Saturday, December 06, 2003

NY Times: "The finale of a powerful two-day storm roared across the New York metropolitan area and played out over the Northeast today, burying parts of the region in a foot of snow that set records, slowed travel, challenged Christmas shoppers and transformed the landscape into vistas as uncluttered as early maps of America." 

Joi Ito and Loic Le Meur will present at Davos in January on weblogs. That's cool, I'm glad the WEF is finally letting the bloggers in, officially. It's not the first time the Media Leaders have heard the story of amateur journalism, though -- maybe some of them will remember my prediction that they'd be hearing more from us, from Y2K. I blogged Davos that year, of course, and wrote a closing essay with my advice for Big Media on participating in the revolution I was sure we were uncorking. The advice is a bit dated, because we were still in dotcom boom times, but it's stood up pretty well, imho. Wish I could be at Davos this time, sounds like this is going to be one to remember. Jay Rosen from NYU will be there. Probably a few others we know. Let's hope they represent us well. 

Hey, I looked up the session on the WEF website -- check out the title. "Will Mainstream Media Co-opt Blogs and the Internet?" Giggle. They asked the question backwards. "Have blogs and the Internet already replaced Mainstream Media?" For many, the answer is yes. Seems like the WEF is trying to tell their membership (large corps) what they want to hear. It's up to you to not co-opt those cute little blogs. Heheh.  

Yowsa. The Redhead is in Toronto.  

Back in November we tried a transition that didn't work, today we're trying it again. Conservatively I'd give it a 50-50 chance of working this time. A DNS change is going through that will move scripting.com from the west coast to the east coast. When the change is complete, you will see a picture of King Kong atop the Empire State Building to the right. Click on the image for a preview of what it will look like when it's baked. (Postscript: Looks like Murphy is smiling on us. This time the system seems stable, it's handling the flow fine, lots of traffic. It's the first time I've ever cast Frontier as a serious static server. On a 3Ghz monster, it performs quite adequately, knock wood, praise Murphy, etc.) 

Terry Heaton wants his Greymatter weblog to emit RSS.  

Steve Gillmor's latest ode to RSS. He gives credit to Radio UserLand for pulling it all together. Radio 8, in early 2002, was the milestone, it has both sides of the equation covered, publishing and aggregation. It turned RSS from a promising idea into something for users. I'm grateful to Steve, even though he uses another RSS reader, for the acknowledgement.  

Jay Allen has the full lyrics to They All Asked for You. The part that I wanted the most is [inaudible]. Something like "Boiled villas. And tomato paste." Eh labas. 

In the middle of the first blizzard of the season, UPS delivers my new Creative Labs Rhomba. "Oh cool," I said, "a new toy to play with." I cut open the plastic pack, take out the device, hook it up to the computer through USB, and first the computer happily says "New device recognized." Then it pauses, thinks, and decides that it doesn't recognize it after all. On the screen of the Rhomba, a weird display, an open folder icon with the word ROOT next to it. A music note, with the words "reative PDF" in big type. Lots of other iconography including a telltale lock (I assume this means the device is locked). It's clearly not at all right. In the Windows Explorer it should show up as a drive, but it doesn't. Did I get a bad unit? Oy gevilt. I have the worst hardware karma in the world.  

Thanks to lots of help from my friends, I have gotten my IBM laptop to work, so that's good. And it's snowed a lot over night, and I guess that's good too. My cold is back in a big way, and I'm having trouble finding the goodness in that, but I'm sure it's there, somewhere. Cough. Sniffle. Sneeze. Oy.