Congratulations Jayhawks

I’m not a college basketball fan but since I grew up in Kansas, I felt compelled to watch KU versus Memphis State. Wow, what a game. When they were down 9 with two minutes left I thought it was over. Not only did they tie it up at the buzzer for overtime but then they dominated the OT.

This victory would be sweeter for me if Kansas wasn’t the rival of the school I would have gone to had I stayed in the state. Head to head, I would always root for the Wildcats over the Jayhawks but I’m pleased to see the championship go back to my home state.

Firebug Works with Firefox 3!

For those of you like me who have upgraded to the Firefox 3 betas but were taking a big hit because of the loss of Firebug functionality, there is hope! Although it appears that Firebug 1.0.5 doesn’t automatically upgrade to 1.1, but 1.1 does in fact work with Firefox 3. I found this out by accident and it really made me happy since part of what I’m doing today is fiddling with <div> tags on the Create South website. It sure makes life better to have Firebug helping me with that.

New Media and Journalism, Round 127

Here’s an interesting post from Dan Conover in which he riffs on some Tweets of mine about new media and the press. My original impetus for writing those tweets was my cynicism and disbelief of any “received wisdom” about our election and primary. When any talking head on TV makes a statement about something that isn’t verifiable, such as “event X will hurt candidate Y” I just don’t believe it. I think most (not all) of those people believe what they are saying to be true but most of them believe it because they have been gamed in one way or another. That was my point about blogs, not that they are wonderful intrinsically or impossible to be gamed but that it is cost and time prohibitive to buy the opinions of a million or even a thousand bloggers.

Interestingly, on the same day I listened to the episode of The Gang where Mike Arrington came on and was talking shit with Dan Farber. Most of it was pro-wrestling style theatrics but there were some actual substantive bits that showed the difference in their approaches. I have to say that Arrington has hit the point where his motives and goals for himself and his empire horrify me. I might be a special case in that I really don’t care at all about Tech Crunch. I talked to Arrington about AmigoFish back in November 2005 and I subscribed to Tech Crunch around that time. By February I had dropped it because I just didn’t care about 98% of the things and companies they post about. The only reason I stuck around was to see if they posted about my site, and when it never happened I got bored and left. As a property, Tech Crunch holds no interest for me. When Arrington talks about rolling up “A-list blogs” and making a network out of it, I don’t see what value it holds for anyone on my side of the feed reader. It makes him money, but why should I care?

I do know the guy I talked to the day after Thanksgiving in 2005 seemed awfully different from the guy on the Gang. It seems like success has gone to his head, and he’s gotten high off his own tailpipe fumes for some time. When he talks about the value Tech Crunch brings vs Cnet, he sounds like a CEO talking about the value of outsourcing to some country with lax labor and environmental policies. What he is selling as his advantage the fact that he gets to do the same thing and even try to sell to the same advertisers but without playing by the standard rules of big j Journalism.

For me, there is no difference between Tech Crunch and Valleywag. They are both Silicon Alley porn of one form or another, and that’s a subject that holds no sex appeal to me. Even if I cared about the subject matter, the presentation and drama around it would reduce the value to nil for me. Most of the promise of new media melts away when it becomes yet another mechanism to disseminate and reinforce cults of personality. “Bob” save us all from blog celebrities.

Accidental Art




Oil
Originally uploaded by evilgenius

Just fooling around with Photo Booth while getting my oil changed, I took this picture. It turned out much better than I would have expected for such a thing. I expected that the background would have been the strip mall behind me but the MacBook was angled such that it was looking straight into the sky. I do like that Bob Dylan-y, Beatles-y half in shadow look.

CC Chapman thinks this shot reflects kind of an inner war between the light and dark parts of my personality. That might be true, but really I was just dorking with a laptop while bored at a Shell Oil Change place.
This photo was that day’s entry in the Dawn and Drew self-portrait photo pool. It took me two months to start and I’ve managed to miss two days in my first two weeks. I might not be cut out for this.

CREATE South Conference Rolls On

I’m freaked out by how fast the CREATE South conference weekend is coming upon us. April 19th approaches at a startling rate. Over on the CREATE South blog I announce that Ed Cone is our keynote speaker! I’m delighted by this because in several ways Ed was an inspiration for us to have this conference in the first place.

We still need to get the word out into the constituencies that could benefit most by this conference. Tell your offline, non-blogging friends about it. If they are within driving distance of Myrtle Beach, they should just come on out and spend the day with us. If you have people you’d like to get blogging but don’t feel like teaching them, send them our way. We’ll teach them, that’s what we do.

We’re still looking for someone to do a session on how to use new media in a church setting. If you want to do that or know of someone that could, drop me an email. If you or your company are interested in sponsoring the conference, drop me an email.

Tonight I hope to flesh out the programming page, send out tons of emails inviting people and generally doing the busy work of making such a thing happen. Chip in a little bit and tell a friend, blog about it, etc. Help me out, blogosphere! I really need it.

Cullect

I’ve been watching Garrick van Buren‘s Cullect project for a while now. I’ll admit that I feel a little guilty about it because I’ve taken several runs at it and I always feel like I’m not grokking the full power of it. I mean, it seems like it has a lot to offer and is interesting but I’m not sure how to fit it in my day to day cyberlife. This makes me feel guilty, since Garrick has been such a strong supporter of my show and of AmigoFish, my own side project. My failure to jump up and down immediately feels like a betrayal.

I added the Cullect widget to my right sidebar so you can see a little of what it is all about and maybe follow the links back to the main site. I like the way when you look at an article that either references or is referenced by other articles in the system, it shows a map of them in a simple and better way than Technorati and other blogospheric management and mapping tools. I like the sharing and send mechanisms. Above and beyond that, I’m not sure what to do with it. Its paradigm is enough different that I don’t want to just use it like I would NetNewsWire or Google Reader.

Also, Garrick was kind enough to name a release after me and a feature I inspired. I’m not sure what that feature is, but I think that is cool regardless. Thanks, Garrick.

Settling in to 2.5

I hope this is the last post about WordPress and the upgrade migration. The issues seem to be shaken out. If you do see something that doesn’t work right, please drop me an email. Tags are now integrated. Andrew Herron wasn’t sure if the tags I had set up from Ecto would actually push to and be recognized as WP tags. I can tell you for sure they are. I added tags to my template so that you see them on posts and for fun put a tag cloud in the sidebar. I went back and found that highlighting a huge bunch of posts in Ecto (like, a whole year’s worth) and hitting publish would resubmit the articles as edits including the tags, so I did that. The downside and one that didn’t occur to me ahead of time is that it also re-pinged and/or trackbacked many linked posts. If you get a trackback from me for a post you wrote years ago, that’s why. At this point I’ve done them back to the beginning of 2006. By this evening I should have done the full history of the blog, at least the portion that had tags. Whenever I switched from blosxom to WordPress and started using Ecto, that’s when I started tagging.

The nice thing about having the tag cloud on the side is that it gives me a good, positive reinforcement reason to be rigorous with tagging. If I am, then that will correctly reflect the stoichometry of what I’m interested in over time. It has been patchy up to this point but I’ll shoot for full tag coverage on all new posts. Let’s see what that does for us.

Next stop, posts about the whole rest of the world that isn’t WordPress 2.5!

First WordPress 2.5 Impressions

So far so good on the WordPress upgrade and host migration. Ideally, one would be doing these things in smaller, more manageable pieces rather than all at once, but I had no choice. Once WP 2.5 was released, I no longer had the option of installing an older version with the Dreamhost installer so I just did it myself in a weird mishmash of the automatic and manual. It seems to have worked.

Thus far only one person has mentioned having any problems commenting, and that person also had a success so I’m not sure if it was just a fluke. The “Your user agent string has changed” error has not come back, so that’s great. I think I’ve figured out the WP tagging and added in a cloud and a bit for my themes to display them. There are old posts that I have tags in Ecto but not WordPress. If I find some giant bank of time, I might go and resubmit all the old posts. Don’t hold breath.

More later, my food is here. Mmmm, gyro platter!

Update: My woes with the password continue. I couldn’t submit this post at lunchtime. I have to keep resetting the password of my ‘dave’ user and I don’t know why. I’ll save it, all will be fine and then the next time I go to use it, “incorrect password.” That is really getting to be a big drag fast.

Comment Test

Friends, please do me a favor and leave a comment. I had problems with plugins stepping on each other on the previous host. I’m hoping that upgrading to WordPress 2.5 and current versions of all plugins will have fixed it. If you have any problems trying to leave one, please email me. Thanks!