Joho the Blog » 2004

December 3, 2004

Podcasting, hierarchies, new blogs and raw envy

I have an article on the political implications of podcasting at Personal Democracy. It’s mainly about what podcasting is, and then it does the predictable political speculation. There’s a terrific article on the same topic at CampaignAudit.org

And while I’m plugging me, over at Worthwhile I just posted a couple of paragraphs about some really interesting work being done by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps on mapping business hierarchies.

And if it’s ok for me not to talk about myself for one brief instant, I’m enjoying Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother blog (thanks to Liz for the link)

Ayelet points to a terrific essay about writer’s envy by Kathryn Chetkovich. Why, just yesterday I muttered a curse about yet another author whose talent turns me crayon-y green. Oh, it’s a long list alright. Chetkovich’s essay is especially interesting to me because she refracts the topic through her position as a woman.

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Categories: misc Tagged with: misc • politics Date: December 3rd, 2004 dw

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December 2, 2004

Ethan in Egypt

Ethan Zuckerman is in Egypt. Ok, technically he was in Egypt, but he waited until he left before posting about it. He connects the looseness of cab-ride protocols with the scary human rights environment.

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Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: politics Date: December 2nd, 2004 dw

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Google numbers

From an article by Matt Loney at ZDNet:

* Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed

* Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster

* Over 30 clusters

* 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog

* One petabyte of data in a cluster — so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue

* Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster

* An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters

* No complete system failure since February 2000

And that was before they boosted the page count to over 8 billion. (Thanks to Hart Hooton for the link.)

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Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: uncat Date: December 2nd, 2004 dw

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Chief Raging Officer

Would you make someone named RageBoy your Chief Blogging Officer? Look, fellas, you went into this with your eyes open. When the sick bastard turns on you, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.

In short, congratulations! The blog is – rather brilliantly – not about HighBeam, the sponsor. It’s about Chris burrowing into ideas he’s interested in, incorporating information found via HighBeam. So, we get to watch over Chris’ shoulder as he works on his next book, which has nothing to do with his sponsor. HighBeam shines the more brightly by being reflected through Chris’ interests.

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Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: web Date: December 2nd, 2004 dw

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December 1, 2004

Why do we blog?

Frank asks. A bunch of us answer. It seems to boil down to: What a cool way to hang out together!

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Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: web Date: December 1st, 2004 dw

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Dumb HTML question

With Firefox (but not IE), the text of some of my blog entries show up properly as Verdana and dark brown, while others use the Firefox default font and color. I can’t see a difference in the source. For examtple, the previous entry, Truth, Objectivity and Mitch is wrong while the next entry, Berkman Web of Ideas, is right. (This occurs on my blog’s main page, not on the page the permalink takes you to.) What’s the obvious thing that I’m missing?

Here’s Tim Bray’s quick response:

The first step in making display problems go away is fixing obvious markup problems. Check out the w3 validator and it reveals a host of problems, many of which can be fixed by fiddling the <!DOCTYPE> so it knows this is XML, for example steal the one I use: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ‘-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN’ ‘http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd’>

But it also reveals a bunch of real problems, “slign=” where you mean “align=” and a ton of others. If you can make these go away not only will you be a cool, hip, standards-compliant kinda guy, but then your style issues will become comprehensible by mere mortals. Which currently they’re not.

There are also some useful suggestions in the comments to this post. I’ve done some fiddling and I’ve gotten the number of errors down to under 500. Woohoo! Most are not in the template, although the template sure has plenty. In fact, it has so many that I’ve given up trying to make it compliant.

Besides, I prefer unassertive browsers to rigid standards. (OTOH, if my code were valid, I wouldn’t be having the problem that started this thread.)

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Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: uncat Date: December 1st, 2004 dw

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Truth, objectivity and Mitch

Fascinating post today by Mitch Ratcliffe on a topic near and dear to me: facts, news and Wikipedia. Here’s a snippet from his concluding paragraphs:

If WikiNews editors acted as a peer-review committee and called out shortcomings in fact-checking or the accuracy of facts, this could be a powerful enhancement to multiple versions of events that helped the reader decide for themselves what actually happened. But reducing a report to a single version, especially based on contributions from people who were not actually there to record the event, is of questionable value.

It’s a long-ish, thoughtful post and I wish I didn’t have meetings all day so I could respond instead of just linking. I haven’t sorted out my thinking very well about these topics, as Urs Gasser pointed out to me yesterday, and Mitch’s post is helpful. (BTW, thank you, Urs.)

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Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: web Date: December 1st, 2004 dw

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Berkman Web of Ideas tonight: What’s ours on the Web?

Just a reminder that tonight I’m leading a session at the Harvard Berkman Center on the question “What’s ours on the Web?” It’s about why some sites feel like ours and others don’t, and what this might tell us about what an “us” means. I’m going to try to post more about that this afternoon.

I wrote a bit about it here, and got some excellent comments. Peter Merholz took issue with the premise here.

The session is 6-7:15pm at the Baker House, 1587 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge. Here’s a campus map. All are invited and pizza is served.

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Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: web Date: December 1st, 2004 dw

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