Year: 2005

  • New-school anchor blogs the news business

    Brian Williams’ Daily Nightly blog is getting good reviews. (I hope that’s the right link… MSNBC has such fscked up blog URLs.) It makes sense that the anchor to succeed Dan Rather would embrace blogging as a symbol of opening up the newsmaking process. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

  • Escalation

    If only my minor email lossage of the last week had been the end of the story, but through superior advanced dimwittedness, I managed to lost my entire personal computer archive (email, desktop wiki notes, and all documents) since roughly December of last year. It feels a bit like having a house burn down. You…

  • The Course

    “…the Americans, who have already expressed their frustration with the Sunnis, have recently become irritated with what they regard as the stubbornness of the Shiites as well.” NYT, 8/26/05 I can’t understand this criticism. Each of the three Iraqi factions is doing its utmost to emulate the American model. They are Staying the Course and…

  • What's a trackback?

    On the Well’s blog conference we were discussing trackback, who likes ’em and who doesn’t, and a few new bloggers confessed that they didn’t quite grok what trackbacks were really all about. This prompted zorca, aka Suzanne Stefanac, to take a crack at demystifying trackback at her relatively new blog, Dispatches from Blogistan (

  • Minor email setback

    I managed to wipe out all the mail in my inbox since August 9. (Don’t ask.) If you’ve emailed me in the last 12 days and you don’t hear back from me about whatever you emailed me about, that’s probably why. Feel free to contact me again. Thanks.

  • Google Blog: This was posted from Microsoft Word

    Quoting from Google Blog: This was posted from Microsoft Word: Last July, a few of us visited the Democratic National Convention to see political bloggers in action. Many were using Microsoft Word to post their reports. It was a multi-step process that didn’t look like fun, but for citizen journalists, punctuation, spelling and grammar are…

  • Echo Chamber Project launches vlog

    A few weeks ago, Kent Bye, director of the Echo Chamber project, tipped me off to a new vlog (video [web] log) he’s producing. This first episode includes an animation that tries to illustrate the folksonomy concept as well as interviews “about the upcoming media revolution” conducted at the most recent Personal Democracy Forum. He…

  • Wildbit report on online social networks

    Chris Nagele from Wildbit gave me a head’s up about a 35-page report on social networks his company is offering for download as an Acrobat file free of charge: Social Networks Report He says My company, Wildbit, is currently working on a social network and community web site. Part of the research to understand and…

  • It was bound to happen

    In an administration that considers the press a special interest and likes to take their message directly to the people, it was inevitable that eventually President Bush would start his own blog.

  • Blogs (and wikis) help fulfill the read/write web

    Sometimes it’s useful to remember that Tim Berners-Lee’s first web browser has an editor built into it, as he reminds us in this BBC interview (Berners-Lee on the read/write web): Towards a rewritable web ML: I’m interested that at what sense you began to sense the possibilities. You weren’t thinking car rental, you weren’t thinking…

  • Got (moooo) Smog?

    A curious editorial in the Sunday New York Times points out that California’s agricultural heartland may be at the heart of an air pollution crisis that could require regulation of cow emissions as well as car emissions. It seems that the mammoth dairy farms of the San Joaquin Valley–where about twenty percent of the nation’s…

  • Mannish boy

    Saw this somewhere today – it’s sad but not entirely surprising (Masculinity Challenged, Men Prefer War and SUVs): Men whose masculinity is challenged become more inclined to support war or buy an SUV, a new study finds. Their attitudes against gays change, too. Cornell University researcher Robb Willer used a survey to sample undergraduates. Participants…

  • Remembering what America stands for

    I’m reprinting this report from the AP in full: U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour’s comments during Wednesday’s sentencing hearing for Ahmed Ressam, as provided by court officials. Ressam, an Algerian national, was sentenced to 22 years for plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of the millennium. — “Okay. Let me…

  • Generation theft

    J.D. Lasica posts about a conversation with BlogHer co-organizer

  • Legal complaint v. Sensenbrenner

    saw this on the Well: July 28, 2005 Office of Lawyer Regulation 110 East Main St Room 315 Madison WI 53703 I hereby request investigation on the basis of the following: Hon. James Sensenbrenner U.S. House of Representatives Washington DC 202/225-5101 We believe the ex parte communication, “in which [Mr.] Sensenbrenner directly contacted the chief…

  • Ann Althouse fisks Pajamas Media

    I really should get off my ass and get a blogads account. All my blogs together might cover my bandwidth costs, anyway. I don’t think I’m PM material (Charles Johnson creeps me out, for one thing), but even if I were it sounds like a dubious plan. In Althouse: Pajamas Media vs. BlogAds — the…

  • Brownbloggers west

    “Nobody really talks about antiracism, especially in the blogosphere.” – Marian Douglas I remember that my favorite session at SXSW this year was Blogging While Black. Today, not surprisingly, I’m finding the “brownbloggers” session to be again one of the best. There also appears to be much better, much stronger nonwhite representation here (as compared…

  • Listening to women

    Today has been a good exercise in trying to shut up and listen, although I have slipped from time to time and shouted or out or insisted on being heard. Still, for the most part today I’ve been listening and learning. This has to be the best blog conference I’ve been to yet. The range…

  • Regendering this blog

    Here at Blogher I noticed Ka-Ping Yee’s status via rendezvous pointign to a site called regender.com. I went there and put radiofreeblogistan.com in the box and it switched the gender of everything it thought was a proper name. Interesting.

  • Women are from strong, men are from weak

    I’m in the Saturday morning opening session at blogher, which is about whether women should “learn to play by the rules” or “change the rules.” danah boyd just got up to clarify a misstatement claiming that women don’t do social networking as much as men do. danah explained that women and men (tend to) do…

  • Blogher kick off

    Sounds like last night was fun. Finally got the wireless working on my Mac. Sadly, I brought the camera but not the memory card, so I won’t be able to post pictures (except via the phone). Already meeting a lot of cool people. It’s great to be in a room that is 80% women. I…