I’m not the closest follower of state politics out here in Washington. (After all, neither is the local media—a far cry from Boston’s baying news hounds.) But I was a little surprised that Gary Locke declared that he will not seek a third term as Governor of Washington yesterday. It leaves me wondering about his next act. Senator? His profile is a little too low to throw his hat into the presidential ring for 2004.

I will note that coming from eight years of governing a state with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation might make it a little difficult to do battle against Republican opponents on the national stage.

It looks like I was wrong to allege that the Bush policy on logging national forests to save trees was cynical and a sell out of government resources to support industry. This article in the New York Times reports on an accidental experiment that showed that thinned forest patches that had been subjected to prescribed burns—controlled forest fires—stopped a rampaging non-prescribed burn dead in its tracks. Note that Charlie called this one in the comments to my original post.

An article at Wired reports on research in a Milan pharmacology center that reports that eating one or more pizzas a week can reduce the risk of esophageal cancer by 59% and colon cancer by 26%. No link in the article, but the New York Times has the full story, and there are dozens of links in Google News.

Dave points out that LiveJournal blogs have started pinging Weblogs.com. This means that Weblogs.com gets a new high water mark almost for free. My data has been updated, and the chart is below:

I was definitely right to hesitate about predicting exponential growth of the blogosphere back in May. Look at what has happened to the shape of the curve since then. I think what happened was that the end of the war made a lot of people update less frequently, and may have driven some warbloggers off the map entirely. But I also noticed that the traffic on Weblogs.com systematically flirted with the high water mark throughout May and June.

I think the time has come to start investigating the data more systematically. Time to look at starting that cron job...

My blog just became the beneficiary of the new TrackBack features added to Manila by UserLand. Theoretically at least I have the ability to send outbound pings and receive inbound pings. I say “theoretically” because I’ve tried sending an outbound ping and haven’t seen any results, and haven’t seen any inbound pings yet either. But it should work.

Things that I’ve found while working on enabling this feature:

1. For those who don’t know anything about TrackBack, there’s a good non-technical explanation here.
2. The TrackBack list, like the Comments list, is not available on the static view of my site at www.jarretthousenorth.com, but it is available at the dynamic view at discuss.jarretthousenorth.com.
3. The TrackBack ping URL is not the same as the permalink for a post. Don’t know why I thought it would be, but… You can find the URL to ping by clicking the TrackBack link under a news item.
4. NetNewsWire doesn’t provide a field for TrackBack URLs for Manila blogs yet.