Category: Media

New link to the right (bottom): Add Birdhouse to Google Toolbar. If you have the toolbar installed, you can now search Birdhouse directly and also get quick access to new posts. Windows-only, until Goog releases versions for other OSes. Toolbar XML thanks to Niall Kennedy.

Thanks for the push on this, Colleen

Update: The toolbar is broken since moving from MT to WordPress recently.  I’ll update this again when I have a fix in place.

The first entry I ever made in this blog (back when it was on LiveJournal) was on January 20, 2001, right around this time of day, which makes today its fifth anniversary. Sometimes (often) can’t believe I’m still doing this — I’ve threatened to throw in the towel enough times. Must be something wrong with me.

To celebrate, I’ve spent the last few evenings going back to the start of the archive and unpublishing a ton of stuff — almost 1/4 of everything (work in progress – have only made it up to 2003 so far). For the first few years, it seems like I paid little attention to whether posts would be interesting to anyone but me. Heck of a lot of bloviating over the years, trying to trim some of the pointless posts. There’s probably still a lot of embarassing stuff left, but the archives are in better shape than they were.

Sweet Amy even called me on the way to work this morning to wish me a happy anniversary!

The perfect antidote to Wikipedia: Uncyclopedia — “The content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Seems to suffer some performance problems, but often worth the wait. From the Air Guitar entry, which comes complete with annotated air guitar diagram:

Air guitars are similar in shape to normal guitars, with the notable difference that they are made entirely out of air. Air guitars typically have 6 strings and 24 frets. Although acoustic air guitars are available, electric air guitars are by far the most popular.

One perspective: Way too many people have way too much time on their hands.

Another: Thank God for that!

Thanks mneptok

Tuesday, January 17, noon: I’ll be offering a one-hour presentation to UC Berkeley’s Webnet group (campus web developers and editors) on the topic of blogging in the educational environment, with emphasis on tech considerations. It’ll be a fairly rushed overview with Q&A on running high-traffic multi-blog installations, editorial concerns, audio/video blogging, RSS, dealing with comment spam, tweaking platforms to work as content management systems, etc. If you’d like to attend, contact me for details.

This will be my first public presentation using Keynote, which is a deep breath of sweet, compressed air compared to PowerPoint.

Local blog news — Birdhouse user Tom Abate writes:

UC Extension will offer a one-day seminar for aspiring bloggers on Saturday, January 21. Instructors Tom Abate and Tim Bishop will be joined by noted bloggers Lisa Stone and J.D. Lasica. Beginners will get the confidence and basic skills to start a blog or take an existing blog to the next level. The class starts at 9:00 am and will be held at 425 Fremont Street in San Francisco (near Embarcadero Bart station). Visit bloggingclass.com to learn more about the topics and instructors, or enroll at the Extension web site.

Caught this amazing rap on SNL last weekend (Lazy Sunday) with Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell mackin’ on cupcakes, Google Maps, and “The Chronic.” “What?” “Culls, of Narnia.” Tip of the Kanga to Beasties, Matthew Perry, and Mr. Pibb. Amy and I have been riffing on this all week. Miles gets in on the act too. “Pass the chronic!” he yells, loud as he can, and we all fall down laughing.

Thanks selenevomer

Refreshing, after recent high-profile controversies about the accuracy of Wikipedia, to see the results of Nature‘s blind side-by-side comparison of 42 Encyclopedia Brittanica and Wikipedia articles by dozens of scientists. Wikipedia fared only slightly worse relative to Brittanica’s accepted standard of accuracy. But how good is the standard?

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia [emphasis mine]. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively. … “People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica,” Twidale adds. “Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one.”

Thanks Paul

Inspired by a recent post at Weblogsky on the re-publication of Winsor McKay’s original Little Nemo in Slumberland comic, which ran from around 1902-1911. For nearly a century, virtually no one has seen these dreamy, highly detailed, deco/surreal strips at the full “broadsheet” (newspaper) size in which they originally ran. Checked out the book at Cody’s today and was floored — these are so gorgeous, so unlike anything you’ve ever seen, coming from another time and seeming to come from another people… Suddenly you’re seeing what your grandparents or great grandparents were reading in the Sunday comic pages a century ago, and realizing there was some pretty avant-garde stuff going down back then.

Reproducing the strips at their original size results in a book so large it presents a real storage problem — but one well worth overcoming. Couldn’t help getting a copy for Amy’s 40th birthday. She’s swimming in it now.

Possibly piggy-backing on the success of Wikipedia, and using the collaborative potential of the internet to keep themselves current, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary has opened the doors to user contributions. Submissions go online immediately and unedited. And it’s catching on — re-load the new words page a few times a day and you’ll see an entirely different set.

What’s missing here is any kind of collaborative filtering. You can’t edit the “open” entries, you can’t even vote on them. Which, I assume, will soon leave MW with a “ginormous” pile of mostly garbage entries that they won’t know what to do with. And, I just realized when I tried to link to “ginormous,” they’re providing no interface to permalinks for individual words. So it’s a start, but a weak one. I’m wondering whether MW really gets it, or is just riding a buzzword, trying something – anything – to not look like a crustacean clinging desperately to the back of a giant turtle.

If they do decide to open the dictionary further, it raises all kinds of questions about their status as a lexical authority. And they’ll have lots of fun new infrastructural problems to grapple with (wikipedia consumes massive amounts of technical and human resources that the closed MW doesn’t have to think about).

I wonder what the first word to migrate from the open dictionary to the canonical one will be.

Thanks Paul