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Permanent link to archive for Friday, March 29, 2002. Friday, March 29, 2002

DaveNet: In Rebuttal to Glenn Davis

A new macro for your blogging pleasure. 

A picture named udell.gifNow here's an interesting story. Jon Udell just told me that he's written what he thinks has a chance to be the definitive piece on Instant Outlining. He rushed to get it out for Monday. At first I didn't get the magic of Monday, but then I realized that I had told people who were subscribing to my instant outline that I planned to publish my definitive piece on Monday, the 5th anniversary of Scripting News, and fourteenth for Frontier. Blah blah blah. So Jon wants to beat me. That is so cool. But he's hamstrung by an editorial process that gets grouchy when he says he has a scoop. Oy I've been there myself. At Wired I had a big story, ran it through DaveNet, but wanted to get it on the Hotwired home page. They said I had to wait until my turn came around. In the meantime another pub read my story and took the scoop and put it on page 1, where it belonged. Jon says he's tempted to upstream his story to his Radio blog. I said do it, I want to read his take. I don't care if he gets out there first. I'm satisfied that I got there first with the software.  

Another epiphany is coming. In a few days, Murphy-willing, a print journalist will write a truly insightful piece about blogging. It won't be superficial. It will be based on an aha. It won't be demeaning or diminutive. It won't change the mind of many professional journalists, but it will connect bloggers to print readers in a new way. 

Fascinating NY Times postmortem on the WTC. 

BigCo's do web services blah blah lies and BS. Nice lookin template on the site. 

Of course my bemused remark about Flash MX Crack just made matters worse. Now Scripting News itself is authoritative on this subject, not just the referer log. I wonder what people are searching for. Whatever it is, Google thinks they can find it at Scripting News. 

Wes: "My guess is that they just downloaded a warezed copy of Flash MX and are looking for a crack so that it won't ask them for a serial number." 

Register: Intel launches 2.4GHz P4. Yummy! 

Today's song goes like this. "Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam where the deer and the antelope play. Where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the sky is not cloudy all day." 

Ingo Rammer: "All the aggregator posts for which I don't have the time to read them (at the instant I see them) get posted to a 'must read' category that's not upstreamed." 

Ingo points to another Microsoft Radio blogger. This is great. Everyone at Microsoft should have a Radio weblog. We'll give them a good deal. BTW, to Microsoft's developer relations people -- this is Windows software. Works great on your newest OS. A totally new application. Let's spread the word. Win-win. 

88 percent say that fax machines are covered under the Hollings bill. I wonder how that will work. The fax machine will have to go to the FBI or CIA or GAO or whatever and send it a scan of the document being faxed. It will have to do some OCR and then look it up in some massive database that doesn't exist, and then send a message back to the fax machine saying yay or nay. Who will pay for that government database? We know Eisner has at least $700 million (unless he spent it all) -- so maybe he should pay for the database and all the new services the government is going to have to provide. Also something else to consider. The Supreme Court might think this is a First Amendment issue. I am not a lawyer, but due process and privacy might enter into it too. Do you want the government to read all your faxes? Hmmm. Luckily I don't have a fax machine, I hate the things, so it's not really a problem for me. But it wouldn't surprise me if Hollings has a fax and uses it.  

BTW, in case it isn't clear -- a legal system where fax machines must call the government to get approval to send a document is a very bad idea. It reeks of the Soviet Union or the repression that people in China have to deal with. It's not only bad technology (it'll never scale) it's also bad period. The framers of the US Constitition envisioned something like this and gave the people the power to overthrow the government. I hope we will not go quietly into this future.  

It should be noted, in all the hooplah about Dan Gillmor's epiphany about real-time blogging, which does matter, despite what some nattering nabobs of negativism say, that Alan Reiter single-handedly introduced the people at the wireless conference in Orlando, earlier this month, to the idea of wireless conference-based blogging. Alan is the most thoughtful of evangelists. It can be hard to see someone else get all the air for an earlier epiphany one wanted to share. And lest I not share all the credit, let's be clear that this is an instantiation of something called Meeting Technology that was "invented" at Living Videotext in the 80s. I put that in quotes because it's virtually certain that Doug Engelbart did it too, in the 60s. Regardless we're now in bootstrap mode on a new Internet. That the epiphanies are swirling and whirling is pretty good evidence of that. OK, I have to get back to my Instant Outline. Seeya soooon. 

I got an email from John Gapper, the editor of the op-ed page of the Financial Times in response to one of my many observations about the Eisner essay. I said "We fully understand that [Eisner is] lying about protecting the interests of creative people. That the FT let him do this in their esteemed journal says something (not sure what)." Gapper explains. "I think all it says is that we think the debate about Internet copyright is a vital one, and we like well-written and pithy pieces on the subject that excite comment and interest, which this one clearly did. We have also carried a couple of other articles by Lawrence Lessig and we hope to keep following the topic." Accepted. If I the Eisner essay had landed on my desk I would have run it too. 

Glenn Fleishman says pfui to the NY Times theory that the Web has become boring. I concur. Here's how the essay for my Long Bet begins. "As with personal computing, the early days of Web publishing belonged to the hobbyists, reveling that it worked at all. But the Web is maturing, the tools are getting easy, as the understanding of the technology has become widespread."  

A picture named nerowolfe.gifPfui is what Nero Wolfe says when he doesn't believe something. Wolfe is a famous fictional detective. Detectives hear a lot of lies. Pfui is pronounced Puh-foo-eee. I read lots of Nero Wolfe books when I was a kid. They were great. A&E is now running a Nero Wolfe series, but I won't watch it. Their Nero Wolfe is skinny! The real one was very fat and lazy. He never left his house. He had an ace operative named Archie Goodwin who did all his legwork. He raised orchids and ate a lot of food. 

Correction. A&E's Nero Wolfe is fat. Ooops. 

Feminism as a philosophy 

I found a link to this article on MetaFilter yesterday, written by a woman, on a site called iFeminist.Com. I've quoted the last two paragraphs.

"Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe had a custom called charivari in which an abused husband was dressed as a woman and forced to ride through the village, sitting backwards on a donkey. Twenty-first century America displays a similar attitude. We snicker and laugh at abused men -- all the while telling them never to hit a woman, even in self-defense. At the same time, we bring up girls to believe it is acceptable to strike a man: 'If he gets fresh, just slap his face.'

"Battered men pay taxes to support hotlines and shelters from which they are excluded because of their sex. They are dismissed by police because of their sex. Crime and punishment in domestic violence seem to hinge on genitalia and -- legally speaking -- men have the wrong equipment. The only right abused men seem to have retained in full is the right to remain silent."

     

Last update: Friday, March 29, 2002 at 5:05 PM Eastern.

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