“Saying less often communicates more. Our lives are littered with extraneous details that smother salient information. Each little piece of useless chatter is relatively innocent, and only robs us of a few seconds. The cumulative effect, however, is much worse: we assume that most communication is equally useless and tune it out, thus missing important information that’s sometimes embedded in the mess.” Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, August 11, 2003
RSS.
I have to do some more homework before I can take a stab at explaining RSS but Chris Pirillo says it’s the next big thing and few people understand the online world better. My friend John insists he’s disappointed when he takes the time to check this journal only to find there’s nothing new. RSS makes it possible for him to be alerted (NOT by email) when this page –or others– is updated. More to come.
Google’s new News Alerts.
Google has invented another great tool: Google News Alerts, which are e-mailed to you when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify. Email news alerts aren’t new but what makes Google’s so powerful is that Google News trolls 4,500 news sources continuously throughout the day — and you can set the alert to send you links to related articles as soon as Google News find them. So if you’re writing about the debate over the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop, for example, you can set an alert to send you an e-mail as soon as any of 4,500 news sites posts an article containing the words “gay and bishop.”
Funny people: Jim Obradovich
Jim Obradovich was high on my Unborn Blogs” list and he somehow discovered this (could he be reading this very post?). He hinted that he might be willing to take run at blogging and offered to send photos from his new part-time job.
“…beginning tomorrow evening at the Iowa State Fair Parade I will commence my duties as “Fairfield” the State Fair Mascot. Fairfield is a 6-foot blue ribbon of merriment. I will be undertaking my “Fairfield” duties for 2 to 3 hours a day, while the rest of the time I’ll be writing press releases on everything from sheep dog trials to the heaviest pigeon competition.”
Me Laugh Hard.
Don’t know why I’ve never heard of David Sedaris but I caught a short segment on today’s This American Life and he is one funny guy. From an Amazon review: “He thwarts his North Carolina speech therapist (“for whom the word pen had two syllables”) by cleverly avoiding all words with s sounds, which reveal the lisp she sought to correct. His midget guitar teacher, Mister Mancini, is unaware that Sedaris doesn’t share his obsession with breasts, and sings “Light My Fire” all wrong–“as if he were a Webelo scout demanding a match.” As a remarkably unqualified teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sedaris had his class watch soap operas and assign “guessays” on what would happen in the next day’s episode.” I’ll read one of his books and report back.
War & Peace
“Peace is best. You should make every sacrifice to secure peace. When you absolutely must go to war, however, you must try to kill all the enemy you can as quickly as you can, holding nothing back, until they have surrendered or you have been defeated utterly. It is a great fraud to think otherwise and it prolongs the agony. It would be better if people said, if we fight, we are going to boil babies in their own fat and blast the skin off nice old ladies, so they die slowly in great pain, and we are happy to do this, because what we fight for is so important. And if they conclude that it is not as important as that, then they should fight no more.”
— Robert K. Tanenbaum, Act of Revenge
Tom Daschle blogging
Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader and South Dakota Democrat, “will post a daily diary on his official Web site as he drives around the state next month during Congress’ annual August recess, he said Wednesday. The diary is modeled on the growing phenomenon of the online journals known as Weblogs, or blogs for short.” More on the Argus Leader website. [via Steve Outing]
John C. Dvorak on blogging
I’d forgotten how much I like (and agree with) John C. Dvorak. He was one of the headliners at Gnomedex and poked some good natured fun at “the Blogging phenomenon.” (Note to self: Try to have something useful or interesting to say). Dan Gillmor was on the opposite end of the spectrum regarding the importance of blogs and gave some powerful examples.
Gnomedex: Slashdot.
“News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.” Slashdot creator Rob Malda (CMDRTACO) gave the geekiest presentation I’ve heard to date but it was perfect. “One of the largest, self-moderated discussion groups on the web,” Slashdot generates 2.4 million page views per day. Learned a new expression: “Daddy Pants” The guy responsible for getting up at 2 a.m. to reboot the server is wearing the Daddy Pants.
Gnomedex: Google
Nelson Minor is a software engineer for Google and he gave a fascinating presentation to kick off this two day conference. Starting with the Google mission statement:
* Work on things that matter
* Affect everyone in the world
* Solve problems with algorithms
* Hire bright people and give them lots of freedom
* Don’t be afraid to try new things (According to Minor, Google News was the idea of one guy who said, “Hey, wouldn’t this be cool?”)
Average search time on Google: 1/5 of a second. He even explained how Google works…in a way that even I could sort of understand.