Thursday, February 23, 2006
Snark attack
Snark. More snark. Countersnark. Best line: In case you haven't checked in lately, the Tribune site is now a veritable Blogoslovakia. Filled with advertising, by the way. (Not that we were speaking about "business models" or any of that). Thanks to BL Ochman for Pointage and commentary.
Bonus link, courtesy of Dan Gillmor.
A better port. Even without a storm.
Over in Linux Journal: Let's help these folks start podcasting.
Bring your laptops
Rembering Elena
My wife calls my showers "positive ion treatments", because I almost always come out of them filled with new energy and ideas.
In this morning's shower, however, I thought about our kids. Instead of ideas, I was filled with gratitude that the first thing our nine-year-old son wants to do when he comes home from school or camp is play with his parents. Tall and skinny as he is, he's still a little guy who loves nothing more than to fall asleep in a parent's arms. I reflected wistfully on how we would miss that, even as we'd love and encourage his growth and independence.
I also thought about a parent's worst fears. I'm not a fearful person, but I also don't like giving myself reasons for fear, either. That's why I hate going to movies in which I already know kids are killed. I avoided Seabisquit for that reason, and still prefer to forward past the scene where a boy is killed in a car accident. I haven't read a word of John Irving since he gratuitously (I thought) killed off a child in The World According to Garp.
But life isn't a movie or a book. A reminder of that came a few minutes ago, when a friend passed along Dear Elena, a new blog by an acquaintance of us both, who had just lost his six-year-old daughter.
Words can't express the depth of grief a parent feel when their child dies. What can be more hopeless than to lose the living embodiment of hope? And yet, being human, words may be the best we still have.
The author declines to use his name, so I'll respect that and simply pass word of my own sorrow to the family, and to everybody who knew Elena.
Making this place a better world
let me tell you how much i love the world we live in.
theres a thing called peer to peer sharing.
Meanwhile, I missed (though not completely, as you see) the third aniversary of Ev's announcement, live, from the front of a room in Los Angeles, the sale of Blogger to Google. Tony remembered, and that's why he wrote about it.
Right after that happened, there was a great gnashing of blogs, as some of us pondered publicly about What This Meant. A sort-of consensus (or at least a gang-worry) was that Google would crush all competition.
Didn't happen. Two months after Blogger went to Google, Six Apart launched TypePad. Since then Wordpress has become the pacesetting authoring tool, and blog hosting is a category full of businesses.
Sometimes an open marketplace wins in the long run. In other times, the short. This, blessedly, has been one of those other times.
Thanks to Elise Bowers for a nice visualization of blog market growth.
Apparently
Glenn Fleishman: It’s interesting to read about Fon from a European perspective in which there’s more optimism about models that challenge incumbents. Perhaps we’re too beaten down in the States?
Returning to the source
Seeing my picture in Frank Gruber's exploration of Technorati's Favorites feature, using my example, I feel the need to explain the media whore t-shirt I'm wearing in that pictures — and at other times, usually when I wish not to be taken too seriously.
It's custom schwag for kuro5hin distributed by its creator, Rusty Foster, who I haven't seen, I don't think, since he gave it to me at SXSW, four or five years ago.
I'll be there in a couple weeks or so. Hope Rusty makes it too.