Tuesday, May 29, 2001

As midnight approaches...

Finally, Flash finds a purpose.

Beth likes my blog, Kevin likes my house.

Rusty gets Kuro5ive about Apple, battlebots and San Jose. A favorite sample: "San Jose is the forced-corporate-networking gulag of the United States. Siberia in reverse."

This business just got a little bit wider

J.D., who's from North Jersey (Yo! What exit?), lays out the AND logic of blogging, more or less. Sounds like he's just as tired as the rest of us of the tendency to play everything that widens the journalistic stream as an Edge vs. Middle story. OR logic makes better stories (because it sets up conflict, which is what keeps stories going), but too often AND is what's really going on. And blogs are AND logic on speed (BUT, NOR and NAND too, but let's not get technical). It's simple: blogs augment mainstream journalism. Mainstream journalism augments blogs. Carry on.

By the way, I'd like to link to particular parts of J.D.'s blog today (the Jersey thing, his responses to Dean, Alan and Phil...). That's because already I love the direct-linking feature I started using myself, just today. Once again, invention is the mother of necessity. And J.D. has clearly invented a very necessary blog by bringing to the edge some very mainstream creds and sensibilities, as well as that nobody's-fool attitude we appreciate from all experienced journalists — especially ones from New Jersey.

Against the grain

Interesting piece by John Tascheck of eWeek at ZDNet News. Apparently Linux won some transaction benchmarks at TPC.org. The problem: no links to the background information. So I just wrote this "talkback":

I'd be glad to comment if the story made it easy to surf to some background. But this story lacks a single blue word. It's linkless.

I don't blame you, John. Publishing is still more about ink than pixels. And that's no less true for Linux pubs than for the rest of us.

It's time for our industry to reset the journalistic defaults everywhere we can. Let's make it easy for readers in both media.
Whaddaya say? Next time, give us some links. And I'll try to do the same.

Thanks, Doc

Wonder if the editors will post it. I'll have to check back. (I just did. It's here.)

Palmstorm?

Is there something to this? Found out about it here.

Gotta keep 'em on the edge of their thrones

That's my brief explanation of why I'm keeping the profantity theme alive.

Probably the same reason you wouldn't call your personality "sticky"

Eric Norlin explains (or is it demonstrates?) why you wouldn't call your friends "traffic."

The New Economy, translated to Fuck, the language of New Jersey:

Hey eyeball! Come here! Yeah, I'm tawkin' at you!

Maybe it's the chomp somebody took out of the logo

Any Mac hacker out there know what would tend to damage a my directory so much that even Norton hangs, forcing me to use DiskWarrior to create a completely new directory? This is my new routine with the laptop. The box crashes, I run Norton and it hangs. Then I run DiskWarrior and it finds a pile of problems, which it fixes by replacing the directory. Then I run Norton and it fixes the usual minor problems (bundle bits, bad file names), and all is well again for about two days. Then the box crashes and I repeat the routine. Is it fragmentation, I wonder?

Not speaking of which, Brent has an iBook. Is it one of the new ivory ones, I wonder?

Since we're on a chompy subject, I see Dr. Macintosh, Bob LeVitus, loves OS X. I know: of course he would. He's Dr. Macintosh. His identity is involved, to say the least. But that's cool: Bob's good at it. And I remember doing some of my best co-thinking with Bob when we both worked on a vast MORE presentation for a company that employed us both back in the late '80s.

'sup time

While doing some research for Linux Journal, I discovered on Netcraft that Apple is about done moving its site off Solaris and BSD and onto the BSD-derived OS X. I also notice that the Cluetrain site doesn't seems to be rocking along pretty well on Solaris. We're moving in on 441 days of uptime. Others do better. I note that they are just about all BSD. The record-holder, www.transactie.org, has been up 1140 days. That's over three years. I also notice that it can't be found. But who knows? Your luck may vary.

Education is conversation

I just added auto-anchoring to my blog subheads (those little blue things), thanks to live help on the phone from Craig Burton. This is very cool. Now you (or I) can link to specific subheads. I'm going back and adding the feature to a few blogs I think might have linkworthy subheads.

More ifs, ands and bots

It looks like Google's bots are back to crawling Userland-hosted weblogs. Not sure the crawling is back to the depth we had a month ago (and maybe that's not a bad thing for the servers), but it's good to be able to use Google for blog searches again. Data: before the crawling stopped, searches for "Doc Searls" (the two words, sans quotes) yielded close to 13,000 results. After the crawling stopped, it was down to 3,400 or so. (Tells you how much of my online life is in blogville.) Now it's back up to about 7,500. And my blog shows up, which it didn't for awhile there. So here's a high five to whoever is making this thing work again.

By the way, Google finds that "weblog" is found on more Web pages than "attentive," "harbinger" and "truncate," but not on quite as many as "autism," "infringe" and "filth."

I just discovered that there are 116 pages with both "weblog" and "filth." The top one leads to this one, among others. Some pretty funny stuff in there.

The obvious dawns

I just discovered, while looking for pages that included both George Lakoff and myself, that Google caches pages. So even though the engine returned a link to the front page of Doubt's Weblog when the page I wanted was from some past date, I could click on the "cached" link, look at the cached page and find the actual page from there. What's embarrasing is that I've never really noticed the cached page link before. Duh, no?

On the cached page it highlights the search terms, and offers to link to the current page without highlighting. This works very well with weblogs.

I also enjoy reading Doubt's Weblog's remarks about the Mundie vs. Free/Open matter.

Work happens

Just testing Radio Userland on another machine. Good: it works.