scottandrew.com

Rock on my demon brother

walkngbird: hanging out with the Jishman tomorrow?
mathowie: no, I gotta obey the D
mathowie: going to a concert
walkngbird: ahhh
walkngbird: Hail Satan!
mathowie: precisely
walkngbird: I'm trying to invent an emoticon that represents the rock-n-roll devil sign
walkngbird: http://www.av1611.org/amysalut.html
mathowie: oh jesus
walkngbird: i had no idea Amy Grant worshipped the Prince Of Lies
mathowie: \nn/
mathowie: \^^/
walkngbird: \m/
mathowie: \_/
walkngbird: close enough
mathowie: rock on my demon brother

I hate daylight savings time

I hate daylight savings time. It's dark when I get up; it's dark when I get out of work. Hooray. Tomorrow is Halloween. I still don't have a pumpkin. By the time I back to the city after a crowded, hourlong train ride in the dark, I'm too depressed to drag myself to the market and get a pumpkin to carve. Dammit, I will have a pumpkin.

Geocacheing? Bah. Letterboxing!

From the scottandrew.com archives, November 13 2000:

Sorry. I just haven't had much to say recently. What a boring country this is. So boring, nothing going on. Nope. Nothing at all.

Ha ha ha. Ha.

Over at the Mozilla

Over at the Mozilla project, the drive for release 1.0 continues. The Mozilla DOM team is looking for public input on which DOM 2 Core bugs ( here's the list) are considered most critical and in need of fixing before shipping Mozilla 1.0. If you're a web developer who depends on DOM 2 support for developing web applications, why not sign up on the Mozilla DOM newsgroup or Peter-Paul Koch's DOM discussion list and voice your opinions on what should be fixed pronto and what can slide until later.

Doc Searls' new approach

Doc Searls' new approach: more linkin', less thinkin'.

Brendan Eich: the Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto. Also, the party bug!

CSS samurai Eric Meyer, author of Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference and one of my co-authors, has created a cool CSS2 Reference Sidebar for Netscape 6/Mozilla. Click the button to automatically add the sidebar, then open it to find a wealth of CSS-2 info organized in a set of tabbed DHTML panels. Clicking an item whisks you to the corresponding spec page in the W3C site. You. Need. This.

Mirror Project XML-RPC

I wrote this example app using the JavaScript XML-RPC messenger to pull a random photo from the Mirror Project via Aaron's RPC API.

I'm happy to report that (so far) the Mozilla 0.9.5 build seems to be extremely stable and much faster. I've also started using the Mozilla mail client, which for all practical purposes is the same as the Netscape Mail client of yore but with the nice addition of multiple POP account support, among other features. I've always liked Netscape Mail over clients like Eudora, if only for the threaded message views. Now, if I can find a PGP plug-in for this thing...

The first Weblogger User Group meeting is underway just a few blocks from me right now. You can follow along as the meeting notes are blogged in near-real time.

Mozilla 0.9.5 released. New

Mozilla 0.9.5 released. New features include -- egads! -- a JavaScript debugger called Venkman.

Meanwhile, Operation Enduring Book Project continues. 80+ pages of DOM reference.

Net News Ethics

Online Journalism Review: A Scorecard for Net News Ethics. This piece was published on 9/20 in the wake of the WTC/Pentagon attacks. It doesn't address weblogs specifically, but it's great reading for anyone interested in the idea of weblogs making the leap from homepage to news journalism.

I think the type of news reporting seen happening on weblogs can be roughly defined as "nonlinear reporting." In my short experience with news writing, news traditionally goes through a multistep process on its way to the public:

1. Initial report
2. Confirmation
3. Verification (fact-checking)
4. Composition (writing)
5. Editorial review
6. Publication
7. Clarification (or in some cases, Retraction)

A weblog allows a writer to go immediately from Step 1 to Step 6 (stopping briefly at Step 4) without the benefit (or in some people's view, hindrance) of the intermediate steps. Publication usually happens immediately after the Initial Report, with the other steps only occuring when readers begin to respond, assuming there's a method of response. I have to agree with Rusty's sentiment that highly collaborative nature of sites like MetaFilter and kuro5hin help solidify the "trust" factor of those sites by drawing upon the resources and knowledge of the community to verify or challenge the postings.

A lot of attention has been focused on weblogs "scooping" the traditional news outlets. True, word travels faster in cyberspace without all that pesky fact-checking and review, so it's hard for me to see this as a good thing beyond Step 1. But that's not to say weblogs can't improve as credible news sources. Weblogs are already faster; can they become better?

On a related note, Matt is a bit upset to be quoted out of context in this LA Times article on weblogs. It sounds like the reporter had already came to a conclusion and was simply looking for facts to support her view. See, even Big Media can't be trusted.

This will probably be my last mini-treatise on weblogs for awhile, as I have stuff to do and some people seem to believe I've declared a weblog jihad. The first meeting of the Silicon Valley Weblog User Group is taking place this coming Tuesday.

"Constrained" by Objectivity

SiliconValley.com: "webloggers aren't constrained by objectivity or fact-checking."

So we have a new vacuum cleaner, a little Dirt Devil jobbie I picked up a month ago. It has a clear plastic cylinder where I can watch the dirt, dustbunnies and other bits of detrius swirl about as I sweep. It's rather disgusting. Nearly all the vacuum cleaners nowadays have these transparent panels through which you can see the grime being collected, as if the manufactures thought it was necessary to prove the sweeper was doing its job. Gross. Who thought this was a good idea?

Nutjobs At Home

Let's not forget that America has its share of homegrown wackos. This the home of the Unabomber, the Heaven's Gate suicide cult and the still-unsolved Tylenol murders. I would not be at all suprised to find out that the ongoing anthrax scare is not the work of terrorists but of an apocalyptic lunatic, taking his cue from the spectacular WTC tragedy. After all, who could watch the events of 9/11 and not think for a moment that this was the beginning of the End?

There's a discussion of the effectiveness of weblogs and collaborative media as journalism happening over at kuro5hin. K5 founder Rusty writes in his rebuttal:

I don't think, as Scott Andrew seems to, that "journalistic ethics" are the sole property of an elite trained few. I think all of us basically grasp the idea that when you report news, you should try to make it true. But much more powerful than that is the basic impulse to make sure that when someone else reports the news, they make sure it's true. Collaborative media [like K5 and MetaFilter] relies on the simple fact that people like to argue. I don't care how many people CNN runs any given report by, we run it by more. More people, in most cases, equals more accountability, equals better quality. Where weblogs fall down is that they involve fewer people, and no community responsibility at all.

It's a good essay, and the discussion thread contains some very intelligent arguments. I'm still reading through it.

Pictures of Fray Day 5 are up at the FD site, including this one of yours truly doing his best George Dubya impression.

More Weblog Thoughts

Following up on last week's weblog thread, I found this interesting point at Paul Boutin's site:

There are now millions of people online who will read a clumsily written, clunkily laid out first-person web site instead of trusting anything that looks like "the media" to them. Are they excessively cynical? Sure. But if you want to communicate effectively with someone, you have to do it on their terms, not yours.

Paul's a senior editor at Wired magazine. He's currently musing about how to get a weblog into Afghanistan.

Partly because I enjoy intellectual debate, and partly because I'm a masochist, I threw my hat in the ring over at the weblogger user group list. To clarify one point: I am not saying weblogging is not journalism. That's silly. I just feel that if weblogs are ready to provide a serious counterpoint to big media, weblogs should be ready to be show some accountability.

Still, a few people have emailed me privately, stating they are shocked -- shocked! -- that I would ever suggest we be responsible webloggers. How dare I impugn free speech?

scottandrew.com: representing the devil since 1999.

PS: did you notice how today's post had nothing to do with DHTML? See? Trust no one!

How Weblogs Fail

In hindsight, I really wish I could have attended the Seybold panel on the role of weblogs ("amateur journalism") with regard to the events of 9/11, because I might have asked a question or two about the utter failure of weblogs as outlets for objective journalism. True, weblogs served a pivotal purpose in quickly disseminating information, but that began to wane almost immediately in the days following 9/11.

Some examples:

- One of my favorite weblogs, which used to be a great source of info on the attacks, has now descended into a morass of not-quite-relevant linkage coupled with thinly veiled anti-Arab invective.

- Another favorite weblogger linked to a recent story about the outbreak of an Ebola-like hemorrhagic virus on the Pakistan border, but added his own headline: "A test of bioterrorism?" The article plainly states that the first cases of infection were reported in June, well before 9/11, and the virus is known to exist in the areas for years; but the extra headline adds a sensationalist, alarmist tenor that completely changes the context of the posting.

- Quite a few webloggers have pointed to DEBKAFile as a source of information coming from the Mideast region. It's pretty obvious to even the casual reader that DEBKAFile is rather disturbingly biased, in many cases directly inserting opinion and commentary into "exclusive" reports cultivated from "military sources." (The tagline alone -- "we start where the media stop" -- is enough to give one pause) The DEBKAFile meme spread to other weblogs, as memes often do. (Update: The legitimacy of DEBKAFile is now being debated at MetaFilter, which is itself buckling under the weight of rampant rumor and conjecture in the wake of 9/11.)



This is all fine and dandy, except for one caveat: it ain't news. Webloggers pride themselves on their individual views and value their right to express them publicly, and well they should. But I fear the majority of webloggers don't possess even a basic grasp of journalistic ethics. And it's this lack of understanding that could damage the budding reputation of weblogs as journalism. You can't simply change or add your own headline and expect the context to remain valid (this is why the media often employs headline editors). You can't always add a few lines of personal commentary. Once you've added your voice, it's simply not news anymore -- it's opinion. It's editorial.

And in the cases of the three weblogs mentioned above, it had an off-putting effect: I personally no longer view those weblogs as valid news sources.

But that's the whole idea of a weblog, right? Links of interest, with personal commentary? Anything else runs contrary to the spirit of 'blogging. The whole system is inherently designed so you can be your own spin doctor, with editorial accountability and fact-checking completely optional. While weblogs may play a significant role in promoting amateur journalism, I would argue that weblogs have quite a way to go before they can be considered serious journalism. One wonders if, amid the talk of big media overthrow and revolution, webloggers are at all interested in becoming more responsible writers and reporters.

Okay, back to DHTML and JavaScript tomorrow. Promise.

(update: Robert Scoble has started a weblog user group in the Silicon Valley area.)

W3C Patent Policy

Hello from Cleveland. We interrupt the radio silence to inform you (in case you did not already know) that the W3C is considering a draft to allow patents on web standards. The draft was introduced in August with little attention, and the deadline for outside comments slipped past while our collective attention was focused on the the 9/11 attacks. The deadline for comments has since been extended to October 11, in response to loud protest from developers.

Imagine having to pay a licensing fee to develop technology that utilizes CSS, XML or even HTML. Um, yeah, shouldn't we be involved in this before the technologies we use every day are licensed away? Valuable links below:

http://www.webstandards.org
http://www.io.com/persist1/info/011001.html
http://www.zeldman.com/
http://www.scripting.com

Whether or not you support software patents, make sure you take the time to read and make your voice heard on this issue.