Month: May 2003

Have I mentioned just how good is lately?
Having been slammed with real-work lately, my blog time has been limited. And one blogger I find myself consistently seeking out is the Mickster.
Why? The man’s one of the masters, if not the uber-master of the blogging form.
He’s not a columnist. He’s not an essayist. What he has mastered is the particular cadences and rhythms of short, sharp commentary interspersed with focused and relevant links. Kaus is the definitive example of the differences between print-media columns and blogging: you simply can’t replicate what he does on Kaufiles in print; without the connectivity and immediacy of the web, it falls apart.
Whether you agree with his viewpoints or not, you have to acknowledge the guy has this form nailed. And so, if you are a new blogger and want to see how it is done: read Kaus. Don’t try to be Kaus (the position is taken) — but watch the way he crafts his posts, and learn…

Yet another rough real-work week, folks, hence not much on the blogging front. Refunds will be provided on demand for the full purchase price of the free ice cream, of course.
With a bit of luck I’ll be rolling out a major new Ecosystem feature at the end of the weekend, though, which will be of particular interest to new bloggers.
Stay tuned…

Hey, Glenn’s on Washington Journal! Like, right now.
They appear to be doing their whole morning show on weblogs. Neat. The doubly-neat part is that generally you can get streaming video/audio of previous shows for a week or so after they air.
The archive link should hopefully appear someone obvious on C-SPAN’s site; I’ll post an explicit link when I find it…

src=”http://images.quizilla.com/E/EmrysWolf/1043107723_zstuffbear.gif” border=”0″ alt=”Bear”>
What Is Your Animal Personality?
brought to you by Quizilla
Well, duh.

For the past two weeks, the has been accumulating historical data on every weblog’s rank and inbound link count. I’ve just now implemented the front-end code to show this information on the details page.
So: You can now see how a weblog has moved up or down in the Ecosystem over time.
I am planning to keep a decent chunk of this information online (past month, perhaps?) and archive the rest for posterity. Perhaps someday somebody will want to do research on this kind of thing; if so, I’ll have oodles of data for them.
Spiffy graphs are on the agenda, but I have thus far lost my argument with the graphing package I’m trying to use… perhaps next weekend…
-NZB

Lair is nostalgic for the old days of Atari.
Well, I’ve already said my piece on that era…

I owe a few people e-mail responses to various things; sorry. Hectic period of work has left little time for the bloggier things in life, so please, if I haven’t responded to your message, don’t take it personal-like.
Part of me wants to think that feeling the need to post a message like this must mean I’ve arrived as a big blogger who can’t keep up with their email, but nah: I just can’t keep up with life in general…

The site is back up and running.
Sorry for the outage (to those of you who noticed): I moved servers so now WMDI is back on the same host as TTLB itself, and ended up with things halfway-done for longer than I had planned.
I think everything has been moved over properly, including the forums, but please let me know if you see anything odd or missing.
Thanks!

Devon points out a question by Joel Engel:
“With the Dixie Chicks posing nude on a magazine cover to atone for their intemperate remarks, don’t we wish that Shania Twain had opened her mouth instead?”
and adds:
“Yeah! What did she think about the war? Maybe she should do a nude magazine cover as a pre-emptive strike! And now that you mention it, what was Jennifer Garner’s position on the war? Or Famke Janssen’s? Why hasn’t the press covered this?”
Well, I can’t help you there, but I can do you one better: how about the Republican Babe of the Week?
Sarah Michelle Gellar is this week’s pick, so how bad could it be? Sure, I’d rather have it be a little broader than ‘Republican’ : Anti-Idiotarian Babe of the Week, perhaps? (Michele: Next project ? ) But I’ll take what I can get.
Smart, beautiful women. Mmmmmm… yummy…

Marshall on William Bennett’s recent difficulties with them gamblin’ demons, and how “the chorus of defenses of Bennett ring rather hollow”:
“…I don’t really care that much about gambling one way or another. But I think it’s entirely appropriate to report that Bennett is such a big-time gambler even if it would be inappropriate or simply irrelevant to report such information about most others. The reason, I think, scarcely requires explanation: Bennett spent the last dozen or more years not only being a big hawker of ‘morality,’ but also a prime advocate of the proposition that there is an unbroken thread connecting our private habits to our public selves and that we — the media, the chatterers, everyone — should happily pull on that thread and see what we find.
…This isn’t a matter of payback or two wrongs making a right, just treating Bennett to the standard he’s made a living off setting for everyone else.”
Um, Josh, it sounds like payback is exactly what you are endorsing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But if you’re arguing that Bennett’s previous actions single him out as being deserving of particular special treatment for his current offense — well, I suppose you could call it “justice”, but I think payback works just fine as an accurate description too.
Now, I happen to think Bennett deserves exactly what he gets in this area, but I have no qualms about admitting that “treating Bennett to the standard he’s made a living off setting for everyone else” and “payback” are, in fact, the same thing in this case…

For what it’s worth, Glenn, think you’re right.
Holding the speech on the Abraham Lincoln was just the right amount of symbolism; goofing around like a fighter pilot was over the top.
Hold steady, your Instaness: the conventional wisdom shall prove this point shortly.
Could have been worse, I suppose: they could have given him a callsign. ‘Maniac’ has been taken and ‘Shrub’ just doesn’t have the right ring to it for a fighter jock…
Update: That came off a little too snide. I don’t begrudge Bush a bit of fun, he’s earned it. But I guess my suggestion would have been to separate the landing-in-a-jet piece from the major-address-to-the-nation piece. The two together just didn’t quite fit right to me.
And for those of you coming here direct from Instapundit who have no idea who I am: trust me, I’m a blogger who supported the Iraq campaign, even if this post didn’t sound that way. Ask anybody!