This is the bit I memorized for today’s 90 seconds on MSNBC. It should be pretty close to what I actually said, short of the epithet’s I involuntarily barked out. (PoliticalTeen has captured the video. Thanks!)

BlackFive, a right wing military blog, is running a list of about 80 blogs by military personnel. It’s quite a collection. At the National Guard Experience, a mortar infantryman stationed in Afghanistan runs lots of photos of children, and seems, mildly obsessed with care packages. At Jack Army, a special forces soldier tells us why he flunked out of Medic training. A good read. Soldiers Mom, says that her son’s division in Iraq has entered a communications blackout period, which often means there’s some bad news coming. I hope not. By the way, the Army Times itself last month ran a list of military blogs, so they’re becoming more mainstream.

Some bloggers have been talking about a cache of 400,000 documents discovered a hundred years ago in Egypt that’s now legible thanks to new technology They’ve already found lost works by Sophocles and Euripides, and there’s speculation there maybe even be a lost gospel in there. The blogger, Eyeless in Gaza, explains the documents were trash dumped on the outskirts of the town, which was far enough from the Nile that the trash stayed nice and dry. It’s apparently an amazing store of riches that’ll take years to explore.

Finally, Jeremy Stribling, a student at MIT, felt that an academic conference was spamming him, so he generated a gibberish paper…which was, of course, then accepted. If you want to generate your own gibberish academic paper, you can go to Jeremy’s site. [Technorati tags: oxyrhynchus stribling iraq]

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Betsy runs snippets from the daily letters her great-grandfather wrote to his family. Charming.

In a separate post, she reports that one of the t-shirts for sale at a scientific meeting she went to reads:

PLEASE FLIRT HARDER, I AM A PHYSICIST

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I’m jarvising on MSNBC todayt at 5:20 EDT, assuming I can shake myself clear of this awful cold-flu-y thing for 90 seconds… [Technorati tag: msnbc]

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I just downloaded Dreamweaver 2004 (v7) and to my amazement, in order to change the default extension from .htm to .html you have to edit an XML file, just as in v6. The Preferences dialog box shows you the current extension but doesn’t let you edit it there. Oh no. Go root around in XML.

I like Dreamweaver at lot, but what the hell are they thinking over at Macromedia? [Technorati tag: dreamweaver]

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How to tell the people on the plane who are coming into Boston to run in the Marathon:

1. They have big LCD watches

2. They carry their running shoes on board because they’re afraid of checking them through.

3. They are built like whippets.

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Karen Schneider, the Freerange Librarian, has an article in the Library Journal on the ethics of librarian blogs that begins promisingly: “Blogging is turning information into a conversation…” And, it continues just as well, explaining the ethics and ethos of blogging in what she calls the “biblioblogosphere.” She recommends transparency, linking to sites with which you disagree, being accurate — even postponing pressing the Publish button until you’re sure, a pretty drastic step for some of us — and admitting your mistakes.

The BBC reports that the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI) to be held in July in Orlando accepted a paper that was in fact machine-generated gibberish. Well, what do you expect from a conference that calls itself “the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics”?

You can generate your very own gibberish science paper here. [Technorati tags: librarians blogs]

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Matt McAlister explains that the Infoworld.com upgrade isn’t merely cosmetic: On the articles pages they’ve moved from a fixed taxonomy that took them a lot of time to develop to a structured tagging system:

What I like most in this new architecture is that the related links are now driven by del.icio.us. Our edit team is tagging content in del.icio.us. The engineers are pulling down the del.icio.us RSS feeds. And then we create matching logic based on the common tags. We also link back out to del.icio.us pages via the tags for the article on display.

This is a first step with several more ideas for leveraging tags coming soon. We need a more densely tagged data set behind us before some of the other plans can become real. The accuracy of the related links will also be a little shady, I’m sure, until we get more sophisticated with our tagging. But we’re all excited about the possibilities for the site now that we have these tags. New ideas seem to crop up daily.

Fascinating. Matt also talks about the intersection of tagging and marketing.

So, see Ephraim Schwarz’s article on Oracle and Sybase offering RFID integration. To the right is a “See Also” box that lists the article’s tags: Ephraim_Schwartz Oracle_RFID Sybase_RFID. (You can also click on “Complete List of Tags,” which takes you to Infoworld’s del.icio.us page.) The Oracle_RFID link takes you to the del.icio.us list of pages Infoworld has tagged as “oracle_RFID.” It being de.licio.us, that page also shows all the articles every other del.icio.us user has tagged that way. (The fact that zero non-Infoworlders have used that tag to me means that it’s a tad overly specific. Why not tag the article “oracle” and “rfid” instead?)

Meanwhile, the first mention of a company or technology in an Infoworld article is followed by three little links, one of which is “articles.” It takes you to a list of articles about that company. That list is not coming from del.icio.us and seems (seems!) unrelated to the tagging scheme. I don’t know if they’re planning to switch over at some point.

I’m also not sure what it means that Infoworld is applying matching logic to del.icio.us feeds. Does that mean they’re looking at tags from non-Infoworlders?

In any case, this is exciting because a high-traffic site that lives and dies by content is trusting the looser bonds of tagging to help us explore what’s related. And if Infoworld is using del.icio.us to include related links outside of their site — even if they don’t, because Infoworld is using del.icio.us we can do that for ourselves — then we have a great example of the social power of links: They owners of the information no longer are the sole proprietors of the organization of that information. [Technorati tags: tags infoworld folksonomy]

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This is what I wrote out, intending to jarvis it on MSNBC this afternoon. I’m not sure what I actually said.

There’s been a fair bit of discussion about the fact that tech conferences, for all their good intentions, haven’t been able to attract enough women onto panels or into the audience. So a group of women bloggers have started a conference, called Blogher, July 30 in Santa Clara. One of the contributors to the Blogher blog, Surfette, or Lisa Stone, says that the conference is being organized as a do-ocracy – you want a topic on the schedule, then do it! She writes “”How do you subvert the dominant hierarchy? You give up control.”

There’s also been discussion of clampdowns on blogging. China has shut off access to a blog by Isaac Mao a popular blogger, In fact, tomorrow, the OpenNet Initiative, a consortium of 3 universities, is going to issue their latest report on which sites countries are blocking access to. Tomorrow’s report is on China.

Hoder, the Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, reports an Iranian correspondent has been banned from the Iranian parliament building, supposedly for being rude and intrusive,— Hoder suspects it was really her reporting on corruption — so now she’s started a Persian weblog to get her story out.

Then there a couple of sites making creative use of the satellite images of the earth Google’s providing. They’re collecting interesting shots: Fenway park from above the Grand Canyon, Bill Gates’ house. Lotta fun. And that’s a little of what’s going on in the blogosphere

You know what distinguishes professionals from amateurs in this line of work? The professionals can look into the image of themselves projected in front of the camera and not be thrown off by their own image or by the three second delay… [Technorati tags: msnbc blogher hoder berkman]

Ian Schwartz has posted a video of the segment. Thanks, Ian!

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I’m doing the 90-second “What’s new in blogs” segment on MSNBC this afternoon. Now if I can only lose 50 pounds, get the moles sanded off, and have the hair transpants take, all before sometime around 5:15pm EDT. Unfortunately, that won’t leave me time to come up with something to say.

Ah, vanity, thy name is David.

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I have been pulled aside for special searches four out of the previous four times I’ve flown. Yesterday I asked the supervisor at the US Air desk at Logan Airport about it. He said that if you test positive for any two of the following three tests, the computer marks you for searching: A one way ticket, a ticket purchased in the past 24 hours, or paying by cash. On this particular trip, I met the first two criteria. Thus, I am a likely terrorist.

So, here’s a word of advice to today’s would-be terrorist: Splurge on the round-trip. Sure, it’s going to cost an extra couple of hundred, but at the end of the trip, you’re not going to care. Also, try to plan your murderous attack well in advance.

Sigh.

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