y blog?

ya'll may have readers and admirers and butts in conference seats. But I have brothers and sisters.

And in other news, the hamster's awake and eating. He is currently challenging Madame's hamster for the longest life award. He is the father hamster who saw his wife eat 13 babies, the father hamster i mistakenly thought was the mother hamster and put him in the cage with the babies for an entire day, which is why they never got nourishment and when I switched parents, the mother ate them. The second round of kids went better. No one got eaten that I know of. But the father and one of the son's did get into a pretty big fight one time and the old man kicked his son's ass. This hamster's lived so long (for hamsters that is) that I don't even remember his name. I think he's the original Marshmallow who became Max when we realized he was a he and not a she. That was after the 13-hamster-baby-parent-gender-mixup snafu.

Sometimes things don't turn out like you thought.

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knowsitall

There are so many thing I like about Tony Pierce as a blogger, person, Christian, twisted unit, writer, webworker, multi-culturalist, laist, and other things. I should have known that when he got around to group blogging, he'd find a way to do that right too.

anyways i didnt want people to think that laist was the tony pierce show because believe it or not the whole world isnt as into your pal as you think. plus it wasnt like they were discovering me naturally, they were being sent someone from mitch & murray who enjoyed drinking coffee.

long story short friday we had 17 posts by 15 different contributers.

now thats a group.

i get my titles the old fashioned way

i drink a little smoke a little and when midnight rolls around i get on the scale

then i write down my weight and write down the first title that comes to my head

this week i was so busy that i wasnt able to talk about lost or the sopranos or about how i talked to chris in africa who told me that a goat took a dump on her bag while they were IN a cab.

of all the things i teased her that would probably happen to her, that was not on my neverending list of jungle-related comedy. the lord always has the last laugh.

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simplyacquired?

I first saw simplyhired back when they launched the site, had a brief email exchange with the folks there based on my support for the site, and thought it was both powerful and easy to use--the first and best among lots of aggregated job sites to follow.

I wrote about simplyhired a year ago, thinking that a large enterprise might snap it up or at least partner with this kind of site rather than continue to lose valuable employees from the drain of attrition THROUGH these kinds of sites. Mighta been smart. But the Web is smarter.

Simplyhired had an odd effect on my own freelance business. A year or so ago, when I was worried about enough work coming in to pay the bills, whether or not I could continue to make it sans corporate job, I'd search on simplyhired and ease my mind: there are jobs out there. That knowledge--fooling myself, reassuring myself, playing mind games with a half-loaded deck, whatever you want to call it--actually helped me hold out and stay focused on building my own business.

I'm not out of the woods on the worry front. One half day at a time. But simplyhired, in an odd way, kept me on course, for better or for worst, through it's incredible database of jobs I didn't have to take.

We learn from TechCrunch that Google may be looking to acquire simplyhired. Say that three times fast.

As Google becomes THE source of support for the global virtual enterprise of miscellaneous, loosely joined workers, the acquisition makes sense. I hope it works out for the simplynhired folks.

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Blame the Twitterer, Not the Twitter?

"Like Rivers Cuomo on serotonin reuptake inhibitors."

"Indeed, a whole lot of early adopters hate Twitter with Ted Kaczynski intensity. Seriously, there are netizens out there that hate Twitter worse than the third season of Lost. Twitter’s attraction is easy to assess for those interested in the high of new technology and the camaraderie of nonstop contact. It’s the next logical step after the design inanity that is MySpace. But what’s with the animosity? I’m all for hating things, but a lot of these bloggers are downright nasty."

heh.

Look, you know I've had my on-again-off-again with Twitter. I respect Ev--he's one of the reasons I'm here blogging. But when it comes to how Twitter has evolved--or has failed to--I'm left stumped.

I checked in recently and was astounded to see that nothing had changed there. Pretty much the same vapid chatter that made us sign up for the Do Not Call List on our home phones.

It wasn't until I realized that I was PAYING to get twitters as Instant Messages on Cingular -- shelling $80 out of my pocket to find out that my favorite Silicon People were once again having dinner -- that Twitter jumped the shark for me. Maybe that's not surprising.

But what does surprise me is the lack of innovation among the users on Twitter. By now, any other open space -- even given character limitations -- would have birthed something new -- TwitterPoetry. Limerick Jam. Twit for Charity. Adopt-a-Twit. Something!

What I see? The same folks eating and drinking and meeting. It is a complete lack of innovation at the user level that can only be fully understood upon further examination of the service's power users, who continue to use Twitter to do the same thing they have used it to do from the start: Annoy other people.

Among the many things twitter is NOT, please count blogging. Text messaging charges will apply.

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one more for the road: I still think Ev has a good chance of being the first start-up maker to be double-bought by google.

guitarman

Just now, George is working out on guitar--sounds great. he's getting in touch with his inner high end.

Me, I'm thinking about cleaning the hamster cage, which means I'm getting in touch with my inner hamster. Insert your own jokes.

Telling your story

Have you seen Blogger Stories yet? One of my favorite Atlantans and blogologists, Toby Bloomberg, started the site to tell the stories of how people have been touched by blogs, podcasts, vlogs and other online interactions.

Toby and her featured guests are up to 90 chapters of stories contributed by bloggers across the globe. Reading Blogger Stories is a good way to find new-to-you bloggers to add to your aggrevator. For example, My Back Pages. I've been enjoying/empathizing with Kristen's sleep probs.

Anyone notice I'm moderating comments?

I know you have. I am sorry if I don't approve your comments quickly. Also I understand if that means you decide not to comment. I'm thinking about what to do with comments as my blogging is sporadic these days. For now at least I'll moderate.

It's amazing how many racist dimwits have come out of the closet and into comments since my newfound fame of a month or so ago (ten years, five minutes--time isn't really keeping itself straight for me these days).

So, yeah, I'm moderating comments. Jerks, death threats and racist anonycowards won't get through. I don't need a court order or a code of conduct to make it so. Isn't that something.

I may be sporadic, but I'm still here.

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shelley on damn interesting on Tuskegee

When people say there should be no Black History Month, I say ok, but can we have Black American Holocaust Month? No? What about never forget? Americans CRAVE to forget. We are the most forgettenist bunch of plow-ahead-without-a-tear-Protestant-work-ethic people to inhabit this magnificent orb.

To wit, Shelley looks at Damn Interesting, where Alan "Hot Pastrami" Bellows has an enlightening account of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Just one of many reasons why Black Americans sometimes find it a wee bit difficult to 'get over it.' Hey, have you ever thought or said that yourself--about slavery, about Tuskegee, about lynchings? Ever thought it while listening to a co-worker of color on a rant about politics?

If so, have you said 'get over it' that to a Jewish co-worker with relatives killed in the Holocaust? No? Why not? If you live in America, the comparison is worth thinking about.

Shelley Quotes:

In the mid-1940s, however, the recently discovered antibiotic penicillin was determined to be a safe and effective cure for syphilis, and the US government sponsored a nationwide public health program in an effort to eradicate the disease.

The researchers at Tuskegee, in a bid to preserve the fruits of their labors, kept the cure a secret from their subjects. They also supplied local doctors with lists of the participants' names, and instructed the physicians not to provide penicillin lest they interfere with a government health study. The administrators of the experiment were not interested in saving the lives of the black farmers, they were interested only in dissecting them on an autopsy table. As one of the doctors unceremoniously stated, "We have no further interest in these patients until they die.

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Few of the researchers who participated in the study ever admitted to any lapse in ethics, most of them insisting that they were merely following the directions of their superiors.

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everything's coming up misc.

Excited to get a new-book-fresh-smelling copy of David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous today.

So far, I love the little yellow dot, the blurbs by heavy hitters like Esther Dyson and Chris Anderson. I love the term "information omnivores" which has summoned for me visions of bizarre half-human, half-dinosaur creatures grazing in a field lush with data. Yum!

I love David's picture on the jacket, its sparkly blueness. And -- as if you can't tell -- I haven't started reading it yet. But I'm on my way.

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Gabriel Brings a Sledgehammer Down on DRM Issue

Smart smart smart smart. We7 is a soon-to-be-launched music download solution that makes sense for all constituents. It got Peter Gabriel's investor $ and is getting a close -- albiet paranoid -- look from the folks currently sucking distribution and marketing dollars out of artists' pockets.

The new company, based in Oxford, appears to be targeting the UK first with its advert-funding model. Using technology that the company calls "MediaGraft," We7 will dynamically insert 10 second advertisements at the beginning of songs when they are first downloaded. The advertisements will be tailored to the particular user requesting the track, and a version without ads can be downloaded one month later.

Gabriel has been involved in several innovative music startups recently, including The Filter, an automatic playlist generation program that is also free to download. He was also a backer of OD2, a "digital service provider" that has formed the foundation of many European online music stores.

Put a social network behind it and BAM you've got an end-around on MySpace. A 'lil sneak attack. Hey, you never know. I've been right before. I think once or something.

Meanwhile, blogging sucks.

Film at 11.

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