Sunday, August 01, 2004

Spoke with Jim Moore this afternoon, he says the genocide in Sudan has reached the boil-over point. Nigeria and France are preparing to enter, and the US has committed funds to support an intervention. The Holocaust Museum, for the first time, has said this is a genocide emergency. I've been reading the blogs, Passion of the Present and Jim's Berkman weblog. 

Steve Jobs had surgery for pancreas cancer, which is serious, but he's going to be okay. Best wishes to Jobs and his family.  

Robert Scoble is planning one or two dinners in my honor in Seattle next week. And then, we could have a dinner in San Francisco on Sunday, a week from today.  

Tim Jarrett: "I’ve come over 1600 miles in two days." 

This just in from Daily Kos, the author of the DMCA came to the blogger party. I wonder if anyone from the RIAA was there. Oh the humanity. 

USA Today: "The Democratic National Convention boosted voters' perceptions of John Kerry's leadership on critical issues, a [poll] finds. But it failed to give him the expected bump in the head-to-head race against President Bush." 

I admit I'm just learning how Technorati works, so this is certainly a newbie question. It says that ConventionBloggers last updated "10 days 3 hours 23 minutes ago." It actually updated less than ten minutes ago. The question is, how often do they check? Do I have to ping them to get them to check more often? Clearly not. It says Scripting News updated 38 minutes ago, which is just about exactly right. 

NY Times: Blogged in Boston. 

Information Please: Residency Requirements for Voting. 

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Sandy Berger had been cleared of all charges.  

NPR: "John Kerry's popularity is rising in Europe." 

Convention speeches you can download for free even if you don't have an iPod and don't want to register with Apple. 

Remember that cartoon that at first was so upsetting? Today, I want it on a t-shirt. It's the anthem of blogging. It's a perfect way to visualize the barriers to entry crumbling, a priesthood being defrocked, fresh air entering a stale ivory tower. In other words: "Yay! We win." 

Jim Moore: "One of the best parties was given by the RIAA." 

Young Steve Jobs in 1984. Quicktime.  

David Weinberger, in a video blog post, says bloggers are not journalists. This is a perma-thread, it's like the one about whether or not scripters are programmers. I've always argued that they are. If you write logic, loops, assignments; if you worry about saving stuff to disk and user interfaces, why should it matter what language you work in? Same thing with journalism. I explained to a journalist, who interviewed me before going to Boston, that I planned to go there, experience things, see things, use all my senses, and apply all my experience, and then write about the parts that I felt should be written about. He said that's half of what he does, the other half being "big stories." I argued that there's nothing bigger than writing about what you experience. Maybe this is the distinction between a blogger and a journo. We accept our limits, they're still struggling with theirs. But I don't accept David's belief that journalism is having an office and an editor and being given assignments. I think there's more to journalism, and less. And in the end it's not such a big thing to say you're a journalist, and yes, the pros have to be concerned, not because we're out to get them, but because we stopped waiting for them. 

In the WHYY interview on Thursday, a caller said she was frustrated that Kerry isn't responding to the "flip flop" attacks of the Republicans and did I think he should. (I had already said I planned to vote for Kerry.) I said his only job, right now, is to get elected, and I can understand why he personally doesn't want to engage at that level. Also, we can do other things to help increase the chance that Bush is not re-elected, especially in a battleground state like Pennsylvania. Even if you can't convince a Republican to switch to vote for Kerry, you can talk with all your Democrat-voting friends and make sure they know why they should vote on Election Day. Every Kerry voter who stays home is an effective vote for Bush. The Democrats like to talk about the grass roots, but where are our marching orders? Suppose I live in a state that isn't a battleground state? What can I do to increase the likelihood of a Kerry win? It's not enough, in 2004, to ride in a bus across the country and get five minutes on the nightly news. Tell us how we can help, and then help us do it.  

BTW, I like flip-flops. I own a pair. I wear them when ever I can.  

NY Times: "In terms of technology, a political convention is rivaled in complexity perhaps only by the Olympics." 

I just noticed something really cool. WNYC, New York's public radio station, is using enclosures in its RSS feed.