Rummy wins the “Foot in Mouth” award (via Metafilter). The previous winners are a riot, too.
Archives for December 2003
Harpers’ new design
The Web site for Harpers has an unusual new design that builds on its extensive back catalog of magazine content in semantic-Web-ish ways. It’s not a blog, exactly. Paul Ford, of Ftrain.com, who designed it, explains the ideas behind it here. He also suggests that the work that went into the site may well make its way into a new “open-sourced content management system based on RDF storage.” This is interesting because, so far, though RDF has generated all sorts of interesting theory, real-world applications remain not very easy to explain, or even find. Anyway, this sort of site-overhaul is always tough, even when it’s not as technically ambitious as what Harpers has done, so congratulations to all.
Gobble
President Bush’s surprise Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad was certainly a good thing to do. On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that the whole thing was the political equivalent of what happens in Hollywood when the cast and crew are reassembled to reshoot a scene that the director realizes he botched. In this case, Karl Rove’s “Mission Accomplished” footage from May, with its flyer-garb bravado, has now become an albatross around Bush’s neck. The Bush campaign needed new political-commercial fodder. New location; same cast. Roll cameras. Only Bush gets to charge all production costs to the American people.
Patrick Neilsen Hayden’s report, quoting Kevin Maroney quoting a former Air Force officer, provides another perspective on the quickie visit: “First, let me say these little photo opportunities do nothing in raising the morale level. The people who Bush dined with were most assuredly hand selected.” Read more.
Rob Walker on the iPod
In case you missed it: Rob Walker’s New York Times Magazine profile of the Apple iPod is a great piece of technology writing.