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July 21, 2004
Great news from Dave Sifry at Technorati: Technorati is going to be CNN’s guide to blogs discussing the Democratic Convention. Plus, Dave is going to do color blog commentary for CNN on-air. This will help pull more people into the blogosphere as readers and writers. Plus, I love the Technorati folks, so anything that makes them happy makes me happy. (Disclosure: I’m on their board of advisors.)
After some power shopping with Dan Bricklin (thanks, Dan!) and helpful and generous comments from y’all, I bought a Canon Powershot S60.
There are so many models that are so close in features, that ultimately it came down mainly to two factors: First, the Sony guy at Newtonville Camera said that the Sony DSC-V1 wasn’t “mainstream” and I should avoid it. He also liked the wider angle lens on the Canon. (It’s great dealing with a store that puts your interests first.) I was leaning towards a Canon anyway because my current Sony’s picture quality isn’t particularly good, even for a 2.1 megapixel truck. Second, the Canon S500 looks cool and weighs about as much as the idea of it, but I found it too cramped for elderly hand. So, the S60 is it.
I’ve been taking lots of pretty random photos and I’m basically delighted, with occasional flares of ignorance-based concern. The UI is complex — there is no end to the camera’s functionality — but after a couple of hours, I’m pretty well used to it. In Automatic mode, the thing takes brilliant photos: Sharp, colorful, and just pleasing. In Program AE mode, especially if I turn up the ASA, it gets very grainy fast. So, maybe I’m learning not to turn up the ASA. (I should mention that I have no idea what I’m doing.) Also worrisome: I went through a full charge of the battery in well under 100 photos, albeit all with the LCD on and many using the flash. Minor negative: I really dislike the photo management app that comes with it, all because of little, annoying things. For example — prepare for pettiness — the window that shows a photo full size doesn’t tell you the name of the file you’re looking at except in the title of the window, which means if you have a bunch of subdirectories, you have to drag the window into the next county to get to the file name. And the window that shows you all the photos on the camera does it only as a horizontal “film strip,” an annoying way to browse. Anyway.
Overall I’m really enjoying this camera as I get used to how it sees the world.
Dan Gillmor’s blog on the topic of his splendid book, We the Media, is up in beta. (It doesn’t look real beta-ish to me.)
Over at Jeneane‘s, every topic is colored by her non-smoking non-haze – the “the dissociative second-hand activity of smoking,” as she says. Really interesting. (Disclosure: My mother died of lung cancer about 10 years. .)
For some reason, I remember Sartre writing that the hard part of giving up smoking a pipe was the way its absence altered all of the activities he used to do while smoking. Now, I don’t think you need a Nobel-award winning philosopher to point that out, but it does get at what must be the hardest thing about giving up the drug: There’s something to being a smoker. On the other hand, non-smokers tend to be longer. And we definitely want Jeneane to be for a looong time.
So, go Jeneane! Be Jeneane! Be!
Scott Rosenberg cites the NY Time’s nailing of what’s so wonderful about the original I, Robot stories, and then adds his own contemplations.
Unlike Scott, though, I’m going to see the movie. I think of it as meeting someone named Abe Lincoln. Just a coincidence.
Jay Rosen reminds us of Norman Mailer’s pre-New Journalistic coverage of the 1960 Convention. “[T]here is another way of ‘covering’ a political convention,” Jay writes: “Send a writer and let the writer find a language adequate to the event.” A snip:
Mailer on Los Angeles, site of the 1960 Democratic convention: “one has the feeling it was built by television sets giving orders to men.”
In the comments, Seth Finkelstein writes about the Mailer:
Much shorter version: “Let in a bunch of freelance writers, maybe they’ll write something interesting”.
Hmm. Let me rephrase that: Let Norman Mailer in and maybe he’ll write something interesting.
July 20, 2004
When my host was down today, any email that came in was lost. So, if you sent mail to me between 8AM and about 3pm EDT, and on second thought you still think you want me to read it, you’ll have to re-send it.
Sorry!
Joe Gandelman responds to the LA Times commentary that takes us Convention bloggers down a couple of pegs. Joe points to the resentment journalists feel towards bloggers because we haven’t “paid our dues.” True enough. Bloggers who think that just because they got a free account at www.BlogYourAss.com, they can now displace professional journalists are seriously underestimating the skills, dedication and value of real journalists. (Yes, real journalists.)
Of course there are bloggers who are as skilled and dedicated as any professional journalist. In fact, some are professional journalists. But most bloggers aren’t. That’s by no means a criticism. Most of us are doing something different than professional journalism…and that’s precisely why blogging is so important.
I, for one, am not covering the Convention, even though I’m one of the lucky credentialed bloggers. I’ll be attending it, of course, but I can only cover the Convention the way a bed bug covers a bed. No, the professional news organizations will cover the convention. that is, they will provide comprehensive reporting. We don’t have to tell you everything that Kerry and Clinton and the mayor of Sheboygan said from the podium, because multi-billion dollar media groups are taking care of that for us. For which I say: Thanks!
But, of course, the coverage the media will provide isn’t really comprehensive. Even if they televised the 4-day beast from dawn to dawn, they’re still going to point their cameras at the podium, occasionally condescending to talk with a delegate, preferably one with a rural accent and a funny hat. So, that leaves plenty for us bed bugs to talk about. If the media weren’t covering it the way they do, we bloggers wouldn’t have luxury to write only and always about what interests us.
Knight Ridder discloses one of the undisclosed locations the Cheney has been hiding in, a hole in the ground.
So, I thought it was Osama who’s been reduced to living in caves…
I’m sitting here at Da Berkman with Rebecca MacKinnon who is trying to move her site from TypePad to Movable Type. The export of data from one to the other went fine, but TypePad has “type lists” – blogrolls or anything else you want to list, including RSS feeds – that don’t export easily to MT. Anyone know an elegant way of doing it?
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Thank you, WordPress!
