Parasites that infect humans and effect their behavior – carried by cats. Links and discussion at Metafilter.
Author Archives: Karl
Flash Experiments
Many fun and interesting Flash sound, motion, and interface compositions to play and open your mind with with at yugop.com, Levitated and Joshua Davis.
A Few Google Map Hacks
O’Reilly: Glenn Letham: Hackers Tap Into the Functionality and Simplicity of Google Maps.
Many fun things to try here.
An Automated Folksonomy Tool
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.
Report Any Unusual Activities
This poster, seen at train stations between Baltimore and DC on MARC, and uploaded by Articulatory Loop, is downright creepy. View image
Ya Gotta See Sony Data Tiles
A physical object oriented data interface. Interesting and eye opening. Download the mpg movie right here. via ericd.
Yahoo!’s Publisher Guide to RSS
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.
Bloggers Push Story U.S. Media Has Been Ignoring
“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.
Must Read Jay Rosen at PressThink
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.
My timing is funny
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.