TagCloud:”Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feed you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will
display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.”
Very, very nice. I gotta check this out. Some nice features we can use for Philly Future.
This poster, seen at train stations between Baltimore and DC on MARC, and uploaded by Articulatory Loop, is downright creepy. View image
A physical object oriented data interface. Interesting and eye opening. Download the mpg movie right here. via ericd.
I’m not sure if this is a public url or not, but Yahoo! has a terrific guide on how publishers can use Yahoo! to distribute content. Lots of RSS related tips.
The more I look at this, the more I think Yahoo! intends to compete with Feedburner and BlogAds.
Speaking of Yahoo!, Jeremy Zawodny gives us a real peak at product development at companies like Yahoo! that should be an eye opener for bloggers and journalists alike who are not familiar with how these things happen at large companies (like my own employer).
…I’m going to let you in on a little secret about how products are developed at large companies–even large Internet companies that some people think are fast on their feet.
Larger companies rarely can respond that quickly to each other. It almost never happens. Sure, they may talk a good game, but it’s just talk. Building things on the scale that Microsoft, Google, AOL, or Yahoo do is a complex process. It takes time.
Journalists like to paint this as a rapidly moving chess game in which we’re all waiting for the next move so that we can quickly respond. But the truth is that most product development goes on in parallel. Usually there are people at several companies who all have the same idea, or at least very similar ones. The real race is to see who can build it faster and better than the others.
Think about this the next time a news story makes it sound like Yahoo is trying to one-up Google. Or MSN is “responding” to last week’s launch of a new AOL service.
It’s easy to get caught up in the drama of it all. But reality is often quite different than what you read.
The man tells the truth.
“This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.”. So begins the “Downing Street Memo” and contained within is the revelation that “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” – way back in July of 2002!
A week or so ago I opined on how little attention this has garnered in the press.
Dan Gillmor has called the coverage a failure of U.S. media.
Now I’m not a blog triumphalist (err… maybe I am?) but PSoTD has been studiously tracking how bloggers have been keeping this story alive while organizations we trust to provide us with the news have passed on it.
At last count there were 2353 related blog postings (found via Technorati) vs. only 394 related news articles (found via Google News).
Why is that?
The Daily News Daily News: “Deep Throat is 91. He and the rigorous media that held a president accountable are footnotes in history. Their contemporary counterpart? Deep Indifference.”
Of note: Bolton is implicated in trying to keep weapons inspectors from Iraq: “John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat… A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani “had to go,” particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.”
Wow.
Today, if I have PSoTDs technique down, there were 616 mentions at Google News. A huge jump most likely due to yesterday’s Bush/Blair press conference where a brave reporter asked them directly about the memo.
Deep Throat, J-School and Newsroom Religion – PressThink:
…she “loved chasing stories and exposing public corruption and giving a voice to the downtrodden.” That’s the lord’s prayer in the mainline church of journalism right there. And I think it’s dead on too when McGrath (now a happy freelancer) adds: “I’m still that idealistic.”
Deans of Journalism, scribble a note: Investigative reporting, exposing public corruption, and carrying the mantle of the downtrodden were taught to McGrath not as political acts in themselves–which they are–and not as a continuation of the progressive movement of the 1920s, in which the cleansing light of publicity was a weapon of reform–which they are–but just as a way of being idealistic, a non-political truthteller in the job of journalist. (Which is bunk.)
This kind of instruction is guaranteed to leave future journalists baffled by the culture wars, and in fact the press has been baffled to find that it has political opponents. Well, jeez louise, so did the progressives of the 1920s! As far as the religion knows, none of this is happening. And J-schools–by passing the faith along but making little room for non-believers–are part of the problem.
In the newsroom faith that I have been describing, Watergate is not just a big, big story with a knock-out ending. It is the great redemptive tale believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. It is a story of national salvation: truth their only weapon, journalists save the day. Whether the story can continue to claim enough believers–and connect the humble to the heroic in journalism–is to my mind a big question. Whether it should continue is an even better question.
With the Mac moving to Intel and with the spate of stories on income mobility, I think the timing of my posting Influences – Wanamaker’s, the Mac and Me to be downright funny.
Flash Platform announcement.
Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind – New York Times:
…Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes – a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data – now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000.
Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000.
The alternative minimum tax, created 36 years ago to make sure the very richest paid taxes, takes back a growing share of the tax cuts over time from the majority of families earning $75,000 to $1 million – thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars annually. Far fewer of the very wealthiest will be affected by this tax.
…One way to understand the growing gap is to compare earnings increases over time by the vast majority of taxpayers – say, everyone in the lower 90 percent – with those at the top, say, in the uppermost 0.01 percent (now about 14,000 households, each with $5.5 million or more in income last year).
From 1950 to 1970, for example, for every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162, according to the Times analysis. From 1990 to 2002, for every extra dollar earned by those in the bottom 90 percent, each taxpayer at the top brought in an extra $18,000.
…While most economists recognize that the richest are pulling away, they disagree on what this means. Those who contend that the extraordinary accumulation of wealth is a good thing say that while the rich are indeed getting richer, so are most people who work hard and save. They say that the tax cuts encourage the investment and the innovation that will make everyone better off.
“In this income data I see a snapshot of a very innovative society,” said Tim Kane, an economist at the Heritage Foundation. “Lower taxes and lower marginal tax rates are leading to more growth. There’s an explosion of wealth. We are so wealthy in a world that is profoundly poor.”
But some of the wealthiest Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros and Ted Turner, have warned that such a concentration of wealth can turn a meritocracy into an aristocracy and ultimately stifle economic growth by putting too much of the nation’s capital in the hands of inheritors rather than strivers and innovators. Speaking of the increasing concentration of incomes, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, warned in Congressional testimony a year ago: “For the democratic society, that is not a very desirable thing to allow it to happen.”
Others say most Americans have no problem with this trend. The central question is mobility, said Bruce R. Bartlett, an advocate of lower taxes who served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. “As long as people think they have a chance of getting to the top, they just don’t care how rich the rich are.”
But in fact, economic mobility – moving from one income group to another over a lifetime – has actually stopped rising in the United States, researchers say. Some recent studies suggest it has even declined over the last generation.
Related:
The Mobility Myth (NYTimes) via Suburban Guerrilla:
“Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes – a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data – now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000. Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000.”
US Income Distribution, 1980-1999 (rebeccablood)
Even with the terrific writing I’ve seen encouraging the deprecation of blogrolls, I don’t think I could go on without one (or two). I’ve brought it back, on its own page (I had it there long ago), and added the Philly Future list. The urge is to turn it into a personal public aggregator. I mean – why use Bloglines when there are tools like Planet that make it easy for me maintain one myself?