I’m trying to whip my collection of MP3s into basic shape so that I can find them via the rather limited UI of my Creative Nomad Not-an-iPod Zen player. (Oy, so now I’m taxonomizing on the weekends!) And The Godfather has turned out to be really helpful. It’s overly-featured from my point of view, but I have minimal needs. And it sure seems to do the job. Want to tag all the tracks in your Bach directory as artist=”Bach, JS” and rename them using a “Composer – Album – Track” format? This is the tool for you. (Well, I actually haven’t figured out how to do the renaming, but it’s definitely a key feature.) It’s free, it’s got a scripting capability, and it’s well-supported by a forum. Thank you, JTClipper!

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Ethan has a great data-driven post, analyzing which US newspapers have the highest number of blog links per paper subscribers. The winner, hands down, is the admirable Christian Science Monitor.

Ethan wraps up with this:

Is there a way for the Monitor to embrace it’s unique status and become the “official paper of the blogosphere”? Or is the Monitor slated to become one of the first — and most tragic — casualties of the move from paper to bits?

Ethan’s continuing work gives statistics a good name :) [Technorati tags: media CSM EthanZuckerman]

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Steve is going to give a free talk about his new book, Everything Bad Is Good For You — How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, this Thursday, at 7pm, in the Langdell North Classroom in the Langdell Law Library at Harvard.

The book is going to be a big bestseller, and Steve is a wonderful, funny presenter. (You can see a preview of the book in this Sunday’s NY Times Magazine.)

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My daughter’s friend’s Powerbook crashed after she downloaded an episode of “Gilmore Girls.” Now it won’t boot, and reports that there’s nothing on the hard disk. She needs to turn in a paper on the drive on Monday. Any advice? In fact, if you’re in Boston, wanna fix it for her…?

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It’s an interesting experience: You get to hone a topic to 90 seconds, memorize it, and talk into a camera in an isolated room. Plus, they send a limo for you. (It’s possible they pay, but I forgot to ask.) They’re nice people and were happy with the two pieces I did for them. But…

They want reports on what moderate left and right wing bloggers — “Nothing out of the mainstream,” the producer told me yesterday — say about a “major” topic. What the hell does that have to do with blogging? And when two of the producers yesterday independently suggested that I report on the blogosphere’s reaction to a Vietnam veteran spitting on Jane Fonda, I blurted out — because the flu had lowered my normal Walls of Timidity — that this wasn’t a job I’m comfortable with.

What makes the blogosphere interesting to me is not that there are moderate left and right voices talking about mainstream topics. Mainstream major stories are about issues such as freakish celebrity pedophiles, a spit match over a fight from 30 years ago that the press is hoping to revive, and whatever unfortunate child has been reported missing and presumed (better for the story) murdered. I’m in the blogosphere to escape from this degradation of values.

In the ninety seconds MSNBC gives over to blogging, they want to pair A-Listers into a he-said/she-said report on a Major Topic. Yippee for the A-Team! You do two of those and the last of the three segments should be something “fun,” i.e., humorous and trivial because the news no longer knows how to operate without a closing joke. It’s downright pathological.

I have mixed feelings. I’m genuinely glad Jeff Jarvis, Ed Cone, and others are doing it. It’s better that they get to squeeze a few new voices into the MSM, even if those voices aren’t always as diverse as we’d like. It’s good for the MSM to acknowledge their viewers aren’t passive. And people who follow the URLs may find other voices worth listening to. The odd thing is that the two I did for them (1 2) didn’t follow the pattern they want, but they were happy with them nonetheless, so I probably could have kept on if I hadn’t raised the issue. But I just couldn’t face implicitly confirming the idea that the blogosphere consists of big voices arguing with one another — spit fights! — instead of 10 million real voices engaged in every variety of human conversation and delight.

So, fuck it. I quit. [Technorati tags: msnbc msm media]

April 23, 2005: There are some things I didn’t express well in the post above. Thankfully, the blogosphere is so damn conversational that it doesn’t take long for at least some of the weaknesses to come out. So, sorry for the bad writing, and here are some things I should have said.

I should have concluded my second paragraph by noting that after I said that I didn’t think this was going to work out, we continued our amicable conversation and found three topics — two of which I’d suggested, one of which they did — for my segment. It was definitely not an “I quit!” and stalk out moment. The two producers were both great to work with and treated me well. I like them both.

Jay Rosen, ever sensitive to nuance, wonders why I used the word “quit” in my last sentence, instead of “stop.” The answer is that I was instilling the episode with false drama, as a type of self-aggrandizement. That’s a disservice to truth and I apologize. My word choice throughout the piece also reflects some anger, some of which is directed at [Warning: Generalization ahead] the MSM’s laughably corrupt values but some of which is born of my own disappointment at not getting to be on TV any more. It’s complex.

And speaking of complexity, Jeff Jarvis does a great job teasing apart the skein of ideas and emotions here and here.

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Because of my flu — today it’s turned into merely a seal-like cough and Quasimodo’s headache — I’ve been waking up with odd snippets of dreams in my head.

Two days ago I awoke from a dream in which the contestants on American Idol were catching fish shaped like the way they sing. So, the one who does all the Mariah Carey-esque swooping around every note reeled in an eel. Disgusting, but, then…

Yesterday I woke up with this bad joke from the early 1990s:

Why exactly I’m having Ross Perot dreams is beyond me. (And I’d clean up the awful red outlining but I’m too beat. It’s not like it’d be real funny if only I’d done a better job image editing it.)

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Thanks to work and prodding by Mitch Ratcliffe, Audible is now on the RSS bandwagon. You can subscribe to a feed of their bestsellers, NY Times Bestsellers, free audio, and lots more… [Technorati tags: audible rss MitchRatcliffe]

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This is the bit I memorized for today’s 90 seconds on MSNBC. It should be pretty close to what I actually said, short of the epithet’s I involuntarily barked out. (PoliticalTeen has captured the video. Thanks!)

BlackFive, a right wing military blog, is running a list of about 80 blogs by military personnel. It’s quite a collection. At the National Guard Experience, a mortar infantryman stationed in Afghanistan runs lots of photos of children, and seems, mildly obsessed with care packages. At Jack Army, a special forces soldier tells us why he flunked out of Medic training. A good read. Soldiers Mom, says that her son’s division in Iraq has entered a communications blackout period, which often means there’s some bad news coming. I hope not. By the way, the Army Times itself last month ran a list of military blogs, so they’re becoming more mainstream.

Some bloggers have been talking about a cache of 400,000 documents discovered a hundred years ago in Egypt that’s now legible thanks to new technology They’ve already found lost works by Sophocles and Euripides, and there’s speculation there maybe even be a lost gospel in there. The blogger, Eyeless in Gaza, explains the documents were trash dumped on the outskirts of the town, which was far enough from the Nile that the trash stayed nice and dry. It’s apparently an amazing store of riches that’ll take years to explore.

Finally, Jeremy Stribling, a student at MIT, felt that an academic conference was spamming him, so he generated a gibberish paper…which was, of course, then accepted. If you want to generate your own gibberish academic paper, you can go to Jeremy’s site. [Technorati tags: oxyrhynchus stribling iraq]

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Confusability is scraping bloglines and noticing how people are categorizing feeds. Great idea. First results: A list of the 100 most popular categories. It shows the gap between the categories we use for ourselves and those we use for others. I have a category called “Web” for entries in this blog because within the confines of my blog, it’s a useful way of sorting posts. But tagging a post “web” for retrieval within the wide world of resources would be pointless. We’re either going to get more sophisticated in how we tag, or our computers are going to have to get ever more clever about reading lots of implicit and metadata to help us find what we’re looking for. Or both.

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Betsy runs snippets from the daily letters her great-grandfather wrote to his family. Charming.

In a separate post, she reports that one of the t-shirts for sale at a scientific meeting she went to reads:

PLEASE FLIRT HARDER, I AM A PHYSICIST

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