“This Would Make A Really Great Blog Post…”

A comic from XKCD:

“I feel like I’m wasting my life on the internet. Let’s walk around the world.”

“Sounds good.”

[panels showing the world's great beauty, a truly grand adventure]

“And yet all I can think of is ‘this will make for a great Livejournal entry.’”

We Just Have To Go Do The Work

Nicholas Lemann, in a story on blogging and citizen journalism in the August 7 issue of The New Yorker:
[N]ew media in their fresh youth [produce] a distinctive, hot-tempered rhetorical style.
…transformative in their capabilities…a mass medium with a short lead time — cheap…and easily accessible to people of all classes and political inclinations.
And quoting author Mark [...]

thenonist

How can I not appreciate thenonist’s link dumps and other posts when they’re illustrated with works like those above?
The men in suits come from May 29. June 4 offers us these funny trading cards and a gallery of horror movie damsels (in distress, of course). June 5 offers a good look at sincerity among other [...]

Blogging From Basements

My buddy Cliff emailed me excited about the following quote he found on the Yahoo Finance message boards:
Sun vs Dell
All you need to know about Dell & Sun was predicted 8 months ago by some blogger in his parent’s basement. The draft ads are cool:
http://spiralbound.net/2005/09/15/sun-talks-some-smack/
How come the big brokerage house analysts can’t figure this stuff [...]

Higher Ed Blog Con (and other things I should have posted about last month)

I meant to post about this weeks ago, but HigherEd BlogCon has now come and gone. It had sections on teaching, libraries, CRM, and web development. (Aside: why must we call it “admissions, alumni relations, and communications & marketing” instead of the easier to swallow “CRM”?)
The “events” are over, but everything is online, and most [...]

The Web Is Not A One-Way Medium

Anybody who questioned the Pew Internet and American Life report about how teens use the internet and how they expect conversations and interactivity from the online services they use might do well to take a look at this comment on my Chernobyl Tour story:
Student Looking for Info that your not give us
February 3rd, 2006 10:11
you [...]

To Blog Or Not To Blog

A friend revealed his reticence to blogging recently by explaining that he didn’t want to create a trail of work and opinions that could limit his future career choices. Fair point, perhaps.
We’ve all heard stories of bloggers who’ve lost jobs as a result of the content of their posts. And if you believe the [...]

My Cultural Go-To Guy

Most of my reading is non-fiction, so I depend on Bob Garlitz to keep me current with the rest of the literary world and a bit of the art world.
bob, bob garlitz, garlitz, art, literature, stylist, blog

Who’s Afraid Of Wikipedia?

Arguments about Wikipedia’s value and authority will rage for quite a while, but it’s interesting to see where the lines are being drawn.
On the one had we’ve got a 12 year-old pointing out errors in Encyclopaedia Britannica (via Many2Many) and now on the other side we’ve got John Seigenthaler, a former editorial page editor at [...]

Blog Value

The sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL last month for $25+ million got a lot of bloggers excited. Tristan Louis did the math and put the sale value into perspective against the number of incoming links the the Weblogs Inc. properties. It’s an interesting assertion of the value of the Google Economy, no?
The various properties [...]

Tech Tuesdays: Blogs and Blogging

Note: these are my presentation notes for a brown bag discussion with library faculty and university IT staff today. This may become a series…[[pageindex]]
More: my presentation slides and the Daily Show video.
Introduction
Public awareness of blogs seems to begin during the years of campaigning leading up to the 2004 election, but many people credit bloggers for [...]

bsuite_geocode Plugin For WordPress

I’m a big fan of the WP Geo plugin, but I want more.
My biggest complaint is that I want to insert coordinates using Google Maps or MultiMap URLs, rather than insert them in the modified story editor. So I wrote a bit of code that reads through the URLs in a post, finds the “maps.google” [...]

Editing WordPress “Pages” Via XML-RPC

WordPress’s Pages open the door to using WP as a content management system. Unfortunately, Pages can’t be edited via XML-RPC blogging apps like Ecto. This might be a good thing, but I’m foolhardy enough to try working around it.
Here’s how:
Find a text editor you like and open up the wp-includes/functions-post.php file.
in the wp_get_recent_posts() function, change [...]

Linking Bias

Danah Boyd posted about the biases of links over at Many2Many the other day. She looked for patterns in a random set of 500 blogs tracked by Technorati as well as the 100 top blogs tracked by Technorati. She found patterns in who keeps blogrolls and who is in them, as well as patterns about [...]

Faces

I stumbled upon captnkurt’s Information Nation where he popped a link over to Eric Myer’s Stereotypes. The gimic — and it’s a fun one — is that you can mix and match bits of faces. I don’t know why I like the combo above so much, but, anyway.
The thing about this is that it reminds [...]