I’m going to try a John Watson, based on something funny I just heard.
Raina: Get of of the pool, it’s time to go eat lunch.
Raina: [30 seconds later] Get out now. We need to go eat lunch.
Raina: [20 seconds later] Get out! It’s time to go eat! Get out now!
Raina: [15 seconds later] GET OUT OF THE POOL NOW! IT’S TIME TO GO EAT! GET OUT NOWWWWW!!!
Delaney: What?
The fact that there are some idiots playing the censorship card over Linden Labs policy prohibiting “real-life images, avatar portrayals, and other depictions” of sexual acts involving children, sexual violence including rape, and other “broadly offensive content” is precisely why Second Life is not even close to being ready for serious business use. I understand that who defines “offensive content” is an important issue, but that doesn’t mean anything goes should be the policy in Second Life any more than it is the policy in the first one.
Engadget has a Tivo Deathwatch update. I had my own Tivo Deathwatch going, until DirecTV made me switch to their inferior PVRs. Meanwhile one of those new satellites that are supposed to give us all those HD channels has been delayed.
Jeff Balke on Hurricane preparedness in Houston and Galveston. Eric Berger may be “even-handed” now, but he adopted the “our job is to scare people” approach during Hurricane Rita.
Pramit Singh asks if blogging can change the world. No, but the more efficient distribution and archival of information via blogging platforms can certainly change parts of it, similar to the way internet distribution is changing the music business. Seth is correct that blogs have not flattened the earth as much as we’d like and there are still a lot of A-Listers (and, surprisingly, a lot of non-A-Listers too) who stare at you blankly when you talk to them, but it has at least made the hills smaller.
This dude has a 60 story house and a servant staff of 600. Are you kidding me?
I still think this is a joke. If Google buys this site, then we are definitely in the midst of Bubble 2.0.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the usefulness spectrum, Web Worker Daily has 7 Applications for Online Note-Taking. For most of us in the corporate world, the two biggest issues with respect to online note taking are backup and security.
It’s a slow day in the blogosphere. So here’s a little link around with the bloggers currently in my reading list.
ACE, Amy Gahran, Assaf Arkin, Ben Metcalfe, Ben Werdmuller, Bill Liversidge, Chip Camden, Corey Clayton, Craig Newmark, Dave Rogers, Dave Sifry, Dave Taylor, Dave Wallace, Dave Winer, David Airey, Doc Searls, Dwight Silverman, Earl Moore, Ed Bott, Eric Scalf, Ethan Johnson, Frank Gruber, Frank Paynter, Fraser Kelton, Greg Hughes, Haydn Shaughnessy, Hugh Macleod, Ian Delaney, Ilker Yoldas, Jackson Miller, Jake Ludington, Jay Neely, Jeff Balke, Jeff Pulver, Jeneane Sessum, Jeremiah Owyang, Jeremy Zawodny, jkOnTheRun, John Watson, Karl Martino, Kate Trgovac, Kevin Briody, Kevin Hales, Larry Borsato, Lifekludger, Louis Gray, Marc Canter, Mark Evans, Martin Gordon, Mathew Ingram, Michael Parekh, Mike Seyfang, Niall Kennedy, Nick Carr, Om Malik, OmegaMom, Phil Sim, Pramit Singh, R.C. Morin, Rahul Sood, Ric Hayman, Richard Querin, Rick Mahn, Rob Barron, Robert Gale, Robert Scoble, Rogers Cadenhead (that’s 8), Ron Jeffries, Scott Karp, Scott Kingery, Seth Finkelstein, Seth Godin, Shel Israel, Shelley Powers, Steve Gillmor, Steve Newson, Steve Rubel, Steven Streight, Stowe Boyd, Susan Getgood, TDavid, Thomas Hawk, Tom Morris, Tom Reynolds, Tony Hung, Wally Bangs, Warner Crocker and Zoli Erdos.
And those who are already in my new Swivel Feeds reading list.
Amyloo, Anne Zelenka, Ballastexistenz, Be A Good Dad, BldgBlog, Blonde 2.0, Blogging Pro, Bob Meets World, Bonnie Staring, Brad Kellett, Chris Brogan, Christopher Carfi, Claus Valca, D’Arcy Norman, Daily Cup of Tech, Dan Santow, David Rothman, Deborah Schultz, Hilary Talbot, J.A. Konrath, John T. Unger, Les Orchard, Lisa Stone, Mike Miller, Nancy White, Natalie Goes to Japan, Nick O’Neill, Opacity, Paul Greenberg, Paul Stamatiou, Quasi Fictional, Read/WriteWeb, Robert Andrews, Struggling Writer, Tresblue, UNEASYsilence and Zen Habits.
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. My mom used to tell me that saying “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit” as your first words at the beginning of a month would bring you good luck.
Congratulations to Dwight on the publication of his first book!
Here’s the real MySpace vs Facebook debate.
Looks like we don’t have to eat salads after all.
We Weren’t There: When Bill Met Steve at Carlsbad. Nobody ever gets my puns, so here. I loved the We Were There series as a kid.
Every time I drive by Cassidy’s first preschool I smile, and think about my then itty bitty Punkin who is now half way to 18. She doesn’t even remember going to that school. Kids grow up so fast. Hug them. Love them. Take a lot of pictures.
Google Street View Hunting. When you think about it, it’s just as arbitrary as drinking coffee. The NYT’s take.
I was a guest on last night’s edition of Dave Wallace and Mike Seyfang‘s The Extraordinary Everyday Lives Show podcast. The show is up and available. Go give us a listen!
We talked about blogging, networks, music, RSS, Facebook, MySpace, podcasting and all sorts of other interesting topics.
I really enjoyed it, and would welcome the opportunity to guest on more podcasts.
I enjoy memes, because they are a way to find out about others – and sometimes yourself – in an interesting way, without having to write or read a boring autobiography. I also think answers to questions are more revealing than prose, because they elicit specific information rather than whatever the writer consciously or subconsciously wants to present. Having now mounted my defense of memes, let’s get to the business at hand.
Chip Camden tagged me in Randy Morin’s bullying meme. So here we go.
Am I a bad person, if I’m happy to know that the bully did not live a full life?
I believe people are generally good or bad based on what they do, not what they think. Having said that, it depends on the level of bullying and what is meant by “live a full life.” There are certainly some things that a bully could do that would lead me to be happy if he shuffled off this mortal coil, but outside of murder, rape, etc., I would not wish death on someone. I would, however, be happy to learn that karma or the law acted to cause a serious bully to have a bad job, go to jail, become homeless, etc. I might want to forgive and forget, but I am an imperfect person and would be perfectly happy to hear of a little cosmic payback.
Were you bullied as a kid?
Not generally. There were a few times I was treated badly by some older kids, but it was more of a stop following us around thing than a bullying thing. My dad told me to avoid a fight when possible, but that there are times when there is no other way to resolve something. I tell my kids, in cases of physical aggression only, to ask the person (be that a sibling or third party) to stop twice, and only if that doesn’t work to respond in kind (or “do what you gotta do”). It is a hard line to draw and to walk, but I simply do not believe anyone has to accept physical abuse without defending themselves. Of course most of my wife’s friends think I am a caveman (and not the Geico kind) in this regard.
Was bullying as rampant in your schools, as they were in mine?
Probably, although I was largely oblivious to it at the time. If I bullied people in any way, it was by being unaware of their suffering at the hands of bullies that I may have been hanging out with.
What happened to the bullies in your school?
A couple of them are in jail, actually. None of my close friends were bullies, so I don’t know about the rest of them.
Was it just the boys, or did the girls bully too?
I don’t know about at my school, but as a parent of girls, I am convinced that bullying by girls against other girls is much, much worse than between boys. It’s verbal, as opposed to physical, and much harder to detect. If two little boys are fighting on the playground, it’s obvious, and they generally forget about it by the time school’s out. If you see one little girl whisper something to another, you have no idea what she said. And the adverse effects seem to linger longer. I think schools need to be much more proactive where girl to girl bullying is concerned.
Were you the bully?
Not to my knowledge. I have generally taken up for people when I feel they are being taken advantage of. When I was younger, I was less aware of that sort of thing, but the older I get the better my bully radar seems to be.
Bonus: Great country song.
Now to tag some bloggers. I’m going to dive into my new reading list, along with a few long time pals. Bob Meets World, Nick O’Neill, D’Arcy Norman, Nancy White, Blonde 2.0, Dave Wallace, Steven Streight and Thomas Hawk (who I think got beat up unfairly in the comments to a recent Scoble post).
There’s a new version of Windows Live Writer available for download. Lots of new features. Kevin Briody likes it. Why in the hell does it flash every time I add a link to a post? It’s User Account Control (which I long ago disabled) all over again.
Mahalo launched today. Steven Streight has a good write up on it, as does Mashable. Mahalo says it’s:
the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.
There’s a page for Scoble, one for Guy. None for Seth. Or me. Seems oddly familiar…. Anyway, why does a search for wolves return NOFX (whatever that is), Kevin Costner and Instapundit as 3 of the 4 links?
Scott Karp has a good summary of the CBS/Last.fm business. It’s about the declining radio ad dollar. One of these days someone is going to start looking for a return on all this money old media is tossing around trying to become new media.
I was a guest on Dave Wallace and Mike Seyfang‘s The Extraordinary Everyday Lives Show podcast tonight. It was an absolute blast! I’ll link to the episode when it’s up.
Fred Wilson is fired up about HD Radio. He applauds Sony’s entry into the HD Radio market with the soon to be available XDR-S3HD (an inspired name, for sure), a $200 table top HD radio.
I love music, and I particularly love high fidelity music. Currently, I get my car music via XM Radio, and while I am generally pleased with the selection, I find the audio quality to be a notch or two above two tin cans and a string. Anyone who says XM is CD quality hasn’t listened to many CDs.
On the other hand, there’s a very good reason why XM has grown so fast and why networks are looking for creative and technological ways to keep people from skipping ads. People simply don’t like ads. In this era when everyone is jumping on the ad revenue bandwagon, radio advertising has been on the decline.
People tolerate online ads because they are relatively easy to ignore. Ads on the radio are impossible to ignore.
Sure, I’ve never heard HD radio. And the experience might be so amazing that all those radio ads I haven’t missed in the years since I’ve listened to one second of over the air radio will be like, well, music to my ears. But I’ve had HDTV for a few years, and I can tell you this – I’ve never once watched the ads. I record the show and fast forward through every ad that doesn’t have cavemen.
I hope HD radio takes off, mostly because it will put competitive pressure on XM to sound better. But a higher sound quality won’t be enough to lure me back to traditional radio.
Variety is reporting that ABC is “hoping to reinvent the newsmagazine for the YouTube generation with a show produced by ABC News but based on user-generated video.”
i-Caught, a new show with a Web 2.0 worthy and grammatically challenged name, will get a six-week run on ABC starting August 6. If it does well, it might return midseason.
It won’t do well for one reason. ABC, and the other TV networks, are superfluous to the user generated video movement. YouTube, Google, the blogosphere and hordes of other online media hubs already constitute a distributed video on demand system that exists without the need for a traditional broadcast medium.
ABC brings nothing to the table users can’t get elsewhere, whenever they want it, and generally without all the advertising.
This is an update on my swivel feeds experiment, in which I ask bloggers I read to help me rebuild my reading list.
Here are the swivel feeds recommendations so far from the first group. Note that, when possible, I designate blogs by the name of the blogger, because I like to know who I’m talking to.
Anne Zelinka
Ballastexistenz
Bob Meets World
Bonnie Staring
Chris Brogan
David Rothman
Deborah Schultz
Engtech Lite
f8d
Heise Security
Hilary Talbot
Ian Forrester
IT|Redux
J.A. Konrath
John Tropea
Les Orchard
New Scientist
Nick O’Neill
Phydeaux3
Quasi Fictional
Reg Braithwaite
Robert Andrews
The Struggling Writer
Tresblue
Tricks of the Trade
Participants Blonde 2.0, Mike Miller, Amyloo, Assaf Arkin and Improbulus round out the first edition of my new reading list.
So far, we are off to a good start. I have subscribed to all of the recommended blogs, and all of them are new to me.
No suggestions yet from A Consuming Experience, Amy Gahran, Amyloo, Assaf Arkin, Ben Metcalfe or Ben Werdmuller, but there’s plenty of time to get them in.
Now for the next 8 bloggers (whose additions will be listed in the next update):
Bill Liversidge: Bill is a writer, like several of the swivel feeds recommendations above. I have been reading his blog for a long time, though he does not post as much as he used to. I hope he sees this.
Brad Kellett: One of my core blogging pals. He’s one of my mobile tech gurus, though he writes well about a lot of other topics too.
Chip Camden: Another of my core blogging buddies. He’s a software developer who, like me, blogs about all sorts of things. One of my long-time reads.
Christopher Carfi: Chris is an entrepreneur, and the co-founder of Cerado. I’ve been reading his blog since I found out what blogs were.
Claus Valca: Another Houston blogger, who writes detailed and very informative posts about software, among other topics.
Corey Clayton: A relatively new read who I met via Twitter. He’s a tech writer and a podcaster.
Craig Newmark: The founder of Craigslist needs no introduction. The first time he commented here, I actually called my wife from work and told her. That’s the only thing about this blog she actually thinks is cool, as opposed to, well, nerdy. I enjoy Craig’s political and social activism posts.
Dave Rogers: Dave is a retired navy commander from Florida, whose blog I have read for a year or two. He writes well about all sorts of stuff.
That’s the second group of bloggers I’m asking to help rebuild my reading list. If you’re willing, please give me 5 recommendations to add to the list. Use the comments, your blog or email, whichever you prefer.
Newsome.Org 