For the Fourth of July, Maria Kalman’s sketchblog on Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant and flawed man.
If you want to understand this country and its people and what it means to be optimistic and complex and tragic and wrong and courageous, you need to go to [Jefferson's] home in Virginia. Monticello.
This does not absolve him of the wrongs he did, but I have some better perspective and respect for the man. [ via Terry Karney ]
NPR interviewed Denise Paolucci, one of the founders of the new journal/blog site Dreamwidth, last week.
She’s skeptical about advertising-supported social networking sites, and wrote a multipart essay last year walking through the problems with it (the essay was originally posted to her Live Journal account, but has been moved to Dreamwidth.)
The primary problem she argues, is diminishing returns on ads, resulting in lower prices, and lower prices requiring replacing more editorial content on the page with ads. The reason why there’s a diminishing return for ads on a social networking site: people come there to communicate, not shop. Unless you have the capability (like Facebook) to place a narrowly targeted ad with a high likelihood of getting some sort of conversion into sales or action, then trying to fund your site through ads will not succeed.
That skepticism, and Live Journal’s switch to an advertising-supported model, spurred her to take a branch of the open source Live Journal code, and start Dreamwidth.
Dreamwidth supports itself through a paid accounts system. Users pay as little as USD5 a month up to USD50 a year.
Disclaimer: I am a charter subscriber to Dreamwidth with a lifetime account. If you’d like to try it, please comment on this post. I have a small number of free invite accounts I can share.
Jonathan McIntosh remixed Buffy the Vampire Slayer with current pop-culture darling Twilight to show how Buffy Summers would respond to Edward Cullen’s creepy stalker overtures, resulting in the Best. Fanvid. Ever. [Via Cleolinda.]
Miroslav Satan, the NHL player with the funniest URL on Yahoo!, http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/players/666, got to hoist the Stanley Cup tonight. Congratulations to you and the rest of Penguins.
Of course, dammit, I want to see the Sharks hold that trophy, and soon.
My partner Cynthia has a piece in a new collection of essays inspired by WisCon.
We ran into Timmi Duchamp, the publisher, at the Minneapolis airport. We were all on the same connecting flight to Madison for WisCon 33. So we got to see the finished book.
Forgive the crappy iPhone picture here. I’ll replace it with a better one of Cynthia holding her contributor copy after she gets it in the mail.
Duchamp’s imprint, Aqueduct Press, has published a volume of essays related to each year’s convention, starting with WisCon 30. Lst year at WisCon 32, the big conversations were about race, fandom, and feminism as well as trolling. Cynthia’s essay is a response to the troll who showed up and trashed the people on a panel she moderated last year.
If the troll wanted people to shut up about feminism, race, and gender, they failed since Sylvia Kelso, an Australian fan and writer, will edit the WisCon 33 volume.
In 2001 nearly everyone hated Microsoft’s Smart Tags.
You may recall that Smart Tags were a failed IE feature for adding annotations to websites.
Eight years later, why is everyone now fascinated by Blerp, which sounds like Smart Tags with a cuter, Web 2.0 name?
I did send an email to Blerp pointing out the 2001 A List Apart article on Smart Tags, and asking if they’ll support a “don’t-blerp” meta tag like Microsoft added, after protest, to prevent smart tags.
My main complaint, if you’re managing a brand, or identity, is that Blerp is yet another darn social networking site you’ll have to add and keep track of: on every URL you publish. Oy.
When J.G. Ballard died last month, the New York Times, in their obituary, could not deal with the fact that Ballard wrote science fiction, and infamously wrote: But that’s like calling Brave New World science fiction.
Ursula K. Le Guin, who also writes science fiction (while literary critics go into denial), has had enough of that noise.
The Tiptree Award, for the best science fiction exploring gender published in 2008, goes to Patrick Ness for The Knife of Never Letting Go and Nisi Shawl for her short story collection Filter House.
Shawl is also co-author, with Cynthia Ward, of Writing the Other: A Practical Guide, a handbook on writing characters from different cultures, genders, and sexual orientations than your own.
Hooray for Nissi and Patrick! See you at WisCon.
Well, looks like we're good part of the way to Beggars in Spain.
I was amused to read that students are taking Adderall not to be top of their class, but to be able to manage a full course load, and a full night life.
Meanwhile, as a greying post-boomer, cognitive and memory enhancing drugs don't sound like a bad thing.
This entry was originally posted at http://whump.dreamwidth.org/1837.html. Please comment there using OpenID.Leonard Cohen at The Paramount Theater
I don't know if there will be evenings like this again.
Posted via LiveJournal.app.
Several folks have asked, if Amazon's deranking of GLBT, disabled, and other books was the fault of an improper mapping, then why did it affect some titles as far back as February?
The Ja(y)nes at Dear Author have pointed out that Amazon started pulling in category data for titles.
If you look at the category data in the Dear Author post, you'll see that Heather Has Two Mommies has the Gay & Lesbian stamp, while A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality doesn't.
This is consistent with Amazon's official explanation: a content filter scheme incorrectly mapped anything categorized as GLBT and other categories into the Adult filter and deranked it.
So how come Mark Probst's book got deranked back in February?
Probst's book is new, and the newer titles will likely have more complete category metadata. If the mapping error had been in Amazon's system back then, Probst's book would had been an early causality.
Amazon has a huge catalog, so the mappings may not had been applied across all ISBNs, or they may had not had sufficient category data. In the February time frame, derankings may have been isolated.
Roll forward to April, and you've had more time to run mapping jobs and update the resulting data stores, as well as update the collection with category data.
Older editions and or paperback printings of titles that either don't have category data, or incomplete category data, are spared from the deranking.
More and more titles have been deranked and removed from search, books that don't have the blacklisted categories percolate up in the search results, and Amazon's caught out pantless.
Another thing, pointed out in a post by Soft Skull Press Publisher Richard Nash, when you're doing content filtering, it's easy for what he calls the non-normative stuff--GLBT, sex-positive books for people with disabilities, sexuality and race--to be vanished, because we have a cultural norm that codes those things as dangerous, and it's too easy for someone not being mindful to add those categories to a 'smut' filter.
If you want to try a multi-camera shoot of an event, like a TEDx talk, David Pouge found the Flip HD camcorders useful for static shots to augment the close ups, except for a couple of glitches (AV sync in long shots, and different color temperatures on the Flips vs. his Canon.). [ via Saijanai Kuhn ]
A simple, step-by-step guide to derailing awkward conversations by dismissing and trivializing your opposition's perspective and experience.
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abostick59 ]
