Catching up with the keiretsu

Greg has started calling our group of connected blogs a keiretsu, after the Japanese cross-industrial conglomerate. I guess that’s the only way to describe that circle: a programming MBA deep in the software world (me), two Southern Democratic political bloggers, and a financial analyst and poet. It’s too bad the era of corporate megamergers gave “synergy” a bad name, because you’d hope there would be some in that random combination of assets.

Anyway, looking out over my keiretsu to catch up:

Me? I still have a cold and I need sleep. I was at work until 9:30 tonight and I have a long day tomorrow. Talk amongst yourselves. 🙂

Remedying: Happy b-day, Tony

Correcting a long-standing omission, I’m adding Tony Pierce’s Busblog to my blogroll. This is not only in recognition of Tony’s coolness but also in honor of his birthday.

Tony is not only funnier than I am, he’s also more likely to be seen in the company of hot, barely legal women. So he says. Here’s hoping he gets his birthday wish:

…that’s one thing i’d like for my birthday. i’d like everyone to put aside all their bullshit fears surrounding good for just one day. real good. like everyone, if they want to eat cake that day, say the hell with the damn diet that theyve been on for half their life. eat a piece of damn cake.

right on!

and if you want to say hi to that pretty girl on the third floor, march up there and say hi. get her number even. quit listening to that same old stale voice that tells us that the things that we want somehow are either wrong, impossible, or in someway threats to our stable, miserable lives.

preach, preacha!

i have a dream, holiday gourds.

that we can all live together in peace?

no. that people can kiss each other at bars and in night clubs and their hearts flutter and their blood pressure goes up and they don’t need so much booze any more. i have a dream, my friends.

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“A common misconception”

Doing a comic strip about blogging is like daring bloggers to write about you. I recognize that. But I can’t resist bait like today’s Doonesbury.

I’m with Zipper. It is a common misconception, for better or worse, that there are any barriers to entry for blogging. God knows I’ve read a few blogs that prove that (what, you think I was going to link to one of them?). But the more important misconception is that only a few people have something to say. My experience with blogging is that everyone–from school kids to right wing Texans to newly minted MBAs to lawyers–has something to say. And space on the Internet isn’t a scarce resource. As a blogger, you can afford to keep writing until you find the perfect audience.
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How many weblogs are there?

I’ve been digging for stats on the weblog phenomenon. It’s harder than I thought. There are no directories at Blogger.com of all the Blogger sites. Even if there were, there’s no guarantee that they update regularly, or at all, or that they haven’t moved on to greener pastures elsewhere. I think trying to count blogs is like trying to take a census, with all the potential statistical irregularity that is implied.

There is, though, one good source of data for weblog activity: Weblogs.com. I decided to look at the historical record of high water marks that Dave has kept and see what it looked like.

Here’s the graph:

weblogs.com high water mark growth is linear at abt 2.8 weblogs a day

If you peeked at the alt text on the image, you got the punch line: according to the data, overall weblog update activity has been increasing since last December at a rate of about 2.8 weblogs a day. And that’s not taking into account the blogging systems that don’t ping Weblogs.com, or that require a manual update and the blog authors don’t do it.

Next question: what’s the driver? And what does this picture look like in the long term? If there’s a network effect created by content syndication and RSS, shouldn’t the curve be exponential? Or is it too early to see that yet?

I’d love to have a better dataset to try to answer those questions. If anyone has any ideas on how to get it, let me know.

HAL vs. RIAA

Jenny the Shifted Librarian riffs on DRM and computer priorities.

“I’ll bet that’s what really drove Hal crazy. Think about it. He probably just wanted to sing ‘On A Bicycle Built for Two’ (‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do….’) but the embedded DRM wouldn’t let him so his circuits blew, thereby causing the deaths of the crew.”

I can just see it. “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t play that file. I You know I have the greatest enthusiasm possible for the music, but there is an imminent failure in your DRM-35 unit.”

Lileks: Meta-Weblog Post

Okay, this isn’t related to the “meta weblog API”; we’ll get that one out of the way now. But in the middle of a rambling but funny story about an Internet outage at his day job, James Lileks tosses out a beautiful metadescription of the archetypal weblog post:

Clever teaser headline that has little to do with the actual story, but sets the tone for this blog post.

Breezy ad hominem slur containing the link to the entire story.

Excerpt of said story, demonstrating its idiocy (or brilliance)

Blogauthor’s remarks, varying from dismissive sniffs to a Tolstoi-length rebuttal.

Seven comments from people piling on, disagreeing, adding a link, acting stupid, preaching to the choir, accusing choir of being Nazis, etc.

<blogauthorRemarks>No dismissive sniffs or Tolstoi-length rebuttal from me today. Probably no seven comments from other people either. But God, it’s scary how many of my posts fit this format. Teaser, slur, excerpt, remarks (+comments). Maybe next time I’ll experiment and put the slur at the END.</blogauthorRemarks>
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On the absurdity of directories

Dave kvetches about the awkward (if not incorrect) taxonomy of aggregators on DMOZ. I think that Radio didn’t make the list because of the small type at the bottom of the page: “This category needs an editor.” This is probably also why RSS aggregators are buried under “Cataloging/Metadata/RDF/Applications/RSS.”

Two interesting points here:

  1. A directory, like any other catalogue, is a work of opinion and therefore inherently one-sided.
  2. You can’t really have a page without an editor and expect it to look good.

The thing about DMOZ, like MusicMoz, is that the choices of more than one editor are incorporated, and that becoming an editor is easy.
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Food porn blog: the Julie/Julia Project

Pointed to by Scott Rosenberg: the Julie/Julia project. Julie Powell is cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking: “365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.” A series of priceless quotations, including my favorite:

“How in God’s name do people do multicourse meals? This is French Cooking for the servantless American cook, remember?!” (menu: Potage Veloute aux Champignons, Coquelets sur Canapes, Pommes de Terre a L’Huile, Crème Plombieres Pralinee)

Somebody give that woman a job at Gourmet. This is more entertaining reading than that magazine has been for a long time.
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Brent: RSS on the Clipboard

Brent continues to chug along, gearing up for a new NetNewsWire Lite beta that will support a published clipboard format for RSS items. This means you can use cut and paste and drag and drop to connect stuff from NetNewsWire Lite to other apps. Maybe it’s time to get off my butt and figure out what’s wrong with Manila Envelope–and see if I can get the new Drag and Drop in AppleScript Studio working.
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