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Good morning ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it's time for the annual Scripting News Awards for 2001. These are the best weblogs this year in my humble opinion. Who will win? That's up to you!  Hewlett-Packard: "A new species of the personal Web page has emerged recently with dedicated hordes of devotees. This new beast is a blog, short for weblog. Blogs are essentially minimalist Web pages heavy on personal opinion, as well as a collection of links mirroring the blogger's recent Web travels." Now you know it's getting mainstream. Brent Ashley: "I've been saying for ages that Linux will never be ready for prime time until I can take a bare machine, pop the disk in, and have it up and configured pretty well automatically, without partitioning, farting with X parameters, finding drivers, all that." Dan Lyke says he may do his own award nominations, and I think that's a great idea. The process of thinking through what sites you value and why and then saying so publicly is a good one to go through. I learned a lot doing this. BTW, the awards are #1 in the Daypop Top 40. First time I ever got a #1. Thanks! BTW, today's Google search for "awards". You gotta know I'm going to be checking that again in a few days.  While the rest of the development team has been focused on Radio 7.1 and beyond, Brent has been kicking butt on Frontier and Manila. Lots of new features. For example, today Frontier got the ability to send a configuration email. This will be an invaluable tool for getting quick answers to server configuration problems. Red Hat is using XML-RPC in a strategic way. That's cool. Andre has a pic of a Euro. Michael Fraase: Is spam killing email? BTW, we found another brilliant kid, Jeremiah Rogers. This one groks outliners. When I got an email from him last week I thought what a smart person. I bet he's young. Then I see his pic on his blog and am blown away by how young he is. There have been lots of great acceptance speeches today, but none more enthusiastic than the effusive Susan Kitchens. I found myself rooting for her, just reading her gush. A natural-born blogger if ever there was one. Cam is pissed off that I nominated him for BOTY. Bummer. To Brent, re Inessential, that is a corollary of Murphy's Law. It's close kin to the one that says that broken computers can often be repaired by taking them for a drive in the car. Two years ago we were contemplating a new millennium. "It's like a graduation, but on a global scale. There's never been anything like it. It's never happened before, and in our lives it will never happen again. If you screw it up you won't get another chance. So play it safe and assume everyone means well, and let it go at that." Wired: Madcap Maneuvers Halt MS Hearing. Dan Mitchell reviews Apple's iPod. Notes on the choices  I feel terrible about not nominating sites I love. An example, Daniel Berlinger's Archipelago. Daniel is such a sweet guy. I thought about it, but it's not one of my mainstays. Like he says, maybe next year. Same with Bump. Then, there was the Best-Named-Blog category. I only had two entries there, and I didn't know either site well. Then Dori Smith posted a reminder, after I had finished, saying that I had once complimented her for having such a great name for her blog. Ouch. Backup Brain has become a regular read for me, and the name itself fades into the background. It's a two-personality blog, Dori writes it with her husband Tom Negrino. If there had been a best named blog category this year, no doubt BB should have been in it. There are people who run weblogs, like Eric Soroos, who are expert scripters, but their sites don't cover scripting, or update too infrequently, to make it into the scripting weblogs category. Part of the criteria for choosing a site is frequency of updating, and the expectation of continued updates. It's entirely subjective. And so far no flames, thank you, my fragile condition may be getting me some sympathy, if so, that's cool. And I'm sure that lurking in the shadows are some sites I'm going to kick myself for not honoring. I'll use Scripting News, my bully pulpit, to make up for that. Fragile Today is a special day not just because of the opening of the awards site but also because My Back Is Out. This happens every few years. I'm like a cripple. Walking is very slow and painful. Bending down to pick something up an impossibility. Yet here I am contemplating a day of work, hoping I don't start coughing (I have a lingering cold) or laughing too hard. Oh the fragile human condition. And the spam flood continues in force. 180 messages this morning, almost all of it offering things I have no interest in. Sympathy is appreciated, solutions not. BTW, to Cam, who is one of the nominees for Blogger Of The Year, we think of email in different ways. I want my readers to be able to send me email. Hiding my email address would make that impossible. I'll put up with the spam. There is no alternative other than to stop using email altogether. |
 
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