Month: May 2004

The future of Weblogging | The Register:

We also need to find ways to categorise posts – to bring the kind of structure that Yahoo! brought to information on the Web – and the seeds of this concept can be seen in Movable Type, NewsMonster and other tools.

This was the kind of problem the WayPath engine’s ancestor was designed to solve: given a text artifact, it could locate others that were similar in content. At the above-mentioned startup where I came to know about this stuff, there was some effort being applied to a categorization engine, but it never saw the light of day.

I have wondered about this for weblogs, given the categorization tools provided in tools like MovableType. Trouble is, in MT you define your own categories: one man’s trenchant political analysis is another’s joke of the day, but both are filed under ‘politics.’ I’m skeptical of assigning a taxonomy: this gets me back to my half-baked idea of using some kind of barcode/SKU for any given post, allowing a user to locate similar ones. But how to do that in an n-dimensional matrix?

fn1. The idea of a straw versus a needle in a haystack is borrowed from Josh @ communications from elsewhere: he discussed how more complicated finding a specific straw is than a needle and while the old expression is understandable, anyone with a magnet can render it meaningless.

random but apropos

When I was seven years old, I was once reprimanded by my mother for an act of collective brutality in which I had been involved at school. A group of seven-year-olds had been teasing and tormenting a six-year-old. “It is always so,” my mother said. “You do things together which not one of you would think of doing alone.” … Wherever one looks in the world of human organization, collective responsibility brings a lowering of moral standards. The military establishment is an extreme case, an organization which seems to have been expressly designed to make it possible for people to do things together which nobody in his right mind would do alone.
— Freeman Dyson, “Weapons and Hope”

Hmm, it appears my iPod was not misbehaving all that badly: I’m out $30 for shipping and it was returned today with a badly photocopied note explaining that it “meets Apple’s standards for acceptable performance, usability and/or functionality.”

And of course, it comes back wiped clean and reformatted so everything has to be restored: perhaps that will eliminate the annoying behavior of stopping in the middle of a track.

I also got a shipping confirmation that my new earphones are on their way so here’s to an overall improved aural experience.

CJR Campaign Desk Home:

Here’s the pull-quote verbatim:

‘I was on Mr. Kerry’s boat in Vietnam. He doesn’t deserve to be commander in chief.’

We understand the appeal that passage had to an editor. It’s a memorable quote. It would be even more memorable if it were something O’Neill wrote.

But it isn’t. Those words are nowhere to be found in the accompanying article.

What O’Neill does write is that, while he was “on” the same boat that Kerry commanded, he wasn’t there when Kerry was. As he makes clear, he in fact was shipped in to succeed Kerry as commander of the boat once Kerry was removed from the combat zone.

I glanced at the article and was able to spot one fact error — Kerry didn’t request early departure, from all accounts I’ve read: he was moved out of the theater, as noted by CJR, after his third Purple Heart.

The quote gives the clear impression the writer served with Kerry, while the facts indicate otherwise. What else did he — or the editorial staff at the Wall Street Journal — misstate?

For every injunction I see against Kerry campaigning on his war record, there are as many attacks on his peace activism and undermining his conduct in the war.

<update> mattgunn.com:

A newly formed group called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” has called upon John Kerry to release all his Vietnam service records. They also say Kerry is “unfit to be commander-in-chief.”

A little background on who’s behind the efforts to discredit Kerry: President Nixon, from beyond the grave?

errands today, once again with NPR as my co-pilot. I heard some of “To the point” [listen: Iraq and the Propaganda War] and was subjected to of the most ludicrous, embarrassing (for the speaker, not me), and idiotic comments I have ever heard. One Cliff Kincaid, from Accuracy in Media, claimed that the media (I cringe when I hear that) is exploiting the images of torture and humiliation in Saddam Hussein’s old prison for political gain. That didn’t gain any traction, so then he compared it to college sports hazing or pranks.

Eventually, his argument consisted of blaming the news outfits for publishing the pictures and defending any actions with “there’s a war on.” The soldiers involved are not to blame, their commanders likewise: it’s the reporters who revealed the facts who are the villains. He also attacked Al Jazeera as a biased news source, since it was obviously pro-Arab and therefore anti-American (being pro-truth doesn’t enter into it).

The publisher of Harper’s magazine was also on the program and explained that far from exploiting the news, US media companies were under-reporting and self-censoring. The numbers of dead civilians far outweighs the number of uniformed casualties, but they are never mentioned.

Here’s what AIM claims as its mission statement:

Accuracy In Media – Mission Statement:
Accuracy In Media is a non-profit, grassroots citizens watchdog of the news media that critiques botched and bungled news stories and sets the record straight on important issues that have received slanted coverage.

He ended up ranting about Sen Kerry having admitted to war crimes of his own during his Vietnam service, but no specifics. I got the sense the host was trying to just get through the program without further incident.

Now check out their front page and tell me they don’t have an agenda.