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| Monday, June 10, 2002 |
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Quick one 
I've got an attached .ps (postscript) file here, a spreadsheet actually, and need to open it with OS X. Noting seems to do the job. Ideas?
[Later...] Got several good answers on that one (Thanks!). Now the mystery is: Internet Explorer (which I use for those things Mozilla still can't do, or places it can't go), when I try to open a Download window, produces a blank white rectangle that's reversed out of the desktop. No other harm. And stuff downloads. But there's this... phenomenon. Not critical, just wondering if anybody knows how to fix it. Again, we're talking OS X here.
[Still later...] Another mystery: where do you download a fresh copy of IE 5 for OS X? Not obvioius (to me, anyway).
Polyblog
Mike Sanders has a nice rundown on differences among bloggers, including his own thoughts (more or less from the inside) on the essence of a warblogger. It nicely follows his Blogversation with Joe. (That being Joseph Duemer of Reading & Writing)
Eric Olsen has a fine go at it too.
Both guys prove that writing for the Web doesn't have to be short-form. So does Sgt. Stryker in Beers Across America, where he takes issue with something I said recently about the link-averse Andrew Sullivan. His bottom line: So you worry about your shit, we'll worry about ours and everything's cool.
Interesting to read his piece today on The Friendly Skies, since I'll be flying to Europe tomorrow.
Boom
Saltire:
| | I think the real estate market is gonna come crashing down. I think the music industry is gonna come crashing down. I think the professional sports television contracts boondoggle is gonna come crashing down. I think the airline industry and telecom are gonna come crashing down. I think higher-education is gonna come crashing down. I think network news is gonna come crashing down. Today's way of doing business is not sustainable.
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Coincidence?
Chris Locke in The Cluetrain Manifesto:
| | You will never hear those words spoken in a television ad. Yet this central fact of human existence colors our world and how we perceive ourselves within it.
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| | "Life is too short," we say, and it is.
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BBC:
| | A UK television watchdog has banned an advert for Microsoft's Xbox console which shows a man crashing into his own grave.
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Thanks to Kevin Marks for the discovery.
Bowie knife
David Bowie to Jon Pareles in the New York Times:
| | The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.
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Also:
| | Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity"
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And,
| | So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen.
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Get this: It's happening to publishing a lot faster than it's happening to the music industry. What you're reading right now is writing running like water.
Thanks to Slashdot for the link.
Related: Michael Wolff's Facing the Music. One of the most right-on pieces he's ever written.
Lost icons?
The icons of most classic apps on my new OS X laptop have been replaced by blanks or generic representations. In Classic mode I'd just run Norton. But in OS X, I'm not sure about the solution. Suggestions, anyone?
[Later...] Many of you wrote to expain something not obvious to me: that it's still possible to rebuild the desktop for Classic under the Classic System Prefs, under Advanced. Did it and it worked (while not slowing down anything in OS X). Thanks!
Last acreage
Dave Sifry: New last-mile solution using hacked 802.11 cards?
Here's the Slashdot.
Insert story here
David Gallagher's piece is up at the New York Times site. Glenn Reynolds says "it's a well-done and fair piece, despite the rather, ahem, overstated hype" (in a pre-publication pitch by the Times to affiliates).
Dave says, "It's a nice article. Everyone likes each other. Coool. BTW, they also said we're journalists. Thank you, glad that argument is over."
Well, I'm glad Glenn and Dave got to be friends and all, but I'm still gonna call bullshit on it.
When journalists write stories they're often like attorneys: advocates looking for evidence that helps argue a case. Except with journalists, the case isn't for one side or another, but rather for the story itself. And since the best stories are about conflicts, the case journalists often make is is for the conflict itself. A good story therefore works as a brief against the absence of conflict.
Here's what I said about this story when it was still being talked up a few days ago:
| | Stories are about characters and conflicts. Each defines the other, regardless of inconvenient complexities and contradictions. If you're a competent writer, and you keep your characters and conflicts simple, the story writes itself.
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| | That's why we have the warbloggers vs. techbloggers story.
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| | The big inconvenience is that, once again, we're dealing with AND logic here, not OR. The blogosphere is comprised of thinkers and linkers and diarists and techbloggers and warbloggers and newsbloggers and everybody else with a mouse to grind. What's happening is writing, and its out of fucking control.
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David Gallagher is a good writer. He did a good job with his assignment here. Whether that assignment came from somebody else at the Times or from his own head, it was still a case for conflict.
"A Rift Among Bloggers," from the title onward, suggests that Cam, Jason and other members of the "old guard" are in a lather about the warbloggers, and that there's plenty of heat going back the other way. What rings false for me is that I know most of the guys David Gallagher quotes here, and I read their blogs fairly often; yet I never got the impression that there was any kind of a Big Deal going on between two factions, much less something akin to the East Coast vs. West Coast rap music thing, which is a working model for "rifts" in cultures that are external to average newspaper readers.
And while it's true that, yeah, there are different communities here, there's still plenty of overlap. Check my own blogrolodex to find lots of blogs from both "sides." Check Eric Olsen. Virginia Postrel. Charles Johnson. You'll find general patterns of preferences, sure; but not enough to require this:
| | The war bloggers and veteran bloggers have largely ignored each other, rarely reading or linking to one another's sites.
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So, the deeper story here isn't about a rift between bloggers. It's about a the need to tell a story. And to sell it to affiliates.
Go back and look at the pitch for this story that one of Glenn's moles got from the New York Times service:
| | BLOG-PURISTS-PUNDITS (Undated) — In the latest version of the Net techies being outraged by the onslaught of the opportunists, purists in the Weblog or 'blog' community are fighting with pundits who are using the diary-like blog format to publish political commentary. "Warbloggers" is the derisive term for the pundits, whom the purists accuse of turning the Web log medium into the text equivalent of talk radio. By David F. Gallagher.
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Whatever David Gallagher's intentions here (and I believe they were good), he wasn't just writing a story. He was writing a product.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. Nothing wrong with stories, either. They are the very format of human interest. There's a good reason they sell papers and keep us watching the evening news. My favorite priest even says "There are some truths so deep only a story can tell them."
But this story has no deep truth. It's just another feature about another transient topic.
Meanwhile, blogs are still out of fucking control. And the fucking they're out of control from is old fashioned journalism.
Now before you go thinking I'm slamming old fashioned journalism here, I'm not. It's full of ideals, principles and practices that are no less noble and important for blogs than they are for newspapers. I am, however, saying that blogging is a form of journalism that is proving very, very hard for mainstream journals to cover.
I believe that's because blogging enlarges the journalistic world beyond what you get from newspapers, magazines, broadcasts and books — much as personal computing enlarged computing far beyond what you got from mainfraimes, minicomputers and other systems controlled by professionals.
Computing got out of control. And now journalism is out of control too.
It's personal now. There's no going back.
Put that together with traditonal journalism, and you've got:::: The Boutinsphere. And the Searlsphere. And the Reynoldsphere. And the Winersphere. One sphere per blog.
All out of control.
[Later...] Bonus blog: what Tom sez.
Blog cruising far and wi-fi
More from Bernie Dunham on Blog Cruise progress.
discuss
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