December 31, 2003

Blogging the Trial

Some public relations company posted a want-ad on Craig's list saying they're seeking a freelance reporter to cover a courtroom trial in San Mateo County in Jan/Feb. $15 per hour. Whose trial might this be, one wonders?

Imagine if the court case instead got the full blog treatment: multiple bloggers covering the whole thing from different vantage points in the courtroom. Each blogger would be writing about it live (via someone's stealthy WiFi setup), and even writing about the reporter writing about the trial.

You'd be amazed what you hear when you sit in the audience of a courtroom. Especially if you're seated in the front row, right behind the defense and the prosecution. Oh, to have that multi-blogged...

Posted by brian at 03:27 PM | Comments (1)

December 27, 2003

The Landscape

An interesting (that is, if you are curious about physics and cosmology) interview with Leonard Susskind over at The Edge. Available in text or video.
Posted by brian at 02:58 PM | Comments (0)

December 24, 2003

Great. Just What The Breed Needs.

This is precisely what happens when bad owners give a nice breed a bad name.

Look at the image that London's Sun newspaper offers its readers:

Utter propoganda. Note the happy, "smiling" Corgi photo, and the mean, menacing English Bull Terrier photo. Note how the EBT's paw prints are deliberately pointy. Notce the bloody scratch marks on the EBT chart.

As the owner of an EBT, I've found these dogs make delightful, friendly, and loyal companions --- if the dogs are fortunate enough to have a caring owner. Any breed can be a "beast" if the owner's irresponsible. For a more balanced view of English Bull Terriers, browse the Bull Terrier Club of America's website and go to your local AKC dog show and see them in person.

Posted by brian at 03:27 PM

December 23, 2003

Quiet month

I'm still here. Been busy traveling and working on my book. Will post some new stuff soon.
Posted by brian at 05:54 PM

December 06, 2003

Denounce Moves to Movable Type

Denounce Newswire finally makes the move from hacking-raw-HTML-in-a-vi-editor to Movable Type. It even has an RSS feed, for all those who've been asking for such.

Not everything's moved over yet; some ancient stuff from 1998 and earlier will trickle over as time permits. Old URLs will continue to work; they'll eventually by symlinked to their new MT-archive locations.

Posted by brian at 06:47 PM

December 05, 2003

In the Google Dog-House

Google, in its wisdom, has decreed that my Nettle site should not be in the top-10 searches for the word "nettle". No, instead of being something like #5 as of a month ago, now it is #681.

Google says there are 1,140 links to www.nettle.com. That's more links than all of Google's top 10 search results for "nettle" combined. I.e., if you go see how many links to the URLs identified by Google as being the top 10 URLs for the term "nettle", and add up the total number of links for those ten URLs, it is way lower than my 1,140.

Despite the fact that result Google can find no other websites that link to the URL in #680 (sorry, I'm not going to be the first), and that no other websites link to the URL in result #682, it dumps me at #681.

I wonder if Google is punishing me for being recently blogrolled at Doc's blog? (Interestingly, if you search for the word "doc" in Google, Doc's blog is search result #2. Surely that can't be right, Google! Quick, go move it to #681!)

If you like the Nettle blog and would like to see it return to its rightful place on the top-10 list of "nettle" search results, please post something in your own blog, a full sentence that includes the word "nettle" as a link to nettle.com. Maybe we can get Google to wake up and correct its error.

Posted by brian at 06:34 AM | Comments (1)

December 01, 2003

Nettle vs ACLU

Yee-hah! I was thrilled to learn today that the ACLU had implemented my suggested changes.

Here's a link to the latest news, over at my Nettle blog.

Blogs REALLY CAN make a difference, people.

Posted by brian at 03:42 PM
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