Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Joseph Palmer: "Me, a marketing guy? I don't think so." 

Political Wire quotes the Washington Post: "For many Americans, the election will be like a faraway war.." 

Scott Rosenberg: "Those darn Spanish voters -- they just don't do what George Bush wants them to do." 

I found a really nice Starbucks to check email and do a little lite blogging. It's on Ralston Ave in (I think) Belmont, CA, just off Highway 92 on the way to Half Moon Bay. Did a hike in an old favorite spot and had lunch with friends on the water in Foster City. It's official, this is a beautiful place, easy to live in. I found today that I miss my swimming pool. That's the first time I realized that since I left just about a year ago. It's funny you can come back to the place you left, and it looks different in some ways, and exactly as you remembered it in others. 

According to this list I'm the 26th most influential blogger or reporter on the Web. Not bad. Postscript: In response to criticism, presumably from ink-stained folk and their fans, he did another ranking which pushes the bloggers way down the list. He divides the number of pointers by the number of posts, so the fewer posts the higher you go. Heh. Proves that trying to quantify influence pretty hard to do, and maybe not so important. Reminds me of the scene in West Wing where Amy kisses Josh for the first time. As she touches his chin she says "Enough of you with the talking." 

The Boston Globe says they misquoted Kerry, but the Bush attack doesn't let up. The more they focus on the mistaken Kerry quote, the more it makes you think how it must look to foreign leaders. The US owes everyone a big mea culpa. We went to war, unprovoked, the first time in our history. Now the simplest way to say we were wrong, if Bush won't do it, is to elect Kerry. If Bush were smart, he'd change the subject, fast. 

Robert Cox: "The New York Times has withdrawn its DMCA take-down notice and acknowledged that The National Debate's New York Times Columnist Correction page is a parody and therefore protected under the First Amendement." 

Simon Carless: RSS and BitTorrent, Sitting in a Tree. 

Jay Rosen: "A new study from the Kennedy School pinpoints what happened between Big Media and the blogs in the case of Trent Lott." 

BBC: "It may be possible to build a technically better search engine but it will be difficult to make people love it."  

Scoble: "I'm sure that tomorrow we'll be back slinging mud at each other, although I'm pretty sure that won't bring our customers any better technology." 

Boston Globe: Dirty grout around tub can be scrubbed clean. 

This discussion on Joel Spolsky's site showed up in my Referrers. 

Congratulations to Bram Cohen on winning the Software Developer Rave Award last night. Steve Jobs won the Tech Renegade (top) award. 

I got a sneak peek at next year's Danger Hiptop, with a built-in browser showing Scripting News. Their marketing guy (I think) has been at the last two the Rave Awards I've been at, and always has something interesting that he sneaks. It seems he just does it for me, but I'm sure he's just good at making it seem that way.  

A storm is moving into the Boston area tomorrow through the end of the week. It seems totally impossible given the weather in San Francisco, that it could be snowing anywhere now. I fly back on Wednesday, it looks like the arrival might be a bit rough. 

Lots of candidates for header graphics on this day last year.