I appreciated reading the hardcover copy of The Cathedral & The Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revoluionary, even as I recognized some of the ironies of the act. First, the hardcover book, published in 1999, is out of print. Second, Eric Raymond published every essay in the book for free…

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I’m not sure I get it. Via The RSS Weblog, I read about Blogarithm, which lets you know via e-mail that a blog you follow has updated. Huh? I do know RSS is not (yet!) for everyone, but I hadn’t thought there still was even a sliver of market opportunity for doing update notification via…

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Paul Ford, in Followup/Distraction, says there “at least” two kinds of distractions, wide and narrow. My abstracted definitions follow (though you’ll want to read the short essay): Wide = time wasted you will never get back. Narrow = time wisely spent chasing a thread whose unraveling may tie up a loose end. Can you tell…

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I’m nearly caught up on the life I put on hold while News.com was re-introducing itself a short while ago. Carving pumpkins, reading feeds, exercising (a little bit), and thinking about various tidbits I want to blog. But not tonight. Well, except for this Fortune article from Friday, where David Kirkpatrick tell readers about Big…

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What kind of day is it going to be when you wake up to find Slashdot comment on the possibility of The Princess Bride being made into a musical? I think a good day. There are the usual posts about why this non-technical piece of rumor/news was posted on Slashdot, and one commenter called the…

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OK, it’s been a long haul, but the News.com redesign is live, with new services, a new look, a new width, and a new tagline… just the award-winning reporting stays the same. Just for good measure, we threw in a list, the Blog 100. Everybody loves to hate lists, either because they are on them…

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First, I got excited that a Slashdot thread started about The Big Picture. Then I read the thread, and realized the initial post threw out the word “ontology” and led, oh, just about everyone down the wrong path. Ontology is not included in The Big Picture. Move on, start anew, look at the feature, and…

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Sometimes you need to step away from the computer and tech, as I did last night. The kitchen is rarely my milieu, but with a four-ingredient recipe for making ginger beer, I decided it was worth the risk. Ginger beer is fantastically tart: think ginger ale squared, with less carbonation. Several weeks ago I clipped…

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I don’t have anything new to add to the inside baseball discussion on TimesSelect, but I did find Jay Rosen’s Charging for Columnists: Notes and Comment on the Launch of TimesSelect worth the read, and the link to Steve Outing’s column at Poynter: “TimesSelect: Big Revenue Play or Dangerous Move?, where Eliot is quoted, was…

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As some have noticed publicly, we’re running a public beta at work. Nothing like testing your assumptions with real customers (even a small fraction). If you come across the beta, via whatever means, please do click the link at the top and send feedback. Lots of people are listening. This beta won’t last forever, but…

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