Brigitte Dale, the daisytree girl

win·some (win′səm):adjective
attractive in a sweet, engaging way; charming.

Jenny Toomey explains what net neutrality means to musicians

I (supposedly) write like

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

This is the "badge" that was generated when I inputted my text from "At least you can afford shoes", below. Apparently I Write Like is the newest thing, for people who have time to kill and require flattery and haute distractions. I heard about "I write like" from Jim Macdonald, here.

(Incidentally I inputted the verbiage from the Euronews interview with Elif Şafak, and "I write like" decided the unnamed blurb writer is just like Kurt Vonnegut.)

the resident: Twitter Sucks (Now)

"The Office of Letters and Light"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaNoWriMo

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

****in' Blogrolling dot com

The two or three nice persons who read my wee blog may have noticed that I took down my main blogroll recently. This is because the host of my main blogroll( until recently) was blogrolling.com, which allowed you to post a few lines of script to your template, whether in a blogger environment or elsewhere, and add or subtract or otherwise edit items on your blogroll at their site without having to potentially reformat your template each time, making it(again, until recently) a much appreciated free service.

I guess they have to do whatever they need to in order to remain profitable-- or to finally make a profit, as the case may be-- so apparently they decided to crappify their basic free service and make it a lot more difficult to use, both for the blog host and any random user who wants to click on a link. Now the link is set up to take you to an ad first, and won't let you see the actual url you are linking to, and editing the blogroll from their website is now substantially more difficult than before. Possibly I'm overreacting, and the subscription version of their service, which to be fair I must acknowledge I've never used, might be a lot better. And again, it's not as if I ever paid them anything, so I have no business being too annoyed by this development. It would've been nice if they'd emailed users of the free service regarding the changes-- and who knows, maybe they did, and the spamcatcher go my email and hence I never saw it.(When you post your email address in a public place, like on a page of a blog, even if not on the main page, almost inevitably you'll get far too much junk mail to slog through and read everything that lands in the junk folder, lest it be important, even if you're just restricting yourself to reading the titles.)

Anyway, I will repost a regular hand-coded blogroll in a few days, before the end of the month at any rate. If you've been linking here and want me to link to you, email me or leave a comment here, and I'll look at it(unless you're just selling stuff.).



from Blogbloke(2005): "why you shouldn't use blogrolling.com"

Blogrolling.com(January 2009), "More on BR2"

Madisonian.net(Mar 2009), "Blogrolling.com is evil"

NL Blogroll.com(Mar 2009), "Blogroll complete"

Killing your newspaper

Two recent articles, one in Time and one on the web in Salon.com, discuss the decline of the newspaper.

Walter Isaacson, in Time,
“How to Save Your Newspaper”, Feb. 05, 2009 and

Gary Kamiya, Salon,
"The death of the news: If reporting vanishes, the world will get darker and uglier. Subsidizing newspapers may be the only answer"

I would've liked to be able to post a response to Isaacson at Time's web site, but only Salon allows this:

Half-empty? No!

Dear Gary Kamiya,

1.With all due respect, I think you are 100 per cent wrong.
If the internet didn't exist, this article about the "death of the newspaper" would appear in some indie weekly, like the Village Voice, just as somebody else wrote about it recently in Time.
Newspapers have supposedly been dying for several decades now, and the culprit is clearly TV, not the internet.

I would argue that the internet has increased newspaper readership substantially, just not in as profitable a form as big media magnates would like. If anything, I suspect that ad revenue from the internet has probably helped stop the bleeding a bit, and (somewhat) deccelerated the rate of decline of traditonal newspapers at the hands of TV.

Another reader mentioned the UK's Guardian, approvingly. I imagine that reader wouldn't have access to the Guardian if not for the 'net. I know that I've also read scores of Guardian stories, but I've never bought a paper copy, or even seen one. Likewise, I hadn't even heard of Hong Kong's Asia Times, another supremely valuable "paper", let alone read anything in their pages, before I had internet access. I'm pretty sure my story applies to many people.

There will always be a demand, at least among some people, for serious journalism, and newspapers will continue to exist, but they need to figure out a way to make viable a business model whose bread-and-butter is the internet.

We will lose the paper that is all things to all people, with a section for everybody from most demographics, all rolled neatly into one rubber-bandable unit, and I can understand why some people will miss that, but I suspect that's inevitable.

But I'm very skeptical that subsidies are the answer. The subscriber model, like the one that

The Real News

and others have been trying to foster might hold some promise.


2. Still, there's no question, there is a huge mis-allocation of resources, and I think that somewhere down the line that needs to be addressed. Just think of how many news bureaus, of both the television and newspaper/net variety, you could open with just the salaries of Katie Couric and Brian Williams(!). Maybe we need a Big Hair Tax, with the proceeds given as grants to struggling news centers.

But that would be unfair, amusing as it is to momentarily daydream about. Better yet, reintroduce steeply progressive taxation and trust-bust the big media monopolies, and nobody would have a multi-million dollar salary, while thousands of others would have more mundane but practical opportunities to do real journalism. Sadly, I'm still dreaming.


from Walter Isaacson's insipid article
“How to Save Your Newspaper”, which I mentioned earlier:

This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who "got it" by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was "the future." But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings. (See who got the world into this financial mess.)

Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can't possibly stand.

me: this reasoning is garbage-- revenue from everything declined in 4Q 2008, as the recession intensified. And the “three legs of the stool" argument is also bollocks: broadcast television was immensely profitable for decades of “giving away” their content for free, while just depending on advertiser revenue. Now they have more competition, from cable TV and other media, but the advertiser-based model is still working pretty well for them. How could they otherwise afford to pay Brian and Katie all those previously-alluded-to millions if the "one-legged" advertiser-revenue model wasn't working for them?

Isaacson wants newspapers to go to micropayments, a particularly regressive idea that enemies of a mostly unregulated internet have been touting for some time now. It's also Big Brother-style intrusive-- do you really want your web surfing/consumption habits so closely monitored? Ultimately, of course, people like Isaacson attack the internet as it is presently formulated because it represents a rejection of authority-driven media, and, therefore, a rejection of the authority of the Walter Isaacsons of the world-- and a threat to their high-paying jobs.

Sit up straight

Do you ever visit the Internet Archive? Well, you should, darn it. This past week the British National Health Service's "A Modern Guide to Health"(1947, above) was the number one downloaded item in their video channel.

A US Hays Code era exploitation film, "Sex Madness"(1938) was number two, but I figured the typical HZ visitor is too refined for that sort of thing.

sundry items for profit-inclined bloggers

Merchant Credit Advance has a video explaining their service here, and pingomatic will simultaneously ping you on blo.gs, technorati, My Yahoo, Feedburner and a bunch of other such sites, so if that sort of thing is a big deal to you, one or both services might interest you.

Dennis Kucinich and December152007.com

Rob Payne has a really smashing post directly below,"One Party Rule," which I point out because if you're the sort to just read the latest post I hope you won't ignore it. Rob mentions Dennis Kucinich, and somewhat coincidentally I wanted to note that I just got a bulletin from Kucinich's myspace page administrator regarding a new website for the Kucinich campaign, December152007.com, with which he hopes to replicate some of the financial windfall and buzz that Ron Paul generated last month with his co-ordinated "money-bomb" in which scores of people donated to Paul's campaign all on a single day and made him the leading GOP fundraiser in the presidential race for the quarter.

from the bulletin:

Kucinich really wins the lottery!
"Supporters of Dennis Kucinich have begun another "money bomb!" The website is december152007.com - and updates the pledges of donors on a graph updated hourly. The website has been up for only a few days, but has already garnered 170 pledges of a minimum $100 each."

this n' that

stylin' in Montevideo. photo: cardomain.com

via groovy Avedon:

Piracy not raiding CD sales" The enforcement arm of the Australian music industry has dismissed damaging overseas research that found illegal music sharing actually increased CD sales. The study, conducted by two researchers at the University of London for the Canadian Government, found people downloaded songs illegally because they wanted to hear them before buying or because they were not available in stores."

and, 3/7ths of a Paul Goyette post:

2. Some interesting analysis of a couple of the presidential candidates' speech patterns by Mark Liberman.

4. A style guide for citing blogs, from the National Library of Medicine.

7. And I wanted to mention, before we get too far along into the month, that it's National Novel Writing Month again. If you have that great idea, you should get started now...

(you still have 21 days and 4 minutes;PG mentioned this on the 2nd, unlike slothful me. If you don't read locussolus regularly, how is that my fault? Anyway, get to work!)

a possibly prematurely pulled poll

correction-- I still get the Big Brother poll when I use Mozilla, but I'm getting the Iraq funding poll with MS IE, and it doesn't seem to matter if I use the US or International edition. So you can still(1pm CDT)go vote(scroll down a bit, and on the rt. side.). I don't get it, but there it is.

earlier this morning, this poll(above;click on image for slightly bigger screenshot) was running on the front page of CNN's web site. When I read about it at The Sideshow and clicked over, it was already gone. I did some poking around in the bowels of CNN.com, and found it, but also found I could no longer vote. This puzzled me, because in the past I've seen CNN internet polls allowing votes for 24-48 hours sometimes. The poll that is now on the front page is about the Big Brother teevee show, which is undoubtedly more important.

Mike n' P!nk, etc

this is Mike Gravel's Myspace site. I wonder if Pink know his profile features one of her tracks("Dear Mister President"), and would she be tickled if she knew? Incidentally, Gravel was the person, back in the day, who read the Pentagon papers into the congressional record, to make sure they wouldn't "disappear into history."

Google disses Chile(and demonstrates the brave new web world isn't so infallible after all.)

speaking of Myspace and sundry web 2.0 phenomena, I've gotten word via one of my many newsletters that there's a new organization named A28.org that has created an "impeachspace" website, and has declared April 28th "the day the impeachment movement starts." Oh, A28. I get it, sort of. Why April 28th? This I still haven't figured out.