Month: July 2003

A weblog for the ears

Dave sits on the Group W bench and contemplates the significance of Chris Lydon’s “weblog for the ears”:


Do-it-yourself radio with no sponsors, no interest other than curiosity, a searcher and his friends seeking the truth and nothing but the truth.

Chris continues to post fascinating interviews, now at a rate of two or three per week. Put ’em on your mp3 player and listen on the way to/from work.

I get personal with BloggerCon

Tonight I attended a BloggerCon planning meeting at Harvard. Meeting minutes should be appearing tonight or tomorrow. I’ll update this post with the permalink when it comes online. The meeting was pretty intense. Mark your calendars, folks, it’s October 4, 2003 in Cambridge, MA.

On the way home I came up with a new logo idea for Bryan Bell. I was listening my MP3 player as I walked, but I had only one of the earpieces in because I wanted to be able to hear what was happening around me. That was okay, but I realized how much better and more viscerally satisfying music is in stereo.

Anyway, that got me to thinking that, if we do our job well with BloggerCon, we’ll inspire something on the order of a mono to stereo evolution in weblogging. So here’s the logo idea: a stylized graphic of a person listening to something through one headphone, cupping the single speaker around their ear and straining to hear. With the other hand, the listener is reaching for a second headphone—that represents BloggerCon 2003—and raising it up to the other ear.

I suppose the metaphor is a bit dated and maybe even corny. But, if weblogging has taught me anything, it’s knowing how and when to say, “that’s my idea and I’m stickin’ to it!”

Update The meeting notes are here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggerCon/lhcnotes

Borders on paid content

News.com: “Will Web users ever pay for content?”

Borders gets a few things really right but IMHO is also missing out on a few realities. Take this statement for example: “Very soon, you’ll see that the content that’s left to be free is content that will not be trusted; content that has a bias.” Hmm, he seems to be ignorant of the notion media bias, not to mention the authenticity that the typical weblogger brings. Still, I think they could succeed if the price point is right. I bet they could do some innovative things around combined subscriptions and levels of search access to their moby archives.

Blogging and the Howard Dean Campaign on NPR

I turned on All Things Considered this evening and heard the word “blog” several times to my astonishment. The story is about online fundraising in the Howard Dean campaign. Quote: “A task that, if they succeed by doing what they’ve been doing, could remake American politics more radically than any reform bill passed by Congress.”

Story: Dean Makes New Fundraising Push Online. The hyperlink to the audio stream is at the top in blue, on the story title.

Radio tip of the day

If you use Radio as your news aggregator and are tired of seeing warnings about POSTDATA when refreshing in your browser, here is the way out: refresh by clicking one of the other headings in the navigation bar at the top, e.g. “Home” or “Stories”, and then click on “News”. In the end it’s the same number of clicks as before, but it requires smaller mouse movements.

Nerds only: An even better fix would be to have Radio redirect back to itself after each Delete, to clear any POST data that the browser is caching.

Lydon online

In the middle-late 90s I would sometimes listen to a radio show called The Connection. At the time I remember thinking, this is too good.

The topics were thoughtful and provocative. The guests were world class. The callers, everyday people, were just as sharp and, in their own ways, just as world class as the guests.

More than anything else, host Christopher Lydon made The Connection extraordinary. It’s hard to put one’s finger on how exactly. But something Chris wrote in a recent weblog post helps to explain. He disclaims in this first weblog-themed interview, “I think of myself as a journalist and all-purpose searcher, not at all a techie.” It is probably that searcher characteristic that appealed to so many of us. We could hear the wonder and impatience in his voice. We participated in it. We sought and discovered and learned and made connections together.

The Connection’s pace was incredible at ten new episodes per week. I always felt little guilty that I didn’t have the time to take in every episode. This is too good to last.

It was too good to last, as it turned out. A few years ago The Connection’s creators had a falling out with management and parted ways.

The good news is that Chris Lydon & co. have continued to do what they do so well, with the results often appearing on line. Here are a few pointers to recent activity:

Weblog-hosted interviews: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/lydon/

The Whole Wide World: http://world.law.harvard.edu/shows.html

Archived broadcasts from 2001: http://world.law.harvard.edu/chrislydon.html

AaronSw: TV searching

Aaron Swartz: “This reminds me of an idea I had the other day: TV searching. Google hooks up a bunch of their machines to video capture cards and begins recording all the TV channels. Then, they make a full-text available using the closed captioning information.”

Offline day

Things I did today offline:

  1. Took my daughter to the playground.
  2. Bought a new microwave oven.
  3. Saw some friends walking on the street as I drove past. Honked lightly to get their attention and waved when they looked.
  4. Ate lunch at home with my wife.
  5. Walked my daughter to another playground where they have a sandbox. This time in her wagon. Compared to a stroller: more fun her, more work for dad.
  6. Saw another friend while walking, who honked as she drove past and waved when I looked.
  7. Went out for dinner and ice cream.
  8. Put my daughter to bed.

Now I’m going back offline to watch a movie.

Tomorrow: bruch with friends, grocery shopping.