Tea Birds is a blog of nothing
Tea Birds is a blog of nothing but cute girls having tea. (via bb)
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kottke.org posts about weblogs
Nomination for the most useless new word
Nomination for the most useless new word of 2007: beme. A beme is a meme that spreads via blogs and those that create and spread them are called bemerz.
This is puzzling: former Gizmodo editor Joel
This is puzzling: former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson wrote a terrific, blistering, spot-on rant about how bad the technology coverage of Gizmodo (and by association, many of the other gadget sites) is and how stupid their readers are for lapping it up…and they printed the whole thing on their web site. “And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket.”
The effects of blogging
Blogging makes us more oriented toward an intellectual bottom line, more interested in the directly empirical, more tolerant of human differences, more analytical in the course of daily life, more interested in people who are interesting, and less patient with Continental philosophy.
Truehoop, a basketball blog that’s one of
Truehoop, a basketball blog that’s one of the best out there on any topic, has been purchased by ESPN. Congrats, Henry.
Anthony Bourdain critiques Food Network and some
Anthony Bourdain critiques Food Network and some its stars on Michael Ruhlman’s blog. “SANDRA LEE: Pure evil. This frightening Hell Spawn of Kathie Lee and Betty Crocker seems on a mission to kill her fans, one meal at a time. She Must Be Stopped. Her death-dealing can-opening ways will cut a swath of destruction through the world if not contained. I would likely be arrested if I suggested on television that any children watching should promptly go to a wooded area with a gun and harm themselves.” Blogging may well be Bourdain’s natural medium…it suits his vitriolic style.
David Shenk is writing a book about
David Shenk is writing a book about genius, specifically “how science is unveiling a rich new understanding of talent, ‘giftedness,’ and brilliance — and the lessons we can all apply to our own lives”, and he’s using a blog to help him while he researches and writes it.
Some RSS and remaindered links changes
As promised, I’ve made some long overdue changes to the kottke.org RSS feeds and the remaindered links. I’ve combined the two kottke.org feeds — previously one contained main posts, movie posts, and book posts and the other contained the so-called remaindered links — into one feed, located here:
If you’re already subscribed to the main feed, you shouldn’t have to change a thing. If you’re subscribed to the remaindered feed, your newsreader (if it’s smart enough) should automatically and permanently redirect you to the new feed. If not, just change the subscription to point at the above feed. If you’re subscribed to both, unsubscribe from the remaindered feed. The new combined feed will mirror the front page of the site…whatever appears there will appear in the feed.
Second thing: the remaindered links are dead. Long live the remaindered links. Oh, they’re still here on the site, but it’s been a long time since they were just links…they’re more like mini posts with no titles — some of them are actually longer than the non-mini posts. The distinction made sense when they were included in the sidebar on the front page, but not anymore. Functionally that means no separate RSS feed, no separate archives, and no separate index page…they’re all gone (or will be soon). All the remaindered links posts are still available, but they’re in the main monthly archives now. The point is, you don’t need to worry about any of this. Just subscribe to the above feed or come to the front page each day and you’ll get everything that’s new on kottke.org everyday. Simple.
Things should have worked this way for, oh, the past two years, but I just never got around to changing it. What finally kicked my butt into action were two things that happened in the past two weeks. I had coffee with Cory Doctorow last weekend. He asked how things were going with kottke.org and remarked that I’m not posting nearly as much as I used to. I replied that I had been posting as much as ever, but got the feeling that Cory was only subscribed to the main RSS feed, which only accounted for about 15-20% of my total effort on the site. I wondered how many other people out there were only subscribed to the main feed and started to, oh, I guess “fret” is the right word.
Fret turned to panic when I checked my server logs. Bloglines sends along how many people are subscribed to an RSS feed in the user-agent string that’s deposited in the referer logs on the server, like so:
Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 200 subscribers)
When I compared the number of subscribers to the main feed to the number subscribing to the remaindered feed, the main feed number was nearly 3 times higher. Even worse is when I looked at my server logs for the feeds (I stopped looking at my stats months ago)…visits to the main feed are outpacing visits to the remaindered feed 5:1. Which means that somewhere between 75-85% of the people who are reading kottke.org via RSS aren’t even getting most of what’s on the site! Which was dumb, dumb, dumb of me to let happen for all these months and why I’ve now corrected the situation. Interestingly, the stats from Rojo indicate the opposite situation…way more people are subscribed to the remaindered links feed than the main feed. Weird. (Another RSS stats tidbit: I’ve served up 58 gigabytes of RSS so far this month. That’s crazy!)
As always, your bug reports, questions, and concerns are appreciated and may be directed to [email protected].
Ben Brown has a built a little
Ben Brown has a built a little site that takes the content from kottke.org’s RSS feeds and adds the ability to comment on them. “Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, Jason does not allow readers to leave comments. Kottke Komments contains the same stuff as Kottke.org, but with comments turned on!” Here’s more from Ben on the why/how. “The site […] is already built to parse, combine, and remix multiple sources of content. BoingBoingBlurbs, anyone?”
Choire Sicha is returning to edit Gawker.
Choire Sicha is returning to edit Gawker. What’s the line from Godfather 3? “…but they keep pulling me back in.” Here’s a post about it on the big G itself.
The best niche blog yet: it’s devoted
The best niche blog yet: it’s devoted to the use of the lowercase “L” in otherwise uppercase text. “WHAT THE HEll? WHY DO PEOPlE WRITE lIKE THIS?”
On the site for his new novel,
On the site for his new novel, The End As I Know It, Kevin Shay is blogging pre-Y2K internet postings. “On This Day Pre-Y2K is updated daily with one or more verbatim quotations drawn from a variety of online sources, from today’s date, eight years ago.” One of my favorite posts describes “the great geek exodus from the cities late next year”.
Mena Trott: “If you aren’t going to
Mena Trott: “If you aren’t going to say something directly to someone’s face, then don’t use online as an opportunity to say it”.
Gawker has a list of blog-media cliches.
Gawker has a list of blog-media cliches. I’m especially tired of “Best. Thing. Evar!” and “teh”. They also forgot “Internets” and “the Google”. Then again, I’m partial to “wait for it” so whatever.
The blog commentor’s gaze
The cover story of the December 9th issue of Science News, The Predator’s Gaze, is about psychopathy. The whole article is worth a read, but the brief description of psychopathy at the beginning got me thinking about something that Anil Dash wrote the other day. He highlighted a review of a B&B made by a potential guest that was upset that his many attempts to persuade the owners to accept his expired gift certificate. Anil labeled this person a sociopath:
As a public service, I offer you my analysis. This quote is how you can tell this guy is a sociopath. Not that he merely went online and vented to random strangers about his greediness. No, rather, that he was willing to concede his own willful ignorance (or illiteracy?) while complaining. The web is littered with these chuckleheads who point out their own sociopathic behavior while complaining about others.
At dinner the other night, a group of us were talking about a particularly irksome message board contributor and the subject of sociopathy came up again. This particular person seemed to be oblivious to the rules of the board, didn’t pick up on the social cues of other participants or moderators to modify his behavior, and was making public personal attacks against others while complaining that others were doing the same to him, even though they were not. Anyone who runs a community site, has comments on their blog, or participates on a message board knows this guy — and it usually is a guy. He’s the fly in everyone else’s ointment, screaming in the middle a quiet conversation, and then says things like “if you hate me, I must be doing something right”.
With that in mind, some quotes from the Science News article:
Psychopaths lack a conscience and are incapable of experiencing empathy, guilt, or loyalty.
People with psychopathy don’t modify behaviors for which they’re punished and don’t learn to avoid actions that harm others, Blair proposes in the September Cognition. As a result, they fail to develop a moral sense, in his view. Blair’s theory fits with previous observations that psychopaths have difficulty learning to avoid punishments, show weak physiological responses to threats, and don’t often recognize sadness or fear in others.
He views psychopathic personalities as the product of an attention deficit. Psychopaths focus well on their explicit goals but ignore incidental information that provides perspective and guides behavior, Newman holds. Most other people, as they take action, unconsciously consult such information, for instance, rules of conduct in social settings and nonverbal signs of discomfort in those around them.
Sounds a lot like the fellow we were discussing at dinner. I don’t think most of the people that demonstrate antisocial behavior in comment threads are actually psychopaths or sociopaths (there is a difference) in real life. Rather, interacting via text strips out so much social context and “incidental information” that causes some people to display psychopathic behavior online and fail to develop an online moral sense.
Thinking about disruptive commenters in this way presents an interesting challenge. According to the article, psychopathy seems to be genetic in nature and curing people of this extreme antisocial behavior can be difficult. An Australian study cited in the article found that boys with behavioral problems reacted better to rewards for good behavior than to punishments for bad behavior. Maybe looking for ways to reward bad online community members for their good behavior as well as trying to replace some of the stripped away social context is the way forward. (A quick idea for replacing some social context: add a graphic of eyes to the text-posting interface?)
This is exactly how my day goes everyday. (thx, dianne)
This is exactly how my day goes everyday. (thx, dianne)
Why blogs suck. “i am afraid of
Why blogs suck. “i am afraid of the analagous phenonena happening: blog as signifier for experience, rather than experience itself.”
Steven Johnson has a new blog over
Steven Johnson has a new blog over at the NY Times on “the perils and promise of increasing urban density” but it’s TimesSelect which sucks both generally and for me specifically.
Buzzfeed launches
Jonah Peretti, late of Eyebeam and currently of Huffington Post, and his fine team have launched Buzzfeed. From the about page:
BuzzFeed distinguishes what is actually interesting from what is merely hyped. We only feature movies, music, fashion, ideas, technology, and culture that are on the rise and worth your time.
The content territory that Buzzfeed aims to fill is an interesting one. The site is not Digg with 125 new items to read on the front page every day. Neither is it an historical record of what people thought was interesting at a certain point in time. It’s more like a water cooler conversation with velocity, a moving snapshot of what the media and blogosphere is talking about. As a result, the stuff you see on Buzzfeed is not the absolute newest, freshest thing…there’s no truly breaking news on the site because to have buzz around something, people already need to be talking about it somewhere. But unless you’re completely obsessive about keeping up with everything going on in all corners of the world, it’s likely that Buzzfeed will show you something new and interesting every day, especially if it’s in an area you don’t normally pay attention to. That’s the goal, anyway.
I think it’s a great approach, an attempt to cut through a bit of the hype and look past the memes you might chuckle at and then completely forget about and instead, as the about page says, “aggregate authentic excitement that captures what real people are saying about the things they find most interesting”. The Borat trend is an example of something that really works with this approach. Unlike most films released these days, there’s a surprising number of different things around Borat to talk about. There’s the movie itself. There’s the surprise popularity of it. And the almost universal great reviews. Then came the lawsuits. Now there’s a bit of a backlash. And there’s the Snakes on a Plane angle…Borat is a movie that succeeded through viral marketing where SoaP largely failed. A bit of something for everyone there, even for the hardcare Borat fan.
Warning Disclosure: I am an advisor to Buzzfeed.
Are you ready? I said, ARE YOU
Are you ready? I said, ARE YOU READY? End-of-the-year list season has begun!! Woo! Let’s get it started with Information Leafblower’s list of the top 40 bands in America as chosen by a bunch of music bloggers. Lots of guitar music that the indie rock kids like so much.
Blogs are so new in Saudi Arabia
Blogs are so new in Saudi Arabia that the local term for blogging, tadween, was just coined earlier this year. Pretty soon the Saudi kids will be weening on their weens and forming a weenosphere.
Popular posts
Philipp Lenssen recently asked some bloggers what their most popular post was:
I asked several bloggers about their most popular, or one of their most popular, blog posts — the kind that made an impact on people, had skyrocketing traffic numbers, or triggered a meme or changes.
I was asked to answer the question, but didn’t get my response in on time. Here’s what I would have answered. In terms of pure traffic, it wasn’t the biggest, but my 9/11 post and the resulting 2-3 weeks of posts subsequent to that probably had the biggest relative impact on the site. My traffic immediately doubled and didn’t go back down after things settled down a little. You might say that those two weeks made kottke.org, just like they gave birth to the war/political blogs. That day opened a lot of bloggers’ eyes to the cynical truth that the traditional news media already knew: other people’s tragedy and pain sells.
I don’t regret covering 9/11 the way that I did because it came from the heart and I got so much email from people, even weeks and months afterward, who genuinely appreciated my small contribution. But following 9/11, I’ve been increasingly wary of covering similar situations in the same way because, knowing that cynical truth, a part of me would be doing it for selfish reasons: writing for hits, attention, and glory. I posted a few things early on about the Indonesian tsunami and the London Tube bombings, and hardly anything about Katrina (I took a week off instead, writing about anything else during that time seemed trivial and ridiculous). In some ways, 9/11 was the defining editorial moment for kottke.org. After that experience, I took more care in why I was writing about certain topics and when the answer was “to get attention” or “because it’s a hot issue” or “if I piss off [big blogger], he’ll link back to me in rebuttal and boost traffic” or “if I kiss [big blogger’s] ass, he’ll link to me” or “I need to cover this issue for kottke.org to remain relevant in the global news conversat-blah-blah-blah”, I usually take a pass. That editorial stance has probably cost kottke.org a lot of traffic over the years, but that’s a trade-off I’m completely comfortable with.
The brand new Brand New blog identifies
The brand new Brand New blog identifies and critiques new logos and other brand identity work.
Slashdot recently crossed 16,777,216 (that’s 2^24) comments, after which
Slashdot recently crossed 16,777,216 (that’s 2^24) comments, after which no more could be added because of a database misconfiguration. (via waxy)
An organization called Scholarships Around the US
An organization called Scholarships Around the US is offering a $5000 scholarship to a college student who blogs. It’s free to apply…all you need to do is write a 300-word essay (and meet a few requirements).
Richard Dawkins is keeping a journal while
Richard Dawkins is keeping a journal while he tours around in support of The God Delusion. “This Washington signing was remarkable for the number who bought not just one copy of The God Delusion but up to half a dozen. ‘Christmas presents?’ I inquired of one man. ‘Winter solstice’, he instantly corrected me.”
outside.in is a hyperlocal blog/newspaper/
outside.in is a hyperlocal blog/newspaper/information aggregator that Steven Johnson is heading up. Here’s his announcement post on his blog. “Type in a zip code or address, and you’ll instantly see the conversations that the natives are having about their community.”
Time’s White House photographers have a daily
Time’s White House photographers have a daily photoblog. A good look at the stuff that doesn’t make it into the newspapers or magazines. (thx, pablo)
A collection of excuses for not blogging
A collection of excuses for not blogging more. “I haven’t had the internet and I have been drunk or busy alot.”
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