Technology: April 2005 Archive Page

None of these dedicated reporters and editors is paid for their efforts. In fact, most of them don’t know the first thing about professional journalism. All however are as passionate about their craft as the top earners at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News or the BBC. What’s more, they’re convinced they can offer better journalism than anything professional news organizations currently supply; one stripped of all bias, covering areas long ago neglected by a mainstream media and produced by thousands of committed citizen correspondents all over the world. This is the dream of Wikinews.

Objectivity, no political agenda and the puritanical pursuit of truth? Surely that’s a pipedream? It’s certainly not a historical trait of American media. Yet if the lessons of the last year have taught us anything, it is that we dismiss citizen journalism at our peril.

[...]

“We were both kinda addicted to Star Wars Galaxies,” explains Ilya a little defensively. “I would travel [in the game] and claim I was with the press so they shouldn’t shoot me. But they still did.”

It’s not being glib to say that Ilya’s Star Wars Galaxy experience translates well to Wikinews. All the interactive and community skills that today’s 20-somethings have learned online provide the underpinning of this new participatory media. And given all the time and effort Ilya spent “practicising” being a journalist – learning style guides and how to structure a news story, who’s to say he’s any less equipped to start plying the trade than many journalism graduates? --Matthew Yeomans
--The Birth of WikiNews (Citrizens Kane)

Robert Pittman, who created MTV, attributed the station's success to the ability of viewers in their late teens and early 20s to process multiple facets of information simultaneously. In television, success brings imitation....

"When Mary Lynn Ryan, who was CNN's producer at the time, did this the news ratings skyrocketed," Grimes said. "So it appeared as though Robert Pittman was correct: if you are from 12-22 years old, your brain has learned how to process all these competing messages simultaneously, but people in their 30s and older have not learned how to do that."

Bergen, however, hypothesized that Pittman's theory was not correct.... "The human brain is today as it was in the 1880s, the 1580s and in the time of the Greeks and Romans. It has not changed," Grimes said. "We are no better able to parallel process conflicting information now than we were 300 years ago. So this notion that Pittman had that people have learned how to do that is nonsense." --Distracting visuals clutter TV screen; viewers less likely to retain content (EurekAlert!)

We'll be starting our own TV turn-off week, one week late.

Tonight, my son asked to watch The Incredibles again, but I told him we'd play together instead. While my wife took a nap, the kids and I read books aloud, played hide-and-seek, "Simon Says," and a game of my own invention -- "The Obedience Game." Just about anything can be fun if you enjoy the people you're with.

Computer turn-off week? I'm not ready for that...

AP started as a cooperative. Today, it is a cooperative in name only. It’s time to take a lesson from music swappers and invent the new AP – a digital cooperative, a Napsterized news service.

The 21st Century news business needs a peer-to-peer network that lets local operations drive cost out of their non-local news packages, divert resources to local web content creation and operate on a level playing field with bloggers, citizen journalists and internet pure plays. --Bob Benz and Mike Phillips --Time for a change: The Associated Press as Napsterized news (Online Journalism Review)

This is a reasonable attempt by the mainstream media to "get it" when it comes to the internet. Another detail that caught my eye:

Confronted with the rapidly growing need for web-specific content like Flash files, audio clips and other multimedia elements, AP has chosen to spend more of its members’ money to create that content rather than facilitate content-sharing among its members.

I'm planning to introduce a Flash unit in an upcoming (Fall 2006, if memory serves) New Media Projects course.

Pick Up Ax Link-O-Rama (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This year, I've taught Anthony Clarvoe's play Pick Up Ax in two of my courses -- Intro to Literary Study and Media Aesthetics. If you're just itching to find out what my students had to say about this play about geeks who listened to rock music that was recorded before they were born, here's a Google search for 'Pick Up Ax' on blogs.setonhill.edu.

A few years ago, I wrote a brief article on Pick Up Ax in the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games newsletter.

The publisher's website features a brief Clarvoe bio.


Some reviews:

Pick Up Ax reveals how distant such ideals now seem. Its protagonist—far from feeling heat, let alone compunction, for swimming with (past) a school of very nasty sharks—is rewarded for his less-than-ethical actions; and not just in the outcome of the plot, mind you: we actually kind of like and admire this guy, in spite of the fact that—or, more disturbingly, maybe because—we recognize in him the soulless signposts of our recent Age of Greed (NYTheatre.com)

Here's a mostly positive review that praised the production more than the writing.

The company says that its plays are chosen ``for their fiery vitality and thought-provoking topics,'' and this play was very often fiery; but thought-provoking? Well, yes, if the message was that the meek shall inherit modern technology or that the nerds will get their revenge. It seemed unsure, too, as to whether it was a morality play or a realistic one. (Off-Off Broadway Review)

Just today I found a delightful Pick Up Ax photo gallery, featuring photos of the mood room in action.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new 'libraries' that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.

Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia—a condition didn’t even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers. --Steven Johnson
--Everything Bad Goes Public (StevenBerlinJohnson.com)

Johnson's satirical thought piece reminds us that our experiences and surroundings determine what we think of as "normal".

The game scene is resorting to faddish ideas from years ago to try to appear original. I'm surprised they haven't come out with Pet Rock software yet.

None of this will save a doomed industry. The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making game players buy newer and newer machines. Computer gaming has always been sustained by never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?

That time is drawing near. We are already getting pre-hype for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 2, as well as the new Nintendo. All this will do is make the visuals more lifelike and the blood and gore more realistic and nauseating. While the kids who are used to this "progress" may not be put off by it, newcomers may be repulsed and skip these new generations of machines altogether.

If that doesn't flatten the market, the never-ending need to satisfy the demanding full-time game-player should do it. --John C. Dvorak --Doom 4: End of the Game Industry?  (PC Mag.com)

Predictably, Dvorak's getting trashed by twitch-thumbed gamers on Slashdot, but Dvorak's curmudgeonly demeanor is only endearing to a point.

Adams had a knack for describing thorny space-time problems and then squeezing them until they sprayed out juicy absurdity. The novels could be silly -- Adams was a comedy writer -- but they also made dark sport of humans' self-importance. We look pretty small, he constantly reminded us, against the backdrop of a nearly infinite galaxy. --Jason Silverman --One Thumb Up for Hitchhiker  (Wired)

A while ago I blogged a review that trashed the movie, so it only seems fair to blog a more positive one. I still think I'll pass on this one.

In the minority are those teachers who have setup their blog/cms as the main home page for their site, integrated into their blog or CMS or at least provide obvious links to their CV, teaching experience, etc, off of the main page of their blog. The blog/CMS is thus positioned as the main public face for establishing professional ethos, an inseparable part of the teacher/researcher's identity. I was actually surprised at how few I have been able to find; it seems a large number of those in the field don't provide direct links to their professional CV or teaching philosophy from the front page of their blog or only a brief mention of their professional affiliation thus making it obvious to me that they would not share their blog as the singular main portal into their professional identity in a cover letter or resume submitted to a hiring committee.

Here's the list I have so far where teachers are building their professional identity into their blog/cms site, or at least featuring the blog as their home page with direct links back to CV, bio, etc.

• Matt Barton
• Johndan Johnson-Eilola
• Dennis Jerz
• Charles Lowe
• Clancy Ratliff
• Rich Rice
• Clay Spinuzzi

Anyone have suggestions for other sites in rhetoric and composition with these characteristics? I'm sure there must be some more out there and I'd like a few more examples. --Teachers Who Position Their Blog or CMS as their Professional Home Page (KairosNews)

Nowadays, news consumers have an almost unlimited choice. They don't sit down with a newspaper for an hour to read it cover to cover. Instead, they bounce from site to site, story to story, link to link, customizing their newsgathering experience, clicking on whatever stories from whatever publications appeal to them. They don't stick around long, but they do visit. It may be difficult for newspapers to figure out how to make money on them, but that doesn't mean that consumers don't find the product appealing.

People haven't been abandoning newspapers (and magazines). They have been abandoning the print medium. --Adam L. Penenberg --The New Old Journalism  (Wired)

Nothing terribly new here, but it's still notable to see support for The Basics in a publication like Wired.

Incredibles DVD Freezes in My Player (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The other day, my wife picked up a copy of the widescreen, 2-disc DVD of The Incredibles. The movie disc loaded, played the FBI warning, then froze on the screen that threatens our little family with legal action if we ever offend The Mouse.

I'm used to the annoying tendency of DVDs to refuse to let you jump right to the menu, but this was ridiculous. The screen froze at the warning, and didn't do anything. The only way we could get the DVD out was by shutting off the player.

The bonus features disc plays just fine, and the disk that hung in on our DVD player worked just fine in my laptop. The DVD has imprinted on it "www.TheIncredibles.com/support," but that URL leads to an error. Hacking the URL leads to a Disney site containing no obvious technical assistance.

We brought the box back to Wal-Mart to exchange it, and the same thing happened.

My son suggests that we return the DVD and get a videotape instead, but I doubt Wal-Mart will allow that. Maybe somebody else Googling for this problem will find this page and we can commiserate...

First, pigeons cannot fly through Windows. Second, since they don't fly in darkness either, this method's bandwidth drops to zero 50% of the time. Finally, there's the problem of droppings download. We are pleased to report that all these shortcomings were resolved in our new data transfer protocol, as we now turn to describe.

System architecture: the system is constructed of a back end - a carriage, Ben-Hur movie style, which is made of a yoke made of light Balsa, and outfitted with two huge wheels - 2 DVD wheels, 4.7 Giga each. --Snails are faster than ADSL (Ami Ben-Bassat's Blog)

"Their parents posted 'Baby on Board' signs in their cars. They have been protected as children. Their free time was replaced by organized activities and structured programs. They have a high need for achievement and attention," said Xavier spokeswoman Kelly Leon.

She said this generation prefers learning from hands-on experience, craves technology-generated education, and feels comfortable working in teams.

"Millennial students do not learn in the traditional ways of 50, 30 or even 10 years ago," said Xavier President Michael Graham. "We need to adapt our campus to their needs and changing times." --'Smart' classrooms, ritzy dorms lure 'Millennials' (Cincinnati.com)

Via Joanne Jacobs.

Our time here may be fleeting ("Out, out brief candle!") but footnotes are not supposed to be. When online citations extinguish, every discipline is befouled, because replication, at the heart of the research process, becomes difficult without stable archiving, which libraries used to provide.

It was called a book shelf, as in Shakespeare's day. --Michael Bugeja --Such Stuff as Footnotes Are Made On (Inside Higher Ed)

--The Perfect Prescription (New York Metro)

New design for pill bottles, improving legibility and adding several other features.

In the early days of the telephone, the problem of speaking level was widely noted and discussed. The technological innovation was clever: a small amount of a person's voice was fed back to the earpiece, and people then naturally adjusted the loudness of their spoken voice to produce a comfortable level of feedback in the earpiece. Numerous studies in auditory psychophysics were performed to determine the correct amount of this feedback -- sidetone was the technical term. With the advent of the mobile telephone, sidetone has disappeared, and with it, the so-necessary feedback required to maintain voice level.

Why was sidetone eliminated from mobile phones? Two possible answers come to mind, and my suspicion is that both are correct. One is that modern telephonic engineers have no sense of history, and so they lack all the experience and knowledge that led to the early development of sidetone feedback. The second answer is that sidetone poses more difficult problems in the out-of-doors environment of the mobile phone, where wind noise on the microphone and relatively high-levels of ambient noise pose technical limitations on sidetone. --Don Norman --Minimizing the Annoyance of the Mobile Phone (JND.org)

I was recently lined up in the boarding tunnel at the airport. A woman behind me called up her local library to try to renew a book. She put her portable phone on speaker mode, and kept the librarian on the line while she rummaged through her carry-ons looking for the book.

It was the most annoying telephone experience I've had.

When the librarian finally said, "No, I can't renew your book," the feeling of satisfaction in the tunnel was palpable. I would have sworn I heard scattered applause.

The distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers.

Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached "startling" levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip. --Martin Wainwright --Emails 'pose threat to IQ'  (Guardian)

"God forbid, if someone shot the President, which network would you turn to? It will be cable, the Internet--something other than General Hospital being interrupted." --Sam Donaldson, former ABC News anchor --Donaldson: Network News Dead (BroadcastingCable.com)

--i am 8-bit

A Los Angeles art show.

Website requires Flash.

Goodbye, Blogdex (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I used to love Blogdex, but today's "most contagious information currently spreading in the weblog community" are measured by a grand total of three links. So I've taken it off my blogroll. (I can't remember the last time I did that.)

The last announcement was posted in October of 2004, and that announcement hasn't been cleared of the spam that has collected there over the past few months.

I'm glad Technorati is still operating, but I do miss Blogdex.

--Gibby's Game Room (Nescapades)

That's my first computer on the bottom shelf, a Texas Instruments TI-99 4A (c. 1981). The key combination that produced "+" was "shift+equals." The key combination that produced "System Reset" was "namelessbutton-right-next-to-shift + equals." One day it started smoking, so we took it back to the store.

I didn't see an Atari 800 (c. 1979) on Gibby's page. An internal speaker was set to beep every time you pushed a key. The Atari 400 had a membrane keyboard, so I guess the beep was supposed to substitute for the click. But for the Atari 800, which had a real keyboard, the key beep was redundant. I opened up the case, snipped the speaker wire, and threaded both ends out through a gap between the keys. When I wanted sound, I twisted the wires together. What a geek.

Hm.... the TI really was our first computer, but "oldcomputers.net" says the Atari 800 came out earlier. Could we actually have gotten the TI 99 4 first? I remember we got a replacement at one point.... but I specifically remember the sound of the voice synthesizer saying "Texas Instruments TA 99 4A computer."

I'll appeal to my sister.... Rosemary, can you help me out on this?

There seemed to be better games for the Atari, and a summer computer course that I took as a middle schooler used HP terminals in one room and Atari 800s and 400s (check out that profile) in the other, so perhaps when we had enough of the Texas Instruments I convinced the rest of the family to go with the machine that I knew well.

On the top center, that's a Commodore 64 (c. 1982) -- the computer I took with me to college in 1986. (I used a tiny 4-inch TV screen as the monitor.)

If Gibby dies now, I think Gibby will win.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament. --David Keys and Nicholas Pyke --Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world (The Independent)

Are libraries and librarians willing to support initiative to provide weblog support for their community? The University of Minnesota Libraries think so: “It is our goal to develop a blog server through which everyone in the university community (faculty, staff, and student) can have access to their own individual blog” (University of Minnesota Libraries, accessed December 7, 2004). Other campuses are also providing students and staff with the means to creatE their own blogs. Though not library-initiated, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School hosts “Weblogs at Harvard Law,” which allows anyone with a harvard.edu e-mail address to create their own weblog. (John Harvard’s Journal 2004) Seton Hall University students can create their own weblogs with a service provided by the Humanities Division and the New Media Journalism program ([Jerz], accessed December 7, 2004). -- Reichardt, Randy and Geoffrey Harder, Science & Technology Libraries, 25(3), p105-116. --Weblogs: Their Use and Application in Science and Technology Libraries (PDF) (Science & Technology Libraries)

That's Seton Hill University.

It's a good article, nevertheless.

Although not traditionally the domain of special collections, I have chosen to use the donation to create a new collection in the area of interactive fiction, specializing in the early works published by Infocom. Interactive fiction is a genre of computer game that is more literary than most computer and video games popular today. Also known as text adventure games, these works present story text to players, who then type in commands to the computer, which then prints text in response, back and forth, in the process unfolding and determining a story. Although not commercially popular today, the genre may be of great scholarly and historical importance as interactive electronic games grow both in general popularity and as subjects worthy of academic study. --Adam Mathes --Collecting and Preserving Infocom Interactive Fiction (AdamManthes.com)

Via Nick on GrandTextAuto., where Mathes notes that this is a hypothetical project, written for a class.

I wonder... quite honestly, are the best-known commercial IF games really the ones that are most in need of collection and preservation? Still, Infocom's works were undeniably influential.

How can I get rid of That Old Typewriter Smell?

Hey, some of us like it! But we're perverse ... Seriously, it's a common problem, especially with portables--and if you're allergic to mold, it can be a real health hazard. Yes, the smell is caused primarily by mold, combined with decades of dust and cigarette smoke. Mold won't grow on metal, but it will grow on typewriter ribbons and on fabric-covered cases. Take your typewriter out of its case and blow the lint and dust out of it (a compressed air canister for cleaning computer and stereo equipment is handy here). Throw away the ribbon. Look carefully for any surfaces that may have mold on them (the typebars usually rest on fabric or felt; some typewriters also have felt elsewhere, to deaden the noise). Clean and polish the machine using the materials I list on my restoration page. The cases can be cleaned with harsher materials, such as Lysol, window cleaner, or ammonia. Then let everything dry thoroughly, preferably in sunlight. Store typewriters and cases in dry environments with moderate temperatures. You may have to clean the cases again every 6 months or so. --Richard Polt --The Classic Typewriter Page Frequently Asked Questions (The Classic Typewriter Page)

I was in a retrotech mood today...

I typed the first draft of a Star Trek novel on my mother's pink manual typewriter, which she set up in the dining room. I remember the centerpiece on the table would shake every time I hit the carriage return, so sometimes I would put it on the floor of the living room -- where the lamps on the end tables would rattle softly as I typed.

Here's what you can do with a text book: read it. You can also lose it, rip the pages out, deface the cover, and generally abuse it until it has to be replaced. But as far as a delivery vehicle for content goes, you can basically only consume it by reading it.

Here's what you can't do with a textbook:

You can't annotate it. How strange is it that students can't add their own reflections or thoughts or reactions, that they have to do that in a different space?

You can't search it.

You can't link it to other relevant ideas or concepts in any organized way.

You can't access it if it's not in your posession.

You can't copy out important information and paste it with other important information.

You can't share it in any meaningful way.

You can't have the most up to date information about the topic.

You can't edit it.

Think of how much more interactivity we have with digital content, how much more power we have to make meaning of that content through connecting ideas and people with it.

--The Case Against Textbooks (Weblogg-ed)

If students own copies of the book, then of course they can annotate it.

They can search a book if someone else has prepared a concordance, and they can link to the contents of the book by referring to a page number.

And there are all sorts of things that you can't do with a digital text -- such as read it without access to a computer, or add its weight to the milk crate in which you plan to present your tenure review package. Of course, the former concern comes with the territory, and the latter is no flaw in digital text itself.

But I'm picking nits, because I'm mostly in agreement. I use printed collections of essays in my teaching, and of course I use printed literary works, but rarely do I use traditional textbooks.

Since I think of myself mostly as a writing teacher, I tend to think of content as a means to an end. So I'm more interested in getting students to be critical thinkers and researchers, rather than have them absorb the contents of a book and remember it long enough to take a quiz.

I'll use a textbook in my "Newswriting" course this fall, but in my upper-level courses, I'm more likely to use web pages, supplemented with journal articles. Textbooks that cover digital culture go out of date so quickly that Wikipedia is often a better resource.

"Certainly, I didn't do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp away." --Rupert Murdoch, "old media" mogul. --News must adapt to web, says Murdoch  (Guardian)

I don't believe that the internet is a leveller of genders. In fact, in many cases, it seems to be the opposite.

I spend a lot of time on IRC (internet relay chat), where my IRC nick is not gender-neutral. On many occasions I have joined IRC channels to ask technical questions, and have encountered people who say things like, ?Oh, I don't know the answer to your question, but you can talk to me anyway because you?re a girl.? or ?Are you really a girl?? and then after checking my ?real name? exclaiming ?Yesssss!? and suchlike.

If one outright pretends to be a man (for instance, by assuming a male IRC nick) then perhaps one could naively see internet-based communication as a leveller of genders, but only in as much as it'slevel because no one realises that you are a woman'that'sabout hiding gender, not levelling it! --questions (join-the-dots)

Hannah makes some excellent, thoughtful responses to a pre-interview survey. She seems a bit frustrated by commonly held notions about women in computing, noting, quite diplomatically, "a bit of an implied assumption" in a question that suggests that she, as a woman, might faces personal challenges that form personal challenges for her. "For example," she notes, "consider fathers who’d prefer to work part time or from home, but are discouraged from doing so due to societal pressures."

Heh. I'm usually discouraged from working at home by the sound of screaming kids, but I'm on my own for another week until the wife and kids get back from visiting my in-laws.

Simply counting the volume of conversations and comments and the number of trackbacks is one indication of the size and scope of the network surrounding your blog. Whether or not those comments are in agreement or disagreement requires content analysis, but presumably positive or neutral comments would be indicative of a healthy relationship between the blogger and his/her audience.

Examining the credibility and authority of the people who are commenting and/or linking to the site is another way to assess the impact and importance of the blog.

One needs to look beyond just quantity of postings or links to the quality of the dialog. I like the way Dennis G. Jerz of Seton Hill University categorizes blogs in his classroom and have adapted his categories below:

"Coverage" -- The number of times your brand or issue is mentioned.
"Depth" -- How deeply does the posting discuss the brand? Is it just a passing mention or does the blogger go into the subject in depth with numerous links?
"Interaction" -- What was the nature of the interaction? Was the posting designed to solve a problem, compare different brands, or simply allow the author to rant?
"Discussion" -- What was the nature of the discussion? Was it a true dialog with extensive exchange of ideas, or was it just bantering back and forth.

Jerz further classifies comments as:

Comment Primo -- a comment that launches a discussion on someone else's blog
Comment Grande -- a long comment posted on a peer blog, which is then advertised via a cross-blog posting
Comment Informative -- in which a commenter uses his or her particular knowledge in order to flesh out a general or incomplete statement made in a peer's blog entry
Link Gracious -- a link that draws attention to the source of an idea or to a good conversation happening on someone else's blog

Consider also adding Tonality, an indicator of the health of the relationship between the blog community and the brand. If the tone of the posting leaves a reader less likely to do business with your organization it is negative. If the posting leaves a reader more likely to do business with your organization, or recommends the brand, it is positive. If it essentially just discusses facts it is neutral or balanced. --Katie Delahaye Paine and Andy Lark --How To Measure Blogs, Part One... and what to do with the data (The Measurement Standard (via Cymfony))

Apparently the folks at Cymfony were so excited that they appeared in this (subscription-only) article that they pasted the whole thing on their website. I've added extra line breaks for legibility. The link goes to Cymfony's copy, but it originally appeared on The Measurement Standard. I note that authors removed "xenoblogging" and "wildcard" from the categories I proposed, and their interpretation of "interaction" is very different from what I intended. Still, it's a good article, one to which I'll return fairly soon, since this summer I'll be helping two different university administrative units launch PR blogs.

Odd that the article is written in the first person, but is credited to two authors.

Six Apart plans to release version 3.16 of Movable Type this Monday, April 18. The new release includes over 100 bug fixes and improvements including significant security fixes making this a must-have for all Movable Type installations. --Movable Type 3.16 on the way (neil's world)

Aah, phooey... just this afternoon I finally upgraded from MT 2.65 to MT 3.15. One weekend and it'll be obsolete.

I really like MT 3.15's comment moderation feature. If someone posts a comment that looks like spam, MT can hold it for moderation -- that is, the blog owner has to click a button to publish the comment.

Once students users approve a comment from a poster, other comments from that poster get approved automatically.

The only complaint I have is that comments awaiting moderation show up on a page that I created to show all comments across all blogs, a page which doesn't seem to be rebuilding anyway. Hmm... that's a bother, but I've been at it long enough today. Time to go home.

Wireless internet is an idea that first formulated back during the Cold War. It was a young Al Gore who first was struck in the head by an apple (much like Sir Newton, except this apple was thrown at Gore by Ollie North). Mr. Gore said to himself, in a very slow and monotonous tone, "I should create a world wide communication network... with my bare hands! All by myself!" And then, about an hour later, over a bowl of scrambled eggs with ketchup, he thought out loud, "You know what... once I have this internet thing completed, I should make it go through the air without wires... I will make this with my bare hands! The question is how..." --Mike Rubino --Wi-Fi Madness (Tranquility Lost)

Lately I've been love-bombing Mike Rubino, a graphic arts and creative writing double major, who's a major presence on blogs.setonhill.edu, but who for some silly reason won't declare a new media journalism major. He hasn't even taken a class with me yet. (Was it something I said?)

Anyway, he's a great satirist. I'm surprised I missed this back in August when he first posted it.

I spent quite a bit of time sorting through (and adding to) my collection of blogging-related bookmarks. Several of these have been linked here previously, but I thought it would be useful to compile them for easy reference. Here, for example is a (perhaps somewhat arbitrary) collection of blog criticisim links... --William Cole --Blogging Workshop (Donut Age)

A useful collection of links... I'm flattered to be on it.

In the spirit of endism, here's a list of all the forms of major media and how they're trending. Make of it what you will.

Flat to Down to Way Down:

• Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
• Television: network TV's audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
• Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
• Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
• Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
• Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole

Up:

• Movies: 2004 was another record year, both for theaters and DVDs
• Videogames: even in the last year of this generation of consoles, sales hit a new record
• Web: online ads will grow 30% this year, breaking $10 billion (5.4% of all advertising) --Mainstream Media Meltdown (The Long Tail)

To include books along with all the other media dinosaurs is misleading.

The growth rate of books seems flat, but compared to the other traditional media, books look healthy.

I'm also not sure that measuing the advertising dollars spent on the web is a good way to measure the importance of that media. So, while the author coyly withholds commentary in an attempt to appear unbiased, the selection and organization of this particular list carries an ideological slant. I'm not criticizing the author for having an ideology, I'm just noting the rhetorical impact of the author's compositional decisions.

When people don't fill out forms, they often use the excuse that it's too much work. Consider how to encourage them with negative or positive incentives. The IRS appears to have entirely solved this problem, too. Once again, the key comes from the close relationship with the criminal justice system that the IRS enjoys. Willful failure to file your taxes can result in criminal charges. However, the IRS also has an elaborate and complicated set of financial penalties available for people who fail to file their taxes or pay them in a timely manner.

On the other hand, the IRS offers rewards too. As many people overpay taxes during the year, customers who are unsure about their taxes often fill them out early in the hopes of "winning" a refund of their overpayment. This helps keep users interested. --Peter Seebach --The cranky user: Bad design can be so taxing (IBM)

The senior wireless operator was John "Jack" Phillips, age 25, and the junior operator was 21 year old Harold Bride. The radio transmitter was of the "spark" type, and the radio operator used a telegraph key to transmit a "Continental" version of code, which is slightly different from the American "Morse" code. The ship's radio actually required two separate rooms, one for the receiver, and one for the transmitter, to keep the loud buzzing of the transmitter from interfering with the receiver. --Dwight A. Johnson --The Radio Legacy of the R.M.S. Titanic (Avisa)

"Shut up! We are busy...." Phillips telegraphed, after yet another warning about ice in the vicinity.

The Titanic struck an iceberg less than an hour later.

Phillips had been up at 5:30am the previous day, fixing a problem with the radio equipment. During the outage, a pile of outbound messages from passengers had built up... he and an assistant were apparently still catching up on the backlog by the following night. Once the enormity of the accident was clear, Philips stayed at his post, sending distress signals until the last possible minute.

The official inquiry found that the chain of unlikely events that led to the loss of so many lives was not the fault of any one person.

Among the many factors contributing to the loss of life:

• reducing the number of lifeboats in order to gain more deck space
• releasing some nearly-empty lifeboats early
• the desire to make the ship's maiden voyage a race against time
• the captain's decision to steer away from the iceberg, permitting it to scrape all along the vessel's flank, rather than just ram it head-on
• the height of the watertight compartment walls

In the past few years, I have seen Titanic museum displays hosted by pro-salvage and anti-salvage groups. The Titanic wreck was discovered by Robert Ballard, who advocates leaving the wreck as it is. But a company called RMS Titanic Inc was awarded salvage wrights; they have pulled up artifacts such as china and fixtures, and they sell chunks of Titanic coal. (See National Geographic's "Retrieval of Titanic artifacts stirs controversy."

If something needs to be prettier, they just add a few lines of description (or remove some - "beautiful" could challenge your mind to create an entirely different image than "beautiful blonde") instead of spending hours rendering.

In fact, there's so much content, Mihaly says it would just be too difficult to convert his game into a conventional MMOG. "Most good text MUDs would be way too expensive to translate to graphics because the range of features would require ungodly huge heaps of graphics... We'd have to strip out the soul of the game (as well as most of the features) to make it work," he said. While a picture can speak 1,000 words, it seems a few lines of text can conjure thousands of mental pictures. --Joseph Blancato --In Search of Deeper Content (War Cry Network)

Increasing graphics and cooler monsters doesn't always satisfy. Sometimes, less is more...

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