Monday, December 10, 2001

Pearl

"The adverb is the enemy of the verb," Hank Searls says. I don't know if we're related or not (probably, way back), but I thought I'd give him a plug anyway. He's a terrific writer and a professional critic of the same. He also did well by his surname long before I came along and appended a .com to it.

Bloogle

Following up on the Dangerfield Syndrome item below, when I look up 11 September weblog on Google, my 9/11 blog comes up #4. Adam Curry's comes up #8. (Why isn't Scripting News in here? Or Kottke?) The #1 find is Google's own news page, which lists the SiliconValley.com /news/special/attack/blog.html page. Given the high profile that Google gives blogs, maybe it's time to list them among news sources, no? Or how about a www.google.com/blog/ page? Seems like it's almost overdue.

UnReal

When I go to look up a station on the "Radio Tuner" of my RealPlayer, it gives me a pop-out ad for an online casino and nothing else. Man, I hate that company.

I used the "tuner" after I tried to listen to David Coursey live on CNETRadio/910, which is on the air (at 910am) in the Bay Area, and on the Web, presumably. But when I click on the "Listen Live" button, a window comes up telling me to "Choose Player." When I click on RealPlayer, it gives me either nothing or a bomb window saying "Requested file not found. The link you followed by be outdated or inaccurate." The information in the window would be nice to copy into an email, but it can't be copied. When I click on the Windows Media Player link, nothing happens either, even though that player definitely works.

So fuggit.

E-Val

I just noticed that my old friend Val Landi has surfaced as the founder and CEO of Redband Broadcasting.

The Dangerfield Syndrome

In "Communicating Information about the World Trade Center Disaster: Ripples, Reverberations and Repercussions," Michael Blakemore and Roger Longhorn have produced a scholarly and highly sourced document on First Monday that not only fails to mention weblogs, but also just about every other online journal that operates outside the print-defined mainstream. Nearly all its sources are print or printlike, even where the authors rely on aggregating intermediators such as allafrica.com. While the piece clearly respects the degree to which tradional news organizations are now steeped in the Net, it fails utterly to respect the enormous amount of journalism that is native to the Net, and the important role that journalism played in spreading news and increasing intelligence about September 11 and developments that followed.

First Monday calls itself a "peer-reviewed journal on the Internet." But it disqualifies its own tagline by ignoring sources of authority native to the Net.

No, it rocks

Adam says "searching through old email sucks." I don't agree (even though I love his creative ideas about bootstrapping email into something more). Yes, there is a lot of noise, but I can eliminate most of it as it comes in or in a sort that isolates the crap for a gang-delete. What I love is being able to search in an instant for a forgotten login, a receipt, or a past email sent to me by somebody. In other words, it's my private archival message space. I don't know what I'd do without it.

Gonzo Today

USA Today raved about Gonzo Marketing in today's issue. Very cool.

It's getting worse

I downloaded 145 pieces of mail last night when I got back from the trip. More than 80 were spam.

Serial journalism

In Satellite Radio, Tune In or Turn Off, Steve MacLaughlin treats us to a feature so thorough and informative that it seems more native to a Sunday paper than to a blog.

And why not? Until now journalistic blogs have mostly been of the op-ed sort. But Steve raises a serious question here: not "Why can't blogs be serious venues for features and stories?" but rather, "What do blogs do to the marketplace for journalistic talent and its products?"

Steve is a talent and this piece he just posted is a product. If I were a newspaper editor I might want to buy and run this piece, or to hire Steve to write another version of it. I'd also want to get pointers to it from Steve and from others on the Web.

Now let's take it the next step. Do I just want to store Steve's new piece in my paper's archive (or worse, charge for access to it, which costs me more in lost authority than it gains me in fees)? Or do I want a version of it sitting out where bloggers and other linky folks will point to it and use it as an authoritative reference? And if it's sitting out there, is it better off in one of my paper's directories in Saltire's or in both?

These and many other subversive questions arise.

I love it.

Happy Xnuxhah

Dean is back on the blog and out of the period of mourning that followed the Yankees' loss in the World Series. His current subject: Hannukah, however it's spelled. Singing of which, there was one boat in the Cruise of Lights (see below) on Saturday that featured a Hannukah theme: a menorah instead of santa, reindeer and sleigh. Its P.A. system blared Adam Sandler's Hannukah Song, which is now, I guess, a classic. Wish I had a picture, but alas...

Maybe, but jeez

Greg Searle says here that Jones Soda is clueful. I'll grant that maybe the site is conversational and all, but is the soda worth a shit?

It's fucking huge

Wanna know the difference between print and Web journalism? Just look at the difference between print and Web cartooning. (Thanks to RageBoy for the link to the latter — and to Dr. Weinberger for pointing it out to RB, and to Gary Stock for pointing it out in something closer to the first place.)

'Scuse Jason while he kisses the sky

Looks like Susan got a lot closer to the Jason launch than we did. Really nice report and photos on her blog here.

Light weekend

I missed today. It's still Sunday the 9th as I write this, although it appears as Monday's blog. That's because my blog is on East Coast time. According to my blog, it's 1:02am.

What the hell. It was a great weekend not to blog. We hung out at Huntington Harbour, where two of our in-laws dock their new boat (if it's not exactly the one in the link, it's close — this is it on the left, decked in lights). On Saturday night we floated out to watch the Cruise of Lights and had a great time. You'll find a fresh gallery of photographs (all taken with a Sony PC-110 camcorder) behind that last link. Then we toured the harbor, where the lights on the houses were even more spectacular than the ones on the boats.

Today (yesterday in blogtime) we headed out past the breakwater in the boat, encountered high seas and headed back. I'm sure we could have made the run over to the Long Beach breakwater (it isn't far), but with a little kid on board and small craft advisories on the weather channel — and huge splashes pounding up over the cabin — we decided head back, tour the harbour a bit and then drive over.

We finally got home about three hours ago, and the winds have picked up steadily ever since. Now it's almost scary outside. We have four huge trees in our yard and many smaller ones. They're being tested, even as I blog.