Blog Panic. Atlas Says “Goodbye World, Hello Tequila!”

“Today I’m accepting something important.

I cannot cope.

I am now subscribed to 37 news sources.  I add about one new source a week.  Each of these is easily capable of delivering at least one or two items each day that are really interesting to me.  That I want to talk about.  But I cannot absorb this quanitity of new information even on a good day.  There is no time to reflect, to mull, to doze on it.

So I have resolved that I don’t care.

I won’t cope.

I’ll let good stuff go by the wayside.

Other people will find it.

Google will keep track of it.

It’s all their when the time comes.

I’m not Atlas to the internet.

Even to my own small chunk of it.

There.

I feel better now.” [Curiouser and curiouser!]

This is a difficult thing to accept, especially when you have an aggregator that pulls everything in for you. I hit this stage a few months ago, but it’s especially daunting when you go out of town (or injure your back!).

And that’s what it is – a stage. I think there are stages to blogging. Excitement, Fun, Overwhelmed, Panicked, Acceptance, and then the cycle starts anew. Are there “12 steps of blogging?”

From CNET:

Are Mac users smarter?. A new study compares Mac-using Web surfers with their PC-wielding counterparts. If you’re reading this on Windows, feel free to take your time on the big words.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that this study comes out the week before MacWorld Expo. But what do I know? I use Windows.

More on the Denver kid hauled into court over an overdue library book.

“Marisa is scared to check out books,” Norma Gohr said. “This whole situation is ridiculous.”

 

From  the excellent Privacy Digest via the also excellent The Shifted Librarian:

Last week the Berkman Center held their second annual Internet Law Program, an intensive course in (surprise) internet law and developments. You probably didn’t spend the time/money to attend, but the topics covered are interesting enough (to me anyway) to check it out even second-hand. Dan Gillmor attended and posted his notes: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5 part 1 and Day 5 part 2. Donna Wentworth was there, trying to record the seminar in real-time; hopefully she’s learned her lesson. There is tons of interesting stuff in there – it’s worth your time to read through if you have any interest in the subject matter at all.”

Tons of interesting stuff indeed. I spent most of the week being depressed that I wasn’t there. What a great thing that must have been….

The blue dot over by the Blogrolling table is an experiment in randomization. Go ahead. Click it. You’ll be tossed through the rabbithole of the Internet to some other weblog. I have no idea where, and it’ll be different everytime you click on it.

The only thing the other weblogs have in common is that they all carry the blue dot, a project of Joe Jennett’s Best of the Cool.

Let me know where you land.

Janet Reno to host dance party

“We’ve consistently heard from people that if we had a dance party of our own it would be a terrific way to engage young people in the campaign.”

Voter polls show Reno leading the race for the [Florida] Democratic gubernatorial nomination. If she wins the September 10 primary, she will face Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, the younger brother of President Bush, in the November general election.

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There’s a bad news tech story floating around that’s getting spun idiotically as a good news story. Some San Francisco consultancy says that 93 dot-coms have closed down since the beginning of the year. The good news is supposedly that that’s down from the 345 that folded in same period as last year, and the 862 that folded the year before.

What seems to have eluded both InformationWeek (where the story originated) and the AP (which picked it up), is that the dot-com world is hardly the target-rich environment that it was two years ago. Yes, the number of failures is down dramatically; it apparently hasn’t occurred to anyone connected with this story that there are a hell of a lot fewer companies available today to fail.

Let’s put it this way. There are 25 people in a room, and 15 of them die on the first day. Ten more die on the second day. By this consultancy’s reckoning, the second day represents progress, since fewer people died that day than on the first day.

“I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

Interesting Net-related ruling last week from the New York State Court of Appeals (NY’s highest court).

The question before the court is whether an item on the Web is published when it’s first made available, or when it’s seen? The more aware of technology you are, the more subtle the question may become. Many sites — including this one — don’t create static web pages, but rather generate the content on demand. That means the page you see is different from the page that someone else might see, but that both of them are created especially for you and aren’t necessarily stored anywhere in that precise form.

So if I libel you on a dynamically created page that you don’t see for three years after the offending item is first available, when precisely have I libelled you? When you see it? Or when it was first see-able? It makes a difference because in New York, you have just 1 year after the libel to file suit.

Anyway, the AP reports that in New York, publication happens when an item is first posted:

The Court of Appeals said it made little sense to adopt Mr. Firth’s argument that a new publication took place ÷ and a new limitation period started running ÷ with every downloading of a document.

I’m not sure that’s right technologically, but it feels right on the merits.

Piece this morning in the Wall Street Journal (it’s behind a tollbooth, so no link) about the sorry state of Central American economies tied to coffee prices. Seems that there’s now a global glut; wholesale prices are at 50 cents per pound, while production costs in the high mountains are 80 cents per pound. The result is a lot of people out of work — and the very real possibility that they’ll turn to growing something a whole lot less benign than coffee.

What makes the article worth looking for is a rundown of how high coffee prices were an instrument of American foreign policy during the Cold War: strong prices means stable governments, which meant slim pickings for the Godless Pledge-fearing Commies. Now the Vietnam (speaking of Godless Pledge-fearing Commies) has joined Brazil as a major exporter of low-quality beans, supply outstrips demand.

Not that you’d notice it at the checkout, of course. WSJ points out that while wholesale prices have dropped 80 percent in the last five years, retail prices have dropped 20 percent.

Favorite quote:

“Up to 75% of a typical can of coffee is now made up of the cheap stuff, which they then cut with Central American or Colombian [arabica] beans so your coffee doesn’t taste like a shoe,” says Eric Poncon, director in Nicaragua of ECOM Group.