Thursday, March 04, 2004

A milestone case study from the Shorenstein Center was released today. It tells the story of Trent Lott, his talk at Strom Thurmond's birthday party, and how the news flowed through professional channels, to the blogosphere, and back, ultimately resulting in Lott's resignation as majority leader of the US Senate. I first met with Esther Scott, the author of the case study, in May 2003, and met with Alex Jones, the director of Shorenstein, who commissioned the study, a couple of weeks ago. A personal note, it's gratifying to see the study is available publicly, this makes it available for review by bloggers, as well as being useful in classrooms, and as a reference to scholars who will study weblogs in the future.  

An idyllic picture from Woodside, CA, on this day in Y2K. 

Jeff Jarvis: "30 percent of XM satellite radio, Stern said, is owned by, yup, Clear Channel." 

The city of Costa Mesa, CA has an RSS feed.  

A list of all BBC feeds in an OPML file. It's huge. 2.4MB. 

A quick story from last Thursday's Berkman meeting. We were reviewing all the blogging tool ideas people posted on the BloggerCon site. Someone showed me a picture in that thread, with the suggestion "More beards, please." My jaw dropped. I said "You guys aren't going to understand how weird this is." The two guys in the picture are relatives of mine, my great grandfather, and my uncle. Now comes the really weird part. My uncle loved all the Internet arcania I showed him, like the Dancing Hamsters. He said he had no context to understand what they were. But that's why he found them fascinating. If only I could tell him, that in a small way, he himself has become a Dancing Hamster, of a sort.  

Shimon Rura built a feed recommendation engine using the SYO SDK. 

Jon Udell: "Have you ever wondered what happens if you point a VNC viewer on one box at another box then launch a VNC viewer on the second box and point it back at the first?" 

Thanks to Adam, we have new pointers for De Telegraaf's RSS feeds. If it's a tactic to get buzz for the new Dutch feeds, it's working!  

Wired: I'm Sorry, Dave, You're Speeding. 

Werblog: "David's job is to be cantankerous and pick fights." 

Village Voice: "My name is Whitney Pastorek, and I do not have a blog. I am not on Friendster, I do not live in Williamsburg, and I do not think Death Cab for Cutie is a particularly great band." 

Jeeves spent $343 million for "greater visibility" -- which makes me think Oh Geez, couldn't they have done something more creative that costs less? How about optimizing for weblogs. (Hint: Index by the blog post, not by the page.) Implement the Google API, and then improve it and get rid of the limits. Then when people search for stuff on Google, and end up at a weblog (just ask the Register if you don't believe me) the first thing they'd see is "Search powered by Oh Geeze." Or change the name to Gezundheit, because the name sounds like a sneeze. Or give $5 million to Al Sharpton and kick back and watch him run nationwide ads. Why not give $5 million to Dennis Kucinich too. Hey they're still in the race. And you'd have $333 million left. Just some thoughts on a quiet Thursday. 

Smug Canadian: "Eyeballs are bullshit." Amen!