Monday, January 23, 2006

Hoder, an Iranian blogger and Canadian citizen, is going to Israel tonight. Amazing. "As a citizen journalist, I'm going to show my 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like and how people live there," he writes. 

I went to dinner the other night with Evan Paull and his mom Sylvia. Both Evan and I saw the movie Jarhead, and agreed it was one of the worst movies ever made. We also agreed the best part of the movie was the excerpt from Apocalypse Now they played. You know a movie is bad when the best part is actually from another movie. The acting isn't bad, and the scenery is great, but the story just doesn't hold together and the climax is so lame that you can't even believe that was the climax. 

Interesting thread on maintaining a Scripting News-like weblog without using an outliner. It's easier to use an outliner, of course.  

On this day five years ago I was listening to the Grateful Dead, as I was this morning, but a different song. "Golden hills, now veiled in grey. Summer leaves have blown away. Now what remains? The wind and rain." It's a song about California in January, obviously. Except today was a glorious sunny day, absolutely perfect temperature, crip, clear, a great day to be alive.  

Wow, this is impressive. Here's my uncle. And Doc Searls. Elvis. Steve Jobs. John Doerr. Try all the sexy words, they work too.  

Help: How to save a Gmail message? 

The boostrap continues 

Phil Torrone's third reading list is one for readers of MAKE magazine. Here's the list viewed through my directory browser. If you want the OPML behind the viewer, click on the white-on-orange XML icon in the upper-right corner of the page. Phil says every magazine should have an OPML reading list for its subscribers.

Reading lists for Spartanburg 

Andy Rhinehart at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal sent an email last week asking how a publication such as his should do reading lists. This is how.

Think about your most information-hungry readers and imagine an intravenous feeding tube hooked up to their arm with the most potent nutritious news flowing into their intellect. What would you put in that flow? Your own front page, of course. How about the feed for the largest employer in town? One from the local campus of the University of South Carolina. For breadth, the front page of the BBC and the New York Times. You get to play head chef, and the feed is hooked into their arm. What goes in the mix?

PT's role 

Phil Torrone is playing the same role that Chris Lydon played in podcasting. And he's getting ready to play the role that he played in podcasting, as author of the first definitive howto. Someday I'd like to get Phil and Chris in a room with an audience and ask them how they do what they do.

They call him PT 

I asked if this is because, like P.T. Barnum, he leads a three-ring circus? He laughed.

Barnum, along with Charlie Chan, figures prominently in the Grateful Dead song, U.S. Blues.

U.S. Blues: "Shake the hand that shook the hand of P.T. Barnum and Charlie Chan."