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Thursday, March 28, 2002
Ok, I'm Sick | 9:33 PM
At least I can chart my flu on this handy map.
· Flu Trendmap [Fluwatch.com]
Further Reflection on MicroPublishing | 3:54 PM
Riding the F train two nights ago, a Williamsburg type boards and begins making a speech to the car. "I've published three pamphlets, and I sell them for $1 each so I can publish more pamphlets..." Soft-selling, soft-speaking (bad subway sales technique), I lose the rest of his speech. He comes up the car. "I'll take one," I say. "Which one?" "Whatever one is your favorite." He looks at me, pondering, then says with self-assurance, "You want to learn how to publish on a photocopier." As a result, I am the proud owner of "How to Publish By Photocopier," #21 in his series. Alas, no URL!
McSweeneys Update | 3:11 PM
CS gave me Neal Pollack's book to read when it was released by McSweeney's last year and every downtown hipster felt like they had to read it. Like CS, I'm one of the ones that tired of the joke on page 25. But Neal has some interesting insight on the state of McSweeney's Books (and self-publishing in general) in this week's Onion AV Club:
It's doing fine. I mean, there are books coming out, and it's still publishing issues. It's still publishing books. Dave Eggers just opened a big tutoring center in San Francisco, and they just opened a store in New York, and the web site is still read by 25,000 people a day, so the culture is still alive. It's more Dave's project than mine, so I can't speak to how long it's going to be around or anything, or whether the infrastructure is going to be built up. But I can say that the buzz surrounding it has died down, and people don't care about it the way they used to. It still exists and still has a solid following.
Neal reveals that he made about $40,000 from the McSweeneys hardcover of his book and $22,000 for selling the paperback rights to HarperCollins. Analysis of his writing aside, I enjoy his entreprenurial spirit which reminds that everything in life is selling. (There's also an interesting aside concerning Dawson's Creek.) Newly of note in the self-publishing sphere: the new Weblog Braintrust collective SoNewMedia, which is sponsoring Greg Knauss on a virtual book tour from weblog to weblog. That's brilliant.
· Neal Pollack Interview [Onion AV Club]
· McSweeneys Books [McSweeneys.net]
· SoNewMedia [SoNewMedia.com]
· Greg's Virtual Book Tour [EOD.com]
Wednesday, March 27, 2002
Bill Simmons Update | 4:24 PM
With Opening Day less than a week away (woohoo!), now is a good moment to reflect on Bill Simmons' rise to the status of national treasure (ok, how about "must-read sports columnist"?). Author of the late-lamented Boston Sports Guy site, Simmons took up at ESPN's Page 2 last summer and now writes three columns a week. His late-summer remembrance of Sox-Mets Game 6 is already a classic; his recent interview with Red Auerbach brings fresh insight to an overwritten topic (the Rick Pitino team photo story is hyperreal); and his two sets of Anti-Oscar awards this week demonstrate the range of his humor beyond sports.
· Bill Simmons Columnist Archive [ESPN.com Page 2]
Monday, March 25, 2002
Long Bets | 2:52 PM
From the media-beloved (but still pretty damn cool) Long Now Foundation comes Long Bets, a website devoted to tracking bets with a minimum time period of two years. Designed to encourage long-term thinking, the site already has a dozen or so bets from glitterati of the Edge.org ilk. My favorite bet, though, posits "The US men's soccer team will win the World Cup before the Red Sox win the World Series." Ted Danson has accepted the bet on behalf of Red Sox fans with this argument:
The Red Sox have had such bad luck in the 20th century, I have to believe that in the new millennium it can only get better. Besides, statistically, scoring goals is harder than hitting a home run, and in the World Cup, you have the whole WORLD against you, in baseball, but the Red Sox only really have to beat the Yankees.
By the way, with baseball season fast approaching, I recommend the Sons of Sam Horn as the web's best message boards for Sox fans.
· Long Bets Bet 8: Soccer v. Red Sox [Long Bets]
· Long Bets Homepage [Long Bets]
Pushback | 2:43 PM
MOP offers a critique of Below 14th, the Web Presence's newest property:
My only real
criticism is that Below 14th is a bad title, especially since it limits you
-- you may very well be at a restaurant north of 14th, and geographic
limitations are so gauche.
The Below 14th editors inform me that we will not be limited by geography. Below 14th is simply a clever reference to the fact that when we travel above 14th Street, or off our precious Manhattan isle, we start to itch. We are typing this now at 41st Street and we are itching.
Sunday, March 24, 2002
LS.com Upgrades | 10:51 PM
Site upgrade today includes introduction of Below 14th, a new sideblog concerning nightlife in Downtown NYC. (The most recent five posts appear at left, though at the moment there are only five posts.) A linkbox has also been added, weblog archives are now fully functional and Atomz has contracted to provide a search mechanism. That is all.
Book Tools | 5:15 PM
Here's something cool: Singlefile, "An easy-to-use web-based service that helps you organize the books you own, the books you are reading, the books you've read and the books you want to read." At a price, however -- $19.95/year. Not a bad business model -- 1,000 subscribers would net $20,000 annually.
· Singlefile
Friday, March 22, 2002
Richard Nixon Update | 5:00 PM
Friday afternoon... a good time for catching up with RMN's take on pot and homosexuality.
· Just What Was He Smoking? [Washington Post]
Reuters Gets It | 4:13 PM
Okay, there we go.
· Google Restores Web Page Critical of Scientology [Yahoo News]
The Right to Link | 10:11 AM
Excellent conversation on the P2PJ list about the Google vs. Church of Scientology imbroglio. Rusty Foster writes:
If nothing else, the CoS is a reliable copyright test-case generator. Google backing down on this issue would seem to me to be a suicidally
stupid move. It's tantamount to admitting that their core business is one great big copyright violation, and lays out the welcome mat for any other group with a bee in their bonnet.
When is this story going to break into the mainstream media? This is huge -- a clearcut case that could determine the legal framework of linking and the right of a search engine to offer unfettered access to everything on the net. Where are the journalists on this one? Dave sees links to the nascent, bizarre copy protection movement afoot in Congress:
We're getting the first real demo of a nightmarish scenario, a constitutional one, set up by the DMCA. And it looks like it's going to get much worse before it gets better... A bill was introduced today in the US Senate by Senator Ernest Hollings and five other senators that would rearchitect all computers so that one of the two basic things they do is controlled by Congress.
· [P2PJ] Google vs. xenu.net [P2PJ]
· Church of Scientology wields DMCA, Google removes xenu.net [Kuro5hin]
· Church v. Google [Microcontent News]
· Scientology and Google [DaveNet]
· P2PJ March Archives [P2PJ]
Thursday, March 21, 2002
RE: SURVIVOR Infrigement--SURVIVORDEADPOOL.COM | 11:40 AM
The nasty legal document I received from CBS last spring regarding the parody logo of Survivor Deadpool has been added to the database over at the EFF's excellent chillingeffects site. I hoped they would delve into the issues of parody as protected free speech, but their analysis is a little more generic. A good read nonetheless.
· RE: SURVIVOR Infrigement--SURVIVORDEADPOOL.COM [Chilling Effects Clearinghouse]
· Tiny Survivor Website Caves to CBS Legal Demands [Survivor Deadpool]
Monday, March 18, 2002
Young Alumni Update | 11:10 PM
Still a lot of potential for giving here.
· Young Alumni Study [Target Analysis]
Thursday, March 14, 2002
Jane Swift Update | 1:40 AM
As a Massachusetts boy, I'm following the Governor's campaign there with some interest. Jane Swift is an entire novel unto herself. Meantime, it is most amusing that the " Draft Romney" faction is running a weblog full of fourth-grade level putdowns:
... the Swift political organization... nowadays meets in a phone booth.
But there's no Superman in there to come to her rescue.
· Mitt Romney For Governor of Massachusetts [RomneyBlog]
Wednesday, March 13, 2002
My Room is Your Room | 5:19 PM
The always-interesting Nick Denton has the inside track on what's doing at Sputnik:
Sputnik, a San Francisco software company, has a very clever idea. If it succeeds, Sputnik will turn every house into a mobile internet base station. The deal is this: buy a Wi-Fi antenna, install Sputnik software, and share the connection with other people within reach of the signal. In exchange, get free internet access courtesy of your fellow Sputnik users. It's as if you offer a room in your house, in exchange for the same hospitality anywhere in the network. Without the annoyance, cost, or need to clean the sheets. The kicker here is the possibly of getting paid for offering your bandwidth to other users. Shave money off your broadband bill while offering a public service to your neighbors. Nice. · Viral Networking [nickdenton.org] · Sputnikology [Sputnik.com]
Tuesday, March 12, 2002
Chairman's Letter | 9:45 AM
The always plain-spoken Warren Buffett examines the insurance risk of loose nukes in this year's chairman's letter:
Insurers have always found it costly to ignore new exposures. Doing that in the case of terrorism, however, could literally bankrupt the industry. No one knows the probability of a nuclear detonation in a major metropolis this year (or even multiple detonations, given that a terrorist organization able to construct one bomb might not stop there). Nor can anyone, with assurance, assess the probability in this year, or another, of deadly biological or chemical agents being introduced simultaneously (say, through ventilation systems) into multiple office buildings and manufacturing plants. An attack like that would produce astronomical workers' compensation claims... We will not, for example, write coverages on a large number of office and apartment towers in a single metropolis without excluding losses from both a nuclear explosion and the fires that would follow it. Boy, I feel better now. · Chairman's Letter [Berkshire Hathaway]
Monday, March 11, 2002
Towers of Light | 11:20 PM
I watched them turn on the Towers of Light from my roof on the Lower East Side at dusk tonight. Absolutely stunning. After their scheduled one-month commemoration period ends in April, perhaps they could be lit once a month? · View from my roof Approx. 9:10 AM on Sept. 11
· View from my roof Approx. 11:00 AM on Sept. 11
Goodwin Update | 12:14 PM
Publisher's Lunch, an email newsletter about publishing deals, appeared in my inbox this morning reporting yesterday's Week in Review story about Doris Kearns Goodwin's alleged baseball plagarism as fact:
An anecdote in which a teenaged Goodwin fashions a baseball bat out of a fallen oak tree was actually a scene in the Robert Redford film "The Natural." And Ms. Goodwin's account of standing at home plate at Yankee Stadium before a capacity crowd and proclaiming herself to be "the luckiest woman on the face of the earth," is now believed to have been adapted from the life of the Yankee great Lou Gehrig.
"I crank out so much copy, it's sometimes hard to keep it all straight," Ms. Goodwin said. "I could have sworn the Yankees had a special day for me." An apology came over the transom about an hour later. · Can It Be Déjà Vu All Over Again? [NY Times] · Publisher's Lunch
Wednesday, March 06, 2002
Debka Update | 5:04 PM
Remember last fall when checking in on the wacky war rumors at Debka served as a daily guilty pleasure? Village Voice "Mondo Washington" writer James Ridgeway hasn't quit the habit. Military sources tell Debka.com, a dependable Israeli site, that already Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are moving back into Kandahar and Kabul, while others have regrouped in western Pakistan, waiting to cross the mountains when the snow subsides.
Dependable? This is the same site that reported back in October that China had thousands of troops marching into Afghanistan to join Taliban fighters!
· Mondo Washington [Village Voice]
· Debka.com Forbes Best-of-the-Web too!
Pay My Bills | 11:09 AM
KaZaA now says Morpheus' disconnection from FastTrack came as a result of unpaid bills. "MusicCity (also known as StreamCast Networks) has failed to pay any amounts due to Kazaa BV under the parties' license agreement," Kazaa BV founder Niklas Zennstrom wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "As a result of MusicCity's breach, Kazaa BV did not provide version 1.5 to MusicCity. Kazaa has also terminated MusicCity's license." I don't think we've heard the last of this one. · Morpheus' downfall: Bills weren't paid [News.com]
Tuesday, March 05, 2002
Lower East WiFi | 10:57 AM
On the heels of the Times' WiFi coverage explosion yesterday, here's a cool map showing 802.11b wireless connections in Williamsburg and the Lower East Side. My apartment sits almost exactly between the two green dots furthest to the left. Now all I need is a laptop computer and I'm good to go on my roof.
· Williamsburg WiFi Map [NYCWireless] · Good (or Unwitting) Neighbors Make for Good Internet Access [NYTimes]
Monday, March 04, 2002
The Strange Case of Morpheus | 1:21 PM
Death of the best file-sharing program out there brings a tear to my eye.
Then the evening of the 25th, out of the blue, Morpheus users started to be locked out of the FastTrack network with the message about their software being too old. Go to the newsgroups and check out the posts. The first ones are Monday evening, and immediately there are "me too" replies. IT WAS A PLANNED, COORDINATED, AND SIMULTANEOUSLY EXECUTED ATTACK.
The new Morpheus connects to the Gnutella network which has never worked as well as advertised. It's time for some smart coder somewhere to dream up the third generation of file-sharing programs. Meanwhile, Napster's got a new version brewing with a system that promises to let artists get paid. We'll see.
· Morpheus is not the probem; KaZaA is the problem [Zeropaid] A fascinating read.
· File-Sharing Firms Feud Over Users [LA Times]
Google Bombing | 1:06 PM
Interesting look at how Google's link-rating system can be turned against it.
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Google Time Bomb [Corante]
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