Month: May 2004

Thanks to Dave Winer for pulling Scott Rosenberg’s 1999 Salon column Fear of Links out of the past. I’m happy to say I work for a publication which does believe in linking, and always has… but this kind of reminder never hurts, and we could always make more intelligent connections.

News.com just introduced News around the Web, an expansion of, and a riff, on the More news around the Web section which has anchored the home page for seven-plus years. More news around the Web collects hand-picked editors’ selections of interesting stories elsewhere. News around the Web employs a more hands-off approach, casting a wider net. It’s in a first incarnation, but I’m glad to start learning what works (and what doesn’t) from a real audience. One thing I do know is that links work. If these links save readers time, then we’re off to the right start.

Share your thoughts on News around the Web.

Skim the blogs, read some. Skim the WSJ, read some. Skim the SF Chronicle, read the comics and the sports section. Read Sports Illustrated cover to cover. Try to find time to read a few pages of The Nutmeg of Consolation.

Oh yeah… spend some time with the kids and wife, before and after a 10-hour day at work. Hmmmm… maybe it will be a good thing when this initial run of the WSJ ends, since it only came about because of expiring airlines miles.

For Some, the Blogging Never Stops [NYT]

Indeed, if a blog is likened to a conversation between a writer and readers, bloggers like Mr. Wiggins are having conversations largely with themselves. [emphasis added]

Me: What do you think?
I: Ignore them… they’re not part of this.
(insert awful comedy routine here)

Mr. Jarvis characterizes the blogging way of life as a routine rather than an obsession. “It’s a habit,” he said. “What you’re really doing is telling people about something that they might find interesting. When that becomes part of your life, when you start thinking in blog, it becomes part of you.”

Thinking in blog. I like that.

Wondering if this NYT article will be linked to by every blogger in the world… what do you think? (Oh, wait, I’m talking to myself.)

Shrek 2 was a collection of amusing outtakes, with references galore to other movies and pop culture icons/brands. But it wasn’t as much fun as the first one. I will say that the trailer for Spiderman 2 looked pretty good.

Intolerable Cruelty is a somewhat funny blend of the Coen brothers, George Clooney, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. I thought Clooney and Zeta-Jones did a great ‘arch’ and the black comedy about divorce and divorce lawyers almost works throughout. But I thought Down with Love was better. Still, George Clooney continues to make a good impression in comedies, from Ocean’s Eleven to Out of Sight to Three Kings. (Footnote: I didn’t know they were making Ocean’s Twelve. But I guess I’m not surprised.)

SportsColumn.com just re-launched in its 2.0 version. Much stronger because the site now lets you (the reader) filter what the various authors contribute. The quality was uneven in the past, since it was dependent on the author. When Vin Diec, the owner of the site, has something to say, it’s usually worth a read. Now there is a mechanism for sifting the wheat from the chaff. I never want to read chaff… I read too much as it is. I’m impressed that Vin got SportsColumn mentioned in this Seattle Post-Intelligencer article: Going blog wild: Anyone with a computer and an opinion can launch a media startup. It was back in February, but at least they spelled both his name and the site’s name correctly.

Seriously, try it out.

I look at log file summaries for clock every few weeks, just scanning to give myself a snapshot. This morning, I decided to take a look at the actual log files, as I do more often at work. As always, a few interesting lines in there, and this was just from the first 7 hours of Sunday, May 23.

Lots of requests from Cyveillance (63.148.99.233), as Gulker mentioned a year ago. Makes even a lazy man want to do something to block them, just because.

A few reasonable requests from “Pompos/1.3 http://dir.com/pompos.html”. Never heard of the Dir.com search engine. Looks French.

Returning to the summary, I learn that just over one-third of my pageviews are requests for my RSS file. Hardly a surprise… could be higher, since I do full-text in the feed. More than 60% of my entries and exits are on the RSS file, so some bots or some people are turning a few pages per session. Glad to see that 30% of the requests received a 304 (not modified) HTTP code, saving me a tiny bit of bandwidth. Storage, more than bandwidth, is my issue, but I don’t want to delete/export these logs unless absolutely necessary.

101 Google searchers made their way to clock so far this month, outpacing MSN and Yahoo 10x. Top search? Twelve people found this site in May by typing “pulo prabang” into Google and then visiting the first result, where I wondered where that island is (from the Aubrey-Maturin series, to which I’m about to return).

I have better things to do, but it is interesting… you start to see some of the appeal of FeedBurner when you try to get a handle on what people (not just machines) are actually reading. It’s not simple.

Bernie DeKoven’s Funlog reminds me of roofball, including a link to Roofball.com. Wow… brings me back to high school, which is where I played. We never used a tennis ball, which the Roofball.com site illustrates. Instead, we followed the DeKoven quote:

“The best roofball ball is one of those cheap, light-weight jobs, about 10 inches in diameter, with all the swirly colors. You find them at the drugstore, dollar store, toy store, and even the supermarket when they’re “in season”.

Also, you could not let the ball hit the ground at all. I wasn’t a master, but I held my own.

Childless couple told to try sex reads the headline I saw on Wednesday. Another one that makes you wonder whether it’s ripped straight from The Onion, but… we’ll hope it’s accurate, even though Google News only finds two references to the story, of which this Ananova reference is one.

Update: It’s a hoax. Glad I was skeptical… but I still posted it, spreading the meme.

Jon Stewart’s commencement address at William & Mary, which he attended as an undergraduate and returned to to receive a honorary doctorate. Seems real, posted on the actual college website. I’ll go with it being real… and it’s funny even if it’s a hoax, a la the fake “Kurt Vonnegut” commencement address. One clip from Stewart:

Let’s talk about the real world for a moment. We had been discussing it earlier, and IáI wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is I guess as good a time as any. I don’t really know to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it.

Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry.