The WikiTravel site looks like it may become as useful as the WikiPedia. (Thanks to Pete Kaminski for the link.)

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”I lived the American dream,” says Baglio, 70, whose last workday was Oct. 30. ”I would have never thought I’d last 45 years here.”

That’s Louis Baglio speaking, as reported in an article by Johnny Diaz in the Boston Globe on Sunday. This guy cut hair for 45 years in downtown Boston and he thinks he lived the American dream! What a moron!

First, not only did he stay at the same job for his entire career, he only changed his place of employment twice. Even school kids know that if you want to ratchet your salary, you move from place to place. Sure, more than every two years and it looks like you are having problems focusing (i.e., you’re a sexual harrasser), but three places in 45 years? Give me a break!

Then, with all of the haircutting franchises booming, this guy couldn’t manage to sell out? He could have retired years ago. If he wanted to keep working, he could have become a haircutting consultant or a haircutting VC…you know, move up the value chain. But no, day after day, this schlub just keeps on snipping scissors around people’s heads. Oh, and “conversing” with his customers. Yeah, that must have been interesting for 45 years!

Then, he admits that he couldn’t weasel out of the Korean War as a corporal. There’s two years of his life gone!

Sure, he bought his own shop and put a couple of kids through college, but if that’s all it takes to live the American Dream, then, well, we’d better call in Andersen Consulting to do a dream audit because a few things are missing. Where’s the Boxster? The second wife, the one who’s into threesomes? The climb up the ladder? The second home and the the third? The years “lost” to cocaine? The personal trainer and the wine cellar? The guest shot on Saturday Night Live? Where’s the retirement money so large that there’s a whiff of scandal? Where are his enemies?

American Dream? Yeah…for losers!

[The Globe article is available for free today only.]

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Frank thinks that Clay‘s fogged the issues around the Semantic Web. Frank points to places where the careful construction of industry metadata has resulted in integrated systems that work well.

I don’t think Clay is arguing that all metadata is bad. Rather, he’s saying that it doesn’t scale. Yes, the insurance industry might be able to construct a taxonomy that works for it, but the Semantic Web goes beyond the local. It talks about how local taxonomies can automagically knit themselves together. The problem with the Semantic Web is, from my point of view, that it can’t scale because taxonomies are tools, not descriptions, and thus don’t knit real well.

We’ved been through this before with SGML. (I’ve been working on a long piece on SGML and the Semantic Web for months now.) We know how hard it is to come up with Document Type Definition (akin to a taxonomy) for industries and we don’t have an expectation that they’ll somehow knit themselves together into a universal DTD. For exactly the same reasons, the Semantic Web won’t scale.

And the ironic thing is that even the desire to have a Semantic Web is a failure to learn from the failure of SGML to establish itself as a universal document standard…except in the form of HTML against which the Semantic Web is a reaction.

IMO.

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Dave writes:

Weblog software is going to be like mail servers. Lots of ways to deploy, every niche filled. For the masses, services like Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Blogging servers for corporations, inside and outside of the firewall. For schools, for the military, specialized systems for lawyers, librarians, professors, reporters, magazines, daily newspapers. The next President will have a blog. Writing for the Web, the prevailing form of publishing in the early 21st Century, will come in many sizes and shapes, flavors and styles. It won’t be one-size-fits-all. Open formats and protocols will make this possible. I’d bet on the formats and protocols we’re using now, RSS 2.0, OPML and the Blogger API.

Sounds right to me. (Well, the next president will have a blog but won’t write it himself. [I’d say “or herself,” but who are we kidding.]) Also, I don’t know if Dave agrees that what we do with these blogging servers may not look all that much like blogging.

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“Can I supersize that NPR for ya?”

From an anonymous comment on a discussion board at the Dean blog.

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Clay takes apart the Semantic Web, starting small and heading towards the big and beautiful. He ends by pointing out that metadata is politics and that there is a virtue to messiness.

It’s a brilliant piece and I’d be much happier about it if the ending points weren’t ones I’ve been trying to write about for a few months. Damn that Shirky!

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In case you were thinking for a moment that spam sucks but the rest of communicative life is ok, just about the only faxes I get are unrequested ads. Spafax? Faxam? Fam?

Anyway, one came through today that says in big letters:

All you have to do is check off one of the answers and fax it back to 1-900-622-1550.

I have to give it some credit: It does noet in small letters that calls to this 900 number cost $3.95/minute.

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From Jeffrey Tarter comes new of an important new business model for outsourcing software development.

Joe Grossberg thinks the Primate Programming page has “racist overtones.” I can see that way of taking it, although (I hope obviously) that’s not how I took it. I take it as being about the commodification of software development and a Dilbert-esque swipe at the gullibility and irresponsibility of pointy-haired bosses.

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Doesn’t this headline in today’s USAToday mean that Woods and Singh are doing well? I don’t know much about golf, but I’m pretty sure that shooting under par is a good thing.

On the other hand, in golf someone with a high handicap is a better golfer than one with a low one, so who knows?

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1. My Palm Vx died yesterday. This is the one that Buzz ActiveWords Bruggeman gave me after I ran over mine. The writeable screen is so far out of whack that I can’t even get the menu to recalibrate it. It’s been going downhill for a while.

I use my Palm just about entirely as a portable address book. I’m having trouble reading the monochrome screens, so I’d like to upgrade to a color screen. I want to use the Palm OS. Battery life counts: I want to be able to take it on the road for a week, turning it on only occasionally, without having to carry a recharger.

So, I seem to have it narrowed down to the Palm Tungsten E and the Sony Clie TJ25. Any comments, recommendations or expressions of profound uninterest?

2. The heating pad I use for my back died last week. So far two replacements aren’t hot enough; the Hot settings on them don’t get as hot as the Warm on my old one. Have the overly-protective, chicken-ass manufacturers dialed down the temperatures on heating pads sometime in the past ten years?

The good news about my heating pad crashing: I don’t have to reinstall Windows on it.

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