Limiting links … to keep elections fair?

The Federal Election Commission’s Bradley Smith says that blogs, or at least political blogs, might get regulated soon, as part of the ongoing rollout of McCain-Feingold. (Thanks to Dave for the pointer).

On the one hand, what kind of crack is he smoking? Regulating the right of a blogger to link is like regulating the right of a human to breathe; it would be a draconian curtailment of freedom of speech. On the other hand, in this country campaign finance laws already curtail certain freedoms of speech in the interest of limiting the influence of deep pocketed contributors in the political process.

Except, of course, that our belief in general is that blogs re-democratize the individual citizen and enable them to participate in the process to a very large extent. That appears to be the angle that Smith is covering in raising the specter of Internet regulation.

The one piece that makes me nervous about the article is that Smith is a Republican member of the election commission, striking against a move by Democratic members of the commission. Is his alarmism merited, or just a partisan tactic to put his Democratic commission mates on the defensive? Where is the perspective in favor of taking this action? This is one of those issues where there are more layers in the mix than just blogging and speech.

New phone time?

After the umpteenth dropped call on my cell phone, this one from a recruiter, I started finally looking into some options for fixing my lousy cell reception. The first should have been obvious but wasn’t—the form to report a network issue to Cingular/AT&T Wireless.

The second was to investigate new phones. My requirements: Bluetooth, camera, and ability to install third-party software like the Salling Clicker. This pointed me back at Symbian-platform phones, and a couple likely candidates from Nokia: the 6820, which Lisa currently uses, and the 7610, which may be out of my price range.

I wonder if it’s time to look at Sony Erickson again…

On being from Bad News, VA

Daily Press: Hit rapper 50 Cent says ‘Bad News, VA’ isn’t a dis. Heh. Oh yeah it is. But 50’s new song “Ski Mask Way” is hardly the first time my birth town Newport News has been given a bad rap. Not even 30 years after the town’s original founding (before its 1956 merger with the city of Warwick), no less an American literary luminary than Thomas Wolfe was dissing the city (where he spent time helping to construct the airstrip at Langley Field) in Look Homeward, Angel.

Drowning in the sea of RSS

43 Folders: Custom feed refreshing in NetNewsWire. Many thanks to Merlin Mann for this commonsense advice about managing the timesink that NetNewsWire can become—particularly when you’re trying to manage 343 feeds. With his advice as a starting point, I set the default refresh rate to every four hours, and changed the custom refresh property on the few feeds that I want to see more often than that. Now I no longer feel like I’m always drowning under a pile of unread items.

Permasnow

I busted my butt for a few hours yesterday, between shoveling our walks and blowing our driveway clear (and then reshoveling the walks with the rest of the snow that fell). This morning there was a fresh half-inch everywhere. The snow really never stopped falling yesterday; fortunately it was far enough above freezing in the middle of the day that we didn’t get new accumulation until after nightfall.

Uncle. I’ve had enough. And we’re all starting to go a bit crazy here. For example, see the Liberal Avenger’s inspired riff on Michelle Malkin’s bizarro claim that Boston is in imminent threat from anarchists: “Hopefully the storm will slow down the terrorists, gang-members and anarchists and buy us enough time to put our children on trains headed to red-states and to clean and lubricate our weapons for the coming siege.”

To every snow there is a season

…a time to shovel, a time to blow, a time to fix snowblowers and a time to rest one’s aching back.

We have about nine inches here—when I shoveled out the sidewalks this morning, the snow on the ground was almost exactly the height of our bottom front step—and it’s still coming down, though not as fast as it did last night. I’ve replaced the broken shear bolts on our snowblower, and when I’m done with this post I need to go outside and blow the driveway.

If this is what they mean by March coming in like a lion, I’ll pass.

(Nice pan-Boston-blog snow coverage at Universal Hub.

WSJ: Business blogging here to stay

Micro Persuasion: WSJ Extols Business Blogging. The WSJ article says that business blogging has shown its value as part of an online strategy by allowing customers to connect to the business on a personal level and by keeping them coming back to the business’s web site regularly.

The first point is the core of the reasoning behind Microsoft’s entry into business blogging. This, in fact, underlies my objection of the WSJ’s claim that “small businesses may benefit most” from business blogging. I’m not sure you can measure the impact of putting a human face back onto the largest software company in the world, but I’m pretty sure it has a pretty dramatic impact on the business’s future. That said, I certainly agree with the points the WSJ made about a blog’s power to make a small business or consultant an authority in a field.

The second point? You know, I’m going to go out on a limb and say something heretical here. You don’t need to start a business blog to keep people coming back to a corporate web site regularly. You just need frequently updated, honestly and directly written content. What you get from a blog is a framework in which you can publish that content which is:

  1. Search engine friendly: all the content has a permanent address and can always be found again. Contrast that with a corporate website where marketing content gets published, then silently disappears.
  2. Interactive: easy support for features like comments and trackback.
  3. Easy to syndicate: Built in RSS or Atom support allows users to read the content in other formats or recombine it in digest form to make it more useful to them—and incidentally to spread your message.
  4. Easy to navigate: A chronological architecture overlaid on top of the content makes it easy to follow evolutions in the story.
  5. Easy to find just the topics relevant to you: Support for categorization, keyword tags, and other taxonomy technologies makes it easy for a user to filter the content to find just the stuff he or she is interested in.

Plus, by starting a blog you sign a social contract. Whaaaah? Well, posting a blog these days, thanks to the work of blog practitioners like Scoble and others, is equivalent to signing a contract with your customers that you want to speak personally with them; that you want to hear what they say; and that you will be updating the story regularly. In short, you are saying that you want to establish a relationship that will be deeper than a single transaction. If you don’t go into business blogging with this spirit, you’ll get no value from it.

RIP, Jef Raskin

Sad: Jef Raskin, the philosophical father of the Macintosh, died of pancreatic cancer on Saturday.

As credit wars spread in the blogosphere over ideas like RSS and podcasting, I’d like to note that both Raskin and Steve Jobs can fairly claim credit for creating the Macintosh without taking away from either’s contribution. Jef had many of the ideas, and Steve drove the refinements and shipped the damn thing. But without either, I’d be writing this on a 30-pound Kaypro rather than my PowerBook, and for that, I thank them.

More: Metafilter, Joy of Tech, TidBITS.

No UFIA in Boston

Universal Hub: FleetCenter renamed to Boston Garden!. For a day. Drew Curtis’s Fark.com, which bought naming rights for the center for a day during a charity auction, ended up renaming the center “Boston Garden” after several less funny but more sophomoric in-joke names (the “Fark.com Duke Sucks Center,” “the Fark.com UFIA Center,” “the Fark.com Abe Vigoda Memorial Center”) were rejected.

This is much classier and cooler. Thanks, Drew!

(Incidentally, don’t look up UFIA unless you have a strong stomach.)

LifeHacker: blogs imitate Python

With articles like How to photograph snow, How to make a life poster, and How to read effectively, new Gawker-authored, Sony-sponsored blog LifeHacker reminds me of nothing so much as a certain Monty Python sketch, “How to do it”:

(Cut to a sign saying ‘How to do it’. Music. Pull out to reveal a ‘Blue Peter’ type set. Sitting casually on the edge of a dais an three presenters in sweaters – Noel, Jackie and Alan – plus a large bloodhound.)

Alan: Hello.

Noel: Hello.

Alan: Well, last week we showed you how to become a gynaecologist. And this week on ‘How to do it’ we’re going to show you how to play the flute, how to split an atom, how to construct a box girder bridge, how to irrigate the Sahara Desert and make vast new areas of land cultivatable, but first, here’s Jackie to tell you all how to rid the world of all known diseases.

Jackie: Hello, Alan.

Alan: Hello, Jackie.

Jackie: Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvellous cure for something, and then, when the medical profession really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there’ll never be any diseases ever again.

Alan: Thanks, Jackie. Great idea. How to play the flute. (picking up a flute) Well here we are. You blow there and you move your fingers up and down here.

Noel: Great, great, Alan. Well, next week we’ll be showing you how black and white people can live together in peace and harmony, and Alan will be over in Moscow showing us how to reconcile the Russians and the Chinese. So, until next week, cheerio.

Alan: Bye.

Jackie: Bye.

(Children’s music.)

Pork chop sandwiches!! And knowing is half the battle

And speaking of horrific Internet mindworms, these inspired remixes of animated GI Joe public service announcement spots should earn a fond spot in the heart of anyone who watched a lot of syndicated cartoons on weekday afternoons in the ’80s. Personal faves: “Jamaican Nyquil” and “Fire” (not to be confused with “On Fire,” which is also pretty funny). Warning: contains copious amounts of profanity, so watch with headphones on.