Sunday, October 16, 2005

Chris Pirillo says it's time for Google to kill Blogspot. Via Dan Gillmor. I wrote a short piece about spam blogs for the day job: "Spam is the cockroach of the advertising world, adaptable to many environments. "Weblogs are inexpensive to produce, and show up well on the big search engines. Thus the inevitable birth of the spam blog, a.k.a. splog, an automated Web site that mimics the appearance of a weblog in order to lure traffic." (Unfortunately, some good stuff from Dave Sifry ended up on the cutting room floor.) Which reminds me -- Dan, we need to talk about your next CIOI column... 8:37:26 PM   permalink   comment []

Wired's Chris Anderson, of Long Tail fame, says Action Greensboro heartthrob Richard Florida is behind the curve. The Atlantic article in question. 8:07:27 PM   permalink   comment []

A Christian blog-con, held this weekend in California. 7:57:04 PM   permalink   comment []

"Wuss rock" cover of Baby Got Back. Essential. Via Backwards City, also essential. 6:23:16 PM   permalink   comment []

NYT continues its series on athletic recruiting at small colleges, with a focus on my alma mater. Fight, fight, Inner Light Kill, Quakers, Kill 1:26:15 PM   permalink   comment []

Terry Heaton, a thoughtful blogger and nice guy, is headed for surgery without health insurance. He's got some interesting info on the discounts available if you pay cash. Maybe the Nashville blog community can help out the way we've tried here. Update: Terry's added a PayPal button -- I gave a little, it felt good, give it a try if you can. 1:19:23 PM   permalink   comment []

Sue notes an error in Ted Vaden's coverage of ConvergeSouth. Blog standards would suggest a quick public correction of the error... 1:03:59 PM   permalink   comment []

Allen Johnson on Skip Alston: "What a waste of smarts and talent." More: "He is so focused on Doing What's Good for Skip that he misses opportunities to be what he really ought to be: one of the county's most effective servant leaders." Sad. True. Devastating. Read the whole thing. 11:16:41 AM   permalink   comment []

Lisa and I went into a convenience store. The clerk was wearing a t-shirt that said, "I love pain." I asked if that was true, or just a slogan. True, she said. Lisa asked, giving or getting? Both, she said. Just then a guy came in and asked if he could use the bathroom. The clerk said there was no public bathroom. He left, dejected. I said, that seemed to cause the guy some pain, did she enjoy it? Yeah, she said, I did. But she kindly provided a penny for our $2.01 purchase. 9:19:45 AM   permalink   comment []

DarkTimes: Rich sez, "It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby." "Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney." More: "Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Miller's grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: 'Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group.' "Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq." Kristof reports from Niger, a poor, Muslim, US-friendly democracy. "Sadly, we're bullying Niger and dozens of other poor countries and cutting off some aid to many of them because of their support for the International Criminal Court...So the Bush administration is cutting off certain military aid and 'economic support funds' to a couple of dozen of these governments, mostly in Latin America and Africa. The main result has been to undermine our friends and confirm every prejudice that people abroad have about Americans as schoolyard bullies." He says the ICC isn't as bad as Washington fears, even if it's not as great as promised. Kicker: "It looks like the ideologues, in Congress and the Bush administration, who backed this legislation are already hurting America more than the International Criminal Court ever could. And aside from the damage to our own image and alliances, we're taking the children of countries like Niger hostage by threatening: Unless you give us an immunity agreement, those kids will die. "Come on, President Bush! Is that really what your administration stands for?" Brooks says that women, who are better students than men the world around, will come to dominate the information age. "The social consequences are bound to be profound. The upside is that by sheer force of numbers, women will be holding more and more leadership jobs. On the negative side, they will have a harder and harder time finding marriageable men with comparable education levels. One thing is for sure: in 30 years the notion that we live in an oppressive patriarchy that discriminates against women will be regarded as a quaint anachronism." Kicker: "For 30 years, attention has focused on feminine equality. During that time honest discussion of innate differences has been stifled (ask Larry Summers). It's time to look at the other half." 9:14:08 AM   permalink   comment []

N&O's Ted Vaden on journalism and blog standards. It's a decent primer, a bit old-media in orientation but not painfully so...I'm glad the N&O is pursuing blogs, and it's important to remember that Greensboro's 30-seconds-ahead-of-the-curve status is going to make this kind of stuff look a bit remedial as it happens elsewhere -- but I have to ask, how much time have the N&O folks spent reading blogs? Not just other newspaper blogs, but independent blogs? There's a lot to learn out there. I've said before that one of the N&R's blogging strengths is that it emerged into a blogging community that it recognized and respected. The N&O seems to be on a slightly different tack. 8:48:58 AM   permalink   comment []