Thursday, July 01, 2004

Here's a free idea I had the other day while cleaning up a spewage of comment spam. What if comments, by default, were deleted after 24 hours? What if the owner of the site had to check a box in order for a comment not to be deleted? That way if a comment had lasting value, the owner of the site could make sure it sticks around. 

Referer spam is getting ridiculous. As Jessica Baumgart notes, it's cool that Jonathan Schwartz shows referers on his weblog home page, but it's just a matter of time before the spammers find him and he's advertising all kinds of kinky sex. BTW, I just remembered where I heard the name Jonathan Schwartz before. He was a DJ on WNEW-FM in NY in the 70s when I was a teen. You want to hear something funny? When I was driving into NY through NJ after driving across the US, last spring, guess who was on the radio to welcome me after all these years? You probably guessed. Jonathan Schwartz. I wish I had an audio clip of how he says his name. It's so saccharine, so fake-caring, but it actually works.  

Reuters video of Saddam Hussein appearing before an Iraq tribunal. 

BBC: "The international mission to Saturn has returned the first close-up images of Saturn's rings." 

Register article on Sony iPod-like Walkman. "Unlike the clunky-looking players launched in the Japanese market, the European model appears a serious challenger for Apple's market leadership." 

Engadget: "It’s not much to look at, but the Network Walkman is supposed to be able to get an astounding thirty hours of battery life on a single charge and have a retail price of $400." 

Wired: "In its initial investigation, AEI uncovered a total of nine unique software bugs in AEI's inCircle product that were also present in orkut.com,"  

Julie Leung is hosting a blogger's picnic at Bainbridge, WA; July 17. 

Gillmor Gang 

Okay I admit I've become an addict of The Gillmor Gang. I copy them to my MP3 player, which unlike the Sony below, plays MP3s (I guess it's kind of obvious, but the obvious seems to have eluded Sony, that MP3 players should actually play MP3s) and take it on my daily walk. The last one I listened to, from June 18, was about whether Sun should open source Java. It was good. I imagine I feel about them as a lot of people feel about Scripting News, they're mostly wrong, in a predictable way, but they get you thinking. I've also become a fan of Doug Kaye's interviews with people with blogs. I downloaded his interview with Doc Searls, and plan to listen to it on my Friday walk, or maybe on the drive down to NY on Sunday. There's this gap between Worcester and Hartford where there isn't much good radio. Hey I'm getting good at this stuff.

More on Moore 

The war is bad, Bush is a bad president, probably the worst of our lives. I've heard about the seven minutes of video of Bush paralyzed after the second plane hit the WTC on 9/11. Sounds powerful. Even right-wingers have to admit that a President should be someone who's mobilized by a crisis, not frozen.

So often people overstate their case. That's Moore's mistake. When you overstate, you lose people with minds. One of the greatest things about my talk about Moore yesterday is that I heard from right-wingers with minds. What a relief to find out they're not all like Limbaugh or O'Reilly. Seriously.

There's hope for this country yet.