Dadblog

"Charges: You think it’s your patriotic duty to spend money you don’t have on crap you don’t need. You think Hillary lost because of sexism, when it’s actually because she’s just a bad liar. You think Iraq is better off now than before we invaded, and don’t understand why they’re so ungrateful. You think Tim Russert was a great journalist. You’re hopping mad about an auto industry bailout that cost a squirt of piss compared to a Wall Street heist of galactic dimensions, due to a housing crash you somehow have blamed on minorities. It took you six years to figure out what a tool Bush is, but you think Obama will make it all better. You deem it hunky dory that we conduct national policy debates via 8-second clips from “The View.” You think God zapped humans into existence a few thousand years ago, although your appendix and wisdom teeth disagree. You like watching vicious assholes insult each other on TV. You support gun rights, because firing one gives you a chubby. You cuddle falsehood

"The more times you answered “true” to those six questions, the more you need to follow The Traffic Light rule of thumb: During the first 30 seconds of an utterance, your light is green: your listener is probably paying attention. During the second 30 seconds, your light is yellow—your listener may be starting to wish you’d finish. After the one-minute mark, your light is red: Yes, there are rare times you should “run a red light:” when your listener is obviously fully engaged in your missive. But usually, when an utterance exceeds one minute, with each passing second, you increase the risk of boring your listener and having them think of you as a chatterbox, windbag, or blowhard." I have no idea what this person is talking about…

Lots of hyperlocal goodness links from 4iP

"Not that the last president had much to do with any of this. He didn't. It's the way the modern world works. Things improve. Incomes rise, work hours fall, the quality of goods improves. Few things in economics are as consistent as the growth of real GDP per capita over the past 200 years."

"Google News and our response to it as an industry are seriously distorting our web-based publishing models. There is a risk that resources are poured into producing highly commodotised, superficial articles while higher value channels - areas where we can actually make money online, something that is unlikely to happen in news - are left to whither or are stripped to feed the newsroom beast."

"The next thing to be said is: what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history's eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia - and I admit there's much to adore - you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?"

"Plinky makes it easy for you to create inspired content. Every day we provide a prompt (i.e. a question or challenge) and you answer. We make it simple to add rich media and share your answers on Facebook, Twitter and blogs." Can't work out what I think about this at all….

"The crowd quickly took possession of the White House: So many people were squeezed inside that the building itself creaked and shuddered dangerously. A bodyguard of loyal friends had to form a ring around the scarecrow figure of Jackson so he wouldn’t be crushed to death or asphyxiated by well-wishers. The strangers behaved if they were in a Mississippi saloon, standing in mud-caked boots on the damask chairs for a better view. But it wasn’t all riff-raff. Even some of the stuffy D.C. toffs got into the anarchic spirit. “Everyone from the highest and most polished,” marveled one attendee, Joseph Story, an associate judge of the Supreme Court, “down to the most vulgar and gross of the nation,” wanted their slice of the action."

"That said, at Euro 96, Terry Venables's side played a highly fluid system that, although taking 4-4-2 as its base, could become 3-5-2, with Gareth Southgate stepping into midfield, or 4-3-3, with Steve McManaman advanced. In the 1990 World Cup, under Bobby Robson, England switched mid-tournament to a 3-5-2. (Such flexibility, of course, is indicative of the basic truth – which is surely what Fabio Capello was alluding to when he dismissed the Whole notion of formations – that designations such as 4-4-2 and 4-2-3-1 are nothing more than crude signifiers useful for providing observers with a general idea of patterns; there are always far more subtleties beneath, and it is with those that a coach deals on a day-to-day basis)."

"The Saudis have invested intensively in Wahhabi madrasas in the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab, with dramatic effect, radically changing the religious culture of an entire region. The tolerant Sufi culture of Sindh has been able to defy this imported Wahhabi radicalism. The politically moderating effect of Sufism was recently described in a RAND Corporation report recommending support for Sufism as an "open, intellectual interpretation of Islam." Here is an entirely indigenous and homegrown Islamic resistance movement to fundamentalism, with deep roots in South Asian culture. Its importance cannot be overestimated. Could it have a political effect in a country still dominated by military forces that continue to fund and train jihadi groups? It is one of the few sources of hope left in the increasingly bleak political landscape of this strategically crucial country."

"Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information… Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector."

"We also planned on using the blog, from the start, with AP Alert-style notices - basically telling users we knew news was happening, but didn’t know what the story was. For the past nine months or so we’d struggled with what to do with information like that; posting news in a blog format helped us get over the mental hurdle that “we didn’t have enough for a story.”"

New York Magazine currently realizes 20 percent of its ad revenue from the web. The magazine's goal is to get to 50 percent within five years. And while Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia's $14 million in digital revenues is considerably smaller than Time Inc.'s, online made up about 12 percent of its ad sales in 2008. "At the other end of the spectrum, Condé Nast's $104 million digital take last year is an impressive figure. But the fact that digital contributed a paltry 3 percent its advertising stream is surprising, considering its early efforts to build an online ad presence."

"My rule of thumb when it comes to abusing sportsmen is that I tend not to shout anything from the stands that I wouldn't feel comfortable saying if I met them out doing the weekly shop. For all I know, the Sunderland fan sitting beside me a couple of rows behind one of the goals at Craven Cottage earlier this season might employ the same policy, but would have no problem following Mark Schwarzer around Asda for 90 minutes shouting "You butter-fingered Aussie wanker, I shagged your wife last night.""

Tim Ireland lets rip at the laughable Derek Draper, with laughable results. My God, labourlist is just *awful*.

"Those of us who failed to thrive at Google are faced with some pretty serious questions about ourselves. Just seeing that other people ran into the same issues is a huge relief. Google is supposed to be some kind of Nirvana, so if you can’t be happy there how will you ever be happy? It’s supposed to be the ultimate font of technical resources, so if you can’t be productive there how will you ever be productive?"

"Let me say it again, the only newspapers around in the future will be very upmarket, all the downmarket stuff being more readily available on the internet or in magazines made of pulped squirrels that will be handed out free to the unemployable and the insane. Until that day of gentlemen print journalists dawns - more properly redawns - various schemes and scams will splutter and die. Here's one suggesting papers can be saved by Google, a company that has not been, in my experience, notably devoted to the culture of paper and ink. But patience, wood pulp, pigment and high intelligence will endure."

I'd like to use a project I'm developing around 'Kidnapped' as the focus for a discussion about how to bring classic literature to life for young wired kids by taking this stuff out into the landscapes described in the books.

"What a phantasmagorically strange conflict the Arab-Israeli war had become! Here was a Saudi-educated, anti-Shiite (but nevertheless Iranian-backed) Hamas theologian accusing a one-time Israeli Army prison official-turned-reporter of spying for Yasir Arafat’s Fatah, an organization that had once been the foremost innovator of anti-Israeli terrorism but was now, in Mr. Rayyan’s view, indefensibly, unforgivably moderate. "

I'm not even going to try and explain this. Check out the video.

"According to the release, AOL hopes to launch 30 new sites in 2009, using the same model it has employed for its current successes: low-cost sites that target niche audiences, such as TheBoot.com, its popular country music site, and StyleList.com. which focuses on men's fashion."

" …investigative journalists, social scientists, political opposition researchers, social justice activists, public interest attorneys, business intelligence types, [and] amateur dirt diggers at the fringes, posting their findings to blogs, message boards, email lists, zines, and elsewhere."

Nature's "collaborative learning space for science undergraduates" and an awesome resource for amateur polymaths still trying to understand a fraction of this stuff.

"And that’s what everything has to be about; how on earth do we ever propose to fund journalism going forward? How does back-chat make me money? It’s free, user-generated content that - tempting fate - thus far has proved in no need of moderation; we’ve managed to set a bar tone and language-wise that befits a professional journalism site; there’s nothing there that you wouldn’t show your mother. So no cost; free content; published by my community - even when my back is turned; when I’m not on my watch." Go Rick!