What do Dave Winer and the Army have in common?
Based on this post from Rogers Cadenhead, they’re both easy to join, tough to live with and a hassle to get free from.
Oh, and they both seem to have a lot of money to support their wars.
Unlike the Army, however, Dave likes Yusuf Islam.
As I’ve said before, I have no idea who’s right and who’s wrong in the OPML dispute, but I too like Cat Stevens. Father and Son being my favorite Cat song.
Steve Gillmor saying that people shouldn’t link to other blogs/web sites is like someone who just won the lottery crying for its abolition on the grounds that it’s not fair to poor people.
I’ve got mine, so let’s cut off the spigot.
Blogging is not about your reputation or your traffic or how much of an A-Lister you are. It’s about conversations about topics of mutual interest. Links are the way you listen to what someone else has to say. Someone who never links out is like the self-important guy at the party who talks, usually about himself, but never listens.
Many of my favorite blogs (Doc Searls and Tom Morris come immediately to mind) regularly lead me to other interesting voices. Why would any right thinking person argue that is bad?
Thomas Hawk has another great photo, this time of the San Francisco immigrant march.
Maybe I’m more of a visual person that I thought, but more and more I find myself moved in areas of spirituality, philosophy and politics by a photograph. I think it’s because a photo isn’t trying to cram itself down your throat.
It just wants you to look.
Which is what the immigrant marches were all about.
What a beautiful little girl.
Google wants to tell the teacher on Microsoft for making its search engine the default search engine in the new version of Internet Explorer.
From the New York Times article:
The move, Google claims, limits consumer choice and is reminiscent of the tactics that got Microsoft into antitrust trouble in the late 1990’s.
Oh please. If this is the best thing Google can think of to tattle about, Google needs to cowboy up.
Ed Bott demonstrates exactly how oppressive it is to poor little Google to have to convince someone to select Google from the already-provided list of other search engines one can select as their alternative default search engine. Basically, a user clicks the box and selects Google. It takes maybe 10 seconds.
Meanwhile in Firefox (which I use as my default browser and which is very chummy with Google), Google is the default search engine. The process to make Microsoft your default search engine is substantially identical to the one used to do the reverse in Internet Explorer.
See Ed’s post for more details and screenshots.
I hope whatever authority figures Google runs to to tell this sad tale of woe laugh Google out of the building and suggest that Google stop crying over nothing.
Somewhere along the way someone decided that since Microsoft was so successful it had to stop trying to be successful. All of this jargon about default search engines and whatnot is merely a poorly disguised campaign to let a bunch of other companies leverage off of Microsoft’s prior successes. Somehow the argument has evolved from “don’t prevent my trains from running” to “I am entitled to sell tickets on your train.”
Even Nick Carr took a break from thinking about how smart he is and how dumb the rest of us are to actually make a very good point that us idjits can actually understand:
If Google wants to fully live up to its ideals – to really give primacy to the goal of user choice in search – it should open up its home page to other search engines. That would be easy to do without mucking up the page or the “user experience.” You could just add a simple drop down menu that would allow users to choose whether to do a search with Google’s engine, or Microsoft’s, or Yahoo’s, or one of the other, less-well-known engines that now exist.
Even us numbskulls can mostly grasp the goose and gander rule.
Anyway, I am no Microsoft apologist (DISCLAIMER: though I am a shareholder). I don’t even use Internet Explorer. But I know the sound of a crying baby, and that’s what I hear coming from Google’s crib.
Craig Newmark points to a petition where you can request that your name be removed from the mailing list for the hard copy of the Yellow Pages. 540 million hard copies takes a lot of trees.
I signed up, for both the Yellow Pages and the White Pages. I haven’t used a hard copy of either in years. I don’t need one copy and I certainly don’t need multiple copies, which I seem to get every year.
I just finished watching Werewolves on Wheels, a 1971 horror film that is part The Wolfman and part Easy Rider. It was a low budget, offbeat movie, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of the production crew have talking parts.
But there is something really compelling about it.
In sum, the movie begins, almost literally, like Easy Rider and then takes a left turn into a B movie-werewolf romp. If that sounds like your bag (it’s certainly mine), check this movie out.
The camera work by Isidore Mankofsky is really innovative and clever, even by today’s standards and the music, both background and semi-featured songs have aged very well.
The best part is the commentary, by both of the co-writers, one of whom was also the director. I almost never rewatch a film with the commentary. Rather, I just rewatch a few of the key scenes with the commentary turned on. I watched this entire movie again just to hear the interesting commentary.
A little trivia: the girl who initially turns into a werewolf is in On the Beach with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. And the guy who plays Pill was Bud on Father Knows Best.
Here’s my latest report from the realm of Second Life.
I have figured out the building thing and have built a pretty nice house/castle from the ground up. Visitors are welcome. It’s at Sibine (100,75,54). Here is the SURL.
In order to square off the size of my tract of land, I bought a big tract of land next to mine. In Second Life, your monthly fee is based on the size of your landholdings, so I don’t want to keep the excess land. I have two tracts for sale now. One is a 992 sq. meter tract with a small cabin and one is 4448 sq. meter tract with a smaller castle I built. In furtherance of my desire to create a little neighborhood of grownups who share similar interests, I will slash the prices to significantly below what I paid for them for anyone I know who is looking to get a place in Second Life. Email me and we’ll talk about it.
I also have a 7216 sq. meter tract between my house and those tracts that is not on the market, but I would consider developing it for some sort of a group effort- perhaps a tech bloggers’ gathering place or something like that, should enough people be interested.
I don’t know if it’s possible to build a little “memeorandum” community in Second Life, but it would be cool if we did, and I’m willing to throw in some land to make it happen.
I did a new podcast this afternoon.
I played a little Alice Cooper, two great songs by the Bluerunners, some more great alternative country numbers and a classic blues number by Rising Sons.
This episode’s tech talk involved the Lance Dunstan lawsuit (which should be immediately dismissed in my opinion) and a great new blog I have discovered.
In a move that boggles my mind, AOL has launched Blogging Stocks, where bloggers will write about individual stocks. Further boggling is the fact that the bloggers are not only allowed to own the stocks they write about, they are encouraged to own them.
Are blogs becoming the new message boards?
I am having nightmares of the Yahoo stock message boards of the mid-nineties. Visions of all those people who don’t know a PE ratio from a bullfrog either bashing or praising a stock based solely on whether they are short or long.
Sure, there’s a code of ethics in place and I suspect that most of the bloggers will comply with it. But one thing you can count on is that some people, be they bloggers or commenters with a hundred aliases, will try to game the system. At best it will be a chaotic blend of legitimate attempts at writing, infighting and position talking.
Steve Rubel says Blogging Stocks will drag more companies into the blogosphere. I think that’s probably true at first. But once the inevitable chaos begins, companies will write off these blogs just as they wrote off message boards long ago.
To begin with, if I don’t take financial advice from some guy who cold calls me early in the morning, tries to sound familiar by calling me “Jon” (Kent is my middle name; my first name is Jonathan) and tells me how he wants to do me a favor by letting me pay him to tell me what stock to buy, why am I going to listen to someone I don’t know who is blogging about a stock they likely own?
This is such a bad idea, I can’t believe it’s really happening.
The Stalwart shares at least some of my concerns and says:
For one thing, people who are interested in investment stuff are really concerned with credibility. They may be willing to take advice from a guy that throws around chairs while blaring heavy-metal, but they want him to be a successful hedge fund manager. Looking over bloggingstocks, you’ll instantly see the credibility problem at work.
I am not saying that the stock market should be completely off-limits to bloggers. To the contrary, I have mentioned the market here once or twice. I read Henry Blodget every day. Fred Wilson (who isn’t all that impressed with Blogging Stocks, but thinks stocks and blogs are a “perfect fit“) mentions the market from time to time.
But a network specifically designed for and devoted to bloggers blogging and commenters commenting on individual stocks they likely own (or in the case of the commenters, may own or short) is a recipe for chaos.
In September 1999 I was quoted in Money Magazine about stock message boards. I said that I would absolutely not look to them for stock ideas or strategy and that I believed doing so was very risky. I feel the same way about stock blogs.
Some will undoubtedly argue that as long as the network blogs only about huge companies and stays away from the penny stocks, where most of the manipulation allegedly occurs, there is little or no danger of gaming the system. While I agree that a few people blogging and commenting about Google or Microsoft is not going to affect the stock price, I don’t see a benefit (other than another stab at the almighty ad dollar) that supports a step down this slippery slope.
And that’s just it. Like every other internet-related business venture we read about these days, this one is chasing the online advertising dollar that many think is both permanent and infinite.
Also problematic, of course, is that the AOL association will lead many to believe, rightly or wrongly, that this information is more credible than some post by some anonymous poster on a message board.
Maybe it will be, maybe it won’t. And that is the problem.
The combination of individual stocks and a blog network is, in my opinion, a train wreck waiting to happen.
Before I starting building my own, I was a big fan of Dell computers. I bought 4-5 computers and a laptop from Dell over the years. When I am asked (as I am often) by friends for computer recommendations, I still suggest Dell desktops (and Thinkpad laptops).
One annoyance with any new computer is all of the junkware they pre-install on it, likely in exchange for payment from the vendor who hopes against hope you will buy the full version of the crippled junkware version that comes pre-installed.
Dwight Silverman reports today that Dell has added an option to dispense with the junkware. This is great news, and if you buy a computer you should always select the “no preinstalled software” option, if available.
Windows, an anti-virus program and any Office products you buy will still be installed. But you won’t get a bunch of crippled bloatware and offers for ISP services you don’t want.
Kudos to Dell for doing this.
Newsome.Org 