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August 11, 2005
Luca de Biase writes about the attempt to buy the politically independent Corriere della Sera. He reports that some real estate entrepreneuers are trying to buy the newspaper, but that there’s reason to believe that Silvio Berlusconi is behind it. (Luca points to stories by The Independent and the AP.)
It’s upsetting when the world starts resembling a James Bond movie plot line… [Tags: italy JamesBond]
Jim Howard writes (in the comments on my posting about Ben Hammersley’s light-hearted claim that Richard Steele wrote the first blog in 1709) that he (Jim) might be considered the first blogger. Jim writes:
in June of 1982 I setup Howard’s Notebook, a bulletin board system, and people could dial into my BBS. At first they had to connect at 300 baud.
I posted the sort of stuff you see here now.. information and comments and what was going on in my life. I posted the comments that people sent to me about the BBS and subjects of interest. I had “links” to other information on the BBS. Things like list of ham clubs, ham repeaters, satellites in space and stuff like that.. plus I had a list of other bulletin board systems.
Later I added more phone lines to the BBS. A bit later I got connected to the Internet. Remember this was still before the WWW. So people could send and receive Internet email and read and post to newsgroups. I had some Internet email addresses setup as links so that a person just had to click on the link and it would enter the email address. (Because people could not understand how to address an email at that time.) Also I did things like add a phone line so that a person could click on another BBS from the list and my computer would dial out and connect and then the person was on my BBS but connected to a BBS someplace else.
So I think I had everything in place to be a blog and I think that Howard’s Notebook was the first blog and it was June of 1982.
Was it a blog? It depends on the outcome of a really uninteresting argument about the definition of “blog” that I’d rather not have. Nevertheless, I thought I should note Jim’s claim for the record. (And where can I get a copy of The Record anyway?) [Tag: blogs]
August 10, 2005
Mark Dionne has found a niche business that rivals TrackCap.com, a business that sells those little TrackPoint nubbins for Thinkpads (aka The Most Over-Packed Item in History). A family member’s cellphone got run through the washing machine, so Mark googled “cell phone washing machine” and got this Google ad:
Soggy Cell Phone?
Dropped your phone in the toilet?
Took a spin in the washing machine?
FastCellPhoneRepair.com
For $40 they’ll service your cellphone. (Mark notes that he fixed the phone himself, so we don’t know how good these folks are.)
James Wolcott spanks me for saying Oliver Stone is the worst major director around. Easy for him to say: He didn’t sit through Alexander.
James doesn’t allow comments on his site, so I’ve replied by appending to my original post. [Tags: JamesWolcott OliverStone]
August 9, 2005
Shifting Baselines ran an ad warning that we’re depleting marine life. It was a humorous little clip, but it got some sport and commercial fisherpeople quite angry. So, SB went out and talked with a bunch of them, and put together a five minute video in which they get to speak.
This is so cool. (Thanks to Jason Lefkowitz of Oceana for the link.) (There are more videos on the Shifting Baselines home page, including this one on grassroots organizing and this very odd one about penguins.) [Tags: ShiftingBaselines environment]
JD Lasica has posted seven video interviews from Blogher. I haven’t viewed them yet, but it looks like a terrific assortment of people. [Tags: blogher jdlasica]
Fanastic post by danah on her findings looking at 500 random blogs with an eye towards the differences in how men and women link. One finding: The fact that links are untyped — they don’t tell you anything except that A is linking to B — favors the male pattern of having many weak ties. [Technorati tags: danahBoyd gender]
RadioTime is aggregating radio streams and lets you do the TiVo thang with them. There’s a free version, but I’m not yet sure exactly what it does, and a $40/year subscription version that gives you the stuff the free version doesn’t. (I’m in a meeting and not browsing at full capacity.) [Technorati tags: media radio tivo]
Incidentlog.com has added Boston to its coverage, once a week mapping police reports of crime onto Google Maps. It’s easy to imagine this system being then integrated with more information about the crimes, presenting aggregated data in order to spot trends, etc.
While it’s always good to see this type of integration, I had trouble with the UI: I couldn’t get it to show any Boston incidents except what seem to be all of this year’s fatalities even though there’s a pulldown that lists about a dozen crime categories. Maybe I’m not doing it right. [Tags: gis boston]
August 8, 2005
WWII-based PC video games:
Company of Heroes
Brothers in Arms
Medal of Honor
Hearts of Iron
Call of Duty
See any pattern in the titles? Nah, me neither.
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