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Sunday, September 10, 2006
Size matters 
| | Paul Boutin is right about huge screens. I have one at home, and I get a lot more done on it. |
| | Also, in my experience, the brightness and color accuracy of the big screens tend to be better than on laptops. |
| | I think one reason is that laptops cram too much into too little space. With the ruler on the big (23") screen, an inch is an inch. On both the ThinkPad and the PowerBook, an inch is about 3/4" long. Small type — popular on say too many page sources — is reeaal tiny. That my be fine for young eyes, but for me it's a drag. |
Blast from the present
| | Bonnie Raitt is playing down the hill at the Santa Barbara Bowl. I can hear her just well enough to be frustrated by not being there. She's playing something bluesy right now. Nice. |
| | In a box somewhere I have every vinyl album Bonnie ever produced. I've also seen her perform more times than I can count, but not in the last 21 years, which is how long I've been on the West Coast. Every time I saw her was in North Carolina. One of her best shows was at Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke. She had Freebo on tuba back in those days. I think Paul Barrere from Little Feat was in her band too. Not sure. What I remember best about that one was how her dad, John Raitt, came on stage in a surprise visit, and led the band and the audience in a rousing performance of "Oklahoma". He had been performing in the show at a nearby dinner theater or something, and just showed up. The band was lost, and Bonnie did her best to make the thing work, but the old man's charisma carried the day. I won't say it rocked, but it certainly rolled. |
| | In the old days Bonnie was an independent artist. Very big on your album-oriented, progressive rock and blues/folk/americana-formatted stations. Which meant she wasn't a big Top 40 or stadium act. |
| | Since then she's had a lot of mainstream success without ever going mainstream. She's a high-integrity original. Great to hear her again. Even if she's barely audible through the crickets and tree frogs. |
It's about time
| | The first link on the first page in Technorati is not the most relevant, it's the most recent. The first link on the River of News is the most recent, but it could be a bit of sports news, while news of the stock market crash is two screens down. So, if you've been fumbling over the distinction, currency is what a river is all about. When you're reading Technorati, you keep going until you see something you've already seen. Same with the River of News. |
| | So I think we can add River of News to the Live Web column. |
One on many
| | When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content. |
| | If Wikipedia is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit. |
| | Unfortunately, precisely because such people are only occasional contributors, their opinions aren't heard by the current Wikipedia process. They don't get involved in policy debates, they don't go to meetups, and they don't hang out with Jimbo Wales. And so things that might help them get pushed on the backburner, assuming they're even proposed. |
| | I know the feeling, because I'm one of those occasional contributors. |
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