What really ‘makes’ a weblog for me, in the sense that was makes it work for me, and keeps me going back, is none of the technical or structural features, but the passion of the weblogger. Passion not only for the subject(s) that they cover, but passion for logging them. It’s not difficult to see if a person really believes in what they are posting about and ones that simply report on a topic. This is the difference I’ve seen on the political logs. Dean’s people seem to be as passionate the weblog medium as they are about getting him…
It’s not really piracy, its illegality is questionable, but does that make it right?
Dave touches on some good points in his essay on piracy, I can’t imagine the industry every giving up their license to make money, i.e., their old catalogs. However, his observations of the industry’s improprieties are accurate. The industry treats its customers like the enemy, and its artists like farm animals. While they are productive you feed them enough to keep them alive, and when production drops they get a bullet to the head and sent off to the meat packing plant. Some are mercifully sent out to pasture, and if they are lucky, maybe find new “owners” who will…
I’m looking forward to Dave’s piracy essay…
but to borrow a line from Don Henley, “A man with a briefcase steals more than any man with a gun.” Or any 12 year-old with a cable modem. The fact that labels are charging the same for old songs that have recouped their production costs over many thousands of times as they do for new material is ludicrous, particularly pre-digital material whose quality is substantially lower. It’s like a license to print money – you only have to buy the paper and ink and the rest is profit. I can’t imagine the labels ever giving that up voluntarily.
Do Not Call List On Hold.
This is annoying as heck. 50 million people want this, and one asshole federal judge can toss it aside. How does one get a judge recalled? If Bush wants to impress me, he needs find a way get rid of this incompetent loser. I agree with one aspect of this, but not enough to see the entire program get delayed. I don’t want politicitans, charities or people conducting surveys intruding on my dinner either. We should be able to choose what, if any, kinds of unsolicited calls we get. If we don’t want any calls, we shouldn’t have to get…
Tsunami Watch Cancelled.
But seas may be dangerous, so be careful out there!
Tsunami Watch!
“Hawai’i was placed under a tsunami watch this morning after an 8.1-magnitude earthquake struck Japan’s northern Hokkaido area today. If a tsunami was generated, it would reach the Islands at 5:01 p.m. today, officials said.”
It’s OK to be a small fish (or a medium-sized one) in a small pond. Really.
I wrote this in response to Dave’s call for essays on his BloggerCon site. Wish I could be there, but I’m determined to get my MA done this semester, and can’t have any distractions. Well, this essay is a small one, but it’s less intrusive than flying from Hawai’i to Boston and back.
Dave seems satisfied with Brent’s handling of the link vs permalink issue…
and as far as being a NetNewsWire user, I’m pretty happy with the outcome as well. I guess it’s case closed – for now. Things will probably be pretty slow on Radio Keola for the next few weeks (not that there is a lot of activity in the first place) as I move into the final phase of writing and tweaking my MA thesis. I need to get the first draft to my thesis committee by the end of September. It’s been amazing process – analyzing the music of one of Hawai’i’s most influential composer/performers ever, John Kameaaloha Almeida, and…
Brent Simmons picks up on the RSS discussion.
Brent, the author of NetNewsWire, has picked up the conversation on RRS, link and guid on his site. I’d suggest anyone who has any thoughts post them there as opposed to here, as he will undoubtably garner more traffic and comments from knowledgeable users and developers than I will.
Radio RSS Followup
I’m starting to get a better grip on Rob’s problems with Radio generated RSS, but it is definitely not due to funkyness in the feed. I looked at my own Radio feed in NetNewsWire, and checked out the URLs linked in the headline. They point to the story that I linked to on his site. OK, for me that is expected behavior. His point is valid, however. While I don’t care about it for this site, webloggers may want their RSS feeds to drive traffic to the blogs. The only way for them to do this would be to put…