January 2007

The little things

January 3, 2007

[Picture of Manure Fork]There are few things in life as annoying as a bad manure fork when one is cleaning corrals. Bad in this case is a metal-handled beast that has lost the rubber grip portion. Without the rubber grip the resulting leather glove on smooth metal routine means the fork rotates quickly when loaded and picked up. Tonight that came to an end when I stopped by the feed store and picked up a wooden handled fork on the way home. Life the way it should be.

Placeblogger takes off with Drupal

January 2, 2007

Placeblogger kicks off the new year with a site to aggregate blogs by location. The site runs a version of Drupal that has been put together by Boris Mann and the Bryght team. It is a great site and looks to be gaining traction.

Perhaps this will be the impetus to convince Las Vegas publishers that they need to jump on the RSS bandwagon.

Taping an execution

January 1, 2007

Adam Curry says the video of Saddam Hussein constitutes a MSM tipping point. "Recorded on a cellphone by a single citizen in Iraq, seen worldwide the very next day," Curry's blog post said.

Call me cynical but I am not buying it. First, where are the videos shot by "single citizens" in Iraq? If the citizens of Iraq are taking video with their cell phones and posting it to the internet why are we not seeing the videos elsewhere? And why would an event as tightly controlled as the execution of a brutal dictator be so uncontrolled as to have someone show up without it being planned. Somewhat conveniently said video was pointed out to the main stream media and picked up and aired within hours.

Somehow we are to believe that the fingerprints of the mainstream media are not all over this "happenstance."

Silly limits

January 1, 2007

Google's Apps for Domains has been in beta for a while now. The service is a nice way to combine several great Google services with one's own domain. Personalized start pages, calendars and email are a few of the services available. Nevertheless, Google also makes some silly choices. For example in signing up for a new domain name today the following email arrived:

Thanks for your interest in Google Apps for Your Domain. Unfortunately, we are not able to invite your domain example.com into the beta at this time, because you have reached the maximum number of domains per administrator. If we increase this limit, we'll let you know by email.

Now I wonder how they imagine this actually works. Do they imagine that people who are astute enough to reach the "domain limit" will balk at having more than one Google account to sign up additional domains with? That domain administrators reaching this limit do not have more than one Google account already would come as a bit of a surprise.

What is a blog?

January 1, 2007

Blogs are blogs if they say they are. 2007 may be the new year but the old year left us with an old discussion jumping up again. This time Zoli Erdos began the discussion with his post saying Google's Blog is not a blog. The post suggests that Google's self-proclaimed blog is not a blog because it does not enable comments. None the less, Google calls their publication a blog.

Dave Winer joins the conversation and points to his post on the topic "What makes a weblog a weblog". The functional essence of Winer's definition is "as long as the voice of a person comes through, it's a weblog." Back in February Winer engaged in a conversation about the need for blogs to have comments in order to be considered blogs. Winer said on his Scripting.com blog "whether a blog has comments or not does not effect its blogness."

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