The cult of Ken Jennings
The cult of Ken Jennings. Just in case you missed it the first time.
Awesome collection of folk graphics and photography
Awesome collection of folk graphics and photography protesting Flickr's decision to let members post short videos. But without the video, we'd miss out on stuff like this. (via waxy)
A story by J. Robert Lennon using
A story by J. Robert Lennon using only words from The Cat In The Hat.
I have to say one thing here: it is not fun to be with me. I like books and things. Tame: that is I. I get no kicks, fly no kites, play no games. Hops and pot are not my things. If you are here, I want you to go away. So what should this dish, this fox want out of me? I sat and picked at the fish and looked at those hands, so white.
(on the left) When
 |  |
(on the left) When I was back home visiting my mom a few weeks ago, we took a trip to Crystal Cave. I took a quick photo of these wee stalactites.
(on the right) Driving home from our caving adventure, we noticed that rural Wisconsin has some ridiculously high street numbers.
Europe's continental divide
Though not as well known as the US version, Europe has a continental divide located between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. It doesn't run along the Alps as much as I thought it would.
Noctilucent clouds (really high whispy clouds) were
Noctilucent clouds (really high whispy clouds) were so common where I grew up in WI that I thought they were normal. Turns out they only appear in higher latitudes, at least until recently when global warming has caused them to appear more frequently and further south.
How to look at billboards
How to look at billboards, a commentary on outdoor advertising by advertising man Howard Gossage from Harpers magazine in 1960. Gossage thought of billboards as an invasion of people's privacy.
Outdoor advertising is peddling a commodity it does not own and without the owner's permission: your field of vision. Possibly you have never thought to consider your rights in the matter. Nations put the utmost importance on unintentional violations of their air space. The individual's air space is intentionally violated by billboards every day of the year.
Why is the burglary rate in Austria
Why is the burglary rate in Austria so high? Perhaps because of the great minimum security prisons. The outside of one particular prison is all glass like an Apple Store, the furniture is nicely designed, and the sports facilities are top-notch.
Advertising in books
I just had a horrible, horrible thought. What if books had advertising in them? Not product placement in the story like "quoth the raven, eat at Burger King", but real honest-to-goodness ads every three or four pages, just like in magazines. Publishers could print two versions of every title:
1. A normal version of the book at the current regular price; let's say $36 for a hardcover.
2. A version with advertising that costs, oh, 50-75% less than the normal version. That same hardcover would cost $9-18. The ad version of the same book in paperback might go for only $4.50.
Supported by advertising, publically available texts like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, or Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels could be free. Free books!
Financial issues aside, I believe the world is a better place without advertising absolutely everywhere. But if advertising makes books more affordable -- and in some cases absolutely free -- and therefore accessible to more people, it's hard to argue that it wouldn't be a good idea.
Well, this is certainly old
Well, this is certainly old news: women are people too! Guh. I don't know, when I read articles like these (written by a man, of course), they always come off as "women, despite their obvious technological shortcomings, are coming online in droves...and thriving! Look at 'em go, they're so darn spunky!" What a load of crap. And then you post something like that to Slashdot, and you get comments like "Yay! More geek chicks!", which, I agree, is great, but given the forum in which that comment is made, it comes off as a bunch of male construction workers hooting at any passing female.
Atomflow is Atom input and output on
Atomflow is Atom input and output on the Unix command line. Pipe your way to almost anything.
LeBron averaging a triple double?
If the NBA game were played at the pace of the 1962 season, the year Oscar Robertson averaged a triple double and Wilt put up 50 PPG while pulling down 26 RPG, LeBron James might be averaging 40.1 points, 10.3 rebounds, and 10.0 assists this season.
Okay, so you've all seen Wilt and Oscar's numbers from 1962... but have you ever sat down and looked at the league averages that year? In '62, the average team took 107.7 shots per game. By comparison, this year the average team takes 80.2 FGA/G. If we use a regression to estimate turnovers & offensive rebounds, the league pace factor for 1962 was 125.5 possessions/48 minutes, whereas this year it's 91.7. Oscar's Royals averaged 124.7 poss/48, while Wilt's Warriors put up a staggering 129.7 (the highest mark in the league). On the other hand, the 2009 Cavs are averaging a mere 89.2 poss/48. It turns out that the simplest explanation for the crazy statistical feats of 1961-62 (and the early sixties in general) is just that the league was playing at a much faster tempo in those days, with more possessions affording players more opportunities to amass gaudy counting statistics.
(via truehoop)
The tortoise and the hare
Remember that old fable of the tortoise and the hare? Basically, the faster hare is overconfident and loses a foot race to the slower, but steadier, tortoise. Somehow, the moral to this story is: "slow and steady wins the race."
I beg to differ. The race was not won by the tortoise; it was lost by the hare. The moral should read: "don't fuck around when there's shit to be done." Or something like that.
Franz Ferdinand** has a blog and you
Franz Ferdinand** has a blog and you don't probably do too.
** The band, not the archduke.
Poll update
Ok, this is getting really weird. The results of my latest poll show that the "new window" people, after blowing an early lead (about 60% after ~30 total votes) and falling way behind (at about 30% after 160 total votes), have stormed back, closing the gap between themselves and the "no new window" folks. Are these seemingly wild swings caused by voter cheating, different audiences voting at different times (holiday vs. non-holiday, weekday vs. weekend), or is it just statistically insignificant noise? I'd take the time to analyze it, but arsdigita (as far as I know) doesn't keep track of individual votes. Forgive me for prattling on about this poll, but the math/stats lover in me just can't let it go.
Bottle Rocket
Wes Anderson's first film isn't as polished and elaborate as Rushmore or Royal Tenenbaums, and that's a good thing. It would be nice to see Anderson do another stripped-down film like Bottle Rocket. Caw-caw!
Cool new Dutch coin
Matthew Dent's new coinage for the UK was pretty great, but this Dutch commemorative coin is a fully contemporary chunk of wow.
On the front, the names of famous Dutch architects form an image of the queen while some Dutch architecture books on the back form an outline of The Netherlands. The design was done using free software running on Ubuntu/Debian. (via design observer)
Quick interview with me over at leahpeah. "
Quick interview with me over at leahpeah. "I was never one of those kids who had a ready answer for what they wanted to be when they grew up."
Decoupling with the iPad
This is exactly why I bought an iPad:
In this profession, it's critical to have a break-out area where you can think without the computer looking over your shoulder; where you can do your most valuable work without the siren song of an IDE. For the same reason that getting up and even walking to the bathroom can provide new perspective on a heretofore intractable problem, it's in your own best professional interests to do as much of your work as possible before you handcuff yourself to your desk each day.
And:
The potential of iPad is to decouple as many tasks as possible from my work environment -- and to keep me away from that environment when I'm doing things that don't actually require me to be there other than to use a computer.
I do a lot of reading and light writing for this site and I'm hoping that the iPad will allow me to do that somewhere that's not my desk. At least for a few hours a week. (via jb)
Big exhibition of Lee Friedlander's photography at
Big exhibition of Lee Friedlander's photography at the MoMA until the end of August. It's interesting to see the influence Friedlander's work has had on some of the photobloggers I follow.
Avatar
One of the most difficult things to get right in movies about aliens or the future is matching the cultural and technological sophistication of a people with their environment and history. In Avatar, the Na'vi are portrayed as a Stone Age tribe, living in relatively small groups and essentially ignorant or uninterested in technology beyond simple knives and bows. But the Na'vi are also very physically capable, obviously very intelligent, aware of their global environment, well-nourished, healthy, omnivorous, adaptive, and even inventive. They have domesticated animals, are troubled by few serious natural predators, can live in different environments, have easy access to many varied natural resources (for sustenance and building/making), and can travel and therefore communicate over long distances (dozens if not hundreds of miles a day on their winged animals).
And most importantly, the Na'vi have regular and intimate access to a moon-sized supercomputer -- a neural net supercomputer at that -- that connects them to every other living thing on their world and have had such access for what could be millennia.
It just doesn't add up. The Na'vi are too capable and live in an environment that is far too pregnant with technological possibility to be stuck in the Stone Age. Plot-wise it's convenient for them to be the way they are, but the Na'vi really should have been more technologically advanced than the Earthlings, not only capable of easily repelling any attack from Captain Ironpants but able to keep the mining company from landing on the moon in the first place.
Photos of the recession
Slate is organizing its readers in an effort to photographically document the current recession/depression/economic crisis. The 30s had photos of people in soup lines and the 70s had gas lines but what does the economic crisis look like when everyone is online?
You can't take a picture of the unemployed if they never leave the house.
Interested photographers can upload their photos to Slate's Shoot the Recession group on Flickr.
Office spaces
Cliff Kuang traces the evolution of office designs from the open factory-like floors of Frederick Taylor to the present era of semi-private pods.
Keeping Belle de Jour's secret
Darren from LinkMachineGo, an old school blogger, guessed Belle de Jour's identity soon after her blog started. How? Pre-Belle, Brooke Magnanti ran an obscure Robotwisdom-style link blog and wrote in a few other online forums and Darren recognized the writing style. Not only didn't Darren tell Magnanti or anyone else, he even set up a clever Googlewhack honeypot to detect people searching for her secret identity and tipped Magnanti off that The Daily Mail was sniffing around.
I've got the webcam on today for
I've got the webcam on today for awhile.
Update: observe my three work modes.
Re: Jim Emerson's list of films you
Re: Jim Emerson's list of films you should see to consider yourself movie literate, what are the essential gay/queer movies?
What if you could travel
What if you could travel in time? A while back, I asked people about their preferred super power. The majority answered "travel through time". My answer is time travel as well; it seems like it would yield the most interesting results. Anyway, I have some interesting follow-up questions for you:
1. If you could travel in time in only one direction (with unlimited trips to unlimited destinations and then back to the present), would you go forward in time or backward? Why?
2. If you could only time travel on one occasion, to when (and where) would you travel? Why? What would you do there?
I've closed posting on this, but you can read previous comments here.
(For the sake of argument, we'll assume that the time travel occuring here is the science fiction/no-questions-asked sort where you close your eyes, open them a few seconds later, and find yourself in a new time, complete with appropriate clothing, spending money, vaccinations, knowledge of the local language, etc. We'll also assume that your travel is confined to the planet Earth, meaning you can't go to Mars in 2314.)
There's lots of good stuff
There's lots of good stuff on the Errol Morris Web site, inculding a list of reasons Why It Makes Sense to Beat a Dead Horse, this long interview he did at the MoMA a couple years ago, and information on his films (I've seen both Mr. Death and Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control and would recommend both).
After being grounded for more than two
After being grounded for more than two years, the Space Shuttle is set to launch next month.
Alex Goldberg, 14-yo urban hustler, has parleyed
Alex Goldberg, 14-yo urban hustler, has parleyed his chutzpah into free clothes, celebrity friends, and courtside Knicks seats.
Next up: Jamie Foxx. The actor was near the bar, giving a woman a massage, and saw the crowd now gathered around Alex. Foxx offered to buy him a drink. What do you want, little boy? "A pina colada," Alex said. The crowd laughed, and he got one, virgin.
Alex's adventure ended hours later, at Nobu, where the pool crowd had migrated to feast on junket sushi. He had been chatting up Venus and Serena Williams at a nearby table, and mugging for cameras with a cigar hanging from his lips while eating a bowl of ice cream. Then the faces at his table went blank. Alex looked up and saw what they saw. His mother.
Steven Levy: "Since anyone can write a
Steven Levy: "Since anyone can write a Weblog, why is the blogosphere dominated by white males?".
Sideways named top film by NY and
Sideways named top film by NY and LA film critics and is in AFI's top ten.
Diva chimp tries to spell U-T-O-P-I-A, spells T-I-T instead
Diva chimp tries to spell U-T-O-P-I-A, spells T-I-T instead. It's actually spelled A-R-T.
The Best American Essays 2007
I've had this damn thing up in a browser tab for literally months1 and finally got around to reading it, "this damn thing" being editor David Foster Wallace's introduction to The Best American Essays 2007. In it, Wallace describes his role in compiling the essays collection as that of The Decider. As in, he Deciders what goes into the book according to his subjective view and not necessarily because the essays are "Best", "American", or even "Essays".
Which, yes, all right, entitles you to ask what 'value' means here and whether it's any kind of improvement, in specificity and traction, over the cover's 'Best.' I'm not sure that it's finally better or less slippery than 'Best,' but I do know it's different. 'Value' sidesteps some of the metaphysics that makes pure aesthetics such a headache, for one thing. It's also more openly, candidly subjective: since things have value only to people, the idea of some limited, subjective human doing the valuing is sort of built right into the term. That all seems tidy and uncontroversial so far -- although there's still the question of just what this limited human actually means by 'value' as a criterion.
One thing I'm sure it means is that this year's BAE does not necessarily comprise the twenty-two very best-written or most beautiful essays published in 2006. Some of the book's essays are quite beautiful indeed, and most are extremely well written and/or show a masterly awareness of craft (whatever exactly that is). But others aren't, don't, especially - but they have other virtues that make them valuable. And I know that many of these virtues have to do with the ways in which the pieces handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective that constitutes Total Noise. This claim might itself look slippery, because of course any published essay is a burst of information and context that is by definition part of 2007's overall roar of info and context. But it is possible for something to be both a quantum of information and a vector of meaning. Think, for instance, of the two distinct but related senses of 'informative.' Several of this year's most valuable essays are informative in both senses; they are at once informational and instructive. That is, they serve as models and guides for how large or complex sets of facts can be sifted, culled, and arranged in meaningful ways - ways that yield and illuminate truth instead of just adding more noise to the overall roar.
Although there are some differences between what Wallace and I consider valuable, the Decidering process detailed in his essay is a dead-on description of what I do on kottke.org every day. I guess you could say that it resonated with me as valuable, so much so that were I editing an end-of-the-year book comprised of the most interesting links from 2007, I would likely include it, right up front.
Oh, and I got a kick out of the third footnote, combined here with the associated main text sentences:
I am acting as an evaluative filter, winnowing a very large field of possibilities down to a manageable, absorbable Best for your delectation. Thinking about this kind of Decidering is interesting in all kinds of different ways. For example, from the perspective of Information Theory, the bulk of the Decider's labor actually consists of excluding nominees from the final prize collection, which puts the Decider in exactly the position of Maxwell's Demon or any other kind of entropy-reducing info processor, since the really expensive, energy-intensive part of such processing is always deleting/discarding/resetting.
My talk at Ars Electronica 2006 on the topic of simplicity touched on similar themes and the main point was that the more stuff I can sift through (and throw away), the better the end result can be.
From this it follows that the more effective the aggregator is at effectively determining what the group thinks, the better the end result will be. But somewhat paradoxically, the quality of the end result can also improve as the complexity of the group increases. In constructing kottke.org, something that I hope is a simple, coherent aggregation of the world rushing past me, this complexity is my closest ally. Keeping up with so many diverse, independent, decentralized sources makes my job as an aggregator difficult -- reading 300 sites a day (plus all the other stuff) is no picnic -- but it makes kottke.org much better than it would be if I only read Newsweek and watched Hitchcock movies. As artists, designers, and corporations race to embrace simplicity, they might do well to widen their purview and, in doing so, embrace the related complexity as well.
Welcome the chaos because there's lots of good stuff to be found therein. I also attempted to tie the abundance of information (what Wallace refers to as "Total Noise") and the simplification process of editing/aggregating/blogging into Claude Shannon's definition of information and information theory but failed due to time contraints and a lack of imagination. It sounded good in my head though.
Anyway, if you're wondering what I do all day, the answer is: throwing stuff out. kottke.org is not so much what's on the site as what is not chosen for inclusion.
[1] In actual fact, I closed that browser tab weeks ago and pasted the URL into a "must-read items" text file I maintain. But it's been open in a browser tab in my mind for months, literally. That and I couldn't resist putting a footnote in this entry, because, you know, DFW. ↩
Betting on the wrong horse
"Blogshares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs." The idea is that people can buy stock in different weblogs which are valued by inbound links. It seems that a few folks have put some of their hard-earned fake money down on this old grey bright yellow-green mare and are taking a beating:
Oh and I got burned on kottke.org. I bought 5 shares of it for like $14.50, it shot up to almost $15, and now it's down to like $2.10. What's up with that Jason??
-and-
I lost seventy-five, eighty bucks on Kottke sometime today; I knew the P/E was too high! I knew I shoulda sold! So I did what any good, self-deprecating investor would do; I bought a few more shares.
Come on guys, do some research! I'm a horrible buy right now. Quote from last Monday's post about my new job: "Postings may be light (and email replies will be really light) as I get adjusted to the new routine." No postings = fewer inbound links. Plus, there's a war on and I don't talk much about the war. No war = fewer inbound links. Result: my own mini .com bust.
People don't know what to
People don't know what to make of my Amazon entry from yesterday. Entertain the possibility that I'm just playing the devil's advocate here. Thinking aloud (rambling on?). Not jumping the gun. Not going along with the crowd, just because.
It's important in situations such as these to educate yourself. Read the patent before you go signing petitions and pointing to Web sites.
I'm in an "all companies suck" mode right now. People are telling me I shouldn't point at Amazon anymore. Should I point at B & N or Borders? Nope, they ran all the local mom and pop bookstores out of business. When I link to movies, should I point at Internet Movie Database? Oops, can't, they're owned by Amazon. Should I point at the movie Web site? Probably not....they're making me pay too much for their movie...not to mention the popcorn....not to mention that all those huge media companies suck in one way or another. I really need to stop going to Miramax movies altogether because they're owned by Disney, and Disney, as we all know, is brainwashing the minds of our youth.
But, but, but:
Amazon has a great selection, excellent customer service, and is a really good site for finding information on a wide selection of products. Barnes & Noble is fun to waste an afternoon in because they have a wide-ranging selection. IMDB has tons of useful information on movies. And movies....I can't possibly stop going to those, even if they do cost too much. Even Disney makes a good flick (Toy Story 2) every once and a while.
Where does this leave me? I have no idea.
Finally. Finally. Finally. I've added
Finally. Finally. Finally. I've added a search capability to kottke.org. This feature is still in a beta phase as I tinker with how I want it to work, but at least it's working. You'll find the search over on the left-hand side of the screen. Comments are welcome.
The above search is courtesy of Atomz.com. I really cannot say enough about how easy and flexible their search service is. Very cool.
I'm toying with getting rid of the modify feature of kottke.org. There are a bunch of features that I want to add to the site to make it more usable for visitors (like the search mentioned above), but the currently available interfaces aren't that flexible. So, at some point, I think those interfaces will have to go. I'll probably keep the text-only interface (modified to add the new functionality), but that will be it. As much as we'd like it to be, the information and the design are sometimes inseparable.
The idea of web browser as something more is catching on
Dave Hyatt, member of the Safari team at Apple and former contributer to Chimera, posted a bit on his weblog yesterday about integrating RSS reading into the web browser:
I've heard a lot of people state that RSS and news aggregators are for 'geeks' and 'blogging enthusiasts,' but I simply don't believe that to be true. It should be possible to make an application for managing a large amount of information flow that is accessible to mainstream users. Browsers are trying to make information easier to manage with smarter bookmarking systems and page management capabilities (tabs), and news readers are emerging that (in effect) push new information to you in as it's posted and allow you to switch rapidly between different information sets as well.
His comments and the ensuing thread mirror much of the discussion around the Sherfari idea (follow-up). I envy Dave...I think this would be a really fun project to work on for Apple.
Update: yet another post/thread on Dave's weblog re: Browser++. The ensuing thread is useful only if you like reading about what technically-inclined power users (about 0.0002% of the population) want out of a web browser. User-centered whuzzah?
iBook all better
A trip to the SoHo Apple store, a visit to the Genius Bar, and my once-ailing iBook is all better (new battery). Lots of people seemed to be in there with power problems (2 iPods and a TiBook). I've heard rumblings of problems with Apple's batteries...not a good thing for me (or them).
Moneyball directed by Soderbergh?
Wait, Steven Soderbergh is directing the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' Moneyball? When did this wonderfulness happen?!! Last I heard, the director was the guy who did Marley & Me. Perhaps Pitt put the kibosh on that and lobbied for Soderbergh? (via fimoculous)
Kindling
Thank you to this week's RSS sponsor, Kindling by Arc90. Many small companies and groups don't need the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink power and feature set of software like Outlook/Exchange Server, wikis, and enterprise blogging software...they often do too much and yet don't quite do what you'd like them to. Kindling is one of a number of niche web apps that attempt to do one thing well; in this case, that one thing is small-group collaboration around ideas. With Kindling, you and your co-workers (or miscellaneous idea-mates) can suggest ideas, vote on them, and then take action on the best ones. Check out the demo to learn more.
The purple by-county map of the 2004 election
The purple by-county map of the 2004 election results adjusted for population. This is close to a true picture of how "divided" we are as a country.
Invading the South
I'm off to Raleigh, NC this weekend to visit some friends. I don't think I've ever been to Raleigh...well, except for the airport. I think everyone who's ever flown in an airplane has been to the Raleigh-Durham airport at some time or another. Anyway, no posts this weekend probably.
Battle search engine
Intrigued by a stat that John Battelle pulled out of a Wired News story on search, that "the number of unique visitors to Yahoo Search trailed Google by a mere 10 percent", I checked my search referers to kottke.org for December 2003 and found a somewhat different story:
Google 60%
Yahoo 22%
AOL 14%
MSN 3%
Earthlink 0.5%
Now, inferring the market share of a search engine from the referers is tricky because you can't account for algorithm and display differences** (that is, Google may just love my site 3X more than Yahoo! does), so, you know, grain of salt and all that.
** Yahoo!, AOL, and Earthlink search are all currently powered by Google (making their effective search market share 97%), although they may determine and display the results in different ways.
Long profile of David Simon and The
Long profile of David Simon and The Wire in the New Yorker this week. Haven't read it yet, but digging in now.
Update: Ok, all done. I thought this observation about the two main groups of fans of the show (urban poor and media critics) was canny:
Sometimes the fan base of "The Wire" seems like the demographics of many American cities -- mainly the urban poor and the affluent elite, with the middle class hollowed out.
The last bit of the article talks about a new show that Simon's thinking of doing for HBO about New Orleans musicians.
I like the Currentform Web
I like the Currentform Web site; some good design-type links in the weblog portion.
Warren Buffet's letter to shareholders
Warren Buffet has published his latest annual letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, the giant holding company of which he is CEO and chairman. His letters are always a fun read.
The table on the preceding page, recording both the 44-year performance of Berkshire's book value and the S&P 500 index, shows that 2008 was the worst year for each. The period was devastating as well for corporate and municipal bonds, real estate and commodities. By year end, investors of all stripes were bloodied and confused, much as if they were small birds that had strayed into a badminton game.
As the year progressed, a series of life-threatening problems within many of the world's great financial institutions was unveiled. This led to a dysfunctional credit market that in important respects soon turned non-functional. The watchword throughout the country became the creed I saw on restaurant walls when I was young: "In God we trust; all others pay cash."
Paging through, I was surprised at how much stock Berkshire owns in some major companies, including 13.1% of American Express, 8.6% of Coca-Cola, 8.9% of Kraft, and 18.4% of The Washington Post. Berkshire's stock price is of interest as well; the stock has never split and the current price for one share is more than $73,000.
Selling out
Jesus Jones' frontman Mike Edwards on selling out vs. cashing out:
We didn't hesitate to accept the offer [to play at a corporate conference] and I can't think why we should have. I recall from my music-press-reading days that accepting money from The Man is wrong but I can't remember why, or how it differs from signing a recording contract or playing a heavily sponsored festival.
Like other teens, when I was younger I formed a notion about the purity of art versus payment for art (this correlates inversely with the number of 15-year-olds paying mortgages) that made it an Offence In Rock to accept an honest month's pay for an honest three minutes' work. Even then there seemed to be some contradiction between punk ideology and the Great Rock'n' Roll Swindle.
See also Dave Eggers' famous sell-out rant in his interview with the Harvard Advocate.
Kottke Stalker
With apologies to Gawker Stalker, here are some NYC celebrity sighting reports I've gotten from my readers:
Anna Wintour leaping Matrix-style from a black Lincoln Town Car on 43rd Street behind 4 Times Square, descending upon four unsuspecting interns. I have never before seen such exquisitely-toned intern ass kicked so completely. Her beatings administered, Lady Wintour flew off into the morning sky, the world flexing behind her.
Samuel L. Jackson standing outside of Madame Tussaud's in Times Square. He was very nice, posing for picture after picture with people.
Everyone doing cocaine. (Ed. note: This is funny because everyone in NYC does coke -- how quaint! -- and it makes us all feel extremely cool to mention it as often as we can.)
Paris Hilton on the subway platform at 135th Street, waiting for the 2 train to the Bronx.
Colin Farrell having sexual intercourse with six famous young women at the same time. Out of respect for their privacy, we won't reveal the names of the six women. Present were Britney Spears, Winona Ryder (boy, did he!), Tanya Harding, Hilary Duff, Kylie Minogue, and Dame Judi Dench. Colin ain't picky.
Graydon Carter riding Tina Brown like a pony through Midtown at 12:15pm. Gray and blonde locks flowed majestically behind. Of course, it may have been an unknown man riding an unknown woman like a pony through Midtown because I have no clue what Graydon Carter and Tina Brown look like and neither do you.
Every actor that has ever been in an independent film in a tiny vegan coffee shop (so hip!) in the West Village (so, so hip!). Seriously, they were all there. I dare you to name someone who wasn't there. When we left, Philip Seymour Hoffman was leading a rousing game of Who's Keeping It Most Real?
Ben Affleck and J.Lo. absolutely nowhere near the block.
Writers and editors
Upon my return to civilization last week, Greg Knauss wrote up some thoughts he had after doing the remaindered links here for two weeks. His thoughts, reproduced in full:
Over the past two weeks, David Jacobs, Anil Dash and I have attempted to reproduce (in some halting way) Jason Kottke, while the actual Jason Kottke was
in rehabon his honeymoon. The attempt, on my part at least, has been an abject failure. Or haven't you noticed all the crappy links with "GK" at the end of them? Go-kart magazines? What the hell?Like most of the disasters I've had a hand in, I've got a theory that both explains what happened and exonerates me. Ducking responsibility sounds better if you put on academic airs about it.
The theory: There are two kinds of bloggers, referential and experiential. Kottke is one. I, now two weeks too late in realizing this, am another.
The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere: Look at this. Referential bloggers are reporters, delivering pointers to and snippets of information, insight or entertainment happening out there, on the Intraweb. They can, and do, add their own information, insight and entertainment to the links they unearth -- extrapolations, juxtapositions, even lengthy and personal anecdotes -- but the outward direction of their focus remains their distinguishing feature.
The experiential blogger is inwardly directed, drawing entries from personal experience and opinion: How about this. They are storytellers (and/or bores), drawing whatever they have to offer from their own perspective. They can, and do, add links to supporting or explanatory information, even unique and undercited external sources. But their motivation, their impetus, comes from a desire to supply narrative, not reference it.
There's nothing here to imply that one type of blogger is better than the other. There are literally thousands -- OK, hundreds... OK, at least a dozen -- of both kinds that are valuable additions to the on-going conversation/food-fight/furry-cuddle that is the Internet. My point is that Jason Kottke is a very, very good referential blogger and I am a very, very bad one. And I'm sure I wouldn't have trouble finding a link that expresses this sentiment (many, many times over, with varying degrees of vehemence), but I'd rather say it from my own experience:
Welcome back, Jason. You've been missed.
After reading Greg's thoughts, Meg reminded me that Rebecca Blood had made a distinction between filter-style and journal-style bloggers in Weblogs: A History and Perspective. If you want to generalize outside the realm of weblogs, they're both talking about the difference between writers and editors1.
At a party a couple of years ago, I was talking to Nick Denton and he was puzzled by the number of bloggers who were getting book deals and told me that "the natural upgrade path for bloggers is from blogging to editing, not to writing". As Greg and Rebecca note, that doesn't apply to everyone, but it sure describes what I do here. kottke.org has always been more edited than written. I've never particularly thought of myself as a writer (I get by, but I wish I were better), but I do pay a lot of attention to how the writing is presented and contextualized...how the overall package "feels".
[1] And if you want to go even further out on the metaphorical gangplank here, the writer/editor dichotomy compares well to that of the musician/DJ. ↩
Proposed Google News redesign
Holy design issues, Batman! Google's news headlines page is a great idea, but it's impossible to scan quickly. Perhaps something like this quickie redesign would work better.
