Sunday, October 28, 2007

What's a meta for? Metacoincidence and online news (If you're busy and/or hungry for news, just click the link in the next sentence and ignore my chain-of-coincidence outline.) My sequence of events leading a useful link for students keeping up with the news and a lot of metainformation about it... Get e-mail alerting me to a "spam" comment on a blog I hadn't updated in months. Log-in at old blog to delete spam. Write a new item in that blog to point people to my current home. Digress into a local issue about Radford's school colors. Post an item in this main blog linking to that discussion. Reflect on difference between two blogging programs. Realize that since starting my new job, I haven't been keeping up with the adventures of Dave Winer, the wizard whose blog software I've used for more than five years. Discover that Dave has been doing some very cool things (again) with The New York Times news feeds, which he had a big hand in creating in the first place. Now he's combined his already streamlined "river of news" version of the feed with an outline format, another great passion of his. (In fact, Dave wrote the first outlining program I used, about 23 years ago.) Discover that Dave, like me, loves corny quotes and metapuns, even when they're not original. (But I refuse to say "I heart...") Follow link to more about Times metadata and archives and find a link back to another innovation of Dave's -- pointing out keywords in Times feeds. Hover your mouse over each of the numbers on that page to see what the story is about. Follow one of those "metadata" puns back far enough to find an interesting site about how Public Broadcasting uses metadata, which includes a good definition for anyone scratching their heads about the word  -- or any students searching for another "Media & Society" semester research topic. Browsing around that site will have to wait until my homework is done. Perhaps 2008. Write this, with a few re-entries and revisions. Get back to work. (Metapun: This whole digression is about coincidences because I never metacoincidence I didn't like.) 4:48:37 PM    comment [] Tartan testing between Radford and Harvard I decided to dust off my Harvard Red Liner weblog to point old friends to my new position here at Radford... And while I was doing it found an excuse to compare the ease of uploading images to that WordPress blog verus to this Userland Radio system, which is in need of an update... although it has other features I like. On this page, I'm using an image that actually resides on the Harvard blog server, mostly because I haven't  timeright now for the extra couple of steps it would take to put it on Radio's server. Maybe I'll sort it all out by the next time National Tartan Day comes around. (See the Red Liner blog item linked to the image at the right for an explanation of why that's relevant to Radford University and other Highlanders.) 3:44:56 PM    comment []

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