traffic blog that has a lot of offbeat news. Made the ”StarWars Kid” popular. Lesser Blogosphere - me, basically… we’re all lowly citizens waiting for our 15 minutes, just like Bob’s Qveere Eye parody (yes, it was me who posted it to Fark). While we wait, we link and blab. Blog Indexing - these are services that show what’s popular based on how many people link to it in a certain period. Blogdex Popdex Technorati - rankings also weighted based on how popular the site linking to the item is. Traditional “Big” Online Media - once they pick up a story, it can become a story again, how’s that for echo chambers? Reuters.com CNN.com MSNBC.com AP - Yahoo News used for example Offline Media - hey what the… I can’t link to them :) Update: Fark picked up this story, I get to play the role of “source”, so let’s see how far it goes. I’ll track this as well as I can and see if I can build a case study from this. Thanks Drew! Update2: There is now an interim article on my initial observations after being linked from all over. Also, apologies for the site going down for a while there, the database was being moved and server upgraded. 5:21:38 PM

© Copyright 2004 Ted Ritzer.