Popularity tracking of How to Save the World weblog
Dave's Contest Winners: As promised,
I've selected three winning linkers to How to Save the World to
commemorate my 1000th inbound linking source per Technorati.
At the end of May, I had 1066 blogs linking to me, an increase of over
100 in the last month, putting me in 284th place in the blogosphere,
first in Salon Blogs and fourth (I think) among Canadian blogs. My
1000th linker, as best as I can determine, was William Gillis' Human Iterations.
William is a student in Minneapolis-St Paul, a resident of Portland,
and a definite political iconoclast. I selected randomly a previous
linker from the Technorati lists, and the name I drew was Lois Ann
Scheidt's Professional-Lurker.
She's a lecturer at Indiana University, who's written some interesting
papers on adolescent bloggers. And I selected randomly an RSS
subscriber from the Bloglines Public
lists, and the name I drew was Katya at Oddio Overplay. Oddio
is a site that catalogues and links to free, online, legal music of
many genres -- a site I was delighted to discover. Small prizes
are on their way to all three winners. Thank you, readers all! And
thanks to Technorati's CEO David
Sifry and his team for fixing a problem that had frozen the number
of reported inbound sources.
Amnesty
Refuses to Back Down after Bush Rebuke: After Bush accused Amnesty
International of "hating America" for its "absurd" recent report
listing the Bush regime well up in the global list of human rights
abusers, Amnesty has clarified its rationale: detention at Guantanamo
without due process, torture, 'outsourcing' of criminal abuse of
suspects to the world's worst human rights abusers, self-exemption from
the Geneva Conventions etc. Most tellingly, they noted that the
rhetoric of the Bushies, rather than addressing the substance of their
report, was typical of governments caught on the defensive for human
rights abuses and trying to divert attention through scurrilous attacks
on the reputation of Amnesty.
Beverage
Bioterror: Lawrence Wein at the NYT reported that there is an
enormous risk that US beverage supplies could be easily contaminated
with easy to obtain (the authors cited a recipe available online)
botulism toxin, potentially killing hundreds of thousands and creating
a crisis of confidence in the marketplace.
The
End of Globalization: The husband of Canada's Governor General,
author John Ralston Saul, writes a long and damning assessment of
globalization's false promise and the resurgence, for good and bad, of
nationalism, and then turns
it into a book. Thanks to Jon
Husband for the link.
Consumer Reports Goes Green:
Consumer Reports magazine now has a free online site that reviews
environmental attributes of products and services and provides
additional information on what you can do to live greener.
IllumiNations:
I'll have more about my visit to Orlando in a few days, but definitely
one of the highlights of the trip was the spectacular fireworks and
laser light show at Epcot. The fact sheet shows the typical Disney
attention to detail (and sometimes, to excess) that makes everything
they do clearly different from any competitor. And the accompanying
music by British film composer Gavin Greenaway, entitled Reflections of Earth, is stunning
(available on the Buena Vista CD Illuminations). I'm becoming quite a
fan of film soundtracks, and judging from the number of best-selling
soundtrack CDs (many of them without any hits from big-name vocalists)
I'm not alone. Although John Williams is the best-known, I also like
Thomas Newman, John Barry, Jonathan Elias, Jerry Goldsmith, Ron
Grainer, Johnny Mandel, Dave Grusin and a host of others. Hopelessly
eclectic, or the 'new classical'?
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