Tag: memes

  • The B Word

    How ugly the word blog sounds, and despite that there’s no denying it’s more catchy, somehow more fun to say than weblog. Part of that may be fatigue around the word web along with the pleasure of using a clever neologism, something a little more playful than unconscious language evolution. But hey, it could have…

  • Blogging No Longer Cool

    Elizabeth Spiers writes in her Capital Influx blog about the end of cool for bloggers, or the inherent uncoolness of blogging, or how cool it is to be uncool, or something like that: The uncool result of the cross-linking is that something weird or interesting happens and you and fellow blogger look at each other…

  • Schoolhouse Blog

    All this talk of Knowledge Logs generally presupposes a corporate (or to be a little more neutral, an enterprise) environment, but educational institutions are the prime focus of knowledge sharing in society, no? John Robb points to Weblogg-ed, a Radio blog, and Lincoln Public Schools, a crisp-looking Manila-managed site.

  • Can't See the Blogging for the Blogs

    John Robb commented on the Times essay comparing bloggers to pamphleteers: Seems ridiculous that the media would continue to confuse a powerful horizontal tool (very much like desktop word processing) with how it is used by a few people. [John Robb’s Radio Weblog] I’ve always found that the Internet is a sort of mirror pool…

  • N.Y. Times Compares Bloggers to Pamphleteers

    In a Think Tank sidebar in the Arts section of today’s Times entitled “The Ancient Art of Haranguing Has Moved to the Internet” (link requires free signup), Emily Eakin discusses the tradition of independent political discourse from Tom Paine to George Orwell to today’s bloggers: Of course, in today’s media-saturated environment, these latest endeavors can…

  • "Blog" Watch: A (Selective) Reader

    Driver 8 has compiled a list of uses of the word blog in mainstream (“professional”) media. So far he hasn’t included any Salon citings, when we know Scott Rosenberg has been covering that beat for a good three or four years now.

  • Gnosis Coints 'Masturblogging'

    Blog jargon watch: Is there a term for putting entries in a Weblog that are linked to other entries in the same Weblog? If no such term exists yet, I’d like to nominate “masturblogging.”

  • Hydrophobia

    So the “eight glasses of water a day” meme turns out to be urban legend and not medical gospel at all, according to David Harris’ Science News Salon Blog. Harris digs up stuff that we wouldn’t otherwise see for days (the water story came from today’s American Journal of Physiology), so I’m glad to see…

  • Spam in My In-Box Today

    There’s a topic on the Well with that title (Spam in my in-box today). Got a curious message today: Subject: USA Today Vote USA Today is taking a vote on whether the words “Under God” should be removed from the pledge of allegiance. You can vote by going to the following website: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002/06/27/pledge-hold.htm Thanks and…

  • That's 'Swami' to You

    From links.net: From the United Airlines Mileage Plus signup web page, a fantastic list of possible “titles” – name prefixes in a pull down menu: Note: I removed the form element, because it was breaking Radio’s aggregator, losing me at least one subscriber! Here are the titles listed in the pull-down menu (which you can…

  • Weblogger Comments on J-School Class

    By now most people in the blogosphere know the the Journalism School at U.C. Berkeley is offering a class on blogging. As a project, the class will build a community blog about intellectual property. The teachers have also assembled a list of links to comments about the class. (One of them calls it “the Altamont”…

  • Wired at Sea

    To warchalking now add seachalking.

  • www.davidwatson.org: Reporter Asked To Stop Blog

    David Watson reports that a Houston Chronicle reporter has been asked to stop publishing his weblog. Something like this was probably inevitable as the trend of journalists-with-weblogs has continued, branching into edited, sanctioned weblogs at publication sites and independent weblogs of working journalists. If you blog for your employer there may be guidelines to follow…

  • plasticbag Slags and Defends Dreamweaver and Blogger

    Also from plasticbag.org, a twist on the anti-webtool attitudes you sometimes see from hardcore or longstanding hand-coders. Tom Coates makes the point that the tools used to make work easier or to enable shortcuts are not responsible for the lousy design that may result. At worst, shortcuts facilitate laziness and open the doors to more…

  • plasticbag.org Comments on Publication-Hosted Blogs

    You’ll come for the blogging insight; you’ll stay for the Buffy rumors. The beautifully designed plasticbag.org site includes an interesting discussion in its weblog of this new trend of publications hosting blogspaces: It doesn’t take a genius to gather what is happening in corporate world at the moment – weblogs are ‘in’ – they’ve finally…

  • French Pentagon Conspiracy Theory

    While I’m not a big fan of conspiracy theories, the images do raise questions and deserve, at least, a debunking.

  • 'Pictures of My Cat' Meme

    Since the early days of personal home pages, the readymade shorthand for characterizing a lame website is to refer to the owner’s cat pictures. Yet the most popular personal-journal type blogs have always revealed the intimate and the mundane. It’s the close observation that sucks people in.

  • 'We Blog' Book Out Soon

    Also from bOing bOing, the blogosphere braces itself for the much heralded release of We Blog by megnut and matt-a-filter.

  • Old Grove Street Street

    There was a street in Berkeley called Grove. It’s name was later changed to Martin Luther King Boulevard. Some time after that the city posted a sign labeling the street “Old Grove Street.” Subsequently, people would refer to the street that way, which made B and I joke that it was eventually going to be…

  • Librarian worship

    Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian

  • AOL Discovers that Users Hate Pop-up Ads

    In yesterdays New York Times, an article on AOL’s management shakeup reported that AOL discovered its membership was fleeing in the face of increased pop-up ads: A study showed that when the number of pop-up ads was cut in half for a group of members, their satisfaction improved notably. That led not only to a…