Twernt linked this with the comment, "Napster has a business model! Sort of." Well, maybe not; The Offspring are keeping the money.
It isn't about making money. In typical Offspring fashion, they think it's funny to f*** with people. They think Napster's cool and want to see how cool they [really] are.
I've liked the Offspring since I first heard them, and I'm glad they seem to be supportive not only of MP3 distribution, but of MP3 trading and Napster. A couple of my otherfavorite bands are savvy enough to sell their music on MP3 via EMusic. Hopefully, this weekend I'll find time to purchase and download some of their net releases.
By the way, the Shuttlecocks are planning to follow Metaliica's lead in searching for their MP3's being exchanged over Napster. However, their plans for dealing with pirates are a bit different.
We wish to see these people treated as they deserve, which is why we are going to collect the names of Napster users who are distributing our material, present the list to Napster, and demand that they be given candy.
I believe I misjudged ThinkDink when I first saw her "non-negative blogging" page (called, at the time, the "positive blogging pledge"). After some clarifications on her site, and a couple e-mails, I have a better understanding of what she was trying to say. She's not trying to issue commandments from on high, but trying to establish a dialogue. She doesn't object so much to webloggers being critical of others on the web as to being unnecessarily rude, insulting, or personal about such criticism. She is not, as I initially believed, trying to stifle honest debate and discussion on the web; she's merely calling for more civility. While I still don't consider myself a supporter, I have come to respect her and her views.
[via evilplot] President Josiah Bartlet (the Martin Sheen character from NBC's The West Wing) received a landslide in a (very unscientific) poll against two other fictional presidential candidates: Dubya Bush and the Algore 2000. If someone does produce a "Bartlet 2000" bumper sticker, I want one.
By the way, I don't know whether I've mentioned this before, but I think that all presidential candidates should have to submit to a Voight-Kampff test. I'm pretty sure Gore is a replicant; wouldn't that explain all his weird lapses in memory?
...Atlantis would be the great continent across the Atlantic that was swallowed up. Well, that's the Americas. Sure, there's a difference between frozen water and liquid, but to the beleaguered peoples of Pleistocene Eurasia, not enough of one. All they would know is that the land of Kull had lost contact with them just as the waters receeded and the ice flowed over them...a climactic shift that they would be likely to blame the advanced Atlantean civilization for.
The American continents may have meant many things to many people, even before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, or Leif Ericsson dropped in with a longboat full of Vikings. I've always loved the theory that America was the Land of Promise described in St. Brendan's account of his fourth voyage. I was kind of disappointed, though, when I learned that the Romans may have made it to the Americas centuries earlier yet. Addenum: [via LarkFarm] This guy places the Lost Continent in the South China Sea. Hey, it takes all kinds.
If I were a real writer (and not just a silly weblogger who only links things), I'd change the names in this chat transcript (which was posted by one of the chatters). I really hope that by the end of the year, the definition of a weblog hasn't become "a web site that talks about whether or not other websites are weblogs". So much of the discussion on personal websites these days seems to center on classifying things: weblog, journal, good blog, bad blog, whatever. All these divisions seem pretty arbitrary to me, and I haven't seen any classification system that looks any more or less arbitrary (or silly) than any other.
The way I see it is that there is this big mass of personal sites that have a few things in common: They're organized chronologically rather than by subject, they're updated on a fairly regular basis, and they reflect the interests of the creator. You could probably place most of them somewhere within a spectrum: At one end are journals, strictly original, personal writing, without connections to other sites; at the other is a pure link-list, with little commentary or "personality". Most personal sites I see these days seem to be moving towards the middle of the range, whether or not they choose to consider themselves weblogs.
If you enjoy making distinctions, there are all kinds of ways you could slice and dice these personal sites. Short entries vs. long entries. Linking vs. non-linking. Positive vs. negative. Reality vs. fiction. Original content vs. copying. Knock yourself out.
What seems more important to me than all these arguments about the whichness of the why is that a lot of people seem to be finding a public voice, perhaps for the first time in their lives. The tools (scroll down for more) created by early webloggers are being used by people who didn't know how to create their own site, or found it too much of a nuisance. In some cases, these newbies are using them to create content which is totally unlike anything the original programmers envisioned.
A year ago, the personal web seemed to be on its last legs, with bland corporate content on the verge of pushing out quirky individual voices. The recent rise in the popularity and accessibility of weblogs (which has also led to renewed interest in other types of personal sites) seems to be the best counter to that trend I've seen. I only hope that all the recent conflict within this "community" doesn't scare new voices away.
I've been meaning to check out Captain Cursor for a while, but it seems that every time I see a reference to it, I'm behind the Evil Corporate Firewall. I'm glad I finally did; he makes some good points about how a handful of weblogging tools have defined the genre.
Why do web loggers all tend to make shorter posts that point out other sites? The software they are using tells them to. We could get into a detailed analyses about why that is, or the difference in writing style based on the software that people are using, and perhaps we should. But the basic fact is that the reason that everyone's log tend towards similar forms is because that is what the software does best.
I think the biggest thing that tends to limit the length and format of blog entries is the nuisance of editing raw HTML in a <textarea> field in a web form. Even if you're using a tool (like Blogger) that has a few scripted buttons to add basic formatting, you're still looking at raw HTML. Jon Udell wants a <richtextarea> tag that would allow full WYSIWYG text editing that sends well-formed XHTML back to the server. (Nice idea, but we have enough standards that browser makers aren't following right now.) Some people write and test their entries in their editor of choice, and cut and paste the HTML into the textarea. The (seemingly) simple solution I'd love to see is an alternative way to add entries by uploading such a file with an <input type="file"> tag instead of cutting and pasting.
Well the 1% is a webring for those Blogs that actually provide content and not just links to other Blogs and useless sites.
I can't bear the creator of this web ring much ill will, because it seems like a natural outgrowth of the race to come up with the most exclusionary definition of a "real" weblog. I won't apply to this ring, at least until I figure out whether it would disappoint me more to be accepted or rejected.
Once I learned that Internet Explorer 5 can coexist with the older version 4 (which I need on my work machine to ensure intranet app compatibility), I decided to give Deepleap a try. I've been playing with Backflip, another web app, for a week or so, and wanted to compare the two. It's still kind of early to make any real judgement, but both apps have their own strengths and weaknesses. Deepleap's biggest advantage, however, appears to be its developer support [via MeFi], which allows third parties to develop application plugins. I'll probably have more to say about these two services once I've had more time to experiment.
This is the second year of St. Louis's new renaissance faire. I'll have to stop by this weekend. Last year, there wasn't that much going on, but I want to support the faire in the hope that it will grow.
Salon takes pop singers like Britney Spears far too seriously, but some of the reader letters are great.
The article about Britney Spears was a well-written, insightful piece; however it started with the flawed assumption that Spears is a human being. We here at Hangar 666 on the Disney back lot in Orlando are entirely responsible for Ms. Spears; indeed she is the finest piece of "entertainment programming in response to marketing" (tm OprahDisneyGates Inc.) we have built to date, though Ms. Aguilera and the assorted boy groups were none too shabby either.
Let me know when these guys start making products for the consumer market. Plus: My favorite excerpt from the front page:
With no guaranteed smash like "Phantom Menace" and no apparent sleeper like "The Sixth Sense," Hollywood has reason to be worried.
Silly me. I thought a sleeper was a movie that the studios weren't expecting to be popular.
The plot would be unmemorable save for the fact that it’s incomprehensible.
And that's from a reviewer who likedMission: Impossible 2. Very refreshing to hear from a movie critic who understands that sometimes, all some of us expect from certain movies is action and eye candy.
(An arbitrary name, since I certainly don't want this associated with me.) Once someone in a thread mentions Godwin's Law, the thread instantly degenerates into a discussion of whether or not the thread is over.
What I'd like to be known as O'Keefe's Law: "If you look for something hard enough, you'll find it whether it's there or not."
Andrew Looney has created some pretty neat games. I love Fluxx because it's based on the idea of changing the rules until they give you an advantage, and requires a lot of quick, adaptive thinking. I haven't played Aquarius against live opponents yet, but the online demo rocks. His non-game writings appear pretty entertaining as well.
College also allowed you to come into your own. No, but really. Being on the outskirts of any and all social circles in high school required you to entertain yourself more often than not. Consequently, you became very entertaining. Despite what they may have thought, you were not so very different from them, and what amused you, in most cases, amused them. So, you were loud, brash, and obnoxious. And people loved it. Despite your best intentions, you were becoming popular. Granted, you were popular with the left-of-center ritalin freaks, but still, popular.
Sometimes, life doesn't suck as much when you realize other people's lives have sucked in the same way.
The most disappointing news in Salon's roundup of the coming fall season (even more than the nenewal of the dying X-Files) is the cancellation of my favorite new show of the 1999-2000 season: Now and Again. This story of a family man resurrected into the body of a scientifically engineered superman could have been nothing more than a remake of The Six Million Dollar Man, but quickly became so much more. The series ranged from standard battles against such fantastic villains as the Egg Man and the Bugmeister, to his attempts to protect his former family (who must believe him dead, or suffer dire consequences), to his strained relationship with his creator / mentor / jailer. Worst of all is never finding out the ending to the season finale cliffhanger, in which our hero flees with his family once they learn his secret, and the Egg Man escapes prison (with the help of Mick "Mankind" Foley) to seek revenge.
Come on, Powazek, you're just ticked off because they didn't mention your plan to sell product placement rights in Fray stories. (And people think Pyra doesn't have a revenue model.)
I continue to search for information on the effective use of color on the web. There are lots of good sites with useful new presentations of the web-safe color palette: I linked VisiBone (my poster is on its way here) and its interactive color lablast week, and have since played with Newman's Palette Picker.
What I'm interested in right now is color theory. I don't yet trust my intuition to pick good color combinations, and have started reading up on the basic principles. There appear to be a number of good books on color theory, but they seem to be oriented more towards the CMYK colors used in printing than towards the RGB colors used by computers. I found a good conversion algorithm in Delphi, which would be cool to convert to some kind of CGI app someday in my copious free time. I'm surprised I haven't been able to find some such tool already available on the web. I'd love to hear if anyone knows where I could find such a beast.
Another reminder that Microsoft has a different definition of "open" from the rest of the industry. The company appears to have used pressure tactics to keep a developer from discussing changes to Microsoft's implementation of the Simple Object Access Protocol at a users' group meeting. I thought that SOAP was supposed to be an open XML-RPC based protocol for interoperability between different systems. Sounds like the Big M may have its own plans to "embrace and extend" SOAP as it appears to be doing with the Kerberos security protocol.
considered harmful adj.
[very common] Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968 "Communications of the ACM", "Goto Statement Considered Harmful", fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars (text at http://www.acm.org/classics). Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by policy) no longer print an article taking so assertive a position against a coding practice. (Years afterwards, a contrary view was uttered in a CACM letter called, inevitably, "`Goto considered harmful' considered harmful'"). In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and parodies have borne titles of the form "X considered Y". The structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the realization that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke (the `considered silly' found at various places in this lexicon is related).
-- from The Jargon File, version 4.1.4.
