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Permanent link to archive for Thursday, August 01, 2002. Thursday, August 01, 2002

A picture named yupThatsBillGates.gifThe NY Times likes the latest Austin Powers movie: "Like a giant balloon painted with Day-Glo colors, however, the whole gaudy mess wouldn't inflate without the force of Mr. Myers's comic genius." 

You gotta hand it to Amazon's Jeff Bezos who had the guts to appear in public dressed as Austin Powers. 

MacCentral, 4/27/00: Gates dresses as Austin Powers

Radio Free Blogistan: "The indefatigable dws has launched a dynamic Radio FAQ channel. To participate, he says, start a RadioQuestions channel on your blog and tell him about it." 

Also from Xian: "Jerry would have turned 60 today." 

Phillip Pearson did another run of his ecosystem crawler, this time using changes.xml from weblogs.com, and is sampling 1452 weblogs now, and lookin for more. 

On this day in 1999, I created a "news site" on GrokSoup. My site is gone, but GrokSoup is still there.  

A picture named chen.gifJimmy Guterman: "A correspondent writes that good blogs 'remind me of the good old days when I would listen to late night radio to a familiar dj, who might go off on the restaurant he ate at earlier that evening, or a concert he just saw, or whatever.' He says he reads blogs 'in much the same way I would listen to a friend talk. The subject itself may or may not be of particular interest, but because your friend is saying it, there is something good about the simple act of listening."" 

Imho the Salon blogs have been a total success. Perhaps a little-known fact, it's fairly easy to set up a community of Radio users, like Salon's. The key piece of software, released in the spring of this year, is called Radio Community Server. We decided to license it for $0 to encourage formation of communities, like Salon's; and private ones, behind organizational firewalls. The community software does require Frontier or Radio, so it's not totally free. A new release of Frontier ($899) is in the pipe that has RCS baked in, along with Manila and other goodies. (I'm not working on this release, still on sabbatical.) 

It seems we're just about at the tipping point for lawyer-bloggers. I'm getting a sense that if we have a legal question that's appropriate to ask in public, it's likely one of the lawyers will answer it, at weblog-speed, which is fast. They also write well. Here's an example. "The Bronx is where I spent a great deal of the formative years in my professional life; it is a place apart in a lot of ways, a little banana republic in New York City." He tells a good story. I feel a kinship with the kind of lawyer who writes in public.  

Marc Barrot: "The latest addition to activeRenderer is activeRoll, a macro for publishing a blogroll as an active outline, complete with expand/collapse wedges." 

NY Times: GE is Latest to Reconfigure Stock Options

Ernie the Attorney: "I'm more of a techblogger than a warblogger." 

Creative Commons shows its preliminary metadata spec.  

A hearty welcome back to Burning Bird.  

Happy birthday to Jeremiah Rogers! 

Last year on this day, I wrote an ode to the PC, in honor of its 20th birthday. "IBM needed the cloners as much as they needed IBM, they were the source of comfort for the customers, they provided the assurance that IBM couldn't try to lock the rest of us in the trunk and throw away the key." 

Four years ago: "If an idea has a twinkle in it, it's mine! If it can reach our hearts, I go for it. Just like Ringling and Barnum. It's a circus out there. Same on my home page." 

From Vikas Kamat, in India: "Yesterday, in her blog, my mother silently busted an age-old, dark myth of India that had denied the women the use of a sacred Hindu hymn." He adds: "There's been a lot of activity among bloggers from India. We are trying to build a weblogs.com-like portal just for the Indian blogs." 

This morning I have a very strange song running through my brain. It's from Woody Allen's Radio Days, a commercial for a product called Re-Lax. It's sung by Mia Farrow. It goes like this. "Get regular with Reeee-Lax. It's easy and safe. The Re-Lax Way." She sings it over and over. I can't get enough! 

Roger Ebert: "What actually happens isn't nearly as important as how we remember it." 

Last night's West Wing rerun was phenomenal. I had seen it before, but the second time it was even better. I cried and laughed so many times. Loosened everything up, made me feel realllly good. The closing scene was something else, the background music which comes up to a crescendo is Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. I'm going to have to look up the lyrics to see how the words fit with what's happening on stage. 

Yes, it's racism, but we survived 

Glenn Reynolds asks a poignant question. "What would things be like for Palestinians now, if Israelis or Americans thought like Arabs? They wouldn't be like anything at all, of course. There wouldn't be any Palestinians." Bada-boom.

Of course it's just as true that there would be no Palestinians if we thought like Nazi Germans or Klan members in Glenn's home state of Tennessee.

Faisal: "I'll take 'generalizations verging on racist wanking' for $100, Alex."

Glenn summarizes the discussion with Faisal. For what it's worth, I interpreted his original post as "Those Palestinians don't get it, we're trying to make peace with them."



     

Last update: Thursday, August 01, 2002 at 7:30 PM Eastern.

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