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| Friday, February 15, 2002 |
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Truckin' on 
| | The car is ready. I depart. See ya'll tomorrow. |
Consider the sources
| | It seems to me a lot of journalism these days is just chasing business trends. |
| | Here's the knockout paragraph: |
| | Maybe it doesn't matter--my job, after all, is to provide the filling between the advertisements, which pay for the entire operation--but I'm disheartened by all those chipper experts offering nostrums to all of us who make up the reading public. Need a turnaround expert? Let me interview one to tell you how to run a business. Got the downsizing blues? Here's the best way to break the news to the laid off employees and preserve the morale of the remaining workers. It's so American, this belief that experts (via business magazines for executives or women's mags for busy gals on the go) can help us make our lives and our companies better. |
| | This puts in context what Dave was saying this morning about the difference between the journalism you find here (among what are, literally, journals) and what you find in Big Publications that express the Grande Discipline of Journalism. |
| | It's mostly about sources. We're all sources for each other here, and don't have the pressures of space, deadlines, commercial agendas or formats to restrict who we source or the stories they tell us. Here we not only link endlessly to countless other sources (which far outnumber those in the average BigPub piece), but we can vet ideas about what might be true, in faith that others who know more will correct us, or pick up the story and carry it forward. |
| | Blogs are thickly woven into the web of what we know, what we want to know more about and how we inform each other. That makes them vastly different from the information distribution system that constitutes Journalism as Usual. |
| | On the Web, we are not distributors of Information. What we give and gain is not a commodity. It's what we know. And when we share what we know with each other, we get improved knowledge and far more well-qualified opinions. Much different than what we get from your average business pub piece about Company X with a quote from Analyst Y. |
| | Big-time Journalism will never go away — not should it. But thanks to what we're doing here, it will never be the same. |
| | The big crossover will happen when one or more BigPubs starts treating blogs as sources, and not just feature fodder. |
| | Sooner or later, they'll have to. We know too damn much, and we're too damn good at telling each other about it. |
Never metadirectory I didn't wanna join
| | The story of why Microsoft can't (yet) come up with a way to move mail from one to another of its own mail products makes the case for something Microsoft actually has: a metadirectory. |
| | Might not work in this case, but its appeal as a solution begging a marketable explanation remains undiminished after many years of laying around. History: Microsoft's metadirectory is descended from Zoomit's Via. Microsof bought Zoomit a couple years after this was written. Great little company, Zoomit. Out of Toronto. Most of the team is still intact, by the way. |
| | More history: metadirectory was a concept first named and described by Craig Burton a few years back. Kim Cameron and the Zoomit folks made it into a product. The last link in the last paragraph was to a 1997 LAN Times piece (observe: no linkrot). And LAN Times was created a decade earlier by Judith Burton when she and Craig were both at Novell. |
| | They both need to start blogging again. I miss 'em. |
Off the road again
| | It was a bad radiator hose. They ordered one, and it should be here before noon. Then I hit the road. Hopefully. |
| | Meanwhile I'm working here in my in-laws' living room, connected wirelessly over my Airport, which does the dialing for me. Slow, but handy. Meanwhile Rachel the cat keeps trying to sit on my keyboard. |
| | And, on a cautiously plus side, it appears that the crash culprit was Palm Desktop: the beta version for OS X. Details on request. Eudora seems to work fine. And fortunately I backed up he mailboxes before I left. |
Terror, one on one
| | The January issue of Harpers has a fortuitous piece: Diary of a Terrorist, published originally by the Times of London. The author is Ahmad Omar Sayed Sheikh, the same guy who admits (or claims) to have captured Wall Street Journalist writer Daniel Pearl. An excerpt: |
| | Shah-Saab's next instruction was to hunt down an American. I set off for the YMCA. By evening I had established rapport with a chap I thought to be American and had told him about my village when to my annoyance I found out he was German. I was about to leave when an American joined in the conversation. |
| | The American, whose name was Daniel Skinner, had been teaching English as a volunteer and was leaving India because of lack of funds. I turned to him and said, "Hey, I need someone to teach English at my village school." I arranged to meet him a couple of days hence and confirm the details. When we spoke again, he agreed to accompany me the next day. |
| | At one o'clock I made my way to the Markaz, and Amin took me to the van. We picked Daniel up at the YMCA and started off for Saharanpur, but before an hour had passed Dan asked to get off for cigarettes. |
| | We stopped the car and he got off with his bags and said he thought he'd better stay in Delhi for a few days more. "What's the matter?" I asked in a surprised tone. "I've only known you two days," he said. "And all of a sudden I'm in a car with you." |
| | That Daniel escaped. Pearl did not. |
| | And if we don't know the human face of terror, we risk being no more human in our response to it. |
Listen closely because our menu has changed
| | Email is still screwed, so if you've sent me some, or expect some from me, be patient. It will probably be at least another day before things are back to something like normal. |
Car go boom
| | Had a terrific talk and lunch with Dave, before heading back to Santa Barbara by way of the Apple Store in Palo Alto, where I had hoped to solve my OS X / Eudora / Whatever woes (result: better, but still not good). Then I had a terrific cell phone conversation with David while I drove from Mountain View to South San Jose. It had been too long since I had talked live with either co-conspirator. |
| | Then, right after I hung up with David, white steam billowed out from under my hood, and he car died, right there in heavy traffic on 101 South. I made it to the shoulder, called AAA, but found enough water to partly fill the radiator from half-consumed bottles in the car; so I called off AAA, started the car and peeled off at the first exit, about a quarter mile down the road. It overheated again. This time I inertia carried me to the parking lot behind a Jack in the Box, where the nice guys in the kitchen helped me fill the cooling system with fresh water. Then I ran across the street to a Shell station and bought the two quarts of oil the car had lost (how? I dunno). This got me another quarter mile before overheating in the middle of an intersection. After restarting (lucky break) the car, I brought it wheezing and steaming into a mini-mart, and called AAA again, this time for good. Arriving about three hours after the first event, they towed the car to a garage in Morgan Hill, where I was picked up by my sister- and brother-in-law. Now I'm writing in a bedroom at their house, in the wee hours. |
| | I'm bummed that I didn't get home in time for some kind of Valentine's Thing. Maybe tomorrow, if I'm lucky and the problem is an easy fix (pray it's just the thermostat). |
| | Maybe I should finally get around to replacing the junker I call a car. |
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