Wednesday, March 19, 2003

The Heritage Foundation reaches out to bloggers Rebecca Blood received an interesting email from the Heritage Foundation... subject: Is 2003 "The Year of the Blogger"? date: 19 March 2003 received from: Laura O'Dea Rebecca, You've been discovered! Tim Rutten's Media column in today's edition of The Los Angeles Times is the latest example of the traditional media's newfound appreciation of the growing influence of bloggers on America's public policy debates. Our job at The Heritage Foundation is to provide useful resources - objective data and conservative analysis and commentary - to journalists, analysts and commentators of all stripes. But we aren't quite sure how to do this with the blogger community. That's a start, but it will probably be difficult to keep a pulse on the blog community manually. This is what computers are good at! Referring to my recent post on polling, how can we measure the blog community in terms of mindshare, positions, beliefs, and values? 10:12:40 PM

I WIll Not Post The Fake Puma Ad Somebody created two ads showing a woman performing a sex act on a man. Both are wearing PUMA sportswear, the PUMA stripe prominently displayed. The ads were forwarded to Adland with the comment that these ads ran in a Maxim-like publication in Brazil, a claim plausible only if you consider the high-fashion quality of the photos, and ignore the ejaculate. Puma has now sent a demand letter to Adland (which responded by pixillating the trademark). If Puma had a sense of humor, it could have said something like "Of course the ads are fake, that's a discontinued line." Which brings us to tarnishment, and the debate as to whether an actionable form exists. Setting aside Adland's First Amendment defense, does this ad cost Puma any money? Is there a lost sale, a lost licensee? Last week's Victor's Secret case expresses the sentiment that tarnishment reflects poorly on the tarnisher, not the tarnishee. Of course, if the tarnishment takes the form of a hoax, then that might not be true (among those who never learn that it is a hoax). p.s. I'm not posting the ad because in a random survey, I have determined that the ad is offensive to some. If you wish to take an affirmative act and view the fake PUMA ad, click here. p.p.s. Puma is upset by the fake ad, but Gucci paid money to run the brand positioning ad to the right. To paraphrase Spinal Tap, there's a thin line between tarnishment and fashion advertising. More on that here. [The Trademark Blog] The Puma fake-ads have been circulating all week, and they are very graphic. I can understand why Puma would want to squash them, at least from formal channels. Some have suggested that Puma should be thankful for the exposure, but this definitely crosses a line. 10:04:14 PM

HP's Websigns: Information in Places Forget the tired and tiresome scenario of fast-food joints spamming you with e-coupons when you walk past them. What you want is the ability to point your phone down the street you are walking and ask "any good Chinese restaurants in this direction?" When I was researching Smart Mobs, one of the hotbeds of interesting work was Hewlett-Packard's Cooltown laboratory. EE Times now reports on HP's "Websigns" project -- a schema whereby mobile devices can find and access web pages associated with people, places, and services. [Smart Mobs] Interesting idea. DNS created a new "space" and a new "land rush", as everyone figured out that good domain names were going fast. With a domain space service (DSS), the name space is implicitly tied to the physical location (say GPS coords). So, would HP control the DSS and only offer GPS coord regions to people who already control physical regions, like stores and buildings? Would federal, state, and local governments keep the common spaces common in the DSS? Also, could I leave digital messages for others at specific GPS locations? That'd be one hellofa scavenger hunt! 10:00:03 PM

Towards Structured Blogging Lately I've been thinking about how we could evolve blogging tools to allow people to author more structured (dare I say semantic?) content, so that other people could find their stuff that they find of interest more easily. Right now what we have, globally speaking, is pretty much a huge pool of blog posts, each implicitly tied to a particular weblog author and with a date slapped on. Now, say I've written a review of the latest Radiohead album into my blog. I'd like others who are interested in Radiohead, or in music reviews in general, and who may not know me, to be able to pick out my review from the common pool in a simple way. Interesting people may come my way because of this. What we're talking about is getting people to put more metadata on their content. Now allowing it is one thing, and fostering it is another. And I'd say the latter is the bigger challenge. Here are some ideas. ...continued in Towards Structured Blogging [Seb's Open Research] Yes, yes, yes! Bring it on. Personally, I'd like to have an extensible weblog editor, such that I could create new weblog entries of different types: website reference, weblog reference, music review, book review, movie review, photo album announcement, etc. Perhaps these are just template weblog items, but I could see having XML tags in there beyond just text. Also, perhaps these templates would have implicit categories, as well as default pingback targets, so that all music blog entries would be pinged in one place, all politic blog items would be pinged at another place, and so on...? 9:54:13 PM

Jonas promises Pundyt Jonas reports that the first version of "pundyt" should be available shortly: I believe it's about time to lift the veil of secrecy and let you all in on the big project plan: I give you: pundyt , a full fledged microcontent management and news delivery system. Pundyt is somewhere between Radio Userland, Movable Type, Drupal, and Ampheta Desk. Blawgy goodness built in, that means, for example, a citations database, case crossreferences, auto-linking of whatever you'd like to autolink, but especially bluebook-style citations, etc. But that's not all. Pundyt comes with desktop frontends for Mac OS X, Windows (not finished, yet), Unix (it's Open Source), and Palm OS, and has a fully integrated workflow management backend. Woah, sounds super! [Bag and Baggage] I'll believe it when I see it. 9:49:29 PM

"Lose The Browser, Keep The Blog" So says Leo Laporte in recommending RSS to Screen Savers viewers, and in particular aggregator applications NetNewsWire (Mac) and NewsDesk (Windows). Among other things, Leo explains why RSS is not PointCast, and links to UserLand's and Web Reference's definitions of RSS. (I say put the aggregator in the browser, but that's a segment for another day.) [Bag and Baggage] No no, put the browser in the aggregator! NewsDesk does this, and it looks good. (Now if it just had all the other cool features of NNW!). I don't want to browse anymore, I want to aggregate. When I do need to browse, that's just one button away in an aggregator interface. 9:47:56 PM

Temporary RSS filters, oh lazyweb Oh mighty Lazyweb, thee of great loins, grant me this: a filter for NetNewsWire that allows me to mark-as-read all posts containing keywords I set. Today, for example, I wish to be undisturbed by posts containing words such as "Iraq", XML, "Fish Fingers" and "Harlot" - all of which are sat in that little guilty red-starred unread posts number. I want to opt out of these conversations. I don't even want them to impinge on my conciousness enough for me to just skim them. I want them away. But I don't want to loose everything, or unsubscribe from people who, when they're not talking about said words, are quite entertaining. Help me unconsume! Filters, I cry! Filllllttteeers. [Ben Hammersley.com] Amen, brotha. Routing and filtering would be very strong features for NetNewsWire and other desktop news aggregators. I'd want to add feeds in numerous folders, some I would puruse, others I'd let filters act on independently. 9:46:09 PM

New Ad Format: The Fast Forwarded :30 Advertisers might take note of a new study just released by P & G that showed similar ad recall rates for those fast-forwarding through ads using a PVR and those that don't. So...now :30's can be compressed into :5's, get the same recall, and save a bundle of media dollars. Stranger things have happened. [via Ad Age] [Adrants] My wife will be both happy and sad to hear this. 9:43:21 PM

Wolpert at Real TonyG hears word that Richard Wolpert is at Real Networks. Sure enough, it looks as though he stepped down as CEO from CheckOut.com in Sept. 2000, and took a strategic advisor role with Real two months later. He's been putting a face to Real as they look to make digital content profitable. Here's a quote from a press release last year between Sony and Real: Sony and RealNetworks already share technology with each other, but according to Richard Wolpert, a strategic advisor to RealNetworks, the two companies are broadly expanding their existing relationship. "We're focused on everything that's going to happen in the area of home networking over the next two years," he says, "and on bringing our shared technologies to many kinds of non-PC devices." 9:42:41 PM

TonyG needs an RSS feed Aaah! My friend TonyG has been rather prolific over the last few weeks, but I'm only now catching up when I happened to see his URL in my bookmark list. Dude, look into an RSS feed for me? It's all about me, ya know. 9:26:11 PM

Fell St. off-ramp to bite the dust... Fell St. off-ramp to bite the dust / Last chink in Hayes Valley transformation [SFGate: Bay Area] Ug! The commute home just got much longer. There are so many cars going over that offramp now, and once it closes, they all pour into...? ...Octavia Street, sometime in 2006... For more information, click here... http://www.octaviacentral.org/ 3:55:02 PM