Maybe one of ya’ll can explain to me why this post I put up last night does not appear in the blog. Nor does it appear among my list of posts in the WordPress admin dashboard. Yet clearly it exists. Strange.
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A little guide to New Orleans radio & other Hurricane Gustav sources.
If you’re using a regular over-the-air-type radio, and you’re within 750 miles or so of New Orleans, tune in 870am to hear WWL. It’s one of the original (literal) clear channel stations. In the old days you’d get them from coast to coast at night, but in recent years the FCC has chosen to allow new stations to clutter the AM band at night (when signals skip off the ionosphere). But still, worth a check if you’re within range. WWL also has a hurricane coverage network of other stations in the area.
If you’re listening over the Net, your station choices are WWL and WIST. Here’s a link to a browser thingie that plays WWL (using Windows Media or Silverlight). Here’s WIST’s audio page. Wish either used .mp3, but this isn’t the right time to complain. Both have excellent local coverage right now, from what I can gather. Lots of listener call-in stuff.
Can’t get Technorati to chart less than 90 days, but this chart shows Gustav action.
Full Circle‘s Tracking Hurricane Gustav on Social Media.
Rex Hammock’s Where to go for Gustav information. Includes the Gustav Information Center, Nola.com, Wikipedia’s Gustav entry, GustavWiki.
I’ll add more as the night goes on.
American Red Cross Flickr photos. Those with “Hurricane Gustav” tags. All photos with hurricanegustav tags.
Andy Carvin wants to make the ultimate Gustav mashup map.
See the comments below for more.
I’m currently #2 on this list, behind Clay Shirky. (In spite of what may be the worst picture ever taken of me.) Context from Dan Thornton.
Years ago, when the search engine category was a lot more competitive, I did a lot of comparing between contenders. For awhile HotBot was ahead, then AltaVista, then AllTheWeb/FAST… Not necessarily in that order, but you get the point.
Then Google won. Huge. They were just bigger and better than everybody at finding nearly everything.
But lately Google has frustrated me. When I do lookups for subjects, it gives results that include misspellings and other approximations, even when I use the “advanced” settings. Worse, it’s been useless at something it used to do perfectly: find old blog entries of mine.
For example, when I was writing this post about cameras and lenses, I wanted to see what I’d written on my blog back when I first picked up my Canon 30D. I kinda remember that it was in early ’06, but beyond that I wasn’t sure how to go hunting, since Google seems to have lost track of that blog, even though its archives are online with inbound links. See, my old blog was moved off of weblogs.com and mothballed (with welcome help from Dave Winer) at the domain doc-weblogs.com. Some links got 404’d, but Google re-made enough connections so that people could at least search for specific words and strings and find stuff. But somewhere along the way, that ended. When I looked for doc searls tamron zoom canon lenses on Google, I found page after page of nothing.
So I went where I haven’t gone for a long time: Yahoo, and did the same search. Voila! The blog post I wanted to find was right up top. That rocked.
I just repeated the experiment with the same two searches, and found that Google has caught up, and now lists what I was looking for in the first page of the 17 results it brings up, with yesterday’s post pointing to it as the top result. Obviously Google followed the link and indexed the old page.
So I decided to do a search for another day in that same time-frame, for another bunch of words that only occur on that day’s blog postings. The day I chose was Thursday, May 18, 2006. The words I searched were doc searls rob cottingham profitable tragedy. Google found nothing, but gave me three pages of results, including misspellings of Searls. Yahoo delivered four results, including exactly the page I was looking for. In fact, every test I do, for every day of my old blog, brings up a Yahoo result. (One sample.) To Google, my old blog pretty much doesn’t exist unless there’s a new inbound link to one of its pages.
Obviously, Yahoo is doing a better job of following links here.
And that means it’s doing a better job — to me at least — of competing with Google than most folks give it credit for.
My hat’s off to them.
A perfect day in Vermont. In Middlebury at the moment. At Carol’s Cafe. Perfect coffee. Before that, lunch at Mama’s Cafe. Also outstanding. I have a feeling nothing sucks around here.
Not sure what’s next, but we’re doing that.
[Later…] I don’t know why, but this text disappeared, and the comments under it now appear under the one following it, which now appears to precede it, because I was able to recover the text, and post it again. Not sure what went wrong there, but … whatever. Better just to enjoy life. And sleep. I gotta crash now. Tomorrow: something in New Hampshire.
With linkful sourcings of Darren Rowse, Richard McManus and Mark Rizn Hopkins, Duncan Riley in The Changing Blogosphere and Blogging 2.0 shows me how full-circle blogging has become:
| Blogging 2.0 runs counter to the prevailing ethos in blogging, which is maximize your Google juice, your page views, your links in, and refrain from sharing that traffic with others, without putting the end user first. Blogging 1.0 is all about maximizing the opportunities for the blog owner while ignoring community, where as blogging 2.0 maximizes the experience for the end user (reader). |
| In focusing on the experience for the end user, via linking, sharing and enabling the conversation across many places, blogging 2.0 rallies against today’s accepted norms. |
So… what was blogging back when there was no advertising on it, and few of us wanted any? Back then the prevailing ethos was nothing more complicated than writing linky, interesting and helpful posts for readers rather than just for traffic. For a lot of us, that’s what it’s been all along.
Sounds to me like “Blogging 2.0” is a lot like blogging before it became flogging.
My Wikipedia entry is once again the stub it was. The threatening stuff at the top of the page is gone. The deletion debate page is now archived. At the top it says,
| The result was Clear case of snow. Article needs some improvement, but doesn’t require deletion to address issues.. TravellingCari 01:58, 7 August 2008 (UTC) |
I’m not sure what “clear case of snow” means. Is it that there were twelve votes to keep the entry and none for deletion? Or is it wikipedia-speak for something else? No matter. I’m glad the entry was saved, and grateful to the folks who helped save it — both on that page and in comments elsewhere. Much appreciated.
I used to think I should do more writing and editing in Wikipedia; to put my shoulder to the vast wheel of a project from which I draw many benefits and contribute almost nothing. I know lots of well-sourced material I could bring to many subjects, and I could help with copy editing on many more. In fact I could spend the rest of my life doing nothing but editing poorly-written articles on Wikipedia. So could lots of other people.
I hate to say it, but there are more highly leveraged things I can do. Most of those involve writing as well — writing that’s mine and not anybody else’s. I turned sixty-one last week. While I have just as much energy and drive as I’ve ever had, I also know that I’m ratcheting down the short end of life’s stick. I need to do more of something I’ve always sucked at: investing my time wisely and deliberately, even as I continue to enjoy spelunking down the digressive tunnels of my insatiable curiousity about damn near everything. As digressive intellectual tunnels go, Wikipedia has no rivals in the online world. Among those digressions is figuring out how Wikipedia works, and how to participate in a fully engaged and meaningul way. I feel like I need to be a lawyer to figure out all the rules.
So here’s what I’ve learned and now need to put to work.
First, I need to write newspaper op-eds. Here’s a good one by Dan Gillmor that ran the other day in the San Francisco Chronicle. And here’s another, by David Weinberger, in the Boston Globe. I should follow their lead.
Second, I should start writing books. For real. Since Cluetrain came out, Chris Locke and David Weinberger have put out two books apiece. Me: none. I’ve been accumulating text toward The Giant Zero, which is about the Net and its infrastructure (which I believe is inadequately understood — by everybody, including myself). I’m part of an offline community that’s working toward establishing a think tank or an academic center (like Berkman and CITS) we’re calling the Internet Infrastructure Institute. A lot of the writing is excellent fodder toward that book. My corpus of writing for Linux Journal contains more than enough material to gather into a book. There’s also the history quietly being made by the VRM community as we work toward giving customers far more power in the marketplace (among other good things).
So the will and the ways are there. I just need to make the time and use it wisely. Advice is welcome, because I’m sub-optimal at both.
Right now I can’t log into this blog. Not through the WordPress browser dashboard, anyway. For some reason, my logged-in state was lost, just like my password to it.
My outliner knows the login and password, though. So I’m able to blog that way, which is how I post generally. But I need to be logged in to make comments as myself, or to post pictures.
Anyway, it’s a weekend, and I don’t think I’ll be able to get stuff staightened until Monday. Meanwhile I’ll be flying and driving a lot, as well as working. So, happy trails.
I’ll be at Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas in September. Gotta say that I wouldn’t be going if it didn’t coincide with another obligation in town. But since I’ll be there, I’m interested in seeing if a sharper distinction can be made between blogging and flogging. You can see the split by looking Blogworld’s own promotional jive. On the one hand there’s this…
| …if you want to influence decision makers, sell a product or service, if you want to promote yourself as an industry expert, or build your brand using new media… |
And on the other hand there’s the Citizen Journalism Workshop, with a program developed by David Perlmutter, Ph.D. In addition to being the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research at Kansas University’s School of Journalism with a distinguished adacemic pedigree — and a blogger — David is busy doing research on a grant from Knight Foundation to “study the relationship between reading blogs and newspapers”.
Generally speaking, I’ll be a lot more interested in the latter than the former.
Looking forward to seeing some of ya’ll there.
[Later…] I just learned that I might be on a panel. You can guess what I’ll be saying. Though I’ll be listening too.
JP Rangaswami points to This is Zimbabwe as proof that the blogosphere isn’t just “an echo-chamber, full of shallow and superficial like-minded people who couldn’t write an accurate and in-depth story about anything to save their lives”.
So, I’ll see that one and raise him one Baby Kamba.