We are putting to bed our holiday editions of Salon, which will be updated between now and the New Year’s with various fine year-end roundups (movies, music, sports, etc.) and some movie reviews, and our wire stories, but not that much else.
Blogging will continue here in small doses as time permits. But more important things, like time with my family and catching up with “The Two Towers,” will take precedence!
Don’t miss this week’s Ruben Bolling comic, nicely flaying the Wall Street Journal “Tax the Poor” meme.
As AOL pursues its patent on instant messaging, people all over the Net are assembling examples of “prior art” — instant-messaging-like systems that long predated AOL’s. Rafe Colburn recalls one from a company he once worked for. Brian Dear writes in to point out that the PLATO system had IM functionality back in 1973.
Hell, I remember when I was a teenager goofing around in 1974 or so with BASIC game programs on a free “high schoolers” account at the NYU Physics Department’s minicomputer (I think it was an HP-2000 but memory is dim), we could IM each other from teletype to teletype — the messages would pop up in the middle of whatever you were doing; god forbid you were trying to get a clean printout of a 1000-line program and some “friend” had just sent you something like “J052.HS: YOU ARE A DUD.” The AOL patent seems to depend on the particular issue of being able to check who else is online; well, I’m pretty sure we could do that in 1974, too.
Nick Denton is expanding his publishing empire of niche-blogs, which already includes the gadget-blog Gizmodo: Just unveiled is Gawker, a Manhattan-centric gossip-and-stuff site edited by Elizabeth Spiers. Looks like fun.
Morgan Sandquist on reading Proust:
| Reading Proust quickly is as dubious an achievement as breathing quickly. Read Proust because you want to be reading Proust, not because you want to have read Proust. |
Miguel Octavio has been offering vivid reports from the street in Venezuela, where the strife between opponents of Chavez (Octavio is one) and supporters continues.
The Raven offers an in-depth and eye-opening review of the latest in telemarketing — offense and defense.
And finally, SRO (Hugh Elliott) has taken it upon himself to deconstruct the little caricature that accompanies my Salon column — and even offers some make-over tips. (In truth, the caricature is about eight years old; it’s the work of the extremely talented Zach Trenholm, and it’s overdue for an update.)
I’m continuing to enjoy the musings of Real Live Preacher. Here’s a choice passage:
| I spent a lot of time in Mexico as a young boy. The preacher knows the mingled smells of outhouses, kerosene, and poverty. It’s something you never forget.
One year during a bitter cold spell my father and his friends showed up at the border with a load of blankets and coats. The forecast was for temperatures well below freezing that night, and they knew a lot of families were going to be cold. The Mexican government forbade them from entering. Some bureaucratic bullshit, I guess. My dad said his kinder, gentler equivalent of “fuck it” and became a smuggler on the spot. He and the others made numerous trips across the border that day in different cars with blankets, food, and jackets crammed under the seats and hidden in the trunks. My dad felt that one’s calling to serve God was higher than one’s calling to obey the law. For Christ’s sake, he and his friends couldn’t let children freeze. “For Christ’s sake” packs a punch when you mean it literally. |
I’ve updated my link list with a whole bunch of Salon blogs. (Thanks to Mark Hoback for emailing me about this!) Originally my thinking was, hey, I’d be providing tons of links in the main posting area of the blog to different Salon blogs, and ultimately we want to have a more permanent directory listing of Salon bloggers, and so such a list wouldn’t be necessary. But my administrative duties here have cut deep into my posting time, and the directory isn’t here yet, so in the meantime, here it is.
It’s nothing like a complete list of Salon blogs. It reflects a combination of my own interests and blogs that I’ve noticed have some staying power, or that bloggers have put a lot of energy into. If you’re not on the list, don’t have a fit! It probably means I just haven’t stumbled on you yet. And as always anyone is welcome to email me if they think I’ve missed out on their blog.
Today’s NY Times has a piece by Amy Harmon about a new project by leading scientists to create free, online, peer-reviewed journals that get research widely disseminated without the delays and fees associated with the more traditional print-journal approach.
Bravo. Isn’t this what the Internet, and the Web, were created for in the first place?
Mark Hoback has posted a new edition of his Virtual Occoquan roundup of Salon Blogs posts and highlights.
Creative Commons launches today with an innovative approach to creating machine-readable copyright licenses that encourage creative reuse and redistribution:
| The Licensing Project will build licenses that will help you tell others that your works are free for copying and other uses — but only on certain conditions. You’re probably familiar with the phrase “All rights reserved” and the little icon that goes along with it. Creative Commons wants to help copyright holders send a different message: “Some rights reserved” and our “CC Creative Commons” logo. |
Roger McGuinn and O’Reilly & Associates are both going to participate.
