In Texas Today

Today we’re in texas etc. a;sdlkjfa;sldkjf;lasdjkfds

Testing this title

Here’s my blog post

Alberto Gonzales: what an *&%$@#~!

It’s hard to know what to say about this story reported by CNET:Gonzales proposes new crime: “Attempted” copyright infringement

Posted by Declan McCullagh

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including “attempts” to commit piracy.

Comment Conundrum

Comments are cool. Until they devolve into noisy flame wars. CBS News has  “taken the unusual step of blocking all reader comments on its stories about Mr. Obama.”

This is a bad precedent and CBS News should stop it. This opens the door for candidates to game the system by bombing an opposing candidates blog (or heck, even your own candidates if it’s in your interest) as a way of stopping comments. CBS News should realize that the Internet is a free-for-all, and even noisy comments add to the discussion (even if it shows what a bunch of boobs the fans or haters of a particular candidate may be).

Just don’t write any nasty comments below. (Kidding!)

I remain…

Great Political Info-Grafix

Some kinds of information lend themselves to graphical display, I dorkily love to find new sources of great info-graphics. Hence, I’m positively cheery about finding Pollster.com , which has great graphical displays of election-related info.

They chart polls and things and info like this: tag clouds of words used by Dems in the recent debate. The tag clouds live here.

If you’re into this stuff, you’ll also love http://junkcharts.typepad.com/

Bill Gates, You Make Me Cry

I’m not one of those religious-war Macintosh fanatics, or an inveterate Bill Gates hater. However, Vista is making me think about converting to both.

Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 is the most kludgey and difficult-to-use computer system I have used in many, many years. It boasts such features as:

• Office revamped their entire menu system. Remember how you had to search through menus to do easy things in, say, Word about 20 times and then you committed them to memory and no longer were hassled? Well, the hassle returns! Now you have to search through NEW illogical menus.
• There’s big bugs in this thing! For example, Outlook is automatically scheduling all my meetings to repeat every week, so my calendar is filled with bogus meetings. Easy enough you say — go to the preferences and see if you can find something that’ll change that. Not so easy! Nothing about that in Tools > Account Settings or Tools > Options
• (Remember, this is a spanky clean install of Vista…) When I try to add a printer, Windows Explorer crashes and dumps me out of the control panel.

I could go on and on, but I have to get back to manually setting every meeting on my calendar to repeat only once (when I select a meeting and tell it not to repeat, nothing changes). Ug.

Bill Gates, I thought Google Apps was going to finally make Microsoft have to pay attention to the user experience. I guess you’ll have to feel some more market pain before that happens.

Social Networking Set to Surpass Porn

It’s long been funny to me that in nearly all reporting about the Web, the porn figures get hidden (in everything from Google Zeitgeist to all major media outlets’ end-of-the-year Web statistics). Well, it looks like porn may be coming out of the closit: note the Economist graph below and also a writeup in the New York Times Magazine yesterday about kink.com.

Anyway, here’s today’s interesting porn-related tidbit. The economist reports that social networks’ traffic is set to surpass porn traffic sometime soon. What’s remarkable to me about this chart is how much more traffic both porn and social networks get than search engines. Go figure.

Not possible to search Web for commented-out code

I just ran into a problem that really surprised me: apparently there’s no way to search the Web for commented out code on pages.

In a Web page, you can surround a bit of text with the special tags <!– and –> and any words in-between will be hidden from view. <!– That is to say, this sentence wouldn’t show up unless you viewed the HTML source of the page –>

I had never needed to search the Web for commented-out text before, but today it would be super-useful for me to be able to search for a special commented out string on a bunch of my clients’ sites. Much to my surprise, there’s apparently no way to do this! I tried the usual suspects (Google, Yahoo!, et al) and even Google Code Search  . No dice.

If anyone knows a trick, please leave a comment below.

Welcome to Media Something

I’m jumping back into the game of Big Web Media after being away for a few years. It feels good to be back.

As I get caught up, I’m going to use this blog to write down what I see.

Here are links I got from Mr. Blog tonight:

Trend toward localities / hyperlocal content:

• americantowns.com
• placeblogger

Search: hyperlocal

Read: Kathy Siena story (what’s the real story?)

Read Every Day:

• Steve Rubel
• Jay Rosen at OJR
• Mashable
• Dave Winer
• In the Pink Tx
• New Assignment.net