The Badger: Other

Keep Father B

Information about the campaign to keep Father Stephen Bierschenk at St Thomas Aquinas church in Dallas, TX.

Double Dutch

Argh! Just spent 3 hours with a journalist from the Volkskrant about 'media' and stuff. It was fun to speak in my honest weblogging voice, fun when you have lots to tell and nothing to hide, like when I was in the TV business. Out to get some fresh air now... [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] The Dutch language drives me nuts. I look at something written in Dutch (or Flemish) and think "I ought to be able to read that." It feels like it is right at the tip of my tongue but I just don't quite get it. If only. 'Watersnood' is such a great word, I just don't know what it means. Except that it probably has something to do with water.

Wiki/weblog integration points

Wiki/weblog integration points.

Tony Bowden writes:

Having a wiki output OPML won't work, as it requires creating structure that isn't there. Having a wiki input OPML, on the other hand, might produce much more useful results.

Going the other way, RSS is a great connector. I just introduced myself to Sunir Shah the other day. I was going to suggest that MeatballWiki offer an RSS feed of its RecentChanges when I looked again and lo, it already does. Even nicer would be to include the first diff in that feed, so that somebody scanning a lot of feeds can make better choices about what to read. Heads, decks, and leads. The Wiki naming style makes for nice heads, and some items in the feed have nice decks (short descriptive tags) as well. The first diff would make a nice optional lead.

The model according to which Wikis federate is something that the blogging community could profitably study. Peter Thoeny explained it all to me once. Now I want to look into all that again.

Here's a column from two years ago that compares Wiki and newsgroup collaboration. It ties together several of these themes.

[Jon's Radio]

BTW, to the people who say UserLand never helps its users, I gotta say this. They must not know Lawrence. Raise your hand if he has helped you get past some kind of problem. He does such excellent work, he's so steady and smart, and helps so many people, and it's as if he didn't exist to some. [Scripting News]

Wiki/weblog integration points.

Tony Bowden writes:

Having a wiki output OPML won't work, as it requires creating structure that isn't there. Having a wiki input OPML, on the other hand, might produce much more useful results.

The model according to which Wikis federate is, by the way, something that the blogging community could profitably study. Peter Thoeny explained it all to me once. Now I want to look into all that again.

[Jon's Radio]

John Hiler complains about the bloggers stealing his story. Schmuck. It's the other way around. All the epiphanies he's been having and expressing so well, are in the archives of the blogs he writes about. Sheez. I like a newbie as much as anyone, but not one who complains about losing control of ideas he didn't originate. Same old shit. Next thing we'll see a "history" of weblogs that begins with John Hiler. Hehe. [Scripting News] He's not complaining about bloggers stealing his story, he's just talking about how he was caught off guard by the fact that bloggers anticipated all the points in his follow-up story before he had a chance to publish the story. His point, as I read it, is that regular journalists are going to have to adapt to the speed at which blog-journalism can react and to the depth of blog-type commentary. If anything, I thought he was excited about the prospect of the future integration of blogs and conventional journalism.

Company policy

Now this is humor.

Spinsanity moves some ballast to the starboard side of the ship

Now maybe I'm crazy, but it seems like Spinsanity may have been more touched than they let on about accusations that they were too one-sided in their spin coverage First they published a letter to the editor about that topic and a response where they made the case that they weren't as biased as the letter writer thought, then ever since then they seem to be bending over backward to point out examples of unfair Democratic spin. But then again I'm probably just seeing things through my own pinko-colored glasses.