b.cognosco

Someone get me a rock to throw at this glass house -- the CEO of the only major network to pump as much violence, gore, sex, and rampant stupidity into American homes as MTV calls the Internet a moral-free zone. What's up with that?

Internet declared moral-free zone.
News.Com: "The president of media giant News Corp warns that the Internet has become a 'moral-free zone,' with the medium's future threatened by pornography, spam and rampant piracy." [Scripting News]

Well, not my corner of it, in any case.
[Seb's Open Research]

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology

4:23:17 PM

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I read a few copies of JASIST while browsing the Georgia Tech library one day. It's a worthwhile journal for anyone interested in understanding more about information architecture. I think you must be a member of ASIS&T to access the journal online, or have a card at a library that subscribes to one of the online journal services.

TOC for the IA issue of JASIST. The table of contents is available for the Information Architecture issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science. Full text is available to members who have opted for electronic access only. [ia/ - news for information architects]

On Writing Well

4:02:47 PM

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Writing skills are at the top of the list for effective blogging, or for being effective at any sort of written communication. It isn't enough just to run the spelling and grammar check in MSWord. It helps to know the basics of good writing.

Becoming a master at the craft takes years, but conquering the basics of writing so you don't embarrass yourself is straightforward. On Writing Well by William Zinsser is one of my all-time favorite books and should be read by anyone who wants to write for clarity. And the 22 points on this list are a great summary of the common errors many of us commit when writing informally.

Dogma 2000 (the site seems to be down at the moment) says good writing and good grammar don't matter -- write it as you feel it. If you're writing for your feelings that's fine. But if you're writing for others to read pay attention to this list.

Good writing checklist. Good writing. Good writing is the basis for weblogging. Good books about how to write learn are On writing well and Style: toward clarity and grace. If you don't feel like reading books, this list might help as well:

Avoid alliteration.
Prepositions dangle awkwardly if you use them to end sentences with.
Avoid clichés and colloquialisms like the plague, or you will seem old hat.
Employ the vernacular, while eschewing arcane and obfuscatory verbiage.
Avoid ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
Take it easy with parenthetical remarks (however relevant), to avoid chopping up sentences (unnecessarily (we might add)).
To ever, however artfully, split an infinitive, marks you as grammatically challenged.
Skip the foreign words and phrases you know, n’est-ce pas?
Never generalize.
“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
Comparisons can clog up writing as badly as alliterations and cliches.
Avoid redundancy and verbosity, or readers will think you are repeating yourself and using too many words as well besides.
We really get @*&%$**)!! when you use vulgarities.
Clear, specific writing beats vagueness, we suppose. Whatever.
Overstatement totally destroys any credibility you ever had forever.
Understatement can, at times, perhaps shade a point to the point of its fading away.
One word sentences? Eliminate.
Analogies work about as well as fur on a flounder.
“Is” just sits there. Pick verbs that do something.
Even if a mixed metaphor sings, you should derail it.
Who needs rhetorical questions?
Its distrakting too punctuat, an spel rong.
Good writing is surprisingly hard. [Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog] [Seb's Open Research]

Another Fallen Player

6:12:53 AM

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The world of print has not been kind to e-commerce and e-services vendors, many of whom just flat misinterpreted the market.

iPrint: Proposed Asset Sale, Interim Operating Agreement with MadeToOrder.com [WhatTheyThink]

Where to Get Homeplug

12:05:15 AM

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Get Homeplug adapters from the same place you get your VPN router -- LinkSys. Buy.com is selling a Homeplug ethernet adapter (plugs into the existing router) and a Homeplug USB adapter for the laptop for about $80 US each. Get it all at once and get FREE shipping (I don't think they'll send it across the pond for free, though.)

HomePlug and Wi-Fi will make a good solution.
Okay so I've been dreaming about having the money to put Wi-Fi in the house. The problem is that I know I'm gonna need several base stations to cover the entire house and garden, maybe as many as 6 in order to get good signal everywhere. That's expensive and, worse still, I have to run cable somehow to connect them all up.

Bob Cringely has been writing about HomePlug which is a networking standard that uses the power sockets as connectors and the electrical wiring in your house to give you a 14Mbps broadband connection around your home. 14Mbps may not be that great, but it's surely good enough and the best part is: no wiring.

Now, like Bob, I tend to have my laptop plugged in to the mains most of the time. HomePlug would mean I could dispense with most of the wireless access points in the house. Maybe just having one for the conservatory and garden.

Now where on earth can I get this in the UK?
[Curiouser and curiouser!]