theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
I started a single-user wiki (an oxymoron?) to collect my reading notes from Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions. I’m not sure how much will come of it, but it’s good to futz with a different medium.
And I started a tumblelog for more frequent mundanities.
Clive Thompson on Twitter, Facebook’s News feed, and the rise of online “ambient awareness.”
On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog!
I am not this guy, either:
Via kottke.org, Merlin Mann explains why my blogging will always be mediocre:
2. Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?
I’ve got just too many categories in my sidebar.
The most peculiar thing about the new search engine at cuil.com is the random images that are presented next to returned search results. These images are presented on the first two results pages for my name, next to summaries of pages that belong to me.
Who is this guy?
I may be middle-aged, but I’m better preserved than this.
Or who, for the love of Michael J. Fox, is this guy?
It’s been a while since I’ve been called a horse’s whatsis.
Virginia Heffernan worries at the problem of how to quote message board posts.
Adam DuVander explains the new bit.ly service: it’s TinyURL with an API.
Welcome to readers directed here by Bas Bleu, who has recently cracked the mic.
Try out a new movie download service. Right now the status line reads: “Downloading movie (1.94%); 25.1 MB of 1.25 GB at 9 KB/sec; Ready to play in 1d 6h.”
I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Via things magazine: a thought-provoking post by Jeffrey Zeldman on the “outsourcing” of personal web page content:
[Imagine] a 1990s site whose splash page links to sub-pages. Structurally, its site map is indistinguishable from an org chart, with the CEO at the top, and everyone else below. …to re-use the org chart analogy, a site like Jody’s is akin to a single-owner company with only virtual (freelance) employees. There is nothing below the CEO. All arrows point outward.
I wouldn’t exactly say that I’m outsourcing my content, but it’s certainly the case that I’m managing a growing number of multiple online personalities. And I really like the simplicity of my TypeKey profile: that’s the URL that I include in my professional resume.
I added Operator to my Firefox add-ons. Operator discovers microformat markup embedded in a web page: you can do some cool stuff, like extract contact information published as an hCard and export it to your address book, or you can discover what tags are used on a page, or you can add event information posted at Upcoming to your Google calendar.
I added this hCard to my Elsewhere page (and then punched it up to get the HTML to validate):
David Gorsline
nouveau@comcast.net
Reston, Virginia USA
And now, if you have Operator installed, you will see my info in the Contacts dropdown.
The expectation is that Firefox 3 will have microformats support built in.
Google has released a Social Graph API, reports Scott Gilbertson, which means that some value might come of one’s meticulously coding XFN rel= attributes on links. Apparently, Twitter friend relationships automatically are marked as rel="friend", so the Social Graph API can follow these automatically.
Sarah Boxer reviews the current crop of books about blogs for The New York Review of Books. I find it a little odd that she finds it necessary to explain emoticons to NYRB readers, but no matter. Boxer is most drawn to the snarky, neologizing sector of the blogosphere:
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. ;-)
She manages some nice turns of word herself, and pulls off a neat comparison to Plato.
I am not that guy.
In my occasional ego-surfing, I have come across the following people with the same first and last name as me. If you’re looking for one of these guys, I’m not the one you’re looking for. I have not met any of them, and I’m sure that each one is a fine person in his own right. He’s just not me.
There’s no problem, no one is stalking me. I just like setting the record straight. Although, in truth, this pileup of David Gorslines will raise all sorts of heck with the primitive social/semantic web crawlers out there.
Louis Menand reviews recently published diaries, reviews the rationales behind keeping a diary, and makes a distinction, in passing:
“Never discriminate, never omit” is one of the unstated rules of diary-keeping. The rule is perverse, because all writing is about control, and writing a diary is a way to control the day—to have, as it were, the last word. But diaries are composed under the fiction that the day is in control, that you are simply a passive recorder of circumstance, and so everything has to go in whether it mattered or not—as though deciding when it didn’t were somehow not your business. In a diary, the trivial and inconsequential—the “woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head” pieces—are not trivial and inconsequential at all; they are defining features of the genre. If it doesn’t contain a lot of dross, it’s not a diary. It’s something else—a journal, or a writer’s notebook, or a blog (blather is not the same as dross).