Of all the silly ideas and services floating around these blogs this one, Blogshares, a fantasy stock market to monitor who is who in the bloggy world is it. A mover. A shaker. There I am at 590 bucks and change. Say... there is reinvented at...$1,500 MORE!?!?! What is that about...I work hard...
Anyway, if you look at referral logs like mine, you will see there are all these programs out there tracking changes in blogs for the giving of notice and the gathering of statistics. I get the notice ones like this one. But why the stats that get spewed out as some kind to rankings, like Blogshares. Why would someone set this up? Who wins? Who knows. Who cares. I hear people collect the identification numbers of trains.
Sports analogies are like...well, you know.
Most often now the point of sports analogies spewing out of "SportsCentre" talking heads is to challenge you the viewer to keep up with the story you are actually being told. Images of war, politics, family relations are all employed. Watching the Senators and Devils in Game Six of the Eastern Conference Finals last night, however, I was struck by how the game as arguement was being played out on my screen and, in fact, it was an argument that has taken about ten years to put in place.
The game was one of the finest I have ever seen. Both goalies made saved pucks that ought not to have been seen let alone stopped. The other players had the required crazy eyes - something I doubted Ottawa had in them - but, also a requirement, they found how to control themselves just shy of the point of turning into the flailing human cudgle that speeding athlete with a sticks gliding on ice in an enclosed pen ought to become.
What really made the game stand out, however, were the both the success and interaction of the disciplines of theory each team has sought to achieve: the Devil's trap, the patience of Ottawa. Both have been called boring and undermining to the game for years. Last night those claims were proved wrong.
Game reports: here and here.
Also, see my dismal 2003 hockey pool performance - despite being the guy in charge of the rules! Brother Doug leads the pack.
I have had the real pleasure of the acquaintance of a person whom I referred to as
Fontman and his firm which now is apparently headquartered in Finland. While I have had the golden
silverorange touch applied to the visuals here, I wonder what it might be to have pages that look like his.
I heard
this sort of argument often in private practice, in management magazines aimed at the legal profession, at conferences. Isn't the idea in any field the you do something useful and you won't have to convince anyone?
Has Google jumped the shark? Every good IT company sooner or later does a odd thing which may herald a downturn of its fortunes. Didn't Xerox give away windows in the late 60's because it would never work. Didn't IMB give away the PC as, surely, no one could reverse engineer their stuff. Apple - well, Apple will overcome one day...
Google may have entered that lofty pantheon as it has started "Googlewashing" by which they are ridding searches of their bloggy results. Why they would care to is a bit understandable - it seems people want "real" answers not opinions on the topic they are looking for...so they go...to the internet. That hotbed of fact. Go figure. Beyond the problem of identification of the media it works within, how will Google know what to wash out of the search? What is a blog?
Some blogs are like the pre-webs topical 'zines. After friends got married in 1995 or so, I realized I wanted a way to keep in touch collectively after everyone was married off. I started a photocopied 'zine called "People Who Know Al" - one and a half issues made it to print before I took the on ramp to the information super highway and got email and a browser to call my own. Fellow travellers AOV and CEO Blues are pretty much interactive 'zines on their relative topics of web related innovation and business theory. Others, like Ian William's are pretty much a personal exploration through a diary. Still others, such as Tomalak's Realm, continue the original links concept.
What I don't get about Googlewashing is this - if I wanted to know what it was like to try and put a movie together, Ian William's site would be a great resource. If I wanted to know what was new in web related things, AOV is a great resource. Apart from the hubris of believing that it should direct the web substantively based on its definition of what is a blog, what does Google think it is doing making it difficult to find one of the best things the internet does well - provide opinion.
I have been following this story for a while and find it fascinating.
Later: So if there are now "Reporters without Borders" in addition to "Doctors without Borders" and even "Lawyers without Borders", what next...chiropractors without borders? Certified General Accountants sans frontiers?
Later Still: want to know if your favorite sites are blocked in China? Check here.
There are certain personal interests one is wise not discussing during courting. One of mine is the habit of listening to long distance radio in the middle of the night. I have about ten radios including a real nice
wind-up model originally designed for third world listeners to
BBC World Service, a Sony ICF-2010 as well as the little Sony I got in grade 4 with which I listened to reports of the raid on Entebbe in '76 from my bed in the Annapolis Valley care of a New York all-night news station, hockey and baseball games from the US Mid-West fading in and out on waves of propagation, coal miner shift bulletins from WWVA, Wheeling West Virginia.
It was not until 20 years ago that local all-night radio was becoming common in the Maritimes. CBC's night service started with the old CBC Stereo service's Brave New Waves which used to be formatted in the early 80's with increasingly obscure and hardcore music as the show moved deeper into the night. By four in the morning, during a King's campus police shift, we would be well beyond Bragg, past punk and listening to Berlin industrial an hour and a half before Mac Campbell came on at 5:30 am with the Maritime Fisheries Broadcast with an update of conditions on the Sable, Fourchu and Banquareau Bank.
During really nerdy phases, I have even been a member of DX clubs like CIDX, BBC World Service Listeners Club and ODXA. Meeting other members of such groups in person can be quite uncomfortable. Once a guy on vacation driving around the Maritimes listening to every broadcast band transmitter - AM to the uninitiated - stopped in at the manse at Bible Hill. All I can remember about the event was that he wouldn't stop picking at his ears. I was something of a celebrity at the time having logged in the CIDX monthly news letter and confirmed via a casette tape of my reception of a local East German am station on 1044, just above CHUM. [Are you starting to get the point about not talking about this before she says " i do??].
Since Archimedes, radio is the second most important technological advance after the harnessing of electricity. With the growth of the unfortunately named WiFi - with its echoes of 1960's suburban rec-room parties around the stereophonic Hi-Fi and Mitch Miller sing alongs - the internet is catching up. I came across the term RLAN last week, radio local area network. Now I want a dedicated RLAN internet radio player so I can listen at work where Bell apparently has a public hot spot. Something with good sound for about $59.99 would be good, thanks.
I got my new copy of the CD soundtrack to Christiane F, a cheery little movie about a teenage addict in West Berlin in the 1970's. I saw the movie when it first came out at Wormwoods in Halifax in 1981 or so and soon after picked up the lp which I had until one of the record purges during the recessions or a move. One of the many perfect decisions which went into making the film was to use an entire soundtrack of Bowie from his Eno/Berlin albums.
The Swicks introduced me to Bowie. Actually Rob did. Ken taught me about autonomy. Steve gave man fire. Dave was a gardener when I first met him. Dave for some years has had a column in the Halifax Daily News which is one of my favorite and - I would argue - one of the best written regular columns anywhere.
By the way, my current radio favorite, Brent Bambury, ran Bowie covers all week on his show: All The Young Dudes by The Church, Life on Mars by The King's Singers, Rebel Rebel by The Bay City Rollers, The Man Who Sold The World by Nirvana. This is a CBC drive home show!?!?
I don't get much of what Rob Paterson writes on
his blog. Too many big words that don't show up in my daily conversation. Too many ideas that I just can't fix to a landmark. But I do get
this. Well put.
