From the monthly archives:
J. D. Lasica, from Online Journalism Review, writes on the growing popularity of RSS feeds and news aggregators. You’ve seen me talk a little about implementing an aggregator to help keep this Web log updated, but I never really explained it. Lasica sets it all straight.
Gawker is a Manhattan weblog magazine edited by Elizabeth Spiers, designed by Jason Kottke and published by Nick Denton. It is a live review of city news, and by news we mean, among other things, urban dating rituals, no-ropes social climbing, Condé Nastiness, downwardly-mobile i-bankers, real estate porn — the serious stuff.
Funny, snarky, and full of stuff I can barely hope to do or see.
Both Parties Wary of Data Mining. An amendment to a spending bill that requires the Pentagon to spill the beans to Congress on its Total Information Awareness project gets bipartisan support. Privacy advocates see it as a step in the right direction. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News]
Strange. I’d post this article just for its content, but you might remember that its writer, Ryan Singel, is my cousin. Worlds colliding and all that.
Dramatically shorter terms–possibly even 14 years with one renewal–but with a price: stringent enforcement of copy-protection laws. I’d accept that tradeoff, but only as long as copying for fair use were still possible.
11-Digit Local Dialing Starts in New York City on Feb. 1. New Yorkers will have to start using an area code when calling a local telephone number, even if it is in the same area code. By Lydia Polgreen. [New York Times: Technology]
I’d gripe about this, but of the 30 or so New York numbers programmed into my cell phone, fewer than half are in my area code, when you consider the 212 numbers for Manhattanites and all the various cell-phone area codes.
So, y’know. No whining from me.
Clients of Roommate Service Report E-Mail Barrage of Holocaust Revisionism. Users of a well-known roommate-matching service in Manhattan say that after signing up with the service they began receiving e-mail messages from a Holocaust-revisionist Web site run by the service’s founder. By David F. Gallagher. [New York Times: Technology]
This seems pretty vile; you can bet when it comes time to move from here, I won’t be using that service.
Scientific American has a well-written and informative article about brain research into the causes of suicidal behavior. Researchers seem closer and closer to determining the neurological causes and possibly developing new treatments to prevent suicide.
Image Gate is pretty damn cool. I especially like the photos showing the construction of the Holland Tunnel. The pictures aren’t all NYC-specific, though. There are collections of cigarette cards, portraits of Native Americans, and maps of the mid-Atlantic region, among other collections.
From the Image Gate Web site:
Image Gate is The New York Public Library’s first full working version of its new digital image database. Image Gate provides free and open access to thousands of The New York Public Library’s digitized images, taken from the Research Libraries’ collections. At its inception, the Image Gate database contains approximately 80,000 images spanning a wide range of subjects. This number will grow as The Library digitizes more images; this phased rollout will end in 2004, when the site will include more than 600,000 images. Image Gate demonstrates the rich potential for discovery in The Library’s vast international collections of prints, drawings, photographs, illuminated manuscripts, rare books, maps, popular graphics and printed ephemera.
Critique of Lessig’s Copyright Tax Suggestion [GrepLaw]
Some say Lessig’s “compromise” punishes the poor. I wonder, though: Will my kids even know I had a Web log, let alone ever choose to protect its copyright?
