"Contact Us After the Holidays"

Loyal readers, that grinding sound you've been hearing was the gears in my brain spinning wildly as I tried to find a way to complain about an especially annoying aspect of unemployment, "the holidays," without sounding whiny.

As in, "Contact us after the holidays." If you're made an economic statistic about anytime after Nov. 1, you can count on hearing that sentence more often than you hear that "with the stucco and rock products from The General" ad during the national talk shows slot on your local radio station. Even people who have employment ads running in the paper from November to December will make you sweat through Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year's before giving you their Final Answer. You may be invited to apply, may talk by phone or e-mail with the hiring manager, may even get an interview -- but unless it's holiday temporary work, you probably won't get an up or down decision before it's time to throw out the old calendars.

We're told to think of those less fortunate at this time of year, but it's tough to find time to do something meaningful. Hiring managers, here's something that would mean a lot to those unfortunate souls looking for jobs over the holidays: Don't put them off until after your presents are unwrapped and your champagne corks popped. Making your hiring decisions this year instead of next could mean a little relief from a New Year's Eve spent worrying about the future instead of gazing in wonder at how the scientists with their formaldehyde and liquid nitrogen manage to preserve Dick Clark so well year after year.

Friday Accident=Monday Lawyer Letters

Lincoln lawyers are quick on the trigger. Got smooshed between a Ford F-150 and an Oldsmobile Bravada on Friday. Got six invitations to lawyer up on Monday.

Three of the attorneys even sent me a copy of my accident report, which saved me from having to print the PDF off of the Lincoln Police Department Web site. Points to Steven A. Montag for smarts: He stamped his name and telephone number on the accident report. The other two report copies will just have to languish in anonymity.

Here's what I learned from the lawyers' letters:

1. Insurance companies are evil.
2. Insurance companies will make you sign a contract to name your firstborn child "Farmers Mutual Insurance."
3. Did we mention insurance companies are evil?

So I'm hoping Tuesday's mail will contain the last of the lawyer letters. There can't be that many ambulance-chasers in Lincoln ... can there?

53 Degrees Won't Help You Get Your Zs

Insomnia's even less fun when it's 53 degrees in the house and getting out of bed isn't just sleep-depriving, it's subzero.

I've had to shut off the heat at night because the heater, or some process related thereto, produces a clanking noise in the ductwork directly beneath my bed. Moving the bed or sleeping in another room isn't an option -- it can be heard throughout the house, though at a somewhat reduced volume. It sounds like someone tapping an aluminum baseball bat on concrete once every nine seconds.

We've called the heater repair company to no avail. The first person to suggest a solution that (a) eliminates the noise, and (b) keeps the nighttime temperature at 66 degrees, not 53, gets a coupon good for an eternity of my gratitude. (Cash Value 1/10 cent.)

I Will Not Skim Instructions

Remember that test in grade school where you were supposed to carefully read an entire page of instructions and then act on them? Remember how a good giggle could be had watching the kids who didn't follow instructions walk 'round their desks and do other silly things, because the final instruction was to forget all the others and sit quietly?

I was one of those kids. And oh so many moons later, I still haven't learned. In plain sight in the middle of Jim Ray's instructions for making intelligent Movable Type archive filenames was the step, "Click Save, but do not rebuild your site yet."

I didn't click Save, and now I have an archives subdirectory that itself contains like one quadrazillion subdirectories, none of which I can delete because I get a "Can't Delete: ... It could be locked, open or in use by another application." To make matters worse, I can't seem to CHMOD the file permissions on the subdirectories and individual files.

Now my long-delayed Web server spring cleaning has gone straight to pot. And just after I'd gotten rid of that pesky PostNuke directory ... :-)

"Decimated" Means One in 10, Consarn It!

We language-loving types tend toward the tizzy when thoughtless people verb nouns ("Kinkos: The New Way to Office") and especially when they violate verbs.

Frequent violence around the world has made the latter language crime especially prevalent. "Decimate," a wonderfully specific word that originally meant "to kill one of every 10," has slouched into a synonym for "destroy." So when NPR, one of the last bastions of intelligence on the radio dial, reports "the blast decimated a taxi," we English Elves go ape. Destroying one-tenth of a taxi, after all, hardly seems newsworthy.

The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed

From "The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed" by David Dvorkin:

We have been cured of the sin of snobbery. It was very minor snobbery, really. It was limited to the conviction that name-brand items are superior to those sold under supermarket house brands. ... But, say, that house-brand food tastes pretty good! And the house-brand toilet paper, er, holds up better under use! ... Yes, sir, solid values, suitable for normal daily use. Or every-other-day use, if you feel the need to make the item last a bit longer.

One hopes David hasn't been reduced to using the latter house-brand item every other day.

Why Couldn't Graham Give Us Music Instead of Grass?

Some university administrators like to leave a legacy before they drop everything and head for a bigger school and higher pay. Watch out, Penn State: Your president may be on the move, because he's giving you music when all he gave Nebraska students is more grass.

Not fondly known as "Grammy Spammy" while chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Graham Spanier decided to build his legacy by replacing perfectly good parking with a grass field students couldn't use for about a year while the tender green blades took root. Connoisseurs of irony may appreciate his legacy more; after he left, a student union expansion project replaced a good quarter of "Grammy's Greenspace" with spankin'-new concrete.

Why, oh why, could he not have given us music? Spanier's inked a deal to provide Napster music service to all Penn State students, paying a discounted rate out of their student fees.

Maybe if there had been free legal music after Spanier left, we Huskers could have been spared the next chancellor's legacy: the unsingable, fingers-on-a-chalkboard "Alma Mater" co-written by the Unholy Trinity of (thankfully former) Chancellor James Moeser, inexplicably popular synthesizer king Chip Davis and historian Robert Knoll (whom I'd have no reason to dislike, if not for the Alma Mater).

"I Was in Prison, and You Visited Me"

Inmates' families are paying $1,000 monthly phone bills thanks to profiteering by state corrections departments and telephone companies, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

These public officials and corporate executives would do well to remember the words of Jesus: "I was in prison, and you visited me." (Matthew 25:36) Contact with loved ones is a basic human need, even for those who have done great wrong. And treating others as you would have them treat you means supplying such basic needs -- even if you're doing it less out of personal beneficence and more out of a duty to society. (After all, can society afford to cut inmates off from the very family structures that may hold the key to rehabilitating them and preventing recidivism?)

Jesus mentioned prison visits in perhaps the most weighty context found in Matthew's Gospel: The Final Judgment. Jesus tells about how at that time, he will tell the righteous that they fed him when he was hungry, gave him a drink when he was thirsty, clothed him when he was naked, cared for him when he was sick, and visited him in prison.

Reverse Alphabetical Order for Blogrolls

Let's put our blogrolls in reverse alphabetical order to match our reverse chronological order posts, shall we?

It just makes sense, and it lets those Z-people (like my distant acquaintance Andrei Zmievski) finally be first in line. Stop to remember those kindergarten queues, and you'll know what I mean.

Davezilla's Headline Anagrams = MGD Light-Sprayed Keyboard

My keyboard's covered in nose-sprayed MGD Light after reading the headline anagrams at Davezilla.com.

Examples:

Britney Spears waxwork unveiled = Sexy underwear invokes brawl pit.
Windows users download iTunes = Woo! Nerds' sounds widen lawsuits.

(via Utterly Boring)

Bureaucracy Burns Calories

At my university you can get more exercise trying to pay for Campus Recreation than you can working out there.

They've got the bureaucracy tuned so perfectly at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that you actually need to fill out a form to get permission to pay certain bills. They'll usually bleed you to a nice desiccated husk without your even asking, so my four-office runaround today came as quite the surprise.

But in wearing the rubber off my shoes trudging from Campus Rec to Student Accounts to the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs to the Bursar to the Student Union and back to the Bursar, I learned a valuable lesson: Big stage smiles equals pleasant (if not especially quick) customer service. (By the way, who came up with "bursar"? The same guy who's got us driving on parkways and parking on driveways?)

Buy Proteus for Instant Messaging

I'm a shareware leech.

For years I've used shareware for free, clinging parasitically to the backs of programmers who only wanted to fill a need without going through the whole rigamarole of releasing a commercial product. No longer. Proteus -- and a little dog named Hamish -- has inspired me to change my ways.

For instant messaging on OSX, Proteus is really the only way to go. Justin Wood's user interface is so elegant it looks like he's part of the development team behind Apple's iLife applications. In reality, he's developing Proteus alone while a student at Queens University in Canada.

Justin's quick release of version 3.03 to fix Yahoo's attempt at locking out third-party IM clients made the 15-buck registration fee especially worth it. But now I may never get to see again the world's best shareware nag screen: A picture of an adorable white dog with an empty food dish and the legend, "Hamish says please register." Maybe Justin can send me a screen shot of the nag screen, and I'll post it here.

Layoutomatic: Instant Columnar CSS Layouts

http://www.inknoise.com/experimental/layoutomatic.php

Photos: Italy and Germany, May 2003

In May my cameras and I traveled to Italy and Germany. Here's a slideshow with eight photos pulled directly from iPhoto thanks to the fantastic BetterHTMLExport plugin for Movable Type written by that great benefactor of humanity, Simeon Leifer. I simply can't stand dinking around with creating Web-sized images and thumbnails; BetterHTMLExport does it for me right from iPhoto's Export dialog. Bless him.

All Your Entries Are Belong to Us, Part II

Must have been a Movable Type archive settings that gave me the dreaded White Screen of Death -- johnfulwider dot com with nothing in the center content pane. I wouldn't worry, but Rachael and George actually promised to look at my blog, thus bringing its audience to a staggering three people. (Hi Mom!)

Coming next: The photo slideshow I promised them.

All Your Entries Are Belong to Us

All my Movable Type entries have disappeared. They're still in the entries editor, and still available in the archive. They just won't display on the front page.

Three-Column Layout Finished

Many thanks to glish.com and my good friends Anne, Eric and Nate for helping me achieve a three-column layout using only CSS -- no tables.

I've only found problems so far with IE 5.2 for the Mac. If anyone can help diagnose what's up, please post a comment.

Still Struggling with CSS

I'm still struggling with CSS, as people viewing this page on browsers other than Safari and Mozilla will notice.

I really should make layout changes on a development server before taking them live. :-)

"I Sent in $77, and My Neighbors Got Sod!"

There's this horribly cheesy program on an over-the-air religious TV network here in Lincoln that should be called, "Pay for Prayer." You're supposed to send in money and a prayer request. Then they show the prayer "answers" with a headlines slideshow, like you see in movies when they show a plot development via a series of fictitious newspaper and magazine headlines.

Anyway, one lucky lady the other day squealed, "I sent in $77 and three days later, we got increased income of $750."

Tomorrow we're expecting one of our neighbors to show up on TV, overcome by emotion and yelling, "Praise the Lord! I sent in $77 and my neighbors got sod!"

Sorry, habitat-deprived flora and fauna from far and wide: Our yard, formerly a weed-infested candidate for EPA or Fish & Wildlife Service funding, now has sod.

(Kidding aside, prayer works. No deposit required.)

(Can somebody out there tell me the correct cinematography term for "headline slideshow?)

Three-Column Layout in Progress

I'm converting to a three-column layout based on the CSS "look ma, no tables!" tutorial at glish.com. I've modified the "3 Columns, the Holy Grail" design, but the results so far are a bit buggy.

My Yard, the Wildlife Habitat

The downpour continues here in lovely Nebraska, washing away my hopes of having something other than dirt, mud and weeds surrounding my house. I think I may just turn it into a wildlife habitat and live off of EPA or Fish and Wildlife Service grants.

So we bought this new-construction house two or three months ago and figured we'd save money by seeding the lawn instead of sodding. Wrong. The day after the contractor seeded, Mother Nature decided to oh-so-temporarily lift her three-year Nebraska water restriction with three days of drenching storms. We found the straw we'd laid over the yard blocks away at the entrance to our subdivision.

Months of waist-high weeds and disapproving stares from our neighbors later, we called the sod guys. No one returned our calls. We called again and got a nice guy from Nebraska Sod to come out on a Sunday. He reassured us all would be green and groovy Real Soon Now. Indeed, we arrived home from work Monday to find the yard had already been scraped of weeds and graded. Things are looking up, we thought.

The next day, horticultural history repeated itself. The weeds now have a second chance at life, the graded dirt is washing away, and the sod fields are too waterlogged for harvesting. We don't even bother thinking about how nice it would have been to have the sod in before the rain started, thus saving us the constant watering needed to establish a new lawn.

Ah, homeownership. When everything's measured in multiples of $1,000, living under the thumb of a loony landlord looks awfully appealing.

NPR, At Least, Mentions Alabama Tax Hike's Christian Motive

New blogger Gregg Easterbrook decries the national media's failure (tnr.com) to mention the Christian motive for Republican Alabama Gov. Bob Riley's big tax-hike proposal.

National Public Radio (npr.org) is mentioning the Christian motive, in what I judge an evenhanded manner. Heard it this morning on Morning Edition (npr.org) during my rain-soaked drive to work.

I'm deciding more and more NPR is the place to go for evenhanded news coverage, if you set aside Daniel Schorr's commentaries -- which are so reflexively, dogmatically and close-mindedly anti-right they're humorous. (That's not to take anything away from his reporting experience, which is voluminous, his firsthand knowledge of history, which is staggering, or his speaking talent -- which makes him a joy to hear. He's just wrong on the issues.)

Weblogs: There's a Lot Out There, But It's Not Academic

Back in April I wrote a literature review for my communications theory class in grad school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It took a pleasant little poke at my ego (a classmate requested a copy today to help him with his own research) to overcome my laziness so I could post it. Thanks to Movable Type's built-in Extended Entry field, I didn't have to hard-code a static HTML page to contain the huge honkin' 4,060-word monster (which, despite slash-and-burn editing, was still 60 words over spec).

I will have to find some way to put in the footnotes. Look for that in Version 2.0 of this post. By Version 1.2.1b I may have the section headings bolded or something. If you've got the same tolerance for punishment my professor had, you can follow the link below to read it.

Blogging from iPhoto

I can blog photos directly from my iPhoto library thanks to Eric Sigler's iPhoto2Weblog.

The first example is "Osteria Libation," below.

Osteria Libation

Serving up a three-liquid libation at a small osteria in Venice, Italy.
Canon EOS Rebel XS :: 50mm f1.8 :: Fujicolor Superia 400

This photo made it into Visual Prozac 5 (slamomaha.com; look for JavaScript slideshow link on the page), a juried show in Omaha. But it didn't sell, so I'm donating it to a benefit show for the Medusa Project (medusaproject.com).

I asked $130 for it, but a much, much better and cheaper photo didn't sell, either, so I don't feel so bad. The photo, depicting a pregnant belly with a cigar sticking out of the navel, was titled "Castro, Age Zero."

Constipated Christina

That's what all of Christina Aguilera's new music sounds like. Like she's grunting from constipation.

-- A colleague of mine, who shall remain nameless

Old johnfulwider dot com Content Coming Soon

There's a 15 or 20-step process for importing all the old posts from the Blogger-powered johnfulwider dot com, so you can bet you'll see that stuff pop up in these archives Real Soon Now. :-)

Switched to Movable Type from Blogger

I've switched to Movable Type from Blogger for several reasons:

* Blogger's full editor wouldn't load in Safari
* There's a cool iPhoto plugin that creates blog entries from photos you select
* I felt like CHMODing a whole bunch of .CGI files from the command line

Fly American

American is just so the way to go.

Not talking ways of life here, though the USA has got it mostly right. We're talking air travel, which we've found least intolerable on American Airlines.

Start with the legroom. There really is "More Room in Coach." Crossing and uncrossing the legs without rattling the lady in front really staves off the DVTs for the 6-foot-2 set. Competing in a crowded marketplace is all about distinguishing yourself from the other guys, and American should give no ground -- or inches -- on this one.

Add gate announcements. Living in a podunk town smack in the middle of Flyover Country, to which the first flight of the day is oftwen also the last, we live in pathological fear of missed connections. We've nearly perfected a military-grade system for assessing unfamiliar airports at a glance and proceeding at breakneck speed from Terminal A to Terminal ZZ. But all that stress just fades away when the captain tells you well ahead of time where you'll be landing, where all the connecting gates are, and on which page of "our award-winning American Way magazine" can be found a map of the terminal.

Finish with some pretty snazzy adjustable headrests. Our Boeing MD-80's leather headrests raised and lowered to accomodate both Green Giant and Sprout and -- get this -- had folding sides to cradle your head while sleeping. Thus obviating the need to look like a hyper-atomic-ultra-dork using the SkyRest (TM) Travel Pillow to catch your Zs. (By the way, the guy in the promotional photo isn't sleeping -- he's passed out from lack of oxygen after blowing up that huge honkin' thing.)

And You Thought TSA Screeners Were Humorless

Here's the new day job for stand-up comics: airport security screener.

"Take your time, take your time," our Transportation Security Administration baggage engineer fast-talked, Eddie Murphy style, as we lurched toward him with hobbled foot and a badly balanced bag. "I'll wait for you."

"Does your bag contain any medication you may require on this flight?" he inquires.

No.

"Do you have any photographic film, used or unused, in there?"

No.
Dramatic pause.

"Guess what! You have not completed this process," he announces with a flourish. "You may now take a left, proceed to the middle escalator, and rise one floor to Airside F. Have a very nice flight."

Now that guy's worth my money.

Want to Fly Happy? Get Bored

Boredom is the secret to in-flight happiness.

A recent not-even-half-full flight from Tampa to Dallas featured an attendant roaming the aisles offering soft blankets, fresh cups of ice and personalized trash pickup for each passenger (including the woman one seat forward noshing on sweet-smelling barbeque ribs). We'll take more flights like this one. Sure, after-7 flights mean risking an unwanted overnight stay if you miss your last-departure-tonight connection. But a smilingly unharried flight attendant -- plus the chance to escape the talkative armrest-stealer in 22D -- makes air travel positively tolerable.

Ha! Get a Mac

Ha! From my school's (the University of Nebraska-Lincoln) home page:

The MSBlaster internet worm, and several other email viruses affecting Microsoft Windows computers, continues to spread, affecting operations of computers and networks worldwide.
All users of the UNL campus network are advised to install virus protection software available at no cost as part of a universitywide site license.
Macintosh and UNIX users are not directly affected by these attacks.

Windows-Powered Cars

Washington Post: "In its default setup, Windows XP on the Internet amounts to a car parked in a bad part of town, with the doors unlocked, the key in the ignition and a Post-It note on the dashboard saying, 'Please don't steal this.' "
Yet another reason I'm a Mac user.

Shortest New York Times Story Ever!

Power Outages Reported Along East Coast
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Power outages were reported today throughout the Northeast. Blackouts were reported north to Toronto, south to Maryland and west to Cleveland, Detroit and Toledo.

Visual Prozac 5

A photograph of mine is in Visual Prozac 5, opening this Saturday at 6 p.m. in Omaha. It's at the Nicholas Street Gallery, 1301 Nicholas St., near the new convention center. Please join me at the reception.
Here's a picture of me at last year's show, Visual Prozac 4 (link to slideshow).
I'll post this year's picture, of a small wine shop in Venice, after Saturday's show.

Mozilla's New Marketing Push

The new Mozilla marketing push reminds me of the TurboGrafx-16 and Nintendo 64 days. "We've got the better browser. And that's what really matters," says a member of the Mozilla Foundation team challenging Internet Explorer's overwhelming dominance in the browser market. Well, the TurboGrafx 16 was technically superior to the Sega Genesis, as was the Nintendo 64 to the Sony Playstation. Guess which game systems won the market share race? The inferior ones. (Beta vs. VHS, anyone?) Guess which systems I bought? The superior ones. Guess how many of my friends I could share games with? Zero, because they had Sega and Sony.

Jeff Howden at evolt.org has a realistic view of what's likely to happen to Mozilla:

Mozilla won't win with the general public by having a superior feature set. It won't win by rendering faster or being more standards-compliant. Heck, IE didn't do any of those things to get where it is today. It's on top because it's on every desktop.

Too true. It's on mine too, but I use Mozilla. Unfortunately, me plus 1.2 percent of Web users does not a viable market make.

Walled-Off Archives

Walled-off archives are fodder for customer-driven free advertising, Jeff Jarvis writes. He and some A-list bloggers got a preview of America Online's blogging tool:

Anil and I got excited lecturing these AOL-Time-Warner megolith folks that what they should do is give their bloggers back doors into the otherwise fenced-off content of People et al -- as the New York Times is doing with bloggers, allowing them to link directly even to archived stories. That might sound like heresy, treating the expensive People gossip as a commodity. But the truth is -- repeat: the truth is -- that by creating such a back door, AOL would cleverly be turning its audience into its marketing force: AOL bloggers would be the privileged ones who can show you People content (thus selling AOL subs) and if their readers want to see more, they have to buy the magazine (thus selling magazine subs).

Right. I'd change "privileged ones" to "prestigious ones." Readers derive a sense of prestige from perceiving they're among the first with the scoop on the topics that interest them. People's business is gathering scoops on celebrities. If AOL bloggers were the only ones who could link directly to People's archive, their increased prestige could make AOL blogs a destination for celebrity news and increase People's readership at the same time.

Is Unlinked Content Really There?

"It isn't content until it's linked." Jeff Jarvis offers the blogging world's equivalent of "If a tree falls in the wilderness and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?" He's right. In the vast blogosphere, a voice isn't a voice until it's heard. And you get heard when voices to which people already are listening talk about you.

Blogs in Space!

International Space Station science officer Ed Lu (who doubtless laughed at having to repeatedly write his name on the board as a grade-school punishment) is blogging from space. Naturally, my favorite entry is Eating at Cafe ISS, wherein we learn there's no way to get cold water even with the frigid expanses of space just inches out the window.

Remembering DOS File System Isn't a Good Thing

DOS memories mangled my images.

So johnfulwider dot com's masthead images showed up fine in Internet Explorer running on Windows, but not on IE for the Mac or Mozilla for any platform. Talking with my undergrad photojournalism professor yielded advice - check that they're saved in RGB color - that didn't pan out because the images were indeed saved correctly. The mystery continued and my gentle readers (all two of them) couldn't see that mysterious man with the Morpheus-style sunglasses, just my ALT text.

Turns out that traveling through my labyrinthine cortex to the days of Microsoft's Disk Operating System, the last OS I fully understood, I used paths to my images in the form \photos\title_bar_pic.jpg. You know, with a backslash instead of a forward slash. Now Windows, built as it is on DOS's grave, understood my backslashes. But nobody else did. Flipping the slashes fixed it.

Thanks to my former colleagues Anne and Gregg for pointing out the boo-boo.

How Online Groups Go Bad

Clay Shirky's (as ever) excellent essay, "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy," explains how online groups go bad and what can be done to rescue them from the start. It's tough to do justice to the first half of his piece in a summary, but his recommendations can be briefed:

1. Handles (nicknames, usernames, etc.) have to have meaning in the sense that they're reliably and visibly connected with a real person whose reputation can be monitored. Without keeping a handle on handles, trust within the group fails.

2. Reputation has to be attached so "good works get recognized."

There's an interesting pattern I'm seeing among the music-sharing group that operates between Tokyo and Hong Kong. They operate on a mailing list, which they set up for themselves. But when they're trading music, what they're doing is, they're FedExing one another 180-gig hard-drives. So you're getting .wav files and not MP3s, and you're getting them in bulk.
Now, you can imagine that such a system might be a target for organizations that would frown on this activity. So when you join that group, your user name is appended with the user name of the person who is your sponsor. You can't get in without your name being linked to someone else. You can see immediately the reputational effects going on there, just from linking two handles.
So in that system, you become a member in good standing when your sponsor link goes away and you're there on your own report. If, on the other hand, you defect, not only are you booted, but your sponsor is booted. There are lots and lots of lightweight ways to accept and work with the idea of member in good standing.

Like Slashdot's karma system, for instance.

3. Users must be segmented in terms of authority deriving from their participation in the system.

It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.

Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you've got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction. The user of social software is the group, not the individual.

4. Plan for scale in advance. "The value is inverse to the size of the group. And you have to find some way to protect the group within the context of those effects." Take the Live Journal approach of "soft forking," where average-size groups have 12 members and the median group membership is five, but each small group is connected with others through individual users' personal networks. Or take the IRC channel and mailing list approach, where "as the signal to noise ratio gets worse, people start to drop off, until it gets better, so people join, and so it gets worse." Or just make it hard to sign up, like MetaFilter: "When we start seeing effects of scale, we shut off the new user page. 'Someone mentions us in the press and how great we are? Bye!' "

That's a way of raising the bar, that's creating a threshold of participation. And anyone who bookmarks that page and says "You know, I really want to be in there; maybe I'll go back later," that's the kind of user MeFi wants to have.

Blowing Things Up for Money

He gets paid for this. Chuck Cramer's job is to blow things up for Underwriters Laboratories. You'd think a job like this would be dangerous, but the worst he's ever done is "sparked a fire by running an electrical current through what turned out to be a faulty power strip." What about making toast in the bathtub, to see if toasters really merit a label warning against such goofery?

Design Theory for Foodies

Rarely do I find articles appealing to both my foodie and communications research interests. Jakob Nielsen's Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster does it for me with his theories that Internet users "behave like wild beasts in the jungle" searching for food (information); that a certain kind of user, the "informavore," must be led to content by an "information scent"; and that with widespread broadband adoption encouraging "information snacking," sites should aim to "support short visits; be a snack."

Inspiration is lacking during my usual noon-hour lunch-induced food coma, so I'll put it to my gentle readers: How can johnfulwider dot com be made both good-smelling and tasty, so as to attract nibbles from the informavores?

One-Man Blog$

One-man blogs make money operating like the paid niche newsletters of old, Mark Glaser reports.

Bloggers' Political Grid

Mark Glaser has this grid showing top bloggers' positions on the liberal vs. conservative and blogging vs. journalism scales. If only the data points were hyperlinked to the blogs.

On Hold at McDonald's

McDonald's put me on hold.

What's supposed to be a new dining experience at the global hamburger empire's McDonald's 3'n1 concept restaurant turned out to be more of the same experience you expect today when using the telephone: A long wait to talk to a real person. The pleasantly decorated restaurants with quite affordable and good-tasting food have red telephones at each table which you use to order your food from a picture-filled menu that rivals coffee-table books in size.

Encountering such novelty, one eagerly presses the yellow connect button expecting the fast service you get at a regular McDonald's counter. What you really get, though, is, "Thank you for choosing McDonald's 3'n1. Please hold."

Five minutes proceeded to elapse. Grrr. Luckily for the two test restaurants, both in Lincoln, Nebraska, a tatooed guy named Zed saved the evening with a bit of service that recalls the bygone days when employees were empowered to employ common sense, make independent decisions, and actually act to please the customer and perhaps ensure said customer's return. Zed, bless his ink-covered neck (both sides, below the ears), gave us our dinner free after a series of miscues that left us parched without beverages and mystified by the restaurant's billing system.

Here's how it went down: After the long wait on hold, we got a genuine apology from the anonymous operator (where in the store is she?) and proceeded to order the meatloaf platter and the country-fried steak platter for ourselves, and the Chocolate Tower (or some such) for our almost-13-year-old cousin. (She inexplicably had already eaten dinner by the time we finally got an 8 p.m. breather from Saturday chores. Ah, to be a kid again and spend all that free time wishing we were older.) Finishing our order with a request for three "State Fair" lemonades, we got an "okay," CLICK to end that conversation. No total. Hmmm, we thought, but soon had our attention diverted by that almost-13 bundle of energy who just couldn't stop talking, mostly about how best to prank the restaurant by pressing the yellow ordering button at multiple tables.

An impossibly gooey brownie topped with chocolate ice cream, rich whipped cream and chocolate sauce arrived first, to the delight of the almost-13-year-old who'd just eaten two hours ago and to the dismay of the two adults who hadn't seen food since 11:30 a.m. The Chocolate Tower's foundations were almost completely eroded when the platters arrived. Keeping the country-fried steak company were two sides of mashed potatoes, not the one side of potatoes and one of buttered rolls we ordered. The meatloaf, in frighteningly uniform 1/4-inch-thick slices, had the "buttered garden vegetables" and mashed potatoes by its side as requested. Zed looked confused when we asked for utensils; to his credit, they arrived quickly.
The missing-in-action forks and knives should have prompted a quick mental leap toward a "the drinks are never coming" theory, but eight hours of working in the sun with no fuel but Vanilla Coke tends to addle the brain. Especially when steaming tasty food presents itself. Other problems aside, all the food was really quite good for the price -- $5.99 for the meatloaf, $5.99 for the country-fried steak and $4.29 for the Chocolate Tower, if memory serves. The mashed potatoes, though obviously instant, were a buttery garlicky lovely dream to eat. It's good they messed up the order.

The drinks never did arrive of their own accord. We had to again call the operator, who this time did not put us on hold. The "State Fair Lemonade" didn't show up; rather, Zed did, with three empty cups. He looked confused again when we asked for lemonade, but produced it quickly once he figured out we had ordered the specialty lemonade, but were now so thirsty we'd settle for the fountain variety.
Dinner finally drew to a close, the efforts of the resident order-messing gremlin notwithstanding. We rose to pay at the cashier and Zed, who seemed to do just about everything in the restaurant, again looked confused. Hadn't we gotten a bill? No, could you just look it up? Okay. We had a seat and he brought a bill, which did not contain the items we'd ordered. What did you have? "Well, it should be free," we said in a polite and restrained fashion. "But we had the meat loaf, country-fried steak and the Chocolate Tower."

Here's where the rational behavior so rare these days in businesses large and small came in. "You know, you're right," Zed said. "Go ahead. I'll take care of it." So we left feeling fat and happy, and we'll probably return. Zed, they should clone you and put you in all the 3'n1s.

Pork Barrel Politics

Fourteen House Members -- male and female, big and small, liberal and conservative -- stuck in an elevator for a half-hour and forced to learn how to get along. . . . Architect of the Capitol spokeswoman Eva Malecki said the elevator got stuck because it was 'overloaded,' as the 15 (sic) occupants of the elevator apparently exceeded the 3,000-pound weight limit. (From Drudge Report; warning: nondurable link)

That's 214.3 pounds per lawmaker. The Roll Call story, a snippet of which you can see here, says 14 were in the elevator, so Drudge must have just made a minor typo.

Fellow Nebraska Blogger's Funnies

A fellow Nebraskan has a few laugh-out-loud items on his blog (here about Dante's Inferno, here about the Air Force's "resume blackhole) and one sad one. He points out the Omaha World-Herald's Sunday employment section killed 16 pages worth of trees but offered just five information technology jobs. A friend from Lincoln just started commuting to Omaha today for an IT internship; nothing was available in Lincoln. Having sometimes been the informal go-to guy in various offices on computer questions, I can't imagine doing IT for a living.

Time Travel Exists

Time travel exists. I just posted a link to a story written today (June 3, 2003), and Blogger tagged it (and two previous posts) with 5.29.2003.

If one path to blogging stardom is having the Blogosphere's first links to stories, I'm five days ahead already. Try to beat that, Instapundit!

The Baghdad Blogger, Salam Pax, is Real

The Baghdad Blogger, Salam Pax, also known as Dear Raed, is real, according to this Slate story. "Salam Pax" is the Slate reporter's interpreter. But lack of broadband access meant the reporter didn't know this before returning to his New York cable modem:

"My slow-speed satellite phone all but precluded Web browsing, which meant the only non-Arabic media I was exposed to, from mid-March until just a few days ago, consisted of snatches of the BBC. The fascination and controversy over Salam Pax-when he stopped posting for a brief period, his Web fans worried he might have been arrested or gone into hiding-completely escaped me."

(Later . . .) The Slate reporter deserves kudos for some well-turned phrases that just make you smile, including: "nom de blog," "a virtual felled forest of postings on war blogs" and "There was a kerfuffle." Don't miss this laugh-out-loud detail about Salam, who apparently blogs better than he drives: "He got behind the wheel. There was just a foot or so between the Hyundai and the cars in front and back. Salam grimaced. "I don't think I can do this without causing damage," he said.

Cutting the Landline

Abandoning one's wired home telephone for one or two wireless phones seemed a good idea until I had to call Aquila for some natural-gas customer service. Called on the wireless and hung up shortly after the sweet-voiced female computer reported, "Your estimated wait is . . . 10 . . . minutes." And a good thing, too. Calling the number from a landline this morning, that same sweet female computer (does she ever take a break?) told me my estimated wait was nine minutes. Nineteen minutes later, I got a helpful human who wrapped things up by minute 25.

That's 8.3 percent of my 300 anytime minutes. Aquila has 24-hour customer service (probably consisting in the late hours of two people in a lonely call center, one of whom is at the door paying the pizza delivery guy), so I could use my free night and weekend minutes. But what to do for those places that open just 9 to 5? Will this mean employees conducting even more of their personal lives from work than they already do?

Reblogging the Past

Having chosen to maintain just one blog here at johnfulwider.com instead of three (this one, ThesisBlog and Fulwider's Food & Travel), I'm worried posts from the latter two BlogSpot-hosted might disappear in a Blogger server move or suffer some other misfortune. So I've moved ThesisBlog to my server and will soon do the same with Fulwider's Food & Travel.

I'm also "reblogging" some greatest hits from those two old blogs. Readers across the globe (all three of them) voted by telephone and SMS in a hard-fought popularity contest that saw the announced margin of victory change just two times. To soothe those whose thumbs remain sore from frantic Texas-style "vote early, vote often" balloting, I'm posting the greatest hits in reverse chronological order instead of by popularity. Here's the first one.

Airlines are on the right track testing whether customers will pay for in-flight food.
Delta is the latest to try this concept, following America West and Northwest. The airlines should have done this long ago. Long gone are the days when air travel was a luxury, and passengers dressed in their Sunday best. Airplanes are flying buses. But they do make much longer trips, so some concession to the traveling public's collective growling stomach is necessary. One hopes they can turn a profit off their overpriced "Mrs. Fields cookies, Entenmann's cinnamon rolls and Pizzeria Uno sandwiches" and funnel the money into smoothing out their fare structures into something like Southwest's excellent $299 maximum one-way fare.

There's a drawback, though, to eliminating or sharply cutting back full meals on airlines: Less material for the hilarious AirlineMeals.net, the global repository of photographic proof that airline meals stink.
(Reblogged from February 5, 2003.)

You're Not Getting Smarter

Among the numerous theories lolling around in my messy office cubicle of a mind is this: Reading the Web won't make you smarter.

Dead-tree-edition books, magazines and newspapers will, in that order of efficacy. Jumping hither and yon on the Web, I get the effect of scanning a printed newspaper: I remember the headlines, but not the stories. I grasp the trivia, but not the meaning. Were you to quiz me on the day's events following a Web-surfing session, I would be able to regurgitate headlines. But could I comment intelligently on the items I'd seen using information I'd just acquired? I doubt it.

By contrast, I'm still thinking deeply (no pun intended) about a book on water policy I stopped reading over a week ago, Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water. Reading the words in a book, with no hypertext or graphical distractions, seems to have planted thoughts in my mind with roots deeper and stronger than thoughts planted by Web readings would develop. Further, when I'm ready to blog those thoughts, I'll only need to flip to my margin notes for supporting material. By writing in the margins, I preserved either whole thoughts or links to memories of whole thoughts that I can access at will. In a way, one could call margin notes hypertext links to content stored in the original personal server, the brain. While this blog serves in part as a reminder of things I've seen on the Web and may want to examine again, I won't have any margin notes (save the linktext) when I return. I could create a kind of margin note by laboriously copying and pasting each meaningful paragraph of a Web document into my blog and commenting upon it. But when describing a task requires an adjective like "laboriously," one can effortlessly guess how likely that task is to be performed.

Now one could raise this objection: It's even more laborious to blog one's book-initiated thoughts because that requires typing in the book's text and then commenting upon it. All too true. But if I have established that the quality of my blogging increases when the printed word prompts it, rather than the electronic word, the labor may be worth it. And if adding printed content to the blogosphere adds to the diversity of material contained therein, all the better.
The key here may be that doing things slowly means doing things better. (All the people I've pestered to hurry up, hurry up, hurry up may scoff at this "revelation," but what are you gonna do?) Reading books takes more time than reading the Web, at least for me, and produces better outcomes. Writing this post slowly -- it's the first I've ever saved for later editing in w.bloggar -- has in my estimation also produced a better outcome.

What implications does this have for blogging, a kind of publishing where speed mostly rules? That's a topic for another post, considered slowly.

CSS Zen Garden

The CSS Zen Garden shows the flexibility and beauty of CSS design by displaying the same content in eight user-selectable designs. My favorites are Meliorism and Golden Mean.

This site uses CSS, but I'm not good enough at it yet to get CSS validated.

Thanks to Xeni for 'Worksafe'

Thanks to Xeni at BoingBoing for reassuring office workers everywhere with her "yes, worksafe" parenthetical addendum to image links. Is she the first?
The worksafe image is of an Asian woman with SARS mask tan line. Fascinating.

SlowBlogging

Doc Searls turns a nice phrase describing "SlowBlo," aka blogging over dialup: "When the going gets wide, and I can post with ease, posting happens -- usually between other things I'm doing, such as real work. But when going gets narrow, and every link I click on involves a two-minute wait, posting becomes a progressively more arduous and unlikely eventuality."

There's also DoughBlo -- broadband blogging that's arduous and unlikely because you're paying for it by the minute at an Internet cafe in Europe.

Summarizing Weblogs' Impact

Dan Gillmor summarizes weblogs' impact nicely: "Weblogs brought to life an aspect of the Web that had been mostly submerged -- the idea that this is a read AND write medium, that we should be able to write on the Web as easily as we can read what's in our browsers."

Objective Journalism?

"The Rockford College family debated Tuesday what went wrong at its spring graduation ceremony that featured New York Times reporter and antiwar advocate Chris Hedges."
"Reporter and antiwar advocate." In the world of objective journalism, those terms should not abut one another. Does that world still exist?

Archives Now Working

Finally got my archives working.

Thanks, Rebecca Blood

Thanks to Rebecca Blood for posting this link to the "Top Twenty D&D Pickup Lines" on her blog. I already respected Rebecca, but if she played Dungeons & Dungeons when she was a kid -- well, that would make her cooler than a +2 Vorpal Blade.

Condemning America's School System

A well-written condemnation of America's school system can be found here. Reading this in conjunction with "Why Nerds Are Unpopular," a heartbreaking analysis of school social structure, could quite possibly scare a person out of having children. Why intentionally put another human being through this?

Pocket Wireless Personal Server?

Pocket wireless personal server from Intel? Could this be true? I wonder whether public-access screens and input devices will be any easier to find than Wi-Fi hotspots (especially in The Land That Time Forgot, Western Europe).

Water Rocket-Powered BarbieMobile

On a day of hilarious happenings, this site about a water-rocket-powered-BarbieMobile is the funniest happening on the Web.

Carfree.com: Car-Free Cities

carfree.com is an excellent introduction to an urban design concept for a city of 1 million people where there are no cars and every possible destination can be reached in 35 minutes or fewer via walking and public transportation (bicycles optional). Numerous objections can be raised to the ideas presented on the site, but the authors deserve credit for presenting their ideas well. The introduction page is even available in seven languages.

We'll Miss You, Ari.

We'll miss you, Ari.

"Under what the Senate is proposing, the president would have more authority to help protect the homeland if potatoes attacked America in the Department of Agriculture than he would if terrorists did under the Department of Homeland Security." -- Ari Fleischer, commenting in October 2002 about President Bush's desire for control over hiring and firing practices in the Department of Homeland Security.

(From this Washington Post article.)

Back from Europe

Back from Europe. Internet access there is more expensive to use and more difficult to find than I had ever imagined. Thus the lack of updates.

Venice is Beautiful

Venice is beautiful.

Top 10 Tips for a German Vacation

1. You don't have to worry about running out of beer on a volksmarch (a group walk for an entire town; there's one every weekend somewhere close by). A beer company truck will drive into the middle of a large forest to deliver reinforcements to the rest station.
   
2. The beer, bread and wine are the best in the world. No, don't argue. They are.
   
3. Don't believe the travel guides, which make German hotels sound like something from the 18th Century. They all have toilets and showers in the room, comfortable beds, telephones and satellite television. They cost 40 to 80 Euros, most under 60 Euros. Breakfast is included.
   
4. Driving in Germany is a challenge. Germans are amazingly skilled drivers and like to display their skills going 100 kph on narrow, winding roads. There will always be someone right behind you pressuring you to go faster.
   
5. Deutsche Telekom phone cards are not the right way to go. It's hard to find phone booths that take the cards, and it costs about 10 Euro cents for 10 seconds calling the United States. Tear the AT&T access numbers advertisement out of your in-flight magazine and use a credit card to pay.
   
6. The map you'll get with your rental car doesn't show small towns or even some semi-major roads. Since small towns (500 or 1,000 people) are where you'll find the best Germany has to offer, buy a better map.
   
7. German forests smell wonderful. Be sure you aren't congested when you're out for a walk.
   
8. Gummi Smurfs do still exist and they're just as yummy as they always were. But they're called Schluempfe, thus your friends' difficulty in finding them for you when they took a trip to Germany before you.
   
9. The stores close really, really early.
   
10. Buy gas in Luxembourg if you're around Trier. It's 30 Euro cents cheaper per liter. There's a huge gas station right at the border. But don't drive past the pumps and park so you can go use the bathroom first. You won't be able to get back without driving the wrong way on three one-way streets and almost getting smooshed by a truck.
    

Here in Germany at an Internet Cafe

Here in Germany at an internet cafe in the back of a bakery/coffee shop. Access is Euros 1.60 for 15 minutes. Yummy smells are free.

Off to Europe

Off to Europe.

A Guide to Menu English

A Guide to Menu English: "Menus are the Pavlov's bell of eating out. They are a literature of control. Menu language . . . serves less to describe food than to manage your expectations."

Oh Mylanta

Oh Mylanta, I've been spelling Romenesko's name wrong in my links column. (Fixing it ...) I hang my head in shame, especially after somewhat sarcastically pointing out the abundance of writers who get Gillmor's name wrong.

Killing an Employee's Blog

Interesting justification for killing a newspaper employee's off-the-clock blog: "Denis Horgan's entire professional profile is a result of his attachment to The Hartford Courant, yet he has unilaterally created for himself a parallel journalistic universe where he'll do commentary on the institutions that the paper has to cover without any editing oversight by the Courant," [Hartford Courant editor Brian] Toolan said. "That makes the paper vulnerable." Here we have a quotation awash with hyperbole and hubris from a person who may well look scornfully upon newspaper sources using the same rhetoric. If Horgan's blog were not now shut down, I'd be one of the many readers waiting to see how a person could artfully refute the almost certainly false assertion that his "entire professional profile" is owed to one employer, while retaining his job.

Apple Music Service to Go Live

Apple music service to go live: While the story loaded I composed my clever linktext -- "Offering expected to be overpriced, underpowered, and lacking needed buttons, just like the company's computers." But 99 cents a song is a good starting point.

A Clever Turn of Phrase

A clever turn of phrase from Reuters' Dan Whitcomb in this story: "But with the war in its waning hours, all is quiet on the western coast -- leading conservatives to suggest that [Janeane] Garofalo and her fellow travelers are in full retreat from a public backlash and feeling chastened by a swift American victory." Who says wire copy is bland?

$late

The excellent online magazine Slate is making money (Warning: NYT link, may disappear) and "could be the exception that ends up disproving the rule that held that content sites generally serve as a trapdoor for good intentions and prodigious amounts of money."

Blogs as IM/Personal Page Hybrids

"Blogs are a hybrid of instant messaging and personal web pages. They're a conversation."

-- Another classmate in my Mass Communications Theory class.

World Wrestling Journalism

"Journalism has become like professional wrestling -- something to be watched, not believed."

-- A classmate in my Mass Communications Theory class.

Grease as Gas

Finally, a fuel for the environmentally minded foodie: Greasel. The Slashdot thread on this system for turning fast-food grease into diesel-engine fuel offers some real classics:

To get fuel for the next stop they dropped by the local Chinese take-out place and relieved them of some of their waste grease. They pulled out of town leaving an exhaust trail that smelled like shrimp fried rice.

I worked at a McDonalds in high school (about 1991), and one of the maintenance guys had an old (even then!) mid-1970s VW Rabbi (someone chiselled off the T for the fun of it) which was running on used shortening. . . . [T]he car - and I mean *the whole car*, from interior to exhaust - smelled like Chicken McNuggets. Sometimes, Filet-O-Fish.

Site Design Proceeding Nicely

I'm getting really close to happy with johnfulwider.com's site design.
It's almost optimized for 640 x 480 now, need to decide whether to go for 800 x 600 instead.

Overblown SARS "Epidemic"

Descriptions of the SARS outbreak as an "epidemic" sounded overblown to me, so I did a little research. First, the Dictionary.com definition: "An outbreak of a contagious disease that spreads rapidly and widely." Second, the World Health Organization's report on cases worldwide as of April 19th: 3,547. Third, the projected current global population according to the U.S. Census Bureau: 6.29 billion. Fourth, the number of countries reporting cases, again according to WHO: 26 or 27, depending on whether you count China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region as a country. With all sympathy for the people suffering from this disease, this is not an epidemic. It's an outbreak. ("A sudden increase.")

It's sudden because we've only just learned about it, and it's an increase because while there were probably many cases of a disease now called SARS months or years ago, the "SARS" count started when we started calling it SARS.

Reason I Love Slashdot, #43

Reason I love Slashdot #43: "Debian GNU/Linux to Declare GNU GFDL non-Free?" headlines a post that begins, "There's some considerable argy-bargy in progress over whether or not GNU's own GFDL is a Free documentation license at all." But is the argy-bargy GNU-wine, or just a grab for attention?

Mark for Later Reading ...

Mark for later reading: Asia Times has an extensive story on new advertising technologies making profits possible in online newspapering.

Change of Domains Possible

I'm considering moving my two other blogs, ThesisBlog and Fulwider's Food and Travel, from their BlogSpot homes to this domain. I wonder whether I should make johnfulwider.com the "one-stop shop" for all my pontifications (as if there were a pressing demand for such a thing).

Revolutionary Blogs?

Blogs are revolutionary only in the sense that they're outgrowths of Revolutionary War personal publishing. Rick Klau prompted this thought with a clever post substituting "weblogs" for "pamphlets" in a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's essay about the short polemics that played a great role in moving the American colonies toward independence from Britain. Klau writes: "It becomes obvious that what we're now calling warblogs (at least, those that are not just reporting the war but are advocating a particular point of view) are a continuation of a very American tradition from 250 years ago."
In the literature review on weblogs I'm writing (preparatory for a master's thesis on the same), I cite two other reasons blogs are evolutionary, not revolutionary. An excerpt:

Conceptually blogs aren't entirely new creations. Any "what's new" list in any medium (but especially printed newspapers) qualifies as a blog forerunner. This author thinks specifically of The Wall Street Journal's famous front-page "What's News" columns, which feature synopses of all the day's stories. Stretching the metaphor, one could even say the information contained in the synopses on where to find the full story is a "link" to that content. . . . Cameron Barrett compares them to fanzines, those sometimes-photocopied, sometimes printed newsletters that published everything one could want to know about narrow subjects. Says Barrett: "Like fanzine editors before them, weblog editors embrace a topic or theme and run with it."

Klau, by the way, later notes that other thinkers came up with the pamplet analogy earlier than he. Bloggers' attempts to accurately map the development of ideas add great value to the medium.

Off to Europe Sans Digital

I'm leaving for Europe April 30 and not only do I not have firm plans for the two weeks I'll be there, I don't have a digital camera. Memories of my gadget-less six years in Germany as a young pup have faded, poorly reinforced as they are by shoeboxes and cookie tins of negatives I'll never get around to scanning and printing. So it's off to that outpost of detailed and honest information on the Web, Phil Askey's Digital Photography Review. Only 1,500 bucks for the Canon EOS 10D . . .

The Fall of Baghdad in Headlines

The Fall of Baghdad in headlines right now . . .

Google News
Baghdad falls to US forces

Los Angeles Times:
U.S. Forces Control Baghdad
* Looting, Celebrations Erupt in Capital
* Fate of Saddam Hussein Unknown

USA Today:
Iraqis Cheer as Baghdad Falls
* Reports: "No government left to speak of"

The New York Times:
Celebrations and Looting in Iraqi Capital
As U.S. Control Grows and Resistance Fades

Fox News:
JUBILATION GREETS ALLIES IN BAGHDAD;
COALITION CONTROLS MOST OF IRAQI CAPITAL

CNN.com:
FALL OF SADDAM
* Symbols toppled; regime crumbling

Washington Post:
Iraqi Authority Melts as U.S. Forces Tighten Grip

Pixellated Photos in Printed Newspapers

Asked a newspaper friend why papers publish pixellated photos in their print editions. His guilty party: sportswriters. "They're too lazy to go to the archives and look for a picture. So they download one from the Web."

Understandable. My friend's newspaper fired its library staff, the superhuman people who wrestled stacks of negatives and rolls of newsprint to the ground each day. So sportswriters can't call a librarian to dig up a photo for them.
Doesn't this open theft of pictures (low-res JPEGs are still property) raise copyright issues? "Yeah. That's kind of a hornet's nest right now."
Hire more lawyers with the fired librarians' salaries.

My friend (so called because he was nice to me before my 1999 personality upgrade) offered one more thought: Choices on things like photos are moving down from appropriate specialists, like photographers and graphic designers, to inappropriate specialists, like page designers and reporters.

Quality moves down with them.

Dan Gillmor's Collaborative New Book

Dan Gillmor wants help with his book project, "Making the News: What Happens to Journalism and Society When Every Reader Can Be a Writer (Editor, Producer, Etc.)." He owes a beer to whoever gets that subtitle on a book jacket.

Your Plane Has Been Requisitioned by the U.S. Military

Got a call recently from Northwest Airlines telling me my flight to Frankfurt had been re-routed through Amsterdam because the U.S. government had requisitioned for troop transport planes used on the Detroit-Frankfurt route. Having once flown to Greece in a jumpseat bolted to a pallet strapped to the deck of a C-130 cargo plane while facing another pallet stacked with jiggling whole blood products in clear plastic bags, I'm glad to hear our troops are flying in style.

Global Warming: Cause for Doubt?

Word that the Middle Ages were tons toastier than today gives global warming agnostics new basis for doubt. But there's some kind of climate change going on in Nebraska, where the usual weather pattern of delightfully sunny and warm weekdays followed by cold, wet and nasty weekends has reversed itself in this week's forecast. Hallelujah.

Coffee Crime!

10:45 a.m. Someone must pay.

UNL Climbing Wall

I'm working on the new 5.6 and 5.7 routes at the UNL Climbing Wall. In Lincoln, Nebraska, it's reportedly the best wall between Chicago and Denver.

Two Traditional Media Views on Blogging as Journalism

"Weblogs are journalism,"says Joan Connell, executive producer for Opinions and Communities at MSNBC.com. "They can be used to great effect in reporting an unfolding story and keeping readers informed."
"CNN.com prefers to take a more structured approach to presenting the news," the spokesperson said. "We do not blog."

From Online Journalism Review.

Big Slashdot Thread on 'Googlewashing'

There's a big Slashdot thread on "googlewashing." (See this post and this post on ThesisBlog for background.)

The Register Blasts Bloggers' 'Googlewash' of 'Second Superpower' Term

The Register Blasts Bloggers' 'Googlewash' (Just you try to get that many apostrophes/quote marks in a headline.)
The Register writer Andrew Orlowski is none too impressed with the "techno-utopian," "sappy," "mound of feel-good styrofoam peanuts" essay on the 'second superpower" by Jim Moore. Orlowski says bloggers like Moore have, in just 42 days, managed an Orwellian word-meaning change from an original coinage by Patrick Tyler in The New York Times. (Where Tyler, to my reading, meant world opinion is the other superpower.) Greenpeace went on to use Tyler's idea, as did Kofi Annan (Reg. Req'd link).

Now here's the important bit. Look what the phrase "Second Superpower" produces on Google now. . . Moore's essay is right there at the top.
. . . Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a "Second Superpower", it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank? to flood Google with Moore's alternative, neutered definition.
. . . To all intents and purposes, the original meaning has been erased. Obliterated, in just seven weeks.

Orlowski, who seems not to be the Google fan I am, offers a new Googleverb:

The phrase "greenwash" will be familiar to many of you: it's where a spot of judicious marketing paint is applied to something decidedly rotten, transforming it into something that looks as if it's wholesome and radical new, but which is essentially unchanged.
This is the first Googlewash we've encountered. 42 days, too.
What else is coming down the pipe?

Strong Identity = Sticky Blog

A short essay by Maria Benet posits that strong identity equals a sticky blog (remember the endless efforts to make corporate Web sites sticky?):

A blog's stickiness, or that quality that turns us into its regular readers -- comes not so much from the blog's informative value in content or through the network of links it provides . . . . [I]t's the voice of the blogger -- his or her identity -- that frames, or filters, the content for us as trustworthy, entertaining, informative, or whatever other adverb best describes our interest in coming back to read that particular blog.

An identity, I'd submit, can be composed of one's knowledge. Having just started my research on weblogging, I lack the knowledge needed to compose thought-provoking linktext here on ThesisBlog. I don't have an identity in the blogosphere. Thus, my short list of visitors. Onward and upward I shall go, however. I'm confident someone will be interested in the 4,000-word literature review about blogging I'll be posting here sometime before it's due on April 23. (via MetaFilter)

Bloggers Part of 'Second Superpower'?

Jim Moore thinks bloggers are part of a technology-enabled 'second superpower' forming to counter the United States' global power:

The collective power of texting, blogging, instant messaging, and email across millions of actors cannot be overestimated. Like a mind constituted of millions of inter-networked neurons, the social movement is capable of astonishingly rapid and sometimes subtle community consciousness and action.
Thus the new superpower demonstrates a new form of ?emergent democracy? that differs from the participative democracy of the US government. Where political participation in the United States is exercised mainly through rare exercises of voting, participation in the second superpower movement occurs continuously through participation in a variety of web-enabled initiatives. And where deliberation in the first superpower is done primarily by a few elected or appointed officials, deliberation in the second superpower is done by each individual?making sense of events, communicating with others, and deciding whether and how to join in community actions.

Moore's essay seems to be heading toward a collectivist vision until he makes this point:

The shared, collective mind of the second superpower is made up of many individual human minds?your mind and my mind?together we create the movement. . . . [A]ny one of us can launch an idea. Any one of us can write a blog, send out an email, create a list. Not every idea will take hold in the big mind of the second superpower?but the one that eventually catches fire is started by an individual.

Would a movement born in individual liberty preserve that liberty for the future, or would the collective mind bury the individual beneath its mass? My vote is for the former. (via MetaFilter)

Mapping Weblog Geography

Tools that map weblogs by geographic location can enhance communication as bloggers see the real-world connections between themselves, according to "Get caught mapping" in Guardian Unlimited. A London bloggers tube map shows bloggers in relation to the nearest subway stop.

The Bloggers' tube map puts a sense of place back into cyberspace. By doing so, it has the potential to help a group of people doing things online recognise themselves as a real world community and build closer links.

. . . When the net first went mainstream, people talked up cyberspace as some sort of alternative global space . . . . Where you were in the real world wasn't supposed to be that important.

Now, things are beginning to move in the opposite direction. People are beginning to see that location is important . . . . A location-enhanced web will get people out of the house and give them new ways to interact with the world around them. The net might be a tool for localisation as much as for globalisation. . . .

"The revenge of geography" from The Economist mentions weblogs only in a paragraph but offers a comprehensive list of new technologies that create connections through geography - geocaching, location-based encryption (very interesting) and location-based information services delivered through cell phones.

Google's Sergey Brin Talks Google AdWords

Google's Sergey Brin talked Blogger AdWords in an interview with Esther Dyson reported on by Jeremy Allaire. Excerpt (via Scripting News):

The major focus now is getting Blogger into their [Google's] infrastructure, including their ad infrastructure, which can really improve both the user experience of ads in Blogger as well as the contextual linking of blog content to ad content.

I've been watching the AdWords posted atop ThesisBlog to determine whether keywords in my posts drive Google's AdWords selection. Right now the AdWords are . . .

Visual Log File Analyzer
Easy log file analysis in minutes. See your site's traffic. Free trial

Your Turn On The Soapbox
Come blog with us on just about any topic. We're open 24 hours a day.

. . . which is interesting because just a few moments ago I was checking the deservedly low Extreme Tracking usage statistics on my infrequently updated Fulwider's Food and Travel blog.
I'm heading toward the conclusion that it may be my surfing habits, not my blog posts, that are determining the AdWords atop ThesisBlog.

Blogger Bias Research on Chemical Weapons Stories

Blogger Bias Research on Chemical Weapons Stories
Andrew Baio just posted a short study on how bias affects news story link selection on weblogs.

Recently, I noticed that several webloggers that discussed the suspected chemical weapons plant found in southern Iraq on March 24 weren't mentioning those claims turned out to be false, even after the story was retracted . . . .

I thought this particular example would be an interesting case study to study how bias affects story selection on weblogs. So I searched Technorati for weblogs that linked to the four most popular URLs . . . about the chemical plant. Starting with a list of 148 weblogs spanning the socio-political spectrum, I located the relevant entry on each site and searched for followups or updates.

In brief, here are my findings. 113 weblogs linked to the original story, but didn't follow up with another entry or correct their existing entry in any way. 28 weblogs linked to the original story, and later posted a correction or other addendum. 7 weblogs only linked to the story after it proved to be false, but didn't link to it when the news originally broke.

If you look at the sites, it appears that conservative weblogs tended to only link the original report, liberal weblogs tended to only link to the correction, and mixed and group weblogs linked to both.

More interesting reading is found in the comments added to the post, written by some of the bloggers Andrew studied.
Andrew is the son of a fellow student in my Mass Communications Theory class at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She (Andrew's mom) has her own weblog, but didn't tell me about it even though it's quite interesting. Promoting her son ahead of herself: You've got to respect that.

Harvard Weblog Project Moving Along

Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society has an interesting project going. Among other things, they're going to host weblogs for anyone with a harvard.edu e-mail address and host weekly in-person discussiong meetings about blogging.

I hope someone blogtranscribes the weekly meetings.
(Via Scripting News)

School Superintendent Uses Manila Blog Software

The Kern County (Calif.) schools superintendent uses Manila weblog software to power a beautifully designed and full-featured site. (via Scripting News)

Bryan Bell designed the site and has this to say: "This completes the transition to Manila we started 2 years ago. The homepage was last on the list, because we decided to do it back to front. We converted every department in the organizations and nearly all of our client schools. I must have trained 300 people on how to manage their Manila site."

BlogSpot AdWords Update

The AdWords now above BlogSpot-hosted ThesisBlog are (topic background here):

Hosting
Business Web Hosting Solutions for Small Businesses. 24/7 Support!

No Limit Hosting $9.95
8 years in biz, own our own data center, control panel, no usage cap

Please let me know which AdWords you see. E-mail jmfulwider at hotmail dot com.

Blog Talk at PC Forum

There's interesting blog talk, upon which I may comment later, in Cory Doctorow's transcript of the Social Software panel discussion at PC Forum 2003.

Blogger Gets Mailblocks to Change Its Terms of Service

Blogger (and Traditional Journalism columnist and frequently misspelled last name owner) Dan Gillmor got the new "guaranteed spam free" e-mail provider Mailblocks to change its terms of service, which allowed the company to spam its customers (!). Founder Phil Goldman responded and acted roughly two days after Gillmor's first post appeared.
Mailblocks' updated privacy policy still looks a little spam-friendly to this legal layman.

Technorati Notifies Bloggers (Me, Anyway) of Stupid Errors

Technorati proves its uber-goodness every day. The latest example: Technorati's link cosmos for ThesisBlog shows inbound links from my restaurant reviews and travel stories blog, Fulwider's Food and Travel. This is not, as one might suspect, intentional shameless self-promotion. It's shameless stupidity; I've been accidentally posting ThesisBlog entries to Food and Travel. Didn't pay close enough attention to my w.bloggar editing window. I'll delete the erroneous entries soon, which should bring ThesisBlog's inbound links rating down to an accurate two. (Thanks for the links, Doc Searls and Newsisfree.)

BlogSpot AdWords Update

Some new developments on the BlogSpot AdWords front (topic background here):

Doc Searls reports he's seeing the same AdWords in the banner ad atop ThesisBlog each time he visits.

The AdWords I'm seeing when I visit ThesisBlog have changed again. They're now:

Free Software Downloads
Many free software programs for download to your computer.

Blurty Free Web Journals
Get your own online diary for free. Meet friends in Blurty communities.

Doc Searls talked to Google co-founder Sergey Brin about whether the BlogSpot ads are indeed AdWords. Doc reports, "He said yes. I also asked if Google was after a kind of holy grail: Advertising people might actually demand; and he said yes (in a few more words) to that, too."
Here's hoping Doc posts more regarding his conversation with Sergey.

Employment, Not Censorship, Stopped Kevin Sites' Warblog

Rebecca Blood has this well-reasoned commentary on CNN's demand that its employee, Kevin Sites, stop his independent warblog:

Freedom of the press . . is freedom from interference and censorship by the government--not a freedom guaranteed to reporters from interference by the news agencies for which they work . . . .
Kevin is in Iraq as a member of the press corps at the behest of his employer, CNN. They are paying his expenses, and they are the reason he has been provided with press credentials allowing him access to the people and places he is reporting on. . . .
. . . Does Kevin's contract contain a non-compete clause? If so, his weblog is in direct violation of his contract. Does his contract specify that any and all work pertaining to his field, performed by Kevin while in the employ of CNN, is the intellectual property of CNN? (Don't laugh--I know of two people in two different professions who were asked to sign such a contract as a condition of employment.) If so, Kevin's warblog is in direct violation of his contract. At any time has Kevin been unavailable to CNN because he was working on his weblog? If so, this is a work performance issue, and CNN has every right to insist that he focus on his job instead of his personal site. . . .
There are issues here, but from the information available, censorship and freedom of the press are not among them.

AdWord-Watching in a BlogSpot Blog

Doc Searls offers an interesting suggestion in this post about my post on Google AdWords:

I wonder how much the adwords will change on John's blog as more link to him, or as the subjects of his blogs change, or as the searches that lead to his blog change? It'll be interesting to watch. Adword-watching in one's blog might turn into a kind of sport, no?

Indeed it might. I'm hesitant to begin another daily blog-maintenance task, but Google's AdWords on BlogSpot sites like ThesisBlog do bear watching given all the "what does this mean" speculation about Google's acquisition of Blogger.
So, today I see these two ads when I view ThesisBlog:

Free Software Downloads
Many free software programs for download to your computer.

Unlimited Web Templates
Download hundreds of templates and thousands of graphics for $24.95!

Interestingly, when I highlight just the "Free Software Downloads" text to copy it into my w.bloggar window, I get taken to the ad's target site. But when I highlight both ads at the same time, nothing happens. There doesn't seem to be an "on mouseover jump to target" functionality, as I've held my cursor over the ad link for a while and nothing happened.

ThesisBlog readers: Please let me know which ads you see atop this page. E-mail jmfulwider at hotmail dot com.

Thanks, Doc

Doc Searls kindly linked my post on BlogSpot ads, giving me my first and only inbound link listing on Technorati.

Curiously, ThesisBlog's Cosmos listing lists the inbound link, but reports there are "0 Inbound Blogs, 0 Inbound Links to ThesisBlog >> Research on Weblogging."

Glenn "InstaPundit" Reynolds on Warblogging

The first-hand stuff is great. It's unfiltered and unspun. That doesn't mean it's unbiased. But people feel like they know where the bias is coming from. You don't have to spend a lot of time trying to find a hidden agenda.

-- Glenn "InstaPundit" Reynolds, via this Washington Post article, via this boingboing post.

Actually Useful Ads in BlogSpot

Doc Searls points out that the banner ads on BlogSpot sites (like ThesisBlog) contain Google AdWord-like messages that actually pertain to things which interest the blog's owner. For example, in the ad running right now above ThesisBlog (when I view it, anyway), the top item is "Free Software Downloads." I've been looking recently (mostly unsuccessfully) for freeware and shareware to use on my Dell Axim X5 PDA. Mousing over the ad, I get a tooltip saying "go to www.downloadalot.com." Kind of them to tell me in advance where I'm going; I might just click.
Says Doc: ". . . I believe they risk achieving a holy grail of sorts: advertising consumers . . . actually want."

Doc links back to a prescient thought of his from 1997:

Esther Dyson says the big challenge today is not to add value but to subtract garbage. Most advertising is garbage. It's hard to imagine a less efficient way to communicate, or one that wastes more time and materials. Even direct mail, presumably one of the most personal and efficient forms of advertising, is so unwelcome and wasteful that its nickname ? junk mail ? is a synonym for garbage.

The BlogSpot banners have subtracted garbage in at least these ways:

They're light on graphics

They describe their offerings succinctly

They don't rely on annoying animated GIFs, Flash animations, or sounds

Google rose to prominence in part on the strength of its no-nonsense, quick-loading front page. It sells text-only ads (AdWords) I (an active advertising avoider) have clicked on repeatedly. There may be a downside to Google's increasing influence over Web advertising, but I haven't seen it yet.

BookFilter: MetaFilter for Dead Trees

Some folks today launched BookFilter, which the first post describes as:

Just like MetaFilter except we discuss books instead of Metas. Yeah, I know they don't discuss Metas there. They discuss Iraq.

Aptly targeted humor aside, BookFilter indeed looks to be exactly like MetaFilter, only it filters just one topic -- books, primarily the dead-tree editions of the same.

It's powered by FreeFilter, a tool with an eponymous MetaFilter-like site that promotes itself and notes the existence of other MetaFilter clone-generating tools.

As if the MetaFilter links were not piling up enough already, care to guess where I found the link to BookFilter, a MetaFilter clone powered by software that creates MetaFilter clones and is advertised on a site that's a clone of MetaFilter?
On MetaFilter.

Heritage Foundation Sending Reports to Bloggers

Rebecca Blood says the Heritage Foundation is sending her and other bloggers information about its studies, which take a conservative policy view. I'll have to disagree with her opinion in her post on the matter:

I'm also of the opinion that both the product marketers and the idea marketers are vastly overrating the level of influence weblogs have attained.

To the contrary, they're catching the beginning of a very large wave. Weblogs have at least two value propositions that will make them increasingly popular and influential. One, they filter the Web so readers need not wade through a list of news sites to find information of interest to them. (Notice how short my Daily Web Reading list is; if I didn't have Slashdot to point me to Wired stories, I'd have to read Wired each day.) Two, they serve as an outlet for people to express their love of everything having to do with themselves.

Further, weblog publishing will increase to a degree not previously seen -- for better or for worse -- when America Online launches its own weblog tool later this year.

Those who have studied the "hypodermic theory" of mass communications may appreciate Blood's turn of phrase in guessing the Heritage Foundation's purpose in sending these updates: "[to] inject their viewpoint directly into the blogosphere."

Thoughts in the early and mid-20th Century that mass media messages had a direct, "hypodermic" effect on audiences have since been disproved. But I believe Blood is right that Heritage wants to inject its message into the blogosphere. At the very least, it should be successful in gaining mindshare as like-minded bloggers, eager for material with which to update their blogs, repeat its message verbatim. Further, its message will spread even on blogs maintained by bloggers elsewhere on the political spectrum, as they post contrary opinions and link to the material with which they disagree.

In earlier media forms, this kind of instant, direct access to a group's message wasn't available. See something you agree or disagree with on television or in the newspaper, or hear it on the radio? You had to go search for additional information. But with the compulsive hyperlinking inherent in most blogs, the additional information -- often an interest group's unfiltered message -- is just a click away.

BlogTalk: A European Conference on Weblogs

Over 65 papers are slated for presentation at BlogTalk - A European
Conference on Weblogs, which is both a site and an event scheduled for May 23-24 in Vienna, Austria.
The pile of material I must read grows.

And It Does Work!

things magazine's "links in new windows" code worked flawlessly on ThesisBlog. The magazine credits the code to randomwalks.com.

Links in New Window Tool in Blog Sidebar

Update: (03/20/03 11:06 a.m.) Rebecca Blood tells me Randomwalks.com "pioneered allowing users to choose to open weblog links in a new window in january 2000, according to my archives http://www.rebeccablood.net/archive/2000/01.html."

---

things magazine offers the first instance I've seen in my brief blogging research of a links sidebar with a "links in new windows" checkbox. Handy; saves Windows users from right-clicking to get the Open in New Window context menu option. I'll have to see whether the code will work on ThesisBlog.
The blog, "a bi-annual journal of new writings about objects," also offers a clean, pleasing design, though the light-blue linktext may be a bit too hard to see against the white background.

Social-Network Mapping Tools

This Slashback entry on Slashdot offers a list of links to social-network mapping tools under the entertaining headline, "Why meet people in real life?"

Quickly Locating Groups and Group Leaders with E-mail Analysis

Researchers at Hewlett-Packard have found a way to quickly identify "communities of practice" within an organization -- that is, people who have similar beliefs and goals and work together to achieve them. Further, the researchers' algorithm, run "in a matter of hours" on a desktop computer, can find leaders of these groups. This excerpt from the paper's introduction, contained in this .PDF document (296KB), do a better job than the abstract (available in HTML here) of explaining understandably what they've achieved at HP:

. . . The method uses email data to construct a
network of correspondences, and then discovers the communities by partitioning
this network in a particular way . . . . The only pieces of
information used from each email are the names of the sender and receiver (i.e.,
the ?to:? and ?from:? fields), enabling the processing of a large number of emails
while minimizing privacy concerns.
We describe an experiment performed within our own organization, HP Labs,
using nearly one million email messages collected over a period of roughly two
months. The method was able to identify small communities within this 400-
person organization in a matter of hours, running on a standard Linux desktop PC.
In addition, we utilized the network of correspondence to identify leadership
within these communities.