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![[cIb] rss 2.0 newsfeed](/images/blogpics/rss.gif){kind=small}
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« Thursday « September 30, 2004
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First Presidential Debate (2004)
(Google News/Search)
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So, who won? Seemed like a tie to me, but if anything we should now understand: these are two different guys.
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Internet powers tonight's Presidential debate
(CNN.com)
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Beyond this careful choreography, the audience is ready to jump on any gaffs, mistakes or juicy remarks that may slip past candidates' lips.CNN's editors will probably fix this before I finish blogging it, but when did 'gaffe' as in 'mistake' become 'gaff'? I sure hope Kerry doesn't make those kind of mistakes; rocket scientist Dubya certainly will. (treopost)
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« Wednesday « September 29, 2004
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Taxi
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"Chicago's" Queen Latifah and "Saturday Night Live's" Jimmy Fallon team up in this non-stop action-comedy.Two guys driving around in a car ... wow, how original.
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« Tuesday « September 28, 2004
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Social Networking Map: Black Bloggers
(Formica blog)
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I drew relationships between myself and anyone with whom I've communicated, and between those persons who seem to have a relationship ? in real life or online? as evidenced by back linking and/or comments left on weblogs. I realize that the Black blogosphere is vast (and continues to expand daily); I also know that there are a few key people (Huny, anyone?) who were left off the map. As time and my obsession permits, I'd like to draw a larger, more detailed map.I'm always late to these things, colored people's time, ya know. Cecily has started something that I've wanted to do for a while. It's a social networking map of some bloggers who just happen to be Black. It doesn't mean that they only talk about Black issues, or even hang out together, but it does represent one way to group bloggers along certain lines. Maybe arbitrary, maybe not. I think not. And I think it's important because by publishing on the Web what we're all actually doing is building is a web of knowledge, opinion, and perhaps even influence. Being able to see the bigger picture of is important to understanding the dimensions of that web. I hope Cecily doesn't mind if I take her work and run with it at some point in the future.
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The Age of iPod Politics
(Time.com)
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The problem is, American politics are un-American. At least, they no longer fit the a la carte ethos of iPod America. You and I can't each have our own President. We can't have our own Supreme Court or our own assault-weapons law. If you don't like the USA Patriot Act, you can't delete it from your digital playlist.My take: eventually, one ring will rule them all. This has been foretold, somewhere.
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« Monday « September 27, 2004
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Guide to Springfield USA
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A highly detailed map of the Simpsons' hometown.Hundreds of years into the future, we'll look back at "The Simpsons" as one of the greatest American literary creations ... and this map proves it.
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If RSS ain't broke...
(ZDNet)
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Gillmor: "Just as blogging drove the initial adoption of RSS aggregators, so too will moblogging (short for mobile blogging) drive the addition of rich media capabilities to the RSS information router."Another view of the rising tide lifting all RSS boats. Comparing RSS polling to E-mail polling is appropriate, I think. Feeds need to be deployed intelligently. Maybe aggregating 1000 newsfeeds into one isn't such a great idea. Contrast with: Bandwidth Cost of RSS. I learned a new term today, too: "iPod platform."
b/w: Scripting News
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« Friday « September 24, 2004
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My Tuesday with the World Economy Forum
(Joho the Blog)
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Weinberger: "These are smart people and I liked talking with them. They were willing to listen. Some, in fact, even agree to varying degrees. But they are riding beasts that are in agony, and the Internet will be a sticky stain on the bottom of their massive hooves.We are doomed."Weinberger is one of the Cluetrain Manifesto guys, and certainly one of the most thoughtful minds in the blogosphere. Hearing this report, of the discussion he shared with the power elite of media, sheds a tiny bit of light on why so much of today's media -- movies, TV shows, books, popular music, magazines, newspapers, etc. -- are so boring, deadening and dull: these media "barons" aren't interested in creating better product. They just want to stick with the same model that made them rich, even as technology's relentless progress changes the game every day. The way they solve that problem is by using their massive financial clout to have lopside laws written in their favor. Behold the invisible government. Assymetry is their game. They can only conceive a future where they are in control, and where they decide everything for the rest of us. It is possible to be totalitarian without jackbooted goon squads: just control hearts and minds, especially minds. Do that by controlling who gets to access to the tools. That's the vibe I get from "big media" these days. It's all about control.
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Kilts
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File under: 'Off-color Humor'I don't know why I find this so funny, but I read this on a joke website I landed on by accident while googling and I've been laughing all morning, so I had to blog it for posterity:
Why do the Scottish wear kilts?
Thanks, I'll be blogging here all this week.
Because sheep can hear a zipper from a mile away!
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« Tuesday « September 21, 2004
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The Invisible Electorate
(SFGate.com)
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Outdated polling methods seem innocent enough -- that is, until you realize it's the common way the U.S. political establishment renders America's nonwhite voters -- 40 percent of the American people, according to the latest U.S. Census -- statistically insignificant. That's more effective than the Klan's methods.All you have to do is look at how the Democrats treat the Black vote: they're only interested in our votes around election time, then play lip service afterwards. On the national level, politics is still largely a white, and a male game. Kerry or Bush, once in office, they'll still push an agenda that only considers white interests. Black, Latino and Asian voters must wake up and recognize these facts when considering their voting choices. What is the matrix, Neo? It's control.
b/w: negrophile.
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Movie listings
(kottke.org)
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"I've redesigned the movies section of this site."Man, that's a lot of movies! I have written, not quite as many movie reviews, a few that live on my site, as well as on Epinions.com, remember them? Kottke's implementation is a nice, simple approach that will play well in a "micro-content" world, but maybe I'm missing something: where's the crunchy, XML structure behind the scenes?
b/w: marc's voice
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The Benefactor
(PopMatters)
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The Benefactor reinforces a familiar capitalist power dynamic: when you have money, you can do whatever you want...[the players] were just told to show up and "play the game," difficult when you don't know the rules. When you strip away his rhetoric and flimsy efforts to transform banal activities like playing Jenga into "metaphors," what's left is... well, not a whole lot.I was trying to put into words what I thought of this show after 'skimming' -- which is possible with a PVR -- two episodes, but this review summarized my inchoate thoughts, and the truth of this waste of airtime, perfectly: the show is asinine. I had higher hopes, given that Cuban's always appeared to be one of the more interesting sports franchise owners, among other things, to burst onto the scene in recent years. Well, boy, was I wrong; not Dan Rather-type wrong, but just wrong that the guy was interesting. He's just another rich *sshole. Which begs the rhetorical question: can one become rich and not become an *sshole in the process, or is that part of the deal when you sell your soul to Satan's cousin, Mammon?
Now I'm drawn to watching the remainder of this show like a rubbernecker spying a 15-car pileup, or like a couch potato watching Jerry Springer: it's so bad you can't help but tune in again, just to see what stupid sh*t they'll come up with next. And the worse thing about the cast is: they take this crap. A game of Jenga for $1 million? A board of "advisors" made up of 6-year-olds deciding your fate, based on your favorite candy? (I will give Cuban a little credit for mocking Trump's show when he told the second graders that he'd meet them in his boardroom to decide which of his "companies" they can run.) What's that line from The Great Gatsby: the rich get richer but the poor get -- children.
These guys, with their hyperinflated egos -- Cuban, Trump, and later, on Fox, Branson -- flaunt their wealth in front of all our faces every day. Isn't that enough? Of course not, because now, with these reality shows they've proven that they can become social engineers, and turn normal, everyday people in literal playthings, simply because they can count on finding enough greedy people to fall for their offer. $1 million, to Cuban, a $250K job to Trump, come on, to multibillionaires like them is chump change. That's like me handing someone a $20 bill: here, dude, who's your daddy, who's your benefactor? Only thing is, I can't make regular people jump through hoops to get it. Moreover, I wouldn't want to. But to them, it is the ultimate game: human chess, played with volunteer pawns. It's the rich exploiting the not-rich for their entertainment and, no doubt, profit. Now where have we seen that before?
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« Monday « September 20, 2004
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The Lynching of Dan Rather
(GregPalast.com)
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Journalist Greg Palast: "This is not a story about Dan Rather. The white millionaire celebrity can defend himself without my help. This is really a story about fear, the fear that stops other reporters in the US from following the evidence about this Administration to where it leads. American news guys and news gals, practicing their smiles, adjusting their hairspray levels, bleaching their teeth and performing all the other activities that are at the heart of US TV journalism, will look to the treatment of Dan Rather and say, 'Not me, babe.'"U.S. mainstream media is all about the propaganda. But we have no one to blame but ourselves. Think about it: in this country it's not acceptable to openly discuss politics. So if you don't even talk about it with your friends, neighbors and colleagues, why T.F. should we expect our media to ask tough questions? We don't want the answers, because they're probably too complicated for our charge-now-pay-later minds to handle.
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« Sunday « September 19, 2004
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Bloggers Declare War on Comment Spam, but Can They Win?
(Online Journalism Review)
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Winer: "I think a blog is a publication, and publications have proven that letters to the editor are useful. But blogs with comments are not letters to the editor. Letters to the editor are edited, they're selected, and that selection process is a very important aspect of it."In full agreement here. While I do think that thoughtful comments can enhance a particular blog post/article/story, or whatever you call it, I think it's an incredibly rare occurence when unsolicited comments add to a weblog. Create your own blog -- you can still set one up for free in many, many places. On the other hand, spam, in all its forms, isn't going away, unless the general population of Net users becomes incredibly more discriminating, which is probably not likely. To be successful, spam, like any "marketing" pitch, only needs to hit its mark a tiny fraction of the time. Spam is a cancer tailor-made for Internet: it's a medium that enhances anonymity, which begets a lack of accountability, which, apparently, creates the perfect breeding ground for scam artists... and their victims: people looking for "deals" and easy answers.
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BBEdit 8
(Daring Fireball)
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The point of BBEdit is not just what it looks like or what it does, but how it feels.Just a post for my "inner geek." BBEdit is one of the reasons why I stay with the Mac. For all intents and purposes, it's my digital swiss army knife.
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« Friday « September 17, 2004
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Opening up TV, a new API
(counternotions blog)
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[B]egin to think of its TV programs not as inert spectacles confined to set airtimes and reruns, but as malleable digital applications: extensible, interactive and networkable.I love this kind of thinking. Sure, it may be a little naive to expect the TV dinosaurs to change, but just look at what PVRs are doing to the way folks watch TV: people are getting used to the notion of creating their own programming schedules, and since that represents progress for consumers its going to be the wave of the future. Haven't the TV networks learned that you can't fight progress?
b/w: PaidContent.org
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« Thursday « September 16, 2004
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Klaatu barada nikto
(The Day the Earth Stood Still Reference Library)
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There are no bad sci-fi movies, only bad sci-fi audiences...
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« Wednesday « September 15, 2004
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Chi Modu
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Striking photography of Hip Hop icons, and more.(b/w Lynne d Johnson)
b/w: Lynne d Johnson blog
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The Fragmentation of Fashion II
(Corante: Customer Intelligence)
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"Consumers' newfound freedom to customize their lives -- from burning their own music CDs to publishing political commentary online -- is throwing basic business models of many businesses into disarray."Welcome to the on-demand world. Of course, this notion that the consumers are in complete control is nevertheless deeply-flawed; consumers are now demanding customizations to products, they still do not control what products are actually created, nor will they ever. So how much choice do they really have? You can take the candy-apple-red SUV, or the cobalt-blue-with-silver-speckles SUV ... but who said the consumers wanted (or needed) an SUV in the first place? Wow, what choice.
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fragmentation of fashion
(gapingvoid blog)
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"It's not just the product. People have to love the process as well."
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« Tuesday « September 14, 2004
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In Memoriam
(UppityNegro blog)
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"This is Val, Aaron's sister. My family and I are still working out what we wanted to say and do on the site. But at this time, however briefly, I thought it was best to confirm that yes, Aaron did pass away. We found out for certain yesterday."
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Donald please?
(Blog Maverick)
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Mark Cuban: "Nice job on Leno last night Donald. At least you admitted that you hadn't seen The Benefactor. But saying that it will fail. That's a little much Donald, even from you."Trump, born-rich billionaire, goes on Leno to diss Cuban's show. Cuban, self-made billionaire, goes on his blog to respond. Cuban's show seems a little more 'hand-made' but authentic -- perfect for the roll up your sleeves and let's order takeout allnighter entrepreneur vibe he's trying to kick; while Trump's show is produced by the master of RealityTV™ puppets, Mark Burnett. I'm recording both shows on ReplayTV, but which story do you think is more endearing to this blogger? I mean, come on, I'm never going to -- and I'll never want to -- hang out in the Hamptons with Trump's snotty, American brahmin ilk ... but I'll take courtside seats and kick it with Cuban any day!
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« Monday « September 13, 2004
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BugMeNot.com
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Bypass compulsory web registration.A few people may have been wondering what these "bugmenot" links I've been including with some recent posts are. Well, bugmenot.com is a brilliant idea for a site that aggregates generic usernames and passwords for all of those ridiculous (mostly) newspaper sites which require "free registration." These registrations are shams: now your name, age, and E-mail address are in yet another database, yet another marketing company has the ability to spam you with offers you don't want, and worse of all, these registrations don't lead to better content. All they do is put up barriers to entry of these sites. Ancient thinking in a modern medium where the competition is just one click away. I might not speak for many here, but if the content is good, I'll pay; for instance, I'm an ESPN.com and a WSJ.com subscriber; but let me see what you've got first. For all I know the content I want could just be a rehash of AP/UPI wires. These newspaper sites would do better to build services around their content that people would volunteer to register for, than to put a big padlock on their front door. That's very inviting. Bug me not, indeed.
Related:
BugMeNot and the Value of Registration
News Site Registration
Damage In Web Design
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People's Republic of Mac
(Wired News)
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"It was user-friendly. It looked cooler than anything else around at the time."
As Laosan, sinophile and dedicated Windoze lemming, woefully (or sarcastically?) observes from the mainland: Mac-love is international. This rare photo of yours truly proves what I'm talking about: how many non-Mac users take photos with their machines? My Mac, picture here is SilverSurfer, is like a pampered pet in my home. OK, so there may be some truth to the whole cult thing, and perhaps, it really is the apple from the Garden of Eden, but in the end, it's a Mac thing, you wouldn't understand. Hahaha!
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Long-Standing Tensions Fuel Darfur Conflict
(NPR Morning Edition)
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(AUDIO) For decades, the black African farmers of western Sudan were in conflict with Arab tribesmen over grazing and farming rights.I've been looking for something that would give me an overview of what the problem is in The Sudan, and I found this audio report on what's fueling the explosive situation. More digging is needed, but from this initial NPR report, it doesn't sound like Darfur's good place to be, especially if you're Black. Sound familiar? (Windows Media or Real Player, required)
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Marketers Chase Consumers Into The Bathroom
(AdAge.com)
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[M]arketers like Sony Music, Unilever and Nintendo along with major liquor companies and TV networks have been systematically elbowing aside the hookers and cranks to get their own commercial messages in front of a demographic with its pants lowered and its zipper undone. Deodorant brands, recording artists, video games and automakers are routinely buying space on the doors of toilet stalls or urinal walls.Sometimes, marketing is just sh*tty. (Registration required, or just bugmenot.)
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British Comics
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For the file.
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« Saturday « September 11, 2004
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Gmail for cellphones
(Engadget)
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Possibly very useful.
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« Friday « September 10, 2004
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Bandwidth cost of RSS
(Scripting News)
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Winer: "In the last few months I've been paying steadily increasing bandwidth surcharges due to exploding use of my RSS feed. HTML access is also increasing at substantial rates." Also see: "RSS traffic is growing out of control" (Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger).Oh cry me a river: you want a lot of people to read you, but when you've crossed some undefined traffic threshold you complain that it's costing too much; well, get rid of your feed then and shut up! RSS is great, long live RSS, but if I'd have to guess, only bloggers, Internet 'power users', haxxors, and the Slashdot crowd are really using the technology regularly. The total size of the folks who even understand the basic concepts behind RSS is probably just a tiny fraction of total Net users. So it's going to be up to developers to fix this problem before Grandma figures out what those little orange XML buttons mean, because that's when you'll have a real bandwidth problem. RSS is a lot like push -- remember Pointcast -- and push, he died when admins saw their networks getting chewed up; aside, though, I do love the idea of RSS inside of corporate and organizational networks as a way to share information. When RSS concepts start getting baked into set-top boxes, ala concepts like BitTorrent+RSS, these issues better be solved, or no greedy VCs will make any money and the technology will die a quick death. On the other hand, I guess there really is a price to pay -- in real dollars -- to be a popular, A-list blogger, something I wouldn't know a thing about. But like that pop philosopher J-Lo once said, even if you were broke, my love don't cost a thing.
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« Thursday « September 9, 2004
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UPN unveils 'America's Next Top Model 3' contestants
(Reality TV World)
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UPN has unveiled the identities of the finalists who will compete on the upcoming "third cycle" of its hit America's Next Top Model series, and as the show's ratings continue to grow, apparently so does the size of its cast.Oh boy, now that's a foine-lookin' cast! Well, I know what my ReplayTV unit will be gobbling up this fall, besides new Dave Chappelles: Survivor: Vanuatu, The Apprentice, The Benefactor, NFL PrimeTime, and America's Top Model 3, that's more than enough television for any working adult to ever watch ... but then, I have the commerical-skip feature. Five shows, that's basically it for my fall TV diet.
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What Bush means to African-Americans
(WorldNetDaily)
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Star Parker: "...I want blacks to be as in-your-face back to the Republican Party as Bush is to the nation and the world. Ownership and choice are far more critical for blacks than for rich white men."She's got a take on this that I haven't really considered here, but it's definitely food for thought. If anything, the Republicans are predictable, and unapologetic about their narrowed focus; it doesn't take much imagination to figure out what they're going to do. And that predictability can be leveraged.
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