Category: Internet

Brilliant post, brilliant series of questions. I think it deserves an answer:

• I work to understand who the visitors are of one of the biggest websites in the world. Besides this one.
• I’m rediscovering them every day.
• Every day. And that’s girl singular.
• The first two months of this year have been a hell of a lot better than the last five months of last year.
• Learning who I am.
• Not whole CDs, but there’s some great MP3s at KEXP if you pledge.
• When I remember to have hope.
• Q: How many tenors does it take to change a light bulb? A: Four; one to do it and three to stand around and bitch that they could have done it just as well if they had the high notes.
• I’m not sure but I think that’s a personal question.
• No, but I’ve got a close eye on some folks who are trying to destroy our American way of life.
• You tell me. I’ve at least started talking.
• Not nearly often enough.
• Not nearly often enough.
• Not nearly often enough.
• Yes. And yes.
• As big as a move, as small as a post.
• Not nearly often enough.
• Yes. Downhill on and off my feet.
• Not nearly…oh, stop it. Yes, at Trogdor.
• Not yet, but we have crocuses.
• At Christmas time. I’m off pie.
• Not so much.
• Not physically.
• We covered that.
• Not on the blog.
• I think it was the cheese that did me in, actually.
• When Lisa gets back in town.
• Every day.

Just got back from Jish’s very informal blogger gathering (don’t call it a meetup!) at Fadó in Seattle. In addition to meeting Jish, who’s quite a nice guy, and renewing F2F acquaintance with Anita and Jerry Kindall, I met a whole passel of new-to-me bloggers, including Jessamyn West from librarian.net and poetsagainstthewar.org. And Dan Engler from Foreword.com, also known as one of the 2/17 Diesel Sweeties guest artists. Lots of good conversations.

Update, 2/26: Anita has a better summary including links to some people whose blogs I couldn’t remember last night in my brain dead exhausted state: Dan Sanderson, Jacob fron 8BitJoystick, Tara, and others.

Doc Searls pointed to a report by Britt Blaser that Asheville is getting free wireless internet access—with WiFi, Bluetooth, and IrDA! So you can blog from the nearby Old Europe Coffee House or sync your Bluetooth or infrared cell phone or PDA.

My parents aren’t going to get a direct benefit from this one, since they’re not laptop people. But I will, the next time I visit them …

On Friday I pointed to the Flash animation of Strong Bad from Home Star Runner creating Trogdor the Burninator, an appallingly bad and funny cartoon and musical number.

Today I had a ton of traffic to my site. Apparently I’m now the number one link on Google for Trogdor the Burninator. And people are looking for him. (Note: this is a good opportunity to set up a Trogdor fan page and get Slashdotted.)

Google wouldn’t have found Trogdor without me and other bloggers, since the words “Trogdor the Burninator” don’t appear anywhere within the page, and Google can’t index Flash. Yet.

It’s Friday, and what Friday would be complete without Trogdor the Burninator? Yes, it’s Flash, but it’s absolutely a valid use of your valuable time to view this video. (Note the careful use of the “consummate Vs.”)

It almost escaped my attention this morning; as much as I love reading Moxie’s work, I don’t usually read her writing about reality TV. (Disclaimer: I am lying through my teeth. Others are addicted to the shows; I’m addicted to Mox’s write-ups.) However, I did read her note about the season finale of The Bachelorette this morning, only to find that she asked her readers to, quote, “go give some good lovin’ to Jarrett House North” endquote.

I don’t feel worthy of all that good lovin.’ For one thing, my blog already gets plenty of lovin’; for another, so do I. So I would direct any good lovin’ that you want to give this blog to some of the fine sites in the left hand side, who are collectively and individually a lot more worthy than I.

Nevertheless, thanks to Moxie for making my morning.

You know the dyslexic atheist who doesn’t believe in Dog? Well, this particular blogger isn’t sure he believes in the God Blog. But it’s funny anyway.

Mark Pilgrim provides a magnetic poetry generator at his website (the link goes to magnetic poetry generated from text on my site). This is the great thing: to use your site to generate the words, just append your URL after /magnetic/.

Updates around my personal blogosphere:

• Esta has mostly thawed out after being stuck at home for a few days by the blizzard.
• Craig has apparently been able to dig out enough to get to work, only to be confronted by an eternal truth: for a few days after a blizzard, snow is neither created nor destroyed, just moved from place to place. Specifically, in front of one’s car.
• Tin Man makes surviving the snowfall a heroic act: “When you put on a hat and scarf and gloves and trudge out into the snowy winter wonderland, you’re not just keeping your body warm. You’re helping postpone the eventual entropic death of the universe.”
• Moxie reflects on the hazards of fame: disguises and having one’s bandwidth sucked dry by fans of Joe Millionaire.
• Julie Powell managed to move on with the Julie/Julia Project in spite of having no water by skipping straight to lamb stew. Ah, lamb stew…
• William Gibson regrets having to miss his DC book signing but is making up for it by walking down the middle of Broadway, which has been rendered totally impassable by snow.
• Greg debunks the myth of the pacifist French by reminding us who sank the Rainbow Warrior, made the African colonial experience even more brutal, and elected a far-right-wing fella like Chirac to the presidency. Oh yeah, those French, a bunch of daisy waving peaceniks.
• Dave Winer, having struggled through configuring Manila for Weblogs at Harvard, is turning his attention to bringing Manila up to date. As a blogger who has stayed on Manila while Radio went zooming by, Dave, you have my thanks.
• Doc Searls, currently backing up his returned PowerBook (we devoutly hope), sends us to go try to find the 404 of Mass Destruction.
• Ross Mayfield is starting a new company, Socialtext. And he may already have competition from Microsoft.

Such an innocuous post from Evan Williams, founder of Pyra Labs, creators of Blogger:

Holy crap. Note to self: When you get off this panel, you should probably comment on this.

A little disingeneous, because Evan, I’m sure, knew quite well that his company was going to be bought by Google. But I guess he had to set it up for the attendees of the blogging panel. (Aside: with all the hoohah, no one has had much to say about the actual content of the panel.)

So. Google has bought Blogger. Now, as they say, it gets interesting. All of a sudden Google owns the pipes through which a lot of fresh, independently produced content flows. Google now has a community. (Not that it didn’t before, but this one lives on its servers.)

And Google now owns two of the major web service APIs for blogging. (For those counting at home, those would be the Google and Blogger APIs; so far, the Metaweblog API, the Weblogs.com Ping API, and the Trackback Ping API remain in different hands.) What does this mean for the average non-Blogger blogger and customer of Google’s search services—like, say, me? If Evan’s discussion is anything to go by, it shouldn’t lock anybody out. But I would bet that this could spur a little bit of healthy creative tension between the blog side of Google, who want benefits to accrue to their customers, and the other services, who need to stay neutral across the whole web.

Finally, this is funny on a personal level. A friend of mine who’s in online business development has been predicting for a while that Google would become a portal, with the implementation of Google News and Froogle. The irony is, it just made a big content acquisition—and it’s all end-user produced content. Google so gets the Web.

Earlier this week, after Clay Shirky published Power Logs, Weblogs, and Inequality, I subscribed to his mailing list at nec-request@shirky.com. I got a confirmation email from the list and nothing else so far. Until tonight, when I got an email from that address and what looked like a virus in the message body. (Fortunately I was reading mail with a client that wasn’t susceptible to email viruses.) The headers included all the usual mailing list headers. All possibly forged, of course, but the address to which the mail was sent is one that’s not on the web anywhere, but is subscribed to the list.

If someone’s hijacked Clay’s mailing list administration system to send a virus, that’s seriously uncool. I’ve emailed Clay to let him know what’s up.

After a year’s hiatus, the Tin Man is back with guns blazing. I missed his return on Tuesday (I saw a referral from him, but since his blogroll was the only thing on his page for so long I assumed it was a random click. Ooops), but today he blogs about his customer review being edited by some folks at Amazon for using the word gay:

Here are Amazon.com’s General Review Writing Guidelines. I’m trying to figure out where the word “gay” fits in. Maybe someone thought it counted as “profanity, obscenities, or spiteful remarks.”

I love you, Amazon.com, but this is for you:

Gay gay gay gay gay.

So there.

Welcome back, Tin Man. You’ve been missed.

Weblogs.com hit another high water mark today—1683 blogs. Trend analysis, as always, available here under a Creative Commons license. What’s everyone talking about? Well, if Blogdex is to be believed, they’re talking about Clay Shirky’s essay on Weblog Growth, Power Laws, and Inequality. Or maybe the Dell Dude’s alleged pot bust.

Having been overdosing on bad Photoshop contests recently, it was a pleasure to come across this slightly twisted little page, which presents, um, “alternate” characters and scenes in the works of Jane Austen that draw on the works of Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas. I think my favorite is Chewbacca as Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice:

“Oh, Han Solo, you have no compassion on my poor nerves… wrowloughoooow!”

Thanks to Anita for the pointer.