I’m about halfway through Harriet Ritvo’s The Platypus and the Mermaid, a book recommended to me by Chris Locke‘s sister Liz. It’s about the 19th Century’s obsession with taxonomies, and it’s staggeringly good. Ritvo is one of those authors whose breadth of knowledge and grasp of details seems impossible. She shows how naturalists and culture struggled with the concept of species, with the naturalness or artificiality of order, with whether order is simple or complx, with the discovery of a continent’s worth of new animals (kangaroos looked a lot like greyhounds) by not only following the scientific debate but by attending to how children’s guides to animals explained themselves. And she’s a good writer to boot. Thanks, Liz! [Technorati tags: taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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Britt has hit upon the “campfire talk” as the aesthetic corporate bloggers will “get.” Sounds right, although I wouldn’t know having never been to a campfire. So, my only cultural references for campfires are: Roasting marshmallows, telling stories about homocidal maniacs with hooks, and peeing on the fire to put it out (men only!). But if it works in corporate America, then more power to the aesthetic! Anything that will get corporate bloggers past the idea that they’re writing memos or brochures in public…

(Is it a coincidence that a guy named “Blaser” would come up with a fire metaphor?) [Technorati tag: BrittBlaser]

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When doing pushups under water, most of your energy gets expended going down.

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I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (known in my family as I Can’t Believe We’re Eating This) is eschewing TV commercials in favor of a 4-part animated mock soap opera at TasteYouLove.com.

It’s certainly interesting when a retail product jumps off of TV. For one thing, the Web ad doesn’t interrupt me while I’m trying to do something else. And the first two episodes ICBINB has posted are a tiny bit amusing. But just a a tiny bit.

The problem is that products like ICBINB aren’t interesting. The script tries to make up for the product’s tedium by hitting the predictable soap opera parody points (handsome doctor, evil twin, amnesia), but it’s hard to believe that people are actually going to send this around to their friends. Maybe if the product made fun of itself instead of a tired TV genre…

I would love to see more advertising move off of TV and onto dedicated websites, as ICBINB has done. But the Web sites can’t be as boring as TV ads are. If you want our attention, now you’re going to have to earn it. Turning your bottle into an animated character that looks like Nicole Kidman just isn’t going to cut it. [Technorati tags: marketing]

Totally by coincidence – I swear! – our daughter was watching a Simpsons rerun just now that mentions www.SexySlumberParty.com, so I checked it out…

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Pito aggregates what he’s learned about the use of RSS and blogs among academics, researchers and scientists. Short answer: A lot’s going on.

The final point on Pito’s list is one he appropriately calls “awesome”: the University of Saskatchewan Library’s list of feeds from hundreds of journals, from Abacus to World journal of surgical oncology [Technorati tags: rss PitoSalas]

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The Bush administration continues to refuse to release photos and videos of Abu Ghraib that, by all accounts, show far worse scenes of torture.

We need to know what happened. We’re Americans. We’re supposed to believe in the power of truth. [Technorati tags: iraq bush AbuGhraib]

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According to a survey conducted by eBay, how many Americans say that eBay is their primary or secondary source of income?

The answer is in the first comment… [Thanks to Center for Media Research for the info.] [Technorati tags: OrderOfMagnitudeQuiz ebay]

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PRSpeak thinks maybe it’s time to get the various people mouthing off about PR (I am one of those mouthers) into a room and produce something like a manifesto.

This isn’t a manifesto, but here’s a self-description I’d like to hear from a PR agency sometime:

1. Our PR agency’s aim is to help knowledge emerge in public.

2. We recognize that knowledge is a property of conversations.

3. Scientists, industry experts, businesses, enthusiasts, and users each have important and unique contributions to make to these conversations. No one group holds all the knowledge necessary.

4. So, the aim of this agency is to help enable the conversations from which knowledge emerges. [Here’s where a list of services would go.]

5. Our clients pay us to represent the public’s interest in having the honest and useful conversations that generate knowledge, because our clients believe that an increase in public knowledge is good for their business.

Could such an agency actually make money? I don’t know. That’s why it’s called “mouthing off.” [Technorati tags: PublicRelations PR]

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Andy Ratto is reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and blogging about it. Quite unpretentiously and charmingly.

He’s including references he doesn’t understand. E.g., on page 29 of the first volume there’s a reference to the “pangolin.” Andy consults Wikipedia to discover that they are scaly anteaters. Presumably he didn’t look up “pangolin” in the Britannica because he’s checking the volumes out of the library one at a time.

He also promises to note particularly profound moments, ridiculously obtuse parts and the bios that end in murder or suicide. He is also blogging interesting facts, such as:

“The smallest arthropods include some parastic wasps, beetles of the family Ptiliidae, and mites that are less than 0.25 millimeter in length, despite their complex structure, and may weigh less than the nucleus of a large cell.”

Andy is a college student majoring in poli sci, and is in the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. G-d speed, Andy!

(Thanks to the EBlogger — a blog about the Britannica — for the link.) [Technorati tags: britannica wikipedia AndyRatto]

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Take a look at the Big Broadband Bill of Rights and consider signing it. I did.

Fat lot of good it will do. And least it reads better than most petitions/manifestos.

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