my passport photo |
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by Sheila
Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
May 10,
2002 • Last
week's weblog
BLOGSPAM:
Has Blogdex
been hijacked? MIT's
Blogdex offers a list of most-linked to stories, similar to the Daytop
Top 40. Today, Blogdex links #18 ("BestAds.com")
and #25 ("NetSter
- Insurance Center") both point to an ad portal. The same six
"weblogs" originate both links but, when clicked, they redirect
to Netster ad sites. These "weblog" sites -- with domain names
such as upinthisbitch.org, fyrelyzard.ydonert.com and emoshunz.net --
are all
registered to the same owner, Popular Enterprises of Knoxville, Tenn.,
which also owns the NetSter.com domain.
There goes
the neighborhood....
Link
to this item | Comment
Weekend
toonz: Net
radio's roots reggae stations
are my soundtrack on warm days. Among the reggae
stations on Live365: ((R@sTa
ViBraTioN)) and Dread
1.
Over on Shoutcast's
reggae index, you can see what song each station is currently playing.
When I explored the African
category, [World African Reggae] at haiti FM #2 was playing the classic
La
Jolie Blonde (RealAudio clip) by late Cajun fiddle legend Dewey
Balfa. How'd
that get there? The fiddler's American, but the tune is in French, which
is spoken in Haiti. Must be the French connection.
The
Balfa family were mainstays of the early Cajun-Bluegrass Festivals at
Steppingstone Ranch in Escoheag each Labor Day Weekend, and this year
Balfa
Toujours, led by Dewey's youngest daughter, Christine, will headline
its successor, the Rhythm
and Roots Festival.
Link
to this item | Comment
A
weblog with beautiful
images: Travelers
Diagram. Among them, a pointer to Ian
Taylor's photographs of Sri Lanka at toycamera.com,
a fan site for $15 plastic cameras. This
stunning Sriscape was shot with a Holga.
Link
to this item | Comment
Penalty phase update:
"States
cancel Windows demo in Microsoft case":
Reuters reports, "Nine states seeking strong antitrust sanctions
against Microsoft Corp. on Thursday abruptly canceled plans to demonstrate
a version of the Windows operating system with removable features. An
attorney for the states said they had made the decision to avoid prolonging
the case after Microsoft said it needed an indefinite period of time to
prepare its response."
May 9,
2002
Journalist
bloggers walk the line: I
like Dave Winer's "How
To Start a Weblog (For Professional Journalists)," but there
are a few caveats if you want to blog and stay employed.
From Tom
Mangan's original Newsies
site (the 2.0
version is cool, too), "Read
all about us: This is a special report I wrote for Editor
& Publisher explaining how journalists are finding it's a lot
of fun to have a homepage, except when it gets you fired." This
applies to weblogs too.
If it's your
own site,
• You can't compete with your employer, publishing "alternative"
news or stories your editors won't print.
• You can't reproduce work you've done for the paper -- your employer
holds the copyright. If your paper has a paid archive, you may never get
to put your work on the web.
• I love the dogma of
DOGMA2000: "1.type as you think
2.don't care about your spellings, typos and cut-and-paste related mistakes
..." I practiced it in forums, and it was liberating not to fix typos.
But others sent supercilious replies, many focusing on the errors rather
than the content. All it did was let jerks feel superior. Reread what
you write,
fix errors you see, don't sweat the occasional typo.
• In any field, you
may be fired for publishing material that embarrasses your employer.
See Mangan's story.
If it's on
the newspaper site, you know the rules:
•
Some days, half the Daypop Top 40
is unsuitable for the "family newspapers" we blog at.
• You can't use a blogging tool that requires ftp passwords or access
inside the firewall, or that makes your page look different or work differently
from the rest of the site. It has to fit within your sites "content
management system." And others need to be able to get in to "fix"
any page. (I'm not sure whether any existing blogtools meet all these
criteria, so I still use Dreamweaver, as you've read. I did write to the
Macromedia bloggers to ask about a blogtool. Just boilerplate autoreply
so far, but I remain hopeful that an email in a human voice may yet come
my way.)
• You have to fix your typos.
• You buy your freedom by being good at what you have to do. (This
is true everywhere in life.)
•
It's not your site.
Either way,
you may sometimes have to ignore an issue in your blog that you have strong
opinions about, and say "no comment" when other journalists
question you about it. <wink>
But that's
the trade-off when you need a paycheck.
Link
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Sweetheart,
I am rewrite: In a lovely choice of words, Doc
Searls picked up that I "scooped myself" yesterday by reporting
that Dylan would show up at the Newport Folk Festival for the first time
in 37 years. Sure enough, I had to whip up quick "official voice"
stories to get both Newport festival lineups -- Jazz and Folk, Aug. 3-5
and 9-11, respectively -- on the site today. Both have Internet-only pre-sales,
tomorrow only, beginning at 10 a.m. EDT. I'll spare you: If you're interested,
go to the festivals
site for the lineups.
1965:
Margaret Chevian
writes, "I was there when he went electric! And we were cheering
and just about everyone else was booing!"
May 8,
2002
Dylan
bringin' it all back home to Newport: An email from Providence reader
Bryan Rodrigues tipped us that Bob
Dylan is to play the Newport Folk Festival August 3, according to
the tour date page
at bobdylan.com, which
lists an appearance at Fort Adams State Park, site of the festival, on
that date.
It would
be Dylan's first return to Newport since Sunday,
July 25, 1965. Then, after an acoustic set, he returned to the stage
with an electric guitar and three members of the Paul
Butterfield Blues Band in tow (guitarist Mike
Bloomfield; bass player Jerome
Arnold and drummer Sam
Lay) and lit into Maggie's
Farm (RealAudio clip), to the boos of the folkies who expected
a reprise of the 1963 Dylan-Baez croonfest.
I was there,
standing on my chair, dancing to what was easily the loudest music of
the night. Bringin'
It All Back Home, the album with Maggie's Farm on it, had
been released in March of the same year, and
Like a Rolling Stone (RealAudio clip), released in July, was currently
a radio hit, so the electric set was really only a surprise to those who
thought Bob might revert for the occasion.
Nevertheless,
after trying to start It
Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry (RealAudio clip)
from the about-to-be-released Highway
61 Revisited album, which the crowd drowned out with boos, they
left the stage. Dylan returned alone with acoustic guitar and harmonica
rig, sang Mr.
Tambourine Man (RealAudio clip) and the telling It's
All Over Now, Baby Blue (RealAudio clip), and never came back
to Newport.
The official
Newport
Folk Festival site says, "The 2002 artist line-up will be announced
here and in Newport on May 9th. Tickets will go on sale for subscribers
on May 10th." The "subscribers" are those who've signed
up for the mailing list. There's a simple email-address-entry form to
subscribe.
Were you
there in '65? Tell
us about it, please. We'll publish it.
Link
to this item | Comment
Check
out "legacy browser" Lynx at the Free-Net: Last week's discussion
of browser history began with, "In terms of the use of a web
browser by the mass public, the history of web browsers begins with Lynx.
Lynx is a simple text-based web browser primarily accessed via UNIX shell
accounts that displays formatted HTML text (but not images)... "
Lynx is still alive on the Web at the surviving Free-Nets
-- you can try it yourself at the Ocean
State Free-Net: Your browser will open a telnet client if you click
on this link. (But the HyperTerminal that comes with windows is awful
at this -- you might try the free
PuTTYtel (196k), here, instead. and telnet to osfn.org)
Log in as
"visitor" (without the quotes) and don't give a password. Hit
"enter" till you get to the Main Menu, then type "go lynx"
and choose start page 3. In a good telnet client, the background will
be black, the text white, the links bold. Use the arrow keys to hop from
link to link. Hit enter to go to any of them.
Obviously,
Lynx works best for text-based pages, as images are rendered with the
word [image]. As a visitor, you can't type a url directly, but go to one
of the search engine links and search for a favorite site to see what
it looks like in Lynx.
I had
hoped to offer this little tour last week, but the Ocean State Free-Net
went down after Conversent
Communications (which bought Andy
Green's IDS, and continues the tradition of donating OSFN's Internet
connection) cut off its service because of delinquent bills. My print
colleague Tim Barmann wrote about the outage and OSFN's history ("R.I.'s
free Internet service struggles to stay online"), noting that,
"It serves primarily low-income elderly and users with disabilities."
Blind users especially find its text interface compatible with screen
readers, but donations have fallen below the measly $150 a month needed
to keep OSFN going.
Although
OSFN now has only about 1,000 active users, 22,000 users have signed up
since it began in 1994. Users are assigned alphanumeric logins, beginning
with ab001, and they're now up to ax179. In a state where low-number license
plates are coveted, having a low-number OSFN email address is a badge
of honor -- mine is ab226@osfn.org.
(Disclosure: I served on OSFN's volunteer board in the mid-90s.)
Apart from
email (including email forwarding), chat rooms, discussion groups and
one free text-only web page, OSFN offers unique access to the statewide
library system (CLAN) even to visitors. (The original organizer of this
Free-Net was Howard
Boksenbaum, then of the Rhode Island Dept. of State Library Services).
At the main menu, type "go educ" and select Libraries, then
Libraries in Rhode island at the resulting menu. You can search for a
book, see which branch has a copy on the shelf, and, if you log in to
the library module with your library card number, place a hold on it,
as well as get a list of books you have checked out, with due dates. (Always
useful when you know you took out three books, but can only find two,
and can't remember the title of the one that might be under the couch.)
If you select
"Libraries outside Rhode Island," you'll have access to those
at Boston U. and Rutgers, Columbia Law, the New York Botanical Garden
and more.
If you'd
like to help keep this last bit of universal free public access alive,
you can make a donation through PayPal
(Their PayPal email address is donate@osfn.org.) OSFN's founders reserved
the first 100 email addresses (aa001-aa099) with an eye to auctioning
them as "vanity plate numbers" in the future; now might be the
time for a fundraiser.
Link
to this item | Comment
Reptile
brains want to rule: The
"Dinosaurs" Are Taking Over "If the media giants have their way,
the Net freedom fighter says, content will be rigidly controlled and innovation
stifled" headlines an interview with net activist and Stanford Law
professor Lawrence
Lessig.
Baseball:
Only the good parts: ZDnet
reports that "Major League Baseball (MLB) has begun offering
Condensed
Baseball, which reduces the length of a given game to about 20 minutes.
How, you may ask? By eliminating every pitch that doesn't result in a
play. In other words, you'll see pitches that result in a hit, run, or
out, along with wild pitches, pick-offs, passed balls, stolen bases, and
the like. Basically it's baseball for those suffering from Attention Deficit
Disorder."
MLB will
offer 35 selected games each week for $4.95, with other packages available.
You can
watch a sample
-- the April 15 Red-Sox Yankees games, here. It's like watching local
TV sports highlights of today's game, for 20 minutes.
Better
TV moments: Entertainment Weekly's 100
Greatest Moments in TV History is a companion to yesterday's TV Guide
list, and one that zeroes in on single episodes and events. Topping it
is John F. Kennedy's Assassination and Funeral. highights: The premiere
of Roots, The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Man Walks on the Moon, Walter Cronkite
Denounces the Vietnam War, and Geraldo Rivera's broken nose. Links lead
to short narratives and still photos of each.
Windows
won't fall apart? Reuters
via ZDnet: "WASHINGTON--The federal judge overseeing the Microsoft
antitrust case said on Tuesday that she wants to see a version of the
Windows operating system that has removable features. Over the objections
of Microsoft, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said she would
allow nine states seeking stiff sanctions against the company to have
a computer expert demonstrate a version of Windows he has developed that
can be customized. Kollar-Kotelly scheduled the presentation for May 15."
May 7, 2002
Political
assassination in Holland, suicide bomber kills 10 in Tel Aviv, FBI hunts
22-year-old in connection with mailbox bombs... and after figuring out
blogging workarounds for Dreamweaver 3, today Dreamweaver 4 was installed
on my computer here, and all the extensions need to be reinstalled.
It's a day
for mindless blog links. No permanent item links today.
Canned
beats out fresh: TV
Guide publishes the 50 Greatest TV shows ever. The first five are
sitcoms. Laugh tracks set my teeth on edge and I have never seen Seinfeld,
allegedly the greatest show of 'em all. Many others have never seen The
Sopranos, #5, since it's on premium cable. Who picks these things?
Somebody who thinks Letterman beats Carson (too young to have seen Carson,
maybe?)? Somebody who brayed along to The Andy Griffith Show (#9)
while I was watching Rockford Files (#39), M*A*S*H (#25)
and Twilight Zone (#26)?
AP |
| TWINKLETOES:
New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, the MVP of this year's
Super Bowl, wears a black suit with reflective balls as he drops back
to pass in San Diego. Brady was rehearsing his moves during an animation
image-capturing session for a new football video game that will feature
his likeness. |
The top 5:
1. Seinfeld
2. I Love Lucy
3. The Honeymooners
4. All in the Family
5. The Sopranos
"Music
industry finally online but listeners stay away in droves":
MSNBC publishes a Wall Street Journal story about how "(Music Net)
created a service that lacked just about everything that makes online
music downloads appealing. It didn’t allow consumers to keep downloaded
songs permanently. It didn’t allow them to transfer songs to portable
devices or exchange them with friends who weren’t signed up to the
service. And it charged a monthly fee ..."
Hi, (alphabetical)
neighbor! Subterranean
Homepage Blues is the site of Dr. William McKeen, Professor of Journalism
and Communications, and Journalism Dept. chair at The University of Florida.
This all becomes clearer when you know that he teaches a course called
The
History of Rock and Roll.
Psych
test: At Google
Smackdown, mindless fun awaits. Pit two words against each other:
Which one appears in more pages across the Web? Some obvious pairs are...
1. love (49,600,000) 2. hate (5,880,000)
1. women (48,000,000) 2. men (44,100,000)
1. dog (17,000,000) 2. cat (15,600,000)
1. war (33,900,000) 2. peace (12,300,000)
1. wine (8,740,000) 2. beer (5,370,000)
May 6,
2002
He plays
guitar with words: A few of the publications Wayne Robins has written
for are Creem,
Newsday,
Blues
Access, Editor
& Publisher, The
Boston Phoenix and at least one book (Behind
the Music: 1968). And now he has a blog, Wayne's
Words, where he's writing about what he wants to write about: Phish,
the record biz, filesharing, the news biz, Caribbean bounce. (We've never
met, but every coupla years his day job has him calling me about my day
job. One of these days I'm gonna interview him.)
Link
to this item | Comment
Blogging
with Dreamweaver: Doc
Searls (Linux
Journal Senior Editor, Cluetrain
co-author) asked for a permanent link to last week's item about Triana,
the earth-imaging satellite grounded by politics. I've been ducking the
obvious need for a link to each item ("fifth item" is a lame
reference), but I don't use a blogtool
that would automate this. I make all my html pages with Dreamweaver 3
(screenshot),
commuting between the WYSIWYG window and the code, so I worked out a partial
workaround that might be useful to others who blog with Dreamweaver:
(You could
reverse this process by writing every item in a new document, then either
copy and paste each into the main page, or make them includes (SSI) in
the main blog page. But I hate to face a WYSIWYG page that's blank but
for a line of include tags that have to be clicked to see what's in them.
I also often find myself typing one item while another comes to mind,
so I need easy access to the whole main page. When it's all done, I'll
spin the items off to separate files.)
Here's how
to make it less tedious:
1. Make each
blog entry a separate file:
This is a
bit quicker with a Dreamweaver Extension called "New
Document from Selection" that works like this:
-- Select
any text in the DW text window and, on the File menu, under "new from
template," a "new from selection" option appears.
-- Click it and it makes a new file containing only the copied text and
links.
-- Save that to a standard place with a short name (such as triana.htm)
2. Link to
the new files in the main page:
-- Create
a library item containing a prelinked "Link to this item" link with the
path already filled in (http://www.projo.com/cgi-bin/include.pl/blogs/shenews/items/)
except for the "*.htm"
-- Save it with an obvious name such as "linkto"
To use it:
-- Drag the "linkto" item from the library to a new line below the end
of blog entry.
-- Right-click to "detach from original" (i.e. make it editable)
-- Copy and stamp it after each blog entry
-- Complete each link with the appropriate *.htm
This is just
a way of opening a discussion. If others have better ways to automate
blogging with Dreamweaver, I'm all ears.
Link
to this item | Comment
Great
flower photos: In case you missed it, the world's largest flower --
titan arum, a giant lily native to Sumatran rainforests -- reached 2.36
meters (7 3/4 feet) and weighted 165 pounds when it bloomed at London's
Kew Gardens May 1, emitting a rotten stench every few hours that can be
sniffed nearly a mile away. (In Sumatra, it's its scent is described as
similar to that emitted by a rotting elephant.) Its fluted flower is dark
red inside, with a giant yellow spadix (which prompted Wired to headline
its report, "Is
That a Pistil in Your Pocket?"). A page of remarkable
images (as usual, click to enlarge) at the flower's
Kew page documents the event. On May 4, the spadix collapsed, leading
botanists to hope that their attempts to pollinate it had been successsful.
Last June
7, another of the rare lilies bloomed in captivity inside the
UW-Madison Botany Greenhouse. Quicktime movies document this one.
Last month, botanists were still harvesting fruit from it.
Link
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Back
issues: Week one
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issues: Week two
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issues: Week three
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issues: Weeks four and five
Back
issues: Week six
Back
issues: Week seven
Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com
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