The electronic crystal ball has shown me two words: "Douglas Ankara". I see a wedding. I see two cities. I see the Orient. I see Spain. The future becomes clear.

On March 28, 1920, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford married. Ten years later the names of Constantinople and Angora were changed to Istanbul and Ankara....
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The response to my recent posts, Why you shouldn't offer a newsfeed and Why you SHOULD offer a newsfeed illustrates an issue suggested by a post last month on Blogs as serious news media: the potential for bloggers with skewed opinions to skew the opinions of readers. "Why you shouldn't offer a newsfeed" generated a...
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Last week, I wrote a post titled "Why you shouldn't offer a newsfeed" that garnered a bit of attention. The entire post was written from the point of view of someone opposed to and annoyed by newsfeeds as a way of introducing the kinds of objections people might raise. It seems I should have included...
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In the beginning, web pages were text-only. They had a few options for styling, but nothing too fancy. Then came images, tables, Flash, Java, JavaScript, CSS, and oh, let's not forget everyone's favorite: the blink tag! Thus arose the occupation "web designer", the one who specialized in making web pages look great in every version...
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Some of us blog because we're full of ideas we'd like to express. But is blogging really smart? Lots of smart people don't blog. Which side do the smartest of the smart come down on? Do we blog because we think, or because we're not thinking clearly? Am I stupidly wasting my time at this...
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In the beginning, weblogs were little personal pages where you wrote whatever you felt like writing, and a few of your friends, an odd family member, a crazed stalker and other people who were into blogging read it. Many blogs are still little personal pages read only if you're lucky by friends, family, bloggers and...
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Are you sick and tired of people telling you to publish a newsfeed? I sure am. So today, I'm going to give you a break and discuss why you shouldn't publish a newsfeed. Feel free to use these arguments to tell people to shut up and mind their own business.

1) It's too much trouble...
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A few days ago, Amy Gahran posted on her Contentious Weblog (no, I don't mean it's an unfriendly weblog, that's the blog's title) a response to Google's sending a cease-and-desist to someone who'd been providing a service to convert Google News searches to RSS. As much as I'd love to see RSS feeds of Google...
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The electronic crystal ball has shown me two words: "each morsel". I see little fish. I see bigger fisher. I see even bigger fishermen. The future becomes clear.

During the past fishing season, striped bass provided good fishing off the Connecticut coast until bluefish began consuming too much of the local baitfish. Without the small...
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When I first heard the terms "blog" and "blogging", to be honest, I was turned off by them. The slang flavor of the terms gave the impression that it was the domain of egomaniacal script kiddies. I had no problem with the term "web logging", but why "blogging"? It just didn't roll naturally off the...
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