I bumped into a disturbing trend while home sick today, browsing more bloggage than usual. Now that self publishing is widely available, we need to reacquaint ourselves with the power of the written word.
Particularly the distributed pen. I've been on the receiving end of animosity and untruth and the results were hurtful and harmful, to some extent beyond repair. Granted these cases were in newspapers, so circulation was probably higher than your average weblog. All it took was a sugestive line by a 'journalist' who said I was being investigated for deducting personal trips as a business expense. It was a rumour that he didn't care to check carefully. This front page story resulted in, ofcourse, a tax audit that has been ongoing for the past 2 years, and several instances where I was told people wouldn't do business with me because of my 'tax problem'.
Naturally I've used the power of my own written word to combat this, a very tiring excercise indeed.
Take care of what you say and how you say it. SOmetimes even linking to a story can be perceived as an endorsement of that as truth or fact.
And don't think that weblogs have less power than 'official' publications, you don't need to have thousands of readers. All it takes is one person to start the flow and the rest is exponential.
And so I hope one day someone will point to my quote and realise the lessons we learned at the beginning of the blogosphere:
There are no secrets, only information you don't yet have.
While working on my scripting skills I ran across an API for USERland aggregators. It's intended for Radio, but also works with the Frontier based Manila aggregator. My goal is to create an easier method for subscribing to feeds in my manila aggregator. Not that pasting a url in a web page is too much hassle, but it seems even cooler to just drag and drop a bookmark on a magic folder that will do al the rest of the work. Saves me waiting about 2 minutes for page loads. This way I can just drag, drop and forget.
Works fabulously, the subs show up in the aggregator, but aren't 'checked off' as a subscription for my manila site. Any thoughts on how to fix this?
There are no secrets, only information you don't yet have: from USaviation.com: "John Kerry"s 757 was in hgr 4 pit tonight John Edwards vp decals were being put on engine cowlings and upper fuselage."
My video aggregator 'trapped' Michael Moore on Conan's late night talk show. So cool to have stuff just appear on my desktop, ready to play. This is what I've been dreaming of for the past 5 years.
My video aggregator is a kludge of several scripts and technologies working together. It scans rss feeds that have bittorrent files as enclosures and auto downloads them at night. The system uses keywords to catch stuff that I'm interested in. Here's what I'm currently trolling for:
Of course recording and distribution of television broadcasts without permission is as illegal as any Napster-like scheme. I just wish the television industry would recognize the huge potential such a service offers. I would gladly pay to receive programs I cannot and probably will never be able to watch on television here in Europe.
I've reposted the torrent file to my Personal TV Network, you can subscribe to the rss feed here.
William Wirt: "Seize the moment of excited curiosity on any subject to solve your doubts; for if you let it pass, the desire may never return, and you may remain in ignorance."
Môgge. Ik voel me vandaag einedlijk iets beter, de rechter kant van mijn keel doet geen pijn meer en de linker is een stuk minder rasperig. Pijn in me lijf is ook weg. Morgen weer aan het werk! Toch weer die kippesoep met gember van Pat :)
My video aggregator 'trapped' Michael Moore on Conan's late night talk show. So cool to have stuff just appear on my desktop, ready to play. This is what I've been 
