Monday, January 10, 2005

CNN's official page for their RSS support. Nice job, except for all those Yahoo ads. Does Yahoo pay for those? 

Zonkette: "In this past election, at least a few prominent bloggers were paid as consultants by candidates and groups they regularly blogged about." 

NY Times: IBM to Give Free Access to 500 Patents. 

Was podcasting actually invented by NPR in the early 80s? 

Three years ago today: "Burning Bird says that Radio 8 isn't the second coming. She's right about that. It's the eighth." 

Hey it's actually hard to get a hotel room in rural Florida (around Cocoa Beach). Why? Click here for the answer. 

ZDNet's David Berlind on podcasting and Microsoft. 

New header graphic for Scripting News. 

News.Com: "Google, brimming with idealism and its seemingly altruistic goal of turning the world into a giant digital library, is now wrestling with the discomforting mixture of instant employee wealth and a little too much information of its own." 

Yahoo lists planned sales of Google stock. 

There is some data in that report on the size of the Blogger deal. Jason Shellen, a Pyra employee at the time of the aquisition, registered to sell 3563 shares, which is worth approx $691K at the current price of $194 per share. John Borthwick, a Pyra shareholder, registered 490 shares. Paul Bausch, a Pyra founder, declared 281 shares. Of course these people could, and likely do have more Google stock. No mention of O'Reilly Associates or Evan Williams, probably the two largest Pyra shareholders, so they must be holding their holdings. 

Also, at the time of the big blowup at Pyra, no one outside the founders knew what happened, financially. It's good to see that the other founders, Meg and Paul, appear to have been taken care of.  

Disclosure: I own 100 shares, which I purchased shortly after the IPO, which were worth approx $10K when I bought them, and are now worth almost double that. Wish I had bought more! 

Triangle bloggers conference, in Chapel Hill. 2/12/05. 

Jon Stewart on Crossfire, revisited 

NY Times editorial: "He told Paul Begala, on the left, and Tucker Carlson, on the right, that their show, which specializes in encouraging midlevel political types to yell slogans at each other, was 'partisan hackery' that was lowering the level of political discourse."

Crossfire was jumping the shark when Stewart made his appearance in the waning days of the 2004 campaign. How cool, though, that he seems to be getting credit for killing it. The Times says that he was widely criticized for his appearance, maybe at the water cooler in the NYT offices, but not in the blogosphere, where he was hailed as a hero.

In all media, including weblogs, the soundbites and fake theatrics are given too much weight. Lynne Cheney saying John Kerry is not a good man, John Kerry reporting for duty (give me a break), so much TV, so little vision for the future.

We need media to activate our minds, not our saliva. We need ideas, real hope, not the fake kind. News is all confetti and tickertape, never a strikeout or a base on balls or a rain delay.