infundibulum

It bugs me that now that every newspaper on the planet has an RSS or Atom feed, just about any search on a “blog” search engine about a newsworthy topic will turn up mostly newspapers.

On the one hand, that’s great, because I can find news articles. On the other hand, that can be annoying, because I like blogs because they’re NOT newspapers.

Of course, you also have to deal with the fact that a lot of lazy (and or spammy) bloggers just lift articles from newspapers and stick them on a blogspot blog or whatever, which just adds to the frustration.

/rant

Oddhead Blog: Prediction Markets, Gambling, Electronic Commerce, Artificial Intelligence: David Pennock: Yahoo! Research

This is a really interesting blog if you have any interest in stuff like prediction markets. (Incidentally, I’m with Oddhead on the evaluation of prediction markets by Daily Kos — they’re missing the point.)

You know what would be neat?

If you could set up a blog for your own use where you could put future dates on the posts — then you could use it as a sort of “todo blog.”

You’d “read” your own blog every morning or whatever, and there would be the tasks you’d delegated off to your future self.

You got Bill O’Reilly to have a downright rational conversation!

You’re my hero!

I HAVE THE FACTS AND I’M VOTING DANA.

ps go bears

Just watched a video of a panel at Reuters.com, which the Global Voices Online participated via IRC.

The format was quite a bit like what was done at the Global Voices Summit in London: it was a normal panel discussion, with questions from bloggers and interested observers from IRC occasionally asked to the panelists in by Rebecca MacKinnon.

The concept is pretty new, it’s not simply like having callers call in to a talk show, because the remote crowd also has their own discussion going on. I think it’s a pretty interesting way to interact with media, because even if you yourself don’t pose any questions (I didn’t, this time, I only really watched the second half), you get this sensation that those are real people up there on the panel, despite the fact that they’re a grand poobah or a head honcho or whatever.

As far as the topic itself, the media and Iraq, I confess I feel nothing but confusion toward the war in general. It’s pretty hard for me to defend the fact that I never blog about Iraq. But honestly, I just don’t know what to say. I have no feeling whatsoever that there is an end in sight, or that anyone in charge knows how to bring one about.

Even so, I think these sorts of panels are undeniably good things. There’s something about getting people into the same room and having them talk to each other that helps you to triangulate, even if you’re only observing.

Hot damn!

Technorati Search: jill carroll

There’s one sidebar button I’ll be happy to take down. ☺

U.S. concludes ‘Cyber Storm’ mock attacks

Oh, lovely.

I’m so sick of going to read a blog post and then reading the comments underneath and seeing…

The blog post, again.

Yes, yes, let’s show the world how important our blog posts are by repeating them, in order to prove that someone else thought they were worth quoting. That’s not an ego trip.

It’s a trackback, see? Er, I mean, It’s a pingback. It’s a \w+back. I don’t know what it is. And yes, I know, they are on the current blog, and no, I’m not going to go digging around in Wordpress to figure out how to remove them but GOOD GRIEF.

Somebody, anybody, give me an amen.

Please, I feel so alone.

</rant>

After reading and translating a bunch of blog posts to prepare for writing “The Race to Wire Brazil” at Global Voices Online (not to mention hanging out with a two wacky Paulistas in London, I’ve found myself getting interested in Portuguese again.

(Don’t worry Nic, I’m still working on the Welsh. ☺ )

I keep my Portuguese-related links here.

One thing I’m interested in is listening more, and I’ve not been able to find massive amounts of stuff with just spoken Portuguese online.

Tem alguem lá em cyberlândia que conheça mais alguma coisa interessante para escutar?

So far I’ve found:

• Odeo: É batata! — sadly, seems defunct?
• Portal da Cidadania — LULA SPEAKS. Heh, wow. Just politico-talk, mostly, but I have to admit that I find this really interesting. I had no idea he had such a strong accent! É ver-dah-dee!
• Podcast Código Livre — a podcast about Linux. Pretty funny and interesting. (I should write more about Linux in Brazil here…)

So yeah, hook me up with suggestions. You can email me if you want: pat.hall at gmail.com. (I should really fix the registration crap on this blog… Chris seems to have found the magic combination of plugins for stopping spam in the work she did building the Blogamundo deeveloper blog.)

Editing WordPress posts in Performancing | Performancing.com

Testing Performancing… seems pretty neat. The account setup wizard was quite easy.