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)