Jeneane Sessum has been having issues with Technorati and is wondering why other bloggers haven’t spoken up.

allied: When We Are Hypocrites

…I’m getting a little miffed.

Because when it’s someone like Dell that fails to deliver, more brick than click, the bloggerati jump up and down and demand satisfaction. They call in the legit media and launch a feeding frenzy.

But when it’s me and the folks who comment here about Technorati’s weeks of non-usability, you hear a lot of wind. Is that because we’re supposed to all be friends? Not bite the hand that ranks us? Because Dave Sifry’s busier launching Live 8 sites and sending bloggers backstage, and announcing top 100s, than he is making sure that we can search beyond the new Technorati wasted-space homepage?

Is it okay to take Dell to the matt while making sure one of our own is immune?

No it’s not.

MAKE: Blog: ODEO – Mini-review and Screenshots:

I’m really impressed with the ease of use, download tools, recording (great use of Flash com server, finally!) cross platform and niceties of ODEO- I think this is going to get a lot of people publishing and downloading podcasts. ODEO + iTunes 4.9 + iPodder 2.1 + iPodderX + AudioBlog + LibSyn + everything else that’s going on right now, we’re finally going to fill our 40GB portable audio players, and will all be recording a lot of important things to share.

BusinessWeek: “The Myth of Open-Source”:

Q: Why is it a myth that a startup will get developers to hone the product for free?

A: Think for a second, who works for free? I think it gets perpetrated because it’s such a nice myth — you would get love and peace, the old hippie dream you know? And it’s mostly true, but across all of software, not just open-source, you have a pyramid of productivity. It’s an art still — a black art of creating great software.

At top of the pyramid, you have these top 2% of developers that are 10 times — in some cases 100 times — more productive than the rest. It’s true in proprietary developments like Microsoft and true of open-source too. The value is the QA [quality-assurance testing to make sure the software works and finding and fixing bugs]. They cover more ground than we could ever test.

Putting aside the QA, there are 20 people who write the kernel, and guess what? These guys are all professionals. If you get free, you want a lot of it. If you give free, you’re going to give until you’re tired of giving, and that’s exactly what happens in the open-source community.

Based on Rafe’s suggestion I picked up O’Reilly’s “Head First Design Patterns” and it was well worth reading.

Rafe had this to say on the book:

…So I’m in the process of reading the book, and I rate it as the best computer book I’ve ever read in the “instructional tool” category. I generally find it difficult to learn new things from books, I prefer to take a more hands on approach that involves tearing into code and looking at documentation when I have to. This book has been the exception to the rule — it’s designed to apply the most innovative thinking on how humans learn, and the approach is effective. The one danger the book runs into is appearing to be gimmicky, but if you can get past that, I think you’ll be impressed.

While I won’t call it the best computer book I’ve ever read in the “instructional tool” category (that honor would go to “Effective Java” by Joshua Bloch) it comes very close. Long term it might supercede it if for me as while the book may have its examples written in Java, I can immediately see how it applies to work I do in other environments like Flash and PHP.

Update: Rafe stopped by to say: “I loved Joshua Bloch’s book too. I just didn’t think of it as the same kind of book as Head First Design Patterns, since it’s a collection of best practices rather than a book that sets out to teach you about something step by step.”

Makes sense. These two books aren’t truely birds of a feather.

Now I’m off reading Lawrence Lessig’s “Free Culture” and Friends of Ed’s Kris Besley, Sham Bhangal’s Foundation Flash MX 2004. Ya see – I’ve learned Flash backwards. Actionscript first, UI second. Weird, but if you knew the projects I worked on – you’d understand.

Groundhog Day: “Honor”:

In my opinion, you shouldn’t be able to attach the word “honor” to something unless you know what the damn word means. See Miller and Stockdale. (And in case I’m being too obtuse for my own good: If you knew what the damn word meant, you wouldn’t attach it to something as trivial and superficial as “tags.” Clear?)

Do you have a better word? Shoot it to the folks working on the the spec. HonorTags sound like something that can help and I’m all for that. As to the meaning of the word, dictionary.com’s listed idiom, “honor bound”, I think describes the context that is being used when folks apply one of these tags to describe their posts: “Under an obligation enforced by the personal integrity of the one obliged: I was honor bound to admit that she had done the work.”

Admittidly, I’m not a writer Dave. You can dance all over my head discussing word meanings and semantics. But I don’t really care. What I do care about is finding tools to work with difficult problems. You could help.

First Draft by Tim Porter: Shark Bites Citizen Journalism

Stick a fork in it. “Citizen Journalism,” as the moniker describing John and Jane Q’s ability to create their own media, is done. The shark has been jumped.

I was at the gym this afternoon trying to reverse the effects of a late night of Dewars and dancing at the local rock n’ roll saloon, done to the tunes of a Stones tribute band (love the wigs, lads!) and all in a celebration of a good pal’s 40th birthday, when one of the TV screens hanging above the treadmills filled with the words, in all caps, CITIZEN JOURNALISM. CNN was asking viewers to email in photos and videos of Hurricane Dennis. (Here’s a spot on CNN’s web site asking for the same thing without the “citizen journalism” phrase.

…”Citizen journalism” as a concept
is still being defined. At its base, though, are the acts of
participation in coverage and creation of media. On a higher level, it
involves a new definition of news and a realignment of the relationship between reporter and community.

The victims of terrorism in the London underground became reporters
when they felt compelled to capture the scene that surrounded them and
communicate with those outside of it. No one needed to suggest that
they do it. The urgency of the moment and the capability of the technology combined to make it happen. It was an inevitable collision.

What happened in London was reporting. I learn something. I tell it
to you. It’s also empowering because those bloodied and soot-blackened
commuters took control of some of coverage by creating it themselves.
As I said the other day: Terrorism made them victims; technology made them reporters.

I’m pretty sure what “citizen journalism” is not is CNN soliciting photographs from viewers and then putting a few of them on its web site. It’s more like the visual equivalent of the man-on-the-street story. Maybe what CNN is doing should be called “postcard journalism.” Am I being too cynical?

Not too cynical. But read my earlier post – you might be an ambulance chaser .

For ambulance-chasing bloggers, tragedy equals opportunity | The Register

No human disaster these days is complete without two things, both of which can be guaranteed to surface within 24 hours of the event.

First, virus writers will release a topical new piece of malware. And then weblog evangelists proclaim how terrific the catastrophe is for the internet. It doesn’t seem to matter how high the bodies are piled – neither party can be deterred from its task.

For the technology evangelists, the glee is barely containable. The daily business of congratulating each other jumps to a whole new level with all the bloggers marveling in unison at their ability to detail real-time tragedy.

Shelley Powers had this to say:

Orlowskihas a good point: is a tragedy more ‘real’ just because it’s traversed routers? Do we need to see 500 instances of the same photo, scraped from TV, to validate our experiences? Do we need to have a thousand
pundits start bashing each other about causes, while the bodies are still being carried out? Must we link to each other with breathless exclamations of “so and so� has the latest “breaking� news on the story — followed by some outlandish rumor? (Do webloggers know how silly it is to write such things in their weblogs? Or are links worth the cost to their dignity?)

More importantly, why do we have to go through this validation ritual every time events happen?

I’m afraid that Orlowski is going to be disappointed in me, because I’m going to indulge in a bit of writing about an event, and it does fall within his 24 hour mark. No, I’m not going to write about the London bombs: I’m going to write about Hurricane Dennis. I know that some would consider doing so a Cable Cliche, whatever that means. But Missouri has a lot riding on this storm; not as much as some states, but a lot. And I’m not writing news, I’m telling a story.

Me? I think it’s much a do about nothing really. I said this earlier: “Events, both tragic and joyous, drive us to share our experience – to share our reality – it’s what people do.” The net changes nothing in this respect. It’s simply providing us new ways to do so. Ways that bypass filters that have existed for the last fifty years or so – and to a greater audience than before. It is not changing human nature – but providing us new avenues for expressing it.