Music News (You Heard It Here First):
So I was browsing the audio CD’s at Barnes and Noble yesterday . . . no, no, I don’t usually do my music shopping at Barnes & Noble, but I went there to get Lawrence Lessig’s book, , because I couldn’t find it at my local independent bookseller, Politics & Prose. Typically I buy my CDs at DC CD in Adams Morgan. Hipster cred established? All right, moving on…
So, Barnes & Noble has this new thing where you run the UPC code of any CD under a scanner at the listening station, allowing you to listen to any clip of any CD in the place. Which, by God, I have to admit is pretty cool. Is there someone who’s job is to rip every CD in the Barnes & Noble inventory? The only catch is you only get to here a 15-20 seconds or so of each track, but at least they don’t necessarily start with the first 15-20 seconds.
Like I was trying to figure out the name of the infectious Weezer song I heard the other day, and the clip I received was the chorus allowing me to confirm the buzz-jangle goodness of Weezer’s “Keep Fishin’ ” . . . the video [Real format] to which, for the record, stars the Muppets. I love that Rivers Cuomo can’t keep that “I’m-singing-with-Kermit” grin off his face during the video. Who could?!?
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EduNuke:
The EduNuke.com project [link via Kairosnews] is extending PostNuke for educational purposes. PostNuke is an open-source clone of the already open-source Slashcode, the content management system originally designed for Slashdot. (There’s a half-dozen other Slashcode clones, like PHP-Nuke, PHPSlash, Squishdot, Geeklog, Drupal, Scoop, and others.
All of those news-oriented content management tools are open source, and almost all of them have nearly identical features and interfaces, so I’m curious why PostNuke was selected over any of the others.
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Speaking of “Super” Reading….
Apparently someone at the University of Virginia’s has put scans of the entire Action Comics #1 online. Action Comics #1, for those of you who are not afficionados, was the 1938 debut of Superman. He also has Quicktime audio files of old Superman radio shows.
Something tells me the copyright can’t have run out on this stuff. Methinks this guy will be hearing from DC Comics lawyers fairly soon.
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Everyone Read This:
Dive Into Mark’s great series on accessibility has been turned into a great online book, Dive Into Accessibility. Super reading.
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Writing in Public, Take Two (or Blogging Ethics):
After reading more comments by Dave Winer of Scripting News about “editing” (aka “deleting”) blog posts in this thread on Paolo Valdemarin’s blog, I really got irked.
Winer carps a lot about webloggers being journalists. However, journalists are expected to be accountable for their words. Winer doesn’t expect webloggers (or at least himself) to take the same responsibility even though he calls himself a journalist (the comments about “writing with integrity” in that last link are particularly hypocritical).
What Winer does is not editing — tweaking, clarifying, correcting. What Winer does is delete or “un-publish” his previously public comments. He speaks publicly, changes his mind, and attempts to make it appear as if the comments never existed. The ability to “un-publish” is fairly unique; it’s only possible if the “journalist” controls the distribution media as well, as in blogging. Print & TV journalists don’t have the personal luxury of deleting their article, column, or commentary after it has been made public; their only recourse is a public retraction. Winer undermines the credibility of weblogging as a journalistic medium by deleting inflammatory comments he makes in public, instead of posting a retraction, then attempting to whitewash his disingenous “un-publishing” as “editing.”
His argument against it? “There’s no ‘rule’ against it and this is how I want to do it; if you don’t like it you can take your ball and go home.” Lame. There is a “rule” against it — it’s called ethics. Maybe Dave should review the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, particularly the statements in the last section (titled “Be Accountable”) such as “Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.”
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Writing In Public:
When you make comments in public — especially inflammatory ones — you should take responsibility for them. If you “change your mind” then you should publicly clarify that your position has changed or that you mis-spoke or whatever.
What you should not do is cover up your previously public comments under the auspices of “editing.” Like Nixon was just “editing” the Watergate tapes. Bottom line: it’s disingenous, dishonest, and cowardly.
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“Yahoo!” or “Oh damn!”?
has a new look and feel, but I may never go there again because my free Yahoo! Mail account has gotten to the point where it’s unusable. Yes, I did catch Yahoo’s sneaky policy shift a few months back and clamped down on that. Even with their Spamguard service, my account fills up — literally, the entire 6 MB quota — with spam in the “Bulk Mail” folder so quickly that unless I clean it out weekly, it’s useless. And Spamguard still lets about 10-15% of the spam through into my Inbox.
I’m at the point, where I’m going to have to scrap my Yahoo! account that I’ve had for around five years and start fresh with a new username.
UPDATE (07/23/02): In one week my Yahoo! account received 236 spam emails (230 filtered successfully to Bulk Mail, 6 that slipped through), consuming 37% of my account quota. Ridiculous.
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Google Labs Does It Again:
. Search Google without a mouse. This will certainly have some accessibility applications for people with motor disabilities as well.
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Facets, Not Outlines:
A while back I wrote about why hierarchies are bad for organizing information. A found a good expression of that idea in an article titled “After the Dot-Bomb” in a recent issue of First Monday (another quality online pub I forgot about; where’s my head these days?!?):
“When classifications are used in Internet databases, it is hierarchical classifications that are almost invariably used. These are in the conventional ‘tree’ shape, a broad area subdivided, then subdivided again and again, with each possible category contained within the one above. Librarians invented a better kind of classification decades ago, that is called faceted classification. It is too involved to explain in this brief article, but a good analogy is to say that faceted classification is to hierarchical classification as relational databases are to hierarchical databases. Most system designers would not dream of using hierarchical files these days, so why are hierarchical classifications of information content still being used?”
Bingo. That’s why I’m so puzzled over the Userland crowd’s orgasmic devotion to outliners. I use them as a writing tool, but hierarchical information architecture pales in comparison to relational architectures. That’s why Google is so much better than the Yahoo or DMOZ directories.
My opinion on this has only solidifed since I’ve been playing with ZWiki, a Zope-based WikiWikiWeb, on a local machine. It’s fun and mirrors the thought process (mine at least) way better than the linearity of blogs or the hiearchical nature of outlines. Next area of investigation: the blending of Wiki and weblog.
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Finally, Congress Does Something Right About Copyright:
This article in the Chronicle reports that “The House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the bill, the Technology Harmonization and Education Act (S 487), on a voice vote without debate. It is identical to a bill the Senate approved in June 2001.” (FYI, in that quote I fixed the Chronicle’s link, which just pointed to Thomas instead of the actual text of S 487.)
This is a pretty good bill that will make it easier for teachers to use digital works in online education. It’s been 16 months getting it pushed through Congress. The Senate acted on it pretty speedily, but the House sat on it for over a year. Criminy!
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