Thursday, June 06, 2002

MAKES ME FEEL QUITE SMALL He's miles further along than I was on Day 2 Glenn White:  "Today is my second day using Radio..." [jenett.radio] 10:32:11 PM     Comments[]

WHEN STORIES SUCH AS THIS FLOW through the weblogs and the news aggregator, I find myself wondering the following: Is this simply another case of "don't believe everything you find on the Internet?" Is this a story by someone with an ax to grind? Was this so insignificant that the mainstream media decided not to pursue it? Is some other dynamic at work? Have I found a weblog run by a top-notch person with great skills? Clearly, there are times when I've read a weblog story and used the mainstream media to verify or fact-check it. As I come to know the weblog writers's styles and approaches, I find myself checking mainstream media stories against the weblogs. I was engineering school at a time when electronic calculators were invented. I know it is hard for anyone to imagine today, but we literally "checked" our first calculators with the sliderules "we knew we could count on." It seems silly now, but it was the only way we could gain confidence in the new tool! Checking weblog reporting is sometimes like this! Once we get to know our "reporters" we'll gain more confidence. Talking with a British friend a few minutes ago, he told me of a recent story...  The story appeared in Der Spiegel, and quite a few weblogs, but appears to have not been carried by US publications. Why? [Scripting News] 10:19:30 PM     Comments[]

ALL THE EXCITEMENT IS OVER, BUT... I think this is my weblog neighborhood. I'm not sure what good it is now that no one is using or talking about this stuff, but here it is late. I'm also unclear as to whether this is somehow being kept dynamically or maybe this dates back to the last "gather." Ok, it dates to the date of the gather. Apparently the Events that the instructions refer to is not the link on the right hand side, but instead it is one of the choices in the menu at the top of your local weblog page - up there where Prefs, etc. are located. Further, that Events link takes you to an EventsLog that only shows the weblogNeighborhood link immediately after a "gather." So, all of my searching there today isn't going to do any good, because that link is gone. Were it there, apparently it would have been of the form radio.userland.com/usernum/misc/weblogNeighborhood.html or weblogname/misc/weblogNeighborhood.html. All of these are mere details to those who are lawyers, librarians or developers. To those of us lacking the requisite number of brain cells, those details made the difference in success and failure. 3:59:56 PM     Comments[]

WHAT IS RSS? The more I get into Radio Userland and the tools that come with this software package, the more I become curious about certain details. Today, it dawned on me that I didn't know or recall what RSS stood for. I found this site. As I've browsed the web recently, I've tried index.xml and rss.xml on the end of URL's to see if the site I was visiting had the RSS feed. I'm not sure why some sites turn their's off, but clearly they do because they are using tools that come with the RSS feed enabled by default. 2:27:02 PM     Comments[]

DAVE'S ESSAY HAS LEGS People want answers IN LIGHT OF MY JOURNALISM-AND-COWARDICE POST... readers may want to check out these real-life stories by Dave Winer. Journalists say that blogs can't be trusted because there's no oversight. Read, and see what oversight means. Bloggers have biases -- but they're usually right out in the open. And bloggers don't pretend to be objective professionals. [InstaPundit] It gets better: Scripting News Mail Pages Steve Outing comments on today's piece, and links to a response from Knight-Ridder's Rajiv Pant. [Scripting News] Follow up to today's piece [Scripting News] 12:36:36 PM     Comments[]

ARE THESE SIMILAR SITUATIONS? Read this story about the Air Force Colonel who got suspended for criticizing his boss. Then, read one of the best DaveNet emails I've seen. Are there similarities here? Do things change when we're talking about our nation vs. our employer? What was the original historical context of "freedom of speech"? Can an employee openly criticize his or her employer? Can an employee openly criticize his or her boss? We live in a time when some are becoming more strident in their criticism of governments, some consider it patriotic to "go along," and others won't say or write what they really think for fear of the government's newly-exercised powers of investigation. Whether a government, business or church are there any limits on criticism? Do insiders to one of these have greater or lesser responsibilities than reporters, journalists or outsiders? When is one a whistle-blower and when is one merely a concerned party? The DaveNet is relevant to nearly all of our current national news stories - Catholic priests out of control, accounting scandals, government intelligence gathering and analysis and the prosecution of a war. Who is "allowed" to speak out and how forcefully? Who should speak out? Great stuff, Dave, and thought-provoking! 10:40:18 AM     Comments[]

DESIGN IDEA SOURCES The Bloggys. Surprised when you saw the Webbys? I bet you were even more surprised to see the Bloggys! Yes, it's just like the Webbys, Oscars, Grammys, or any other awards thingy where you can vote for the best in different categories, except with blogs! And it's monthly! [C:PIRILLO.EXE] This guy's LINKS page doesn't even provide a link to Radio Userland. How lame is that? Maybe we can "skew" the voting! 7:14:37 AM     Comments[]

© Copyright 2002 Steve Pilgrim.