Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Eric Goldman: "I want to find a way for tools like AutoLink to exist." 

Philip Greenspun explains what the Harvard Business School applicants did that resulted in their being denied admission. It's a real stretch to call it hacking. And that's an understatement.  

Engadget explains how to make your own annotated Google map.  

OJR tutorials on ethics, reporting and writing. 

I've been following the hooplah over Niall Kennedy, the Technorati employee who did a derivative work on a World War II poster about keeping secrets secret. I haven't seen the new art, but he did describe it, and sheez, it sounds pretty harmless (and self-referential). Can someone explain why this post evoked such a strong response from management? 

Good SF Chronicle piece on Apple and bloggers. "Everybody is a journalist, or nobody is."  

My project this morning is to familiarize myself with Furl. 

Virgin Radio is "the first UK radio station to produce a daily podcast." 

Wired News: "For many years SXSW has provided on its website a library of free MP3s of bands participating in the conference. This year, the festival is making it even easier to listen by providing a huge BitTorrent file (2.6 GB) of more than 750 songs." This is excellent for at least three reasons. 1. It's great to get all this music. Not clear what terms it's being offered under, though. Can it be used in podcasts? That's pretty important. 2. It's a non-infringing use of BitTorrent, thus helping assure BT's future. 3. It's something that a lot of people will download so the download rate should be very good. It'll be interesting to see how high it goes. I'm downloading right now. (3 days remaining!) 

Jon Udell: "Google Maps isn't just a service, it's a service factory." 

A screen shot showing what weblogs.com looked like in 2000. 

Weatherbug: "Suppose you wanted to write an application to control the thermostat in your home or to automatically turn on the lawn sprinkler when certain conditions existed." 

Haaretz article, in Hebrew, on RSS. 

The Diane Rehm show has an RSS feed. No enclosures, though. 

New header graphic. And then another. The picture of the Marine Parkway Bridge was the shortest-lived Scripting News header graphic, lasting just 28 minutes. Anyway, I would do anything to get Sergey off my site. Funny thing, I doubt if it's really going to be that easy. Heh. The new header is an inspiration from the 20th century, President Harry Truman, who said The Buck Stops Here (meaning his desk) and gave em hell, and beat Dewey, despite what the headline said. It's a reminder in this day when the pros are more thin-skinned and defensive than ever, and are keeping us dumber than ever, and saying we work in pajamas, that there are truths beyond those reported on the front page of the daily paper. Like Harry Truman, who may be the patron president of the bloggers, we're doing it for ourselves.