Friday, March 18, 2005

Surfers in a roiling Atlantic Ocean today. 

The Dowbrigade is in Florida, looking for a cheezy motel. "Then we saw it, lying low and white in the moonlight, surrounded by apparently abandoned cars, discarded tires, a disintegrating jungle gym and overgrown weed fields. Next door was Big Al's Gun and Pawn Shop, shut down for the night. Jerked out of our reverie, we swerved to the left of the empty highway and fishtailed into the gravel-packed driveway of the motel." 

It's ironic that Danny O'Brian, writing on O'Reilly's website, quotes me saying things I didn't say and don't agree with in order to discredit my position on AutoLink. It's ironic because changing what people say is exactly what the dispute is about.  

I got an email from Yahoo's feedback department saying they had removed my primary email address from the penalty box, and sure enough they have. Thanks for the help. Whew. 

Ross Rader really likes BlogMatrix Sparks 2.0. Gotta check it out. 

I'm doing a new site that lists all the sites I manage. It's also a testbed for a new OPML directory browser. Caveat: The link will certainly break.  

Dare Obasanjo reports on yesterday's presentation by Odeo. 

Rebecca MacK has an article in The Nation about the WebCred conf. 

As of today, March 18, I plan to vote for Russ Feingold for President in 2008, and it looks like he might actually be running. I'm sure he has no chance of winning, but every time I've wondered if anyone would stand up against the lunatics that run this country, Feingold has been there. He has real courage and intelligence and he cares.  

TheoDP says we don't have to worry about Amazon patenting OpenSearch, because there's plenty of prior art.  

A bug report on the Google Toolbar beta. When I uninstalled it, it left a piece of software hanging around. Now when I enter a bad URL into my browser (MSIE6), it takes me to Google just like every other snarky search engine that manages to install some software on my machine. I never gave them permission to do this in the first placfe, so it's adware, but even if I had, it should have reverted when I uninstalled the Toolbar. Is this evil? You be the judge. It sure is annoying.  

Podcasting News proposes a way for casters to include metadata about advertisements that go in their RSS feeds, so that when they display a link to your podcast they can also display your ads. They asked me about this a few days ago, and I said it's a good idea, and a good use of RSS. There are too many plans for world domination in the podcast world, frankly I don't think any of them will work. A mini-dotcom boom. The people at Podcasting News are proposing something more modest, more realistic, more cooperative, less about domination and more about working together.  

Gary Turner: "Flickr is da bomb." 

Bingo Barnes: "Blogs are grassroots journalism at its best." 

Jane Peppler: "Let's remember to be mutual." 

Julie Leung: "Is blogging a religion?" 

Sylvia Paull: "I've seen company after company grow to the point where not only is evil permitted, it's sanctioned. It's like a Jekyll-and-Hyde metamorphosis of the business. It's like a sickness that permeates every large corporation, from WorldCom to Hewlett Packard, which began by two guys who supported a non-evil workplace and turned it into a company where evil vibes are commonplace." 

Danah Boyd: "I was actually part of the 5% who applied to etech, only my application was rejected because it wasn't emerging. That's fair. But as an academic, i can only go to conferences that i present at. I wasn't even thinking about SXSW until Tantek approached me to speak on a panel there."