Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Literacy Weblog offers an abundance of terrific, smart, and thought provoking links, plus it has the backlinks in effect. Too bad it has no RSS subscription option, but you can't have everything. I found this via Dr. Laurel Clyde's article on blogging at FreePint. Clyde also has an academic web page about blogs -- the first I've seen. While I'm at it, Clyde also provides links to more great sites, including: Crag's Booknotes: I think I've been here before, but again, since it has no subscription option I'm less likely to make it a daily read. I need to change that. Saturday's entries offer a wealth of great links to the ongoing developments in post 9-11 investigations, accusations, etc. The highlight is the full text of Georgia Democrat Cynthia McKinney's statement on terrorist warnings. McKinney says: Because I love my country, because I am a patriot, and because the American people deserve the truth, I believe it would be dangerous, loony and irresponsible not to hold full congressional hearings on any warnings the Bush Administration had before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Ever since I came to Congress in 1992, there are those who have been trying to silence my voice. I've been told to "sit down and shut up" over and over again. Well, I won't sit down and I won't shut up until the full and unvarnished truth is placed before the American people. Go McKinney! Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog: The title is pretty self-explanatory. One of the only blogs I've seen to actually link to The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Laughing Librarian: Great library humor... Here's a taste. 7:56:05 AM

I finally got around to reading "Use the Blog, Luke," and found it to be a great analysis of the potential for blogs as a new kind of communication that helps improve traditional journalism, rather than replacing it. But the best part of the article was its description of how the Web should work: Punch up a URL and if Jason, or Andrew Sullivan, or Sopsy has an opinion about that page, you see their comments in a floating window alongside your main browser window. It's a simple enough trick: Sites like Blogdex are already tracking blog-borne references to different URLs. All your browser would have to do is send an additional request to a database of blogged URLs anytime you pulled up a page: If there's a match -- if one of the bloggers you're following has referenced the URL -- their comments get sent back to your machine and appear in the floating palette. That's such a cool idea. It's like backlinking (or auto-linkbacks or whatever you want to call it when a page automatically links to all pages which link to it), except it's so much better. It seems like this would be so easy to do.... I wish I were a programmer. But it should include all links to a page, not just blogs. Generation of 1-3 line summaries of web pages (a la Google's search results) should also become standard and automatic to make the whole thing that much more useful. 7:20:46 AM