Sharrows on the street. Those odd symbols popping up on Seattle streets that look like small bicycles wearing big, pointy hats? They're called sharrows and they're "friendly reminders" that motorists must share the road with bikes. By brianchin@seattlepi.com (Brian Chin). [Buzzworthy]

Sharrows. Very cute.  10:31:14 AM    

Ecstasy Trip. Video shows a 2-year-old girl who had purportedly been given the drug Ecstasy. [New Urban Legends]

Nice. Someone posts some video for family and friends, others take it , mislabel it and the parents end up getting visited by the police. Be careful of what you post, especially if it has children in it.  10:08:00 AM    

Deerly Departed. Photographs show a live deer pulled out of the water by fisherman. [New Urban Legends]

Nice gesture by the fishermen.  10:06:27 AM    

Environment: Are the Bees Dying off Because They're Too Busy?. Are bees dying because factory farms are "overworking" them? California bee farmers who let their hives take it easy find their colonies are thriving. [AlterNet.org: Coverage Areas]

An interesting hypothesis.   9:46:50 AM    

Wired's Long Tail web strategy: the Three Cs.

One of the questions I get most often is how I apply the Long Tail strategy to my day job of running Wired.

(Actually, the question I get most often is how I can work for a blockbuster company, Conde Nast, by day and celebrate the decline of the blockbuster by night. My physics-geek answer: it isn't hypocrisy, it's wave-particle duality!)

The short answer is what I call the "Three Cs": Catalyze and Curate Conversations.

Wired, as a mass market magazine (paid circ of around 675,000 and an estimated 2 million readers per month) is unavoidably a one-size-fits-all product. To be sure, that "all" as in "all people who are interested in how technology is changing the world" but in an era where nearly everyone in the Google generation has broadband, an iPod and a cellphone, that's pretty mass.

So in the magazine, with limited pages and a huge general-interest readership, we remain in the blockbuster business. Thus Transformers and Martha Stewart (albeit with a Wii cake) covers.

On the web, however, we have "unlimited shelf space" (an infinite number of pages, which can be created at close to no cost), so that's where we focus on the niche as well as the mass. We have room for geeky blogs on hacker subculture and Lego. Obsessive drill-downs. And for loads of user-generated content (best shown in the form of our Reddit news aggregation and voting site).

As we roll out new features over the next year, you'll see the ratio of conversational catalysis to traditional journalism climb. Not to say we'll do less traditional journalism. We're just going to be starting and curating a lot more user-driven conversations. Our new How To wiki is just one example.

Some of these experiments aren't going to work. That's fine--"fail fast" is as good a motto as any for online media. Indeed, we were just honored by the Knight-Batten awards  for our Assignment Zero experiment in crowdsourcing journalism, which was highlighted as "an excellent example of learning from failure." 

Here's a question: how should you reward failure? And how can you tell the difference between failure that came from commendable risk-taking and failure that came from sloppy execution? 

[The Long Tail]

Wave-particle duality!! ANd it sort of fits - the demands of mainstream media vs. the long tail. Maybe Wired will do a good job meding both.  9:31:43 AM    

The Irony of David Barton [Dispatches from the Culture Wars].

I was having a conversation with my father the other day and this thought suddenly occurred to me. David Barton loves to point to the Massachusetts Bay Colony for evidence that America is a "Christian Nation." That position is absurd enough when you consider that this was a colony under the rule of the British crown, rule that we overthrew in the revolution. But there is an added bit of irony here because Barton is a Baptist. Baptists, you see, were persecuted in Massachusetts under Puritan rule - sometimes banished from the colony (as Roger Williams was), sometimes they were imprisoned, sometimes they were subject to public whippings (Obadiah Holmes suffered both imprisonment and lashing at the hands of the magistrates there) and sometimes they were even put to death, hung or buried alive in the Boston Commons. Were we to return to the Massachusetts model, Mr. Barton would quickly find himself in prison - if he was lucky.

Read the comments on this post... By Ed Brayton none@example.com. [ScienceBlogs : Combined Feed]

A nice example of how so many people have no real concept of history, picking and choosing certain aspects to bolster their arguments but ignoring facts that reveal their misleading comments. There is a reason we have an amendment preventing the government from interfering in religious matters.  9:07:36 AM    

DNA testing helps Neb. dairy identify cows that produce single-protein milk. Metronews Aug 11 2007 8:59AM GMT [Moreover Technologies - Science news]

Nice use of new technology. I had never heard of single protein cattle before.  9:04:34 AM    

I Forgot How to Write !. I was sitting in a meeting the other day and decided I needed to take some notes . My memory isn't the worlds best, so if I think there is something worth memorializing, I will take notes.

Typically I will just use my PDA or Laptop . I can touch type pretty fast. I can thumb type on my Sidekick almost as fast as I type using all 10.. Then when Im done, I email the notes to myself and I have a permanent, searchable record of the meeting. I've been doing this for so long, I can pretty much type as fast as I think

This particular meeting for some reason I couldnt go the digital route so I can had to go 1900s and actually handwrite my notes.

What a disaster. I couldn't write.

I literally couldn't take notes fast enough because as I wrote, I realized I couldn't read my own writing. Not only could I not read my own writing, when I tried to slow down so that everything would be legible, I realized that actually writing each letter as part of a complete word was actually difficult

I had forgotten how to write. Sure i could fight it out by going slowly. Very slowly. But any skills I had that used to enable me to quickly write what I was hearing or what my thoughts were, had left me.

Am I alone ? SHould I start a self help group ? Should I take a class with 5 year olds to relearn ???

Is writing with a pen on a pad of paper not like riding a bike ??

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[Blog Maverick]

Of course, one of the main difficulties is that you use only 1 side of your brain to control handwriting while most people who type use two hands and thus two sides of the brain. It might be that forcing everything to go through the left hemisphere after years of using both requires some retraining to do it well. I find that I compose and write much faster on a keyboard than I write. Always have. I guess this would be an interesting experiment for some of those new fangled MRI machines.  8:57:31 AM