Year: 2003

Ok. Finally it looks like Blogger is going to start catching up with the rest of the weblogging applications that have been developed or have been enhanced over the last couple of years. You can read all about Dano at new.blogger.com. First things first – they’ve been working on the interface. Here are a couple of (presumably rough – some low-fi) interfaces for the new system – which clearly aren’t designed to look their best on a Mac. Still – never mind, it’s early days:

• Beta disclaimer
• Low-fi interface
• Hi-fi interface
• Archive Options

While we’re at it – perhaps with less mass-appeal (but I guess we’ll see), keep an eye out for TypePad – the new Six Apart venture that’s supposed to be a turnkey version of Movable Type – kind of like Blogger, but more powerful. [Typepad stuff via kottke.]

In the latest Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, which I swear to god I buy because of the pictures of the clothes, there’s an interview with James Marsden. In it he is asked the question, “Based on your fan mail and people who approach you on the street, who would you say is your fan base?” He replies:

Well, since X-men, I can add comic book fans, but before that I’d say young women between 10 and 24 and probably every gay man in the universe. Straight men all think I’m a pussy. I gotta tell you, if it wasn’t for gay men, I’d probably own a carpet cleaning business. I’m very popular with the gay community, which is lovely. There are plenty of people out there who have no clue who I am, but I have never met a gay man yet who didn’t know who I was. It’s great!

This – ladies and gentlemen – is what pardens for an enlightened attitude these days. Just think – all of us gay men lusting after James Marsden! How lucky we are to have someone as pretty as him to unite around! How we love him. I think we should all change our political identity to being Marsdosexuals! Maybe wave banners! Ah, we’re so loyal and friendly and loving. Much like Labradors! Wouldn’t we make such good pets? I’m going to say this once and once only – James Marsden, it’s not only straight men that think you’re a “pussy” and I think it’s a bloody sorry state of affairs if your kind of patronising, self-obsessed idiocy represents the world that gay people have battled for over the last few decades. You can take your “mad props to all the gay men out there” and you can shove em up your butt.

One of my windows in Safari is full of tabs – so full of tabs that I can’t actually find the stuff I want to work with without closing them. And Safari doesn’t have a neat “Bookmark all tabs” option like Camino, so I have to bloody bookmark them individually. Except I’m not going to do that, I’m just going to post the damn things to my site and let God sort ’em out later…

• CNN posts premature obituaries
  “While all news organizations prepare obituaries in advance of the deaths of famous individuals, the folks at CNN inadvertently gave the Internet-surfing public a chance to preview how the network’s web site would note the demise of Vice President Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, and a few other prominent figures.”

• Prepare to meet thy Doom
  “These days, the employees at id need to play with pain. They’re hard at work on Doom III, which is already a shoo-in for event of the year in the $10.8 billion videogame industry, even though it’s not expected out until fall.”

• Dive into Mark on spammers and WaSP
  “That?s right, folks. Scumbags were setting up web sites, spamming millions of people trying to sucker them into clicking through to said web sites, and then immediately redirecting them off-site to get them to upgrade their browser first before allowing them to be suckered.”

• 24 hours watching the world look for answers at Google
  “The computer screen is divided horizontally. On the bottom, the Google queries, 10 visible at a time, stream up and, after 5 seconds, disappear. Each also carries the location of the questioner, often down to the city, but sometimes only the country, the Internet portal (e.g., AOL), or, when the source is untraceable, just question marks.”

I’m off to SC for O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conference on Tuesday. I’m going against the grain this year by taking my iBook along, “blogging” in “realtime”, and taking digital photos of people. If there’s a box, I am out of it. If you’re attending as well, stop by and say hello…I’ll be the guy with the iBook and digital camera.

I’ve given this post a pretentious title because I can never think of what to call these semi-regular link-log updates and there’s only so many ways you can use the phrase “Microcontent Vote” before someone tells you to get off your damn hobby-horse already.

• Tom Tomorrow on US Domestic / Foreign Policy
  This one (and the one following) are way via BoingBoing which I’m reading more now since Cory took Webb and I to this neat Biker/Geek bar where they serve burgers.

• Crazy Input Devices
  … including a vertical keyboard – again via new celebrity best friend and life-partner Cory Doctorow (“Tom Who?”, Cory). I quite want the vertical keyboard just to see people’s faces at work.

• What if Jobs was one of us?
  Thanks to Mr Webb for pointing me Joy-of-Tech-wards for this Joan Osborne themed day. My friend Nick is obsessed with Joan Osborne. He says I should listen to her because it’s not all weird Christian pseudo-profound pap. I say, “Get a Job!”.