Wednesday, October 2, 2002

Last minute blogcleaning

I believe we've solved the problem with getting on the blog that's been bothering folks over the last few hours.

Anyway, I've gotta move the office, so blogging will be pretty slow until tomorrow, and not very fast then, either.

There should be a SuitWatch newsletter going out early tomorrow. It's a report on last week's Digital Hollywood conference. Subscribers will get it in the email, and it'll be up in the archive section of the LInux Journal site after that. Subcribing is free, by the way. Go for it.

Meanwhile, blog amongst yourselves.

Looking for a 5-way deal on Internet radio

The current struggle over royalty rates for Internet radio is being fought between the RIAA, Congress, small webcasters, large webcasters and suppliers like Real Networks and AOL -- not just between the webcasters and the RIAA. The whole complicated mess is unpacked briefly and well by Jon Healey in this morning's Los Angeles Times. (The link is to SFGate, which won't scroll the piece into a fee-access archive in seven days.)

Enclosure of the Commons

It has occured to me before that ...

Well, the rest of this post got chopped off, somehow. Shit. Well, I'll leave it here anyway as a kind of blogmark, so I can get back to it later this week. No time right now.

All overboard

This isn't the kind of news you want to read when you're going on a cruise in two weeks.

Fair blogging

Here's Glenn Fleishman on the Digital Rights panel at the O'Reilly OS X conference. J.D. Lasica, who was on that panel, summarizes it in Fair use gets a posse. More on the conference news page.

Grankings

Dave has be re-observing the polysurdities of Google's ranking system, which moves him up and down the totem pole of top-ranking Daves, and seems to deny Scripting News the Alpha position among results for weblog. For a long time this very blog held that position. Now we're #5, just behind Weblog Wannabe.

Alain Breillant thinks the name of the blog itself has a lot to do with it. For example, this blog has "Weblog" in the title, while Scripting News doesn't. Dave doesn't agree, since he's experimented around with the name of his blog, to no apparent effect. But I think there's something to it.

Could it be that Weblog Wannabe moved up because "Weblog" is the first name of Wannabe's blog, and the third name of mine? And could that be the reason why Doc Searls Weblog is the #2 Doc result out of 24,300,000, right behind the Department of Commerce? I dunno, but it makes sense.

Do a search for "blog". Blogger is on top. Ring around the blog (aka BlogPhiles) is next. Blog*spot is next. Then International Blog MEETUP Day. Then three actual blogs: rabbit blog (at tinylittlepenis.com), JOHO the Blog and Ethel the Blog.

Makes some kind of sense, name-wise, no?

I see by Dr. Weinberger's JOHO blog that he is no longer the #6 David, but has been pushed down to #25. Yet his blog's tagline is still "David Weinberger's Weblog..." Which leads me to think what Google changed was its degree of caring about taglines, or the weighting it gives to each word to the right of the first one.

Maybe this is akin to an early decision by the Google folks to give very little shit about meta tags, which were (and still are, in many cases) a means by which savvy site authors hack rankings on search engines that look more closely at raw HTML than at what readers see on a page.

Here's an interesting twist, found in my referer logs: a search for "Searles" ("Searls" spelled with an extra e, which is an alternate spelling used by some members of my extended family), still comes up with this.

Ah, whatever.