Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Catching up on all my reading:
Scoble has dropped his subscription to Burningbird because I don’t provide full feeds. That’s okay Robert: I think I would rather not be read then to be skimmed quickly: fitted in between this meeting and that tech dinner.
I thought about this and realized I don’t write posts that skim well. I’m just as likely to start a post out about my cat, but finish on some esoteric bit of semantic web nonsense. I am an oblique writer; I drag all my readers through everything that’s of interest to me regardless of a topics of interest to them (you). Tech people get cats, cat people get tech, and you all get pictures.
On the other hand, Dave Winer has a good point in that if I’m not going to provide fulltext, I should provide meaningful excerpts rather than the ‘first so and so characters of the post’. I can agree with this and will attempt to do this in the future.
Of course, I always see the excerpt as yet another place to extend my creative urges…
Jeneane Sessum asked for opinions on commenting options, and received some good feedback. I like my approach: successful commenter’s email address enables them to comment freely; others go into moderation; comments are closed at 20 days. No muss, no fuss, no problems.
I’ve also decided to take a hands off approach to my comments. If someone is trolling, we can learn to ignore them. If folks want to get into strong disagreements, it’s between the parties — I’m not going to intrude. I’ve found in the past that when I do intrude, most of the time it just makes it worse because I’m not letting the folks work through the disagreement out on their own–and insulting them in the bargain. The only comments I’ll delete are ones that I feel are sp*m and ones that are so off-topic and deliberately harmful, that they might as well be sp*m. I won’t shut down comment threads either because of ongoing discussions–that’s only another form of intrusion.
I also thought about removing my ‘edit’ feature, but I like being able to clean up my comments and feel you all do, also. What I am thinking of doing is annotating any comment that’s been edited with a small line of text at the bottom that reads: “This comment has been edited”.
Back to catching up:
Happy Tutor writes about using humiliation as punishment and a case where a thief is required to wear a “I stole mail” sign:
But the good news really is that shame and humiliation can be imposed without a court. Satire is judge, jury, and executioner. Our noble trade is fully in the spirit of the times: Brutal. Branding is not restricted to products.
Sometimes that man is too damn smart for our own good.
Speaking of satire, I love finely crafted satire but it is a chancy art. I dabble in it, from time to time, with both visual and verbal offerings. The Happy Tutor is acknowledged master of the art of satire, and the Better Bad News folks hit the target time and again. Of course, no one is better than Jon Stewart, but we do what we can.
Including a new site, pointed out in my comments by zo: Go Flock Yourself: beta:(My mistake on pointing to this site–some people just like to wear hoods and burn things just to see them burn.)
Moving on….Noded has the best reaction to Michael Brown actually starting a consulting business for disaster planning.
Microsoft, bitch slapped by the state of Massachusetts for being all proprietary, has decided to see the standards light and release all of it’s Office formats to ECMA for care: feeding of. (What, has ECMA become the trash compactor of the spec world?) Tim Bray said why not support ODF (OpenDocument)? Dare Obasanjo responded with pot calling and kettles named “Atom”; Tim responded back with apples and oranges. and sticks.
Look, I have the perfect solution: use RDF. Sure, we can convert ODF to RDF; we can convert Office XML to RDF. It’s not only a standard now, but your office format would be inter-operable with dozens of other specifications already in use. More than that–all parties involved really dislike RDF; a shared mutual sense of loathing is a good first step in forming an alliance.
See, you need a woman involved in these discussions to get to the heart of these matters; to see the crystal clear path amid the dark, old, and crusty biases.
Speaking of matters, I’ve just realized that 2/3’s of my subscriptions in Bloglines haven’t been updated in a very long time. Either I am subscribed to the wrong feed, Bloglines is missing updates, or a lot of people I know have quit weblogging. If the latter, too bad, really, because I miss the melody and it seems lately all I’m hearing is a lot of tubas with an occasional flute.
And now is a good time to drop in another Zoë photo! Zoë says use RDF…or else.
alt=”Hard Day Cleaning” width=”500″ height=”333″
(Warned you: esoteric semantic web nonsense, and a cat picture.)