From the Center for Media Research:

Half of All Web Viewers Watching What The Other Half Has To Say

According to the just released Deloitte’s study on Media & Entertainment practice, looking at how American consumers between 13 and 75 years of age are using media and technology today, Millennials (13-24) are leading the way, embracing new technologies, games, entertainment platforms, user-generated content and communication tools. Data from the survey show that user-generated content is in tremendous demand across the generations, with 51% of all consumers watching and/or reading content created by others.

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Andy Carvin just twittered:

Just realized OneWebDay is the same day as Yom Kippur this year. Guess I’ll be giving back to the Net by fasting and being irritable.

Yes, One Web Day is Sept. 22, which this year falls on Yom Kippur.

At the Berkman Center, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, at lunchtime, we’re going to have a discussion of the near-palindromic Net in Ten, i.e., the future of the Web. Four of the Fellows have agreed to give a five minute talk (a literal five minutes), followed by open discussion. We’ll post the video on Sept. 22 (aka Yom Kippur), on a discussion page.

That way, we can have our cake and not eat it, too. [Tags: one_web_day onewebday andy_carvin berkman future_of_the_web ]

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And many, many more to you, my friend.

Personally, I’ve been finding there’s a lot to be said for being in your fifties. Welcome to the decade. I look forward to many more years of learning from you and from your example. [Tags: akma]

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After initially refusing to fix my under-warranty ThinkPad X40 because there was (and I’m quoting) “melted goop” on the motherboard, IBM/Lenovo changed its mind because the goop was unlikely to be the cause of the intermittence of the power supply. In fact, the problem unsurprisingly turned out to be a broken solder joint. So, they fixed it up real good, including replacing some of the bits of the case I’d, um, lost. It came back clean, fixed, and working.

Thanks, IBM/Lenovo! And thank you, Lenovo/IBM!

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Today’s Dilbert is destined to be shown during the introductory remarks at every Web 2.0 conference for the next two years. And it uses the phrase “tag-based folksonomy,” albeit it as a phrase so technical it’s suppose to scare us. It

And today’s Doonesbury is destined to be shown during the introductory remarks at every “Future of Media” conference for the next two years. Along the way, the strip mentions DonorsChoose.org, a cool site that will get a boost from the plug, thus inadvertently showing the power of the mass media that the strip questions. (I blogged about DonorsChoose here.) [Tags: dilbert doonesbury donorschoose web2.0 media everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Suppose you want to positing the insertion point in a textarea on an HTML page using javascript. (If you don’t want to suppose that, then stop reading now.) This is basic stuff for real programmers, but it took me longer than it should to figure out exactly how to get this to work, so pardon my step by step instructions. I figure it might save some other clodhopping amateur like me the effort of figuring out what’s so obvious to real programmers that they don’t bother mentioning it.

So, let’s say your HTML page has a textarea element — you know, one of them type-in fields. In fact, let’s say the entire body of your page looks like this at the code level:

<textarea id=”ta”>01234567</textarea>
<input type=”button” value=”Move cursor to after first letter” onclick=”setsel()”>

That’ll make a page that looks like this:

01234567

(The button doesn’t work. It’s just for show. But see below.)

In case any of this is unclear, the first line creates a textarea with an identifer that I made up (“ta”), and containing “01234567” as its initial text. The second line creates the button, gives it a label, and says that when a user clicks it, the function “setsel()” should be executed. But you already knew that.

Here’s the operative part of the function “setsel()”:

var tarea=document.getElementById(“ta”);
tarea.focus();
tarea.setSelectionRange(1,1);

The first line creates a variable called “tarea” and assigns it the textarea that has the identifier “ta.”

The second line tells it that that’s the element on the page that is going to receive the user interaction. (I lost a couple of hours not realizing the textarea had lost the focus. You may not always need this line. But what could it hurt?)

The third contains the command that works in Firefox (but not IE) for selecting a range of text. It takes two parameters: The position of the character where the selection should start and the position of the character where it should end. (Note: The second value does not say how many characters should be selected.) This is a zero-based system: The spot before the first character is 0. So, if you tell setSelectionRange (and capitalization counts!) to begin at 0 and end at 1, it will select the first character. If you tell it to begin and end at, say, 1, nothing will be selected, and the insertion point will be between the “0” and the “1” in this particular example.

Because I am such a fun guy, fill in the values you want in the following two boxes and click away to select the text in the same textarea. (Remember, only Firefoxers can play this exciting game!)

0123456789A01234567890
24

You’d better read any comments before taking this seriously because I’m guaranteed to have gotten it wrong, possibly in destructive and certainly in embarrassing ways. [Tags: javascript amateurs setSelectionRange mozilla firefox tutorial wrong_in_public_again]

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When you’re tempted to borrow the Dave Barry trope of adding “And, by the way, that would make an excellent name for a band,” you can share the name at NowFormABand, a site created by Aanand Prasad. Recent names include: Foxy Morons, Clot, CornSquat and Eat More Chemicals.

None of the names I saw match the pure, godawful ridiculousness of my band’s name in high school: Wheel and the Spokesmen. Even today I can play a truly awful rendition of “This Diamond Ring”…

(Link via Yesh Omrim.)

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John Edwards has given a major speech outlining his anti-terrorism policies. (Disclosure: I’m a volunteer advisor on Net policy to the campaign.) I read it and I think: This is a lot better than our current policies. Orders of magnitude better. But do I think each of the agenda items is the best thing to do? Nah, but that’s because I don’t think there is a set of best things. If only. So, I look for the general understanding of how the world is made more peaceful. And for that, I think Edwards is right on.

But Edwards doesn’t say the one thing I think any anti-terrorism policy should acknowledge: Terrorism is not going away, any more than crime is going to end. Kerry said something along those lines and got creamed for it, even though Bush had muttered something similar a few weeks earlier. But it’s the truth that ought to be setting our sense of what constitutes success. [Tags: john_edwards terrorism politics]

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Doc and I don’t always see eye to eye on questions of implementing the privacy goals we share, but his pushback on FaceBook’s change of policy is on the nose, in my book. I’d have no problem with FB exposing its members (so to speak) if that was part of the original deal. But as a change in policy, it stinks. FB has become too important to too many people to make it easy to leave — important because of what we users brought to FB: our friends, relationships, and time. danah, to no one’s surprise, also has a terrific post on this.

FB could make this right with about two lines of code: Make exposing your FB info to search engines a matter of checking a box. What part of “opt in” does FB not understand? [Tags: facebook doc_searls danah_boydprivacy ]

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The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and MTV announced today the Knight News Challenge “Young Creators Award,” a new digital journalism grant program for young people age 25 and under anywhere in the world. The contest will award up to $500,000 to young creators with compelling ideas for using digitally delivered news and information to enhance physical communities – improving the lives of people where they live, work and vote. The new award is a component of the Knight News Challenge, an annual competition awarding $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news. [source]

The site also allows entrants to gather public discussion so they can improve their proposals. Cool! [Tags: media citizen_journalism knight mtv journalism ]

Also from the world of press releases, this one from the NYT:

NEW YORK, Sept. 6, 2007 – The New York Times introduced today a new online
initiative that pairs Times content with faculty course material for both
credit-bearing and continuing education courses. Educators will now have
the opportunity to select Times articles, archival content, graphics and
multimedia content, including videos and Webcasts, gathered around specific
subjects, and make them available to students online, along with other
course materials. Students will benefit from access to thematic content
that is drawn from the vast array of Times reporting on a countless number
of issues.

Aren’t we all students, after all? Wouldn’t we all benefit from t

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