Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. The average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days (almost four months).…
Noticed that you had written about our site, The World Rock Paper Scissors Society (www.worldrps.com) on your blog before and thought you may be interested in the upcoming 2003 Rock Paper Scissors International World Championships taking place on October 25th. Couple notes about the Championships: – We have built a new Championship specific site at…
Surely not all the bells and whistles are defensible, college officials concede, but given the expectations of students who have grown up with DVD players in their own rooms, any campus without, say, a nightclub and a food court is as obsolete as an eight-track cassette. “These are not frills,” said Daniel M. Fogel, president…
What does it look like at exactly 25 degrees N, 8 degrees E? What about the other places on the globe where latitutde and longitude lines intersect? Find out at Confluences. —Degree Confluence Project (Orbitals) Link via Rosemary Frezza, who also sends this BBC article: “A Unique Picture of the World.” Similar:T.S. Eliot: "when we do…
Listeners who have come to hate the labels believe their favorite artists no longer need the labels. If only that were true. Maybe Prince can afford to cast his label aside and go directly to the fans. But he did so only after becoming a household name. The vast majority of musicians will never find…
Google is engaged in a battle royale with rivals Overture -acquired by Yahoo – and Sprinks for the lucrative classified text ad business. Initially welcomed as the potential savior of small websites, including blogs, Adwords payments have trickled away in recent weeks, webloggers note. —Andrew Orlowski —Google shafts blogger, adds gagging clause to Adsense (Register) Is…
—Senators butt heads over Iraq funding (Yezbick) Is there subliminal editorializing in this headline? :-) Similar:when someone say ur joke louder than u and get all the creditAmusingFrom The 'London Times' of 1904A Mark Twain short story, written in 189…CybercultureBeowimp (spoof I wrote for my high school lit magazine c. 1985)I got an email this morning…
Web pages soon plunged in Inktomi’s search rankings and disappeared from key sites like MSN, where Inktomi feeds its listings. After he demanded to know what happened, Spooner learned from Inktomi that his site contained editorial flaws that hurt his ranking. And he would have to become a paid-inclusion customer to learn what these flaws…
Literature is defamiliarizing the ordinary, making us see even the most quotidian things in a new way. And games? We might describe them in several ways, but they are certainly ritual spaces in which rules that are not the ordinary social and cultural ones apply. So perhaps the concept of the literary game — a…
It is not surprising that the feminization of the television industry would give female characters more prominence, but it is a little disconcerting to see how men have waned in the process. Suddenly, sensitive shows are dealing with men as an oppressed minority group. Television writers who once focused on women’s dilemmas are now exploring…
A while ago, I lamented that, when copying and pasting from an online source, it’s a pain to have to re-create the links and other HTML embedded in the text. DrWeb sent me this e-mail, and gave me permission to post it here: Just a note.. saw your post on the Kaironews site, and decided…
“We now have a greater understanding of why biscuits develop cracks shortly after being baked.” — PhD student Qasim Saleem, quoted in an article by Christine McGourty —Broken Biscuit Breakthrough (BBC) A biscuit in the UK is what Americans refer to as a “cracker”. Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary. Similar:MisSpelled: Premiering Oct 1In this podcast series,…
[M]ore than 1,000 fans [were] turned away from turnstiles for up to 1-1/2 hours over a bizarre ticket snafu.|The fans – many of them season ticket holders – were forced to wait on line until as late as the fourth inning to get replacement tickets after accidentally tearing their ducats out of ticket books without…
In other words, a White House leaker is leaking to the Washington Post about Novak’s White House leakers, but the leaker to the Post draws short of dribbling out the identities of who leaked to Novak and whom else they tried to leak to. The Post source does, however, pass stern judgment on Novak’s leakers,…
Lower standards and grade inflation make campuses safe for students who have little hunger for knowledge, little love of learning, and almost no appetite for hard work. Although students have many reasons for going to college, a very large number–71.3 percent of the entering class of 1995–do so not to enrich their minds but their…
Something has been bothering me all day. Either the front-page flap over the ‘outing’ of a CIA operative is a farce, or sloppy reporting is contributing to the FUD factor. The controversy involves the charge that someone in the Bush administration leaked the identity of CIA operative (undercover agent currently serving in a hostile country?…
A new Brookings Institution report debunks the popular notion that U.S. schoolchildren suffer from a growing homework load, and do not have enough time to play and just be kids. According to data analyzed by the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, the great majority of students at all grade levels now spend less…
For the last nine years, the readers of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction have held a yearly interactive fiction competition. For fans of the old Infocom games as well as for newcomers to the genre, the competition is a chance to enjoy some of the best short adventure games available anywhere. —9th Annual Interactive Fiction CompetitionIFcomp.org)…
Being of the generation that wanted to both bring home the bacon and fry it, I didn’t plan on going back to part-time work, and neither did many of my friends and colleagues who have done so. But we all had an eye open for opportunities and were willing to go out on a professional…
Fingers in this cyber-saddled age are more dexterous with computer keyboards and Pavlovian mouse clicks than with the ragged edges of a new hardback’s pages, with the satisfying heft of a book about to be cracked, with the spooning feel of its spine in your palm. Lost, too, are the inky smell of a book’s…