I wish to cash out my influence at this mighty blog and use the proceeds to promote a worthwhile experiment being run by my buddy Lloyd, he of the Year of Coffee Blog. I urge all of you, dear readers, to give a visit to 50,000 Monkeys Blogging. Nay, I urge you, more than to visit, to participate, for that’s what the blog is about. We’re all of us now endowed with the ability to contribute to the ultimate social blogging experiment. Simply send your latest random thought—that’s any random thought—to 50000monkeys@thecoolkids.us. Take a sip of coffee. Then, load the site into your browser. Voila! Instant blogging. Completely anonymous. No one ever has to know that it was you. What could be easier?

The site has already taken on a kind of Dada-esque quality. It didn’t take long for the spammers to find the email address, but to me, that’s part of the fun. Random blog postings mixed with random spam emails. Where does one end and the other begin?

My buddy Lloyd is a Feedster Feed of the Year Finalist! Woo-hoo! Way to go, Lloyd!

TheCoolKids.US » Blog Archive » Feedster Feed of the Year Finalist!

Check out the Year of Coffee Blog. But hurry… the year’s almost up.

I’m really happy to be on the planning committee for the upcoming Seattle Mind Camp. On November 5th and 6th, we’ll bring together 150 of Seattle’s forward thinkers: techies, entrepreneurs, executives, gamers, artists, and other brilliant minds for 24+ hours of a big-ass geek brain dump.

Registration is free, so check out the website for more details. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Lloyd’s first podcast is up. You have to go to the site to listen or download, but it’s worth it. I’ll work on him to get the enclosures working. Gotta have you on my pod, man.

Okay, I have to listen again. Tony is saying some things that are very relevant to the process that Lloyd and I are going through right now. Damn you, Lloyd! There goes my discretionary time.

That’s how the upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 went. I must admit I was a little nervous overwriting all my files on the server, but the whole process went like a dream. Can’t wait to play around a bit with the new interface, check out the new plugins… all dat.

Nice job, Six Apart!

I’m getting really tired of this debate. Are bloggers journalists? Isn’t that kind of like asking, Is a car a murder weapon? Are all priests pedophiles? Are all journalists vapid jagoffs?

Are bloggers journalists? The answer is, of course, “It depends.” Some bloggers are journalists because some journalists blog. But having a blog doesn’t make you a journalist, any more than owning a gun makes you a murderer. A blog is a type of web page, usually enabled by a particular type of software which allows you to post anything you want, from pictures to links to incoherent rants to real reporting. A blog is what you make it, and whether a blogger is a journalist depends on the substance of the content, not the form it takes.

Of course, it’s easy to see how those in the media could have lost sight of this fact over the years. The media have built themselves a nice little bubble house, inside which they can tell themselves that anything they do is fascinating and interesting and worthwhile. Anything they do is news, they seem to think, because it’s presented as if it were news. Adopt a certain tone of voice or style of writing and you can make the most trival drivel appear to be Serious Stuff. But 95% of it is a pile of crap with an expensive haircut.

The real question ought to be, Are journalists journalists? Are you a journalist just because you’re on television? Are you a journalist just because you get published? Is that all it takes, or is there more to it?

Cleaning out the old link bank today. This is the first of several posts, loosely organized by catagory. First up: random links…

• Merlin Mann has cranked up the 43 Folders Wiki, an incredibly useful adjunct to his 43 folders blog. Mann tracks the latest in productivity tips and tricks, including information about applications for OS X.

• Here’s more on Merlin Mann and getting things done on the Mac from MacDevCenter.

• Speaking of productivity, I use AquaMinds’ NoteTaker to help me organize my work and writing, and I’m loathe to change, but Steven Berlin Johnson has a pretty cool system going on with DevonThink.

• Not to be confused with 43 folders, 43 Things is a nifty new site for setting, sharing, and tracking your life goals. Who’d’a thunk it? Sign up and visit. It’s weirdly compelling.

• Wicked cool. Via CoolGov, here’s a movie that shows the flight paths of every airplane flying over the US in a 24-hour period.

• Via Boing Boing, here’s an article on writing better emails. Very helpful. (HBS Working Knowledge)

• Very interesting: The Matrix online game hires actors to hang out online and provide “local color.” (Boing Boing)

• The Google Tutor on Google Print.

A quick glance at the calendar on the left of this blog confirms it. I’ve been in a post-election funk. I just haven’t had the energy or interest to post lately, and I’ve only been breezing through my RSS feeds. I’ve had a couple of half-written post-election posts sitting in VoodooPad for weeks, but just haven’t wanted to work on them. The weeks after the election have seemed a bit like the aftermath of a bomb—a lot of noise, shouting, confusion, and rending of garments, little of it focused. I felt that the best thing to do was to step away a bit and get some perspective. The true impact of November 2nd will become apparent over the next few months; I’m not sure that participating in all the hand-waving does me any good right now.

In the meantime, my mother reminded me that Texan columnist Molly Ivins is alive and kicking and available on the web. I’ve read Ivins in the past and really dig her perspective, but never had access to her columns on a regular basis. Lucky for all of us, Working for Change posts and collects Molly’s musings all in one place. Clicking on the link will take you to the ongoing collection, with archives going back to April of 2000. If you haven’t read her yet, what are you waiting for? She’s smart, funny, tough, and sharp as a Ginsu.

I imagine I’ll be back to blogging soon. The time away has been good, and I’m collecting stuff to talk about. Hope all is well in your corner of the world.

I noticed that I had been pinged – a very rare occurrence for this blog – so I read through this post at Right On Red. Johnny Walker Red makes a good point: few of the bloggers I read, which are mostly lefties, had anything at all to say on the subject of the Beslan massacre. The only time the subject showed up on this blog was when I noted the harsh rhetoric coming out of that country in response. In retrospect, this was an appallingly callow reaction to the event itself, and I regret not having given more thought or attention to this horrific attack.

At the risk of appearing defensive, let me try to sort out a couple of reasons why my own response was so muted, as I’ve been pondering lately my reading and writing habits, and my responsibility to this blog.

First, I don’t consider myself a news source of any kind, so I don’t tend to link to news stories that are widely reported, or for which I don’t have a special feeling or an individual “take.” The massacre in Beslan was a major news story, has been widely reported and written about, and there’s only one possible reaction to it: outrage, mixed with immense sadness and sympathy for the families and friends of the victims.

Secondly, I don’t tend to pay attention to stories of foreign terrorism. I don’t say this as a defense; just the opposite, I think this is a problem. Stories of bombings in other countries have become commonplace enough that on some level I’ve tuned them out. A car bomb in the Middle East or Africa or Australia, or anywhere besides the US and it’s a quick prayer for the victims and I shake my head and wonder how anger can become so entrenched and intractable and I’m on to the next news story. Sometimes I don’t even give it that much time. I think I’ve become so dulled to reports of foreign terrorism that I didn’t pay attention to the incident in Beslan. In my knee-jerk, reptilian-brain first response, I lumped it in with “another international terrorist incident” and glossed over the details. I’m not in any way proud of this.

Thirdly, I think I’ve placed myself in an echo chamber of sorts. I pay far more attention to bloggers whose views I agree with than those I don’t. I pass on… and I’m not even sure why I do this, to be honest… links, quotes, and thoughts that reinforce my point of view rather than really chew on something and consider it. If Beslan wasn’t showing up in Left Blogistan, it wasn’t showing up in this blog. That’s a weakness. That’s a problem.

Look, I don’t know if I’m going to change what I do. I don’t expect to become an Atrios or a Brad DeLong or a Glenn Reynolds. Mostly I’m doing this for myself, not because I expect to become an invaluable font of punditry and outrage. This blog tracks the stuff that passes through my sphere of attention. However, I am part of the blogosphere, and as Johnny Walker Red suggests, perhaps my side of it isn’t always paying attention when it should. I’ve added Right On Red to my RSS reader, and I’ll keep working to expand the scope of what I read.

In the meantime, I urge the three readers who visit this blog regularly to head over to Johnny’s post on this subject so that you can visit the blogs he mentions for details about the Russian School Tragedy. The Russians need our prayers now, and the victims deserve our attention and respect.