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Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.
 
Permanent link to archive for Monday, July 29, 2002. Monday, July 29, 2002

NY Times: "Stock prices staged a broad, strong advance." 

Phillip Pearson did an ecosystem crawler starting with the Scripting News blogroll. Here are the results. Nice. Thanks! 

Ernie the Attorney has a directory of lawyers with weblogs. 

Steve Gillmor on why trusting Microsoft is not the best idea.  

The Top-100 weblogs report for Salon is starting to get interesting. 

And Scott Rosenberg puts to rest, once and for all, the question of whether or not blogging is journalism. "Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty." Ta-dahh, and duh. 

Glenn Reynolds comments on Delaware Senator Joe Biden's new entertainment-industry-friendly bill. "These legislative initiatives aren't just about copyright. They're about building a regime that's hostile to content that comes from anyone other than Big Media suppliers." 

US News: "Keep an eye on bloggers." 

News.Com: "The Recording Industry Association of America's Web site was unreachable over the weekend due to a denial-of-service attack." Prediction: A new law that stops all HTTP requests because we might be doing a DoS against the RIAA. Hillary Rosen says the new law is "innovative." 

Blogmapper "lets you associate blog entries with hot spots on a map. When you click on the spots, the entries appear." 

Here's an example of an RSS 0.91 file containing the location encoding. Not sure yet how you generate the Points. 

All of a sudden DaveNet is getting lots of hits from the main weblogs page in Google's directory. Hmmm.  

John Robb points out that Scripting News is a highly rated technology weblog according to the Google directory. 

Happy 55th to Papa Doc. Two other 55-year-olds: Rob Reiner and Arnold Schwarzenegger. How do I know? Maureen Dowd wrote a column about Meathead and the Terminator facing off in the 2006 California governor's race. 

Is Adam Curry is a corporate MoFo? Look it up. And what a coincidence. I taught that exact word to Young Patrick Scoble yesterday. He's going to Portland, OR today to teach it to his cousin.  

NY Times: "The creator of a Web site whose name is a vulgarism for 'failed company' said he would roll out a new site called InternalMemos.com." 

Warning: Silly joke 

A Hispanic mathematician has two penises.

One is named José.

What is the other one named?

Answer tomorrow.

The value of the truth? 

I received another book to review over the weekend. This one is about web services. It's a college textbook. I skimmed five chapters. Without saying who the author or publisher is, so no one can say I have a bone to pick with them, and with the disclaimer that the story they tell is totally flattering to me and UserLand, they got the story wrong.

Now I know what I'm "supposed" to say. Since they gave me so much credit, I'm supposed to be happy with it. But I'm not. I think books and magazine and news articles should at least try to tell the story as it actually happened, not embellish it, or change it, or whatever they do.

The author clearly worked from this document. But he says that I designed XML-RPC, by myself, in frustration with the slow process of SOAP at Microsoft. Well, that's just not true. XML-RPC is a snapshot of SOAP taken in 1998. When it was designed it was not intended to be frozen, it was designed to be evolved. That it evolved so much as to be unrecognizable from what eventually was called SOAP might be interesting to some people. But XML-RPC did not come from left field. It was the earliest public version of SOAP. As far as I know, none of the people who were involved would tell a story that contradicts that.

If you read a Newsweek account of the development of a new Macintosh, what are the chances that the story bears any resemblance to what happened? If you read a Fortune story about Microsoft is there any truth to it? And how far back does this tradition go? Was there any truth to the history books we read when we were children? Does anyone try to tell the story as it happened or is everyone just trying to sell books and articles?

Smoking update 

Thanks to Mark Pilgrim for the kind wishes and great tutorial.

I just re-read the I'm Not A Smoker bit he points to, and thought I should post an update. My mind no longer seems so interested in solving problems by smoking cigarettes. There are still things that make me think of smoking, but not the things people warn about. Here's an example. I think "Wouldn't it be nice to rent a house on the east coast of Florida for the winter and do a lot of body surfing?" My mind thinks: Cigarettes! I issue a correction. "No cigarettes, sorry."

Okay, so I can deal with that one. Now, here's another automatic response. I'm on my walk, pumping lots of oxygen, turning it into carbon dioxide, and feeling really good. My mind generates a limiting comment. "But you're killing yourself by smoking." A moment of depression. Then I remember: "No I'm not!" In other words I'm not doing anything overt to kill myself now. A nice difference.

If you've never smoked you have no idea how weird it is.

     

Last update: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 at 12:53 AM Eastern.

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