Sunday, May 26, 2002

No, You're Not Right " 'Strike the heart, enjoy the florist, fa la la la la la la la la' AmIRight collates all of those misheard song lyrics and goes a step further, organizing them by band, song, or decade. Plus for the truly band-curious, they have archives of cool and stupid band names, song parodies and commentary on lyrics that people think are repetitive, nonsensical, or just insincere. Sometimes it's tough to tell the wrong lyrics from the right ones... 'You strut your rasta wear and your suicide poem' real or misheard?" [MetaFilter] 6:17:08 PM  Permanent link here

Also Known as "Common Sense" What Violating the Golden Rule Means in an Era of Blogging " 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' Good words to live by normally.  Essential words to live by now that blogging is becoming: common normal credible not just by geeks and for geeks Here's why: If you treat me poorly I'll blog it. If you treat me well I'll blog it. If your contract is offensive then I may sign it but I'll blog it publicly for the world to see. If you are incompetent I'll blog it. If you're competent I'll blog it. the list goes on What's happening now in this 'blog era' we've entered is that I can tap into the day to day knowledge of people I respect." [The FuzzyBlog!, via McGee's Musings] Subjects: The Dough; Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel. See also: The Cluetrain Manifesto. 5:20:28 PM  Permanent link here

Or an InfoMaven "I went to dinner last night with my fiancee Kilee and her sister Jodie. I realised that I have become the atypical Blogger of conversations.... I've never been one to get too involved in big conversations, preferring to sit back an listen. Now though I find I can slap out 15 second bites of current affairs. If you could convert the conversation to HTML or XML, I'd be the perfect Blog News Feed. Funny how life imitates Blogs :)." [DotBlog] 3:21:12 PM  Permanent link here

Quote of the Day " 'I was outside the theater and there was this spontaneous party. We were just huggin' and drinkin' champagne, and it dawned on me: I might be the only woman who has won this award who can dance.' Of course, Suzan-Lori Parks is far more than that. When the 38-year-old playwright twirled in 8-inch platform heels in front of Manhattan's Ambassador Theatre, home to her play Topdog/Underdog, she did so as the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer-Prize for Drama." That comes from the April 19, 2002, edition of Entertainment Weekly (p.68), which is how far behind I am in reading the one print magazine to which I still subscribe. I'm trying to play a little catch up on this gloriously sunny day. 2:37:57 PM  Permanent link here

Maybe They Want to Bid on Access to My Aggregator, Too (Enclosures) "Re: Payola On Pho Mark Cuban remarked that radio should go to a GoTo.com bidding placement model where every morning a member label would upload a song and start bidding for placement on the morning drive. Highest bidder wins." [Matt Goyer] 11:39:10 AM  Permanent link here

It Sounds Great, but Should I Add It? Meta Linker "The future of the internet may be reciprocal linking, the semantic web, a whole self-organising mesh of information that encompasses everything. But let's be honest - it's not going to happen tomorrow... So we at ThinkBlank have come up with the next best thing - a simple piece of Javascript that you can add to your site that uses Blogdex to help bridge the gap between webloggers. You might be writing about the latest Apple gadget or you might be writing about tensions in the Middle East - and if it's topical you're probably not going to be the only one. But how do you (and how can you help your readers) find out about the other discussions going on around the net? Metalinker takes a very simple approach - every time you put a link into your website, metalinker uses javascript to add a link to the page on blogdex that lists other people talking who have mentioned that link. And so with just a couple of mouse-clicks people reading your site can read a webful of opinion and debate...." [via nickdenton.org] I know others have hand-rolled this for Daypop, but this is the first third-party service I've seen for someone like me who isn't a programmer. It's a great idea to maintain flow. But here's my dilemna - for which audience should I write my post titles? I l-o-v-e the Bloglet service, but it doesn't pick up titles, which means I can't put the link to the external site in the title. But in my abridged RSS feed, titles are the only links, so I've been making them link back to my site so that those readers can get to the full post. So my titles probably won't be very helpful for Google and Blogdex searches. I'm not sure how to really change this. However you're reading my site - is what I'm doing working for you? Suggestions welcome.... 11:37:10 AM  Permanent link here

Google Me This, Batman! "My trip to Google on Friday was great. First I took the tour. Lots of geek toys. Lots of press clippings. A nice graph showing flow. Then we sat down and talked software. This is not Netscape. They're playing long-term, they've got real technology (Netscape's was all quick hacks). I pushed six things and gave them a heads-up on an seventh. Here they are. 1. Spell-checker web service. 2. Pings from CMSes for more currency. 3. Google On The Desktop. 4. An API to access page rank. 5. OPML and directories (instead of two or three directories, millions). 6. RSS feeds for their news flows. 7. Gnutella as a decentralized distribution method." [Scripting News] But not just Google for the desktop (although, I really, really, really want that, too). I need an affordable Google for my forthcoming RCS server for my distributed network of blogs and k-logs for librarians. I hope they follow through on Dave's suggestions, a couple of which I'm guessing were already in the development pipeline. 11:14:36 AM  Permanent link here

This Is Not Good.... Amazon Customers' Recommendations Scammed "This 'clever' author of a $3 Self Help PDF has written a program to put his book in as a recommendation 12 times, on every single top seller at Amazon (at least random collection I checked in the first 500 top sellers). As a result he is now the #3 best seller on Amazon." [kuro5hin.org] 10:41:25 AM  Permanent link here

Who Will Land the First Quad? Figure Blogging "Formalized Figure Blogging started as a small movement by a band of nomads in Norway. Scoring in Figure Blogging has more to do with how the bloggers approach their chair before they sit down to begin blogging than what they actual write or post to their blog or web site. The Triple Salchow Blog Jump is an excellent example of one of the more difficult figure blogger maneuvers." [via jenett, via a klog apart] 10:37:03 AM  Permanent link here

What MTV 1 Should Be.... Sometimes I just want something on TV in the background while I'm working or blogging, and this weekend it's MTV2 because it's an "Increase the Beat" weekend. (I'd make that a link if I could find ANY information about it on their site.) Basically, they're playing 400 songs in order of increasing beats per minute. Cool! 10:25:21 AM  Permanent link here

Aggregating Aggregators More on DMOZ "More updates to the DMOZ RSS section. This morning I added a "news readers" subcategory here. Please suggest URLs of things I've missed out. I know I have." [Content Syndication with XML and RSS] This looks to be a good, current list of available news aggregators. It will be interesting to watch this list grow as the standards evolve and folks realize the potential. 10:18:10 AM  Permanent link here