Subterranean Homepage News

By Sheila Lennon

'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!

May 20, 2005, 7:15 p.m.-- Last week's weblog

Another busy day in a busy week. Rain is forecast again this weekend, both days. Check out our Summer Guide -- maybe it'll bring the sun.

Weekend game: Hapland 2 happens on one screen, and everything needs to be clicked in the right order or your guy gets eaten, squashed or worse. Eventually, by trial and error, you figure out the sequence.

If you haven't played Hapland 1, you might start there. The sequel is more complex, so you might as well start off simply baffled.
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NMNHNLM*: Internet slang, at Wikipedia. You thought you knew it all? How about,

TMR@IA — "The monkeys are at it again"; usually used to blame the staff of online gaming communities for any screw ups in-game.

There are hundreds of these, including emoticons.

*Acronym for "no money no honey nobody loves me"
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Ireggae: 'GIOP's: The Italian Lion that fights alone against BABYLON music system!' was the subject of a most colorful email from Andrea "Giops" Gioacchini. Is it spam if it gives you something? The Italian roots reggae singer wants you to hear his music. It's catchy. Here's People From Jamaica (mp3)

...Anyway the whole promotional album called "Face The Music" (EP) is full downloadable (in high quality mp3s) on the official website with the coverart, FOR FREE -> www.giops.net

Note: the mp3 files you will find there were professionally encoded with EAC + Lame software, so if you burn them on an audio cd you will not loose the sound fidelity in comparison with the original audio cd.

In alternative you can find all songs (192kbs mp3) here: http://download.com/giops

If you find GIOP’s an interesting initiative and you love its music, please support our “SOS” : we need your help to strengthen our voice day by day!

So if you are interested in GIOP’s initiative and music… let us know: every kind of collaboration is welcome!

And remember what Bob Marley said: “WHO MAKES MUSIC THINKING TO MONEY, HIS MUSIC WILL LOOSE ITS VALUE.”...

As spam goes, this is more than refreshing.

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Rewired? Twelve Ways to Think Differently. Blogger Dave Pollard (How to Save the World)

The Idea: Twelve methods that will exercise parts of your brain that rarely get it, and make you more creative and better able to understand the world....

You may already be doing these.
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Just don't press the juices out of it: Everything You Thought You Knew About Grilling Is Wrong. By Robert K. Brown, a blogger who got grilling lessons as a Father's Day gift one year:

There are a few extremely simple secrets. Once you learn a good marinade (I'll include on at the bottom), you'll be amazed at the results. Trust me.

1. Flip Early, Flip Often. This is the big shocker. It was hard to imagine doing this at first, and when I told people, they thought I was crazy. Think about it this way: you want a juicy steak, right? Or juicy chicken, or hamburgers, or whatever. The juice is nothing more than the blood in the meat. When you put the meat on the grill, there is more heat below the meat than above. The heat forces the liquid up, through the meat. Ever see a big pool of liquid on top of the steak when you lift the cover off the grill? It's been on too long. You don't want it to come out of the steak, you want it to stay in the steak. So you flip every four or five minutes. Sometimes I flip every two or three, depending on what else I'm doing. Flip it before any liquid has a chance to escape out of the top. Repeat often. Flip, flip, flip. It really works....

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Read some local bloggers while it rains. Read Garden Bloggers who live where it's not raining.
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May 19, 2005, 7:15 p.m.-- Last week's weblog

"Cliché Hell--Star Wars" As if you can't get enough already... is the name of the latest "photoshopping" contest at Worth 1000, famous for "Decorating Martha Stewart's jail cell" long before her trial.

The link above is to the large images. Here are thumbnails of the 64 Star Wars entries.

My favorite is the Jabba the cone -- that's a detail at right.
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Recommended podcasts: Tony Steidler-Dennison, podcaster of The Roadhouse blues show I mentioned Monday, saw that post and, as I'd hoped, delivered a list of podcasts he thinks highly of:

...I'd take some exception to the comment that The Roadhouse is "the one exception to generally dismal podcasting." For example, just a few random 'casts from the top of the current playlist ...

Dave Raven
Dave Slusher
Slacker Astronomy
Digital Flotsam
Jimmy Jett
Coverville

These are all quality podcasts, covering a great range of styles and subjects. I do appreciate being called "the one exception," but it's really just not true. There's a real abundance of quality in the podiverse.

Excellent. Thanks, Tony. Unlike a blog that you can scan quickly, it takes linear time to check out podcasts, and I've wasted a lot of it listening to bloggers sing offkey and try out funny voices. I think I'd like to focus on music podcasts -- if it can be written, I'd rather read it -- but that's not carved in stone. If it's really better as audio, I'll go there..

I'd love to start a list of podcasts that you don't have to be 25 to love. (Uh-oh, "I'd love to start a list" is how the Garden Blogs list began, and we all know how that has took on a life of its own.) If anyone is compiling and tending such a list, I'd love to know about it.
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18 new bloggers: DallasNews.com -- another Belo site -- launched a new sports blog today called SportsSay (a play on the name of their SportsDay section). They're using Movable Type -- with permalinks -- and it is outside the registration wall, on the open Web.

This is going to be a big, fast-moving blog -- 18 writers are on board, all men except for Rachel Cohen, who covers Texas A&M. (Registration is required to see who they are).

Individual voices generally get lost in this metablog format -- try to name a Metafilter blogger -- but as an incubator, I can see the appeal. If a blogger is busy working on a story, the blog doesn't stop. Some writers will take to blogging more than others, and those voices can eventually break out to blogs of their own.

While the meat of this blog is the minutia of a beat I only wake up to during football season, I did learn that our days of watching the Cotton Bowl at noon New Year's Day here in the East may be numbered. From new blogger Keith Whitmire:

Cotton Bowl clock-watching

One likely result of the proposal for the SBC Cotton Bowl and the Capital One Bowl to share teams (reg.req. for this link) is that the Cotton Bowl's kickoff would be at 11 a.m. instead of the insane 10 a.m. kicks we've had in recent years.

For anyone going to the game, that's one more hour of sleep. Or one more hour of partying on New Year's Eve, depending on how you look at it.

I look at it as late, here in EST, where that "insane 10 a.m. kick" happens at noon.

As you might expect, there's a "reporter's notebook" feel to many of these first posts: Few links. If you're a Texan already familiar with these sportswriters, that won't bother you. But I suspect Matt Mosley might revisit this declaration eventually:

Just to prepare you, most of my posts will include references to one of the following subjects: 1. Baylor 2. Lake Highlands 3. Kaufman, Texas. 4. Todd Archer's foul mood

You're on the World Wide Web now, Matt, and you may have to explain to the rest of the world what's so compelling about, um, Kaufman.

Related: Where Are They Now? Longtime blogger Jeneane Sessum (that's Jeneane with her daughter, Jenna, at right) does a wrap of some veteran bloggers' very first posts, and invites others to post their first URL in her comments (I did: March 20, 2002.).

Here's Jeneane's intro:

I was thinking on my way to Group how far so many bloggers have come from where they were -- in style, substance, voice, even personally -- since we started this little exercise. This now noisy bunch for the most part started out a little timid, whimsical, unfocused, then took the lid off and never shut up.

So, how did we sound back then, in the beginning?...

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Cheap gas (cont.): Reader MikeO sends along a lower gas price:

BJ's gas, N. Dartmouth Mall reg. $2.02

This is in the Mass. Gas Buddy, as well, which notes that's a members' price.
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May 18, 2005, 7:45 p.m.-- Last week's weblog

Cheap gas: Gas Buddy meets Google Maps. Pull down a form to select a city or state. Here, $2.05 is the cheapest reported to gasbuddy.com.

Since this depends entirely on the spotter knowing about the site, you might find even cheaper gas somewhere. If you do, please tell me.
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Citizen Photojournalism Competition: NowPublic.com is offering $100 every week through June 9 for the best newsworthy photo:

All photos uploaded to your NowPublic member portfolio will be eligible for weekly $100 cash prizes (five awards announced between 5/13 and 6/10) and the $500 grand prize (announced on 6/17), provided that you own the rights and tag your images correctly.

Honorable Mentions will be awarded, and include a membership upgrade with editorial privileges.

Membership is free and there is no entry fee or other obligation to submit your work.

More info at the headline link.
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When comics blog conferences: Long, and very funny report from the Mobile Media: Opportunities and Strategies for a Mobile, Broadband Generation conference last month. The author is Michael Dare, who blogs at disinfotainmenttoday.com, but this is a repost by Gloria Pan at Morph, the blog of the Media Center at the American Press Institute. (Update: I just found it on difttd, with caricatures)

This is a hoot -- not only for its characters but for the yada yada buzzwords and the cynical marketing that drives what you'll need, or at least what you'll get. The conference was devoted to small devices you can lose easily:

The Mobilistas figure, with good reason, that nowadays no one leaves home without their keys, their wallet, and their cell phone. If they could take over your keys and your wallet, they probably would, but right now they're aiming at what they can get at. Mobile media, media in bite-sized chunks - where the biggest sellers are ringtones and wallpaper, making overnight millionaires of people smart enough to be selling them - is specifically created to access on the move. It's not TV -- too long. It's not Internet -- the screen's too small for serious research and it's not even compatible with HTML. Mobile media is a brand new thing, aimed at people who can't stand going for one single nanosecond without something to do.

Here's just a bit more of it:

Why did Mitch Ratcliff, co-founder of Persuadio, have to go on and on about "top down broadcasting" and the "audience market" and "distribution hubs" and "digital rights management" (purposely making things inconvenient enough to force the customer to pay for things they could just do themselves) and "the birth of adhocracy" and "monetizable moments" and "the edge?" Couldn't he tell I was baffled? I didn't want to hear that qwerty keyboards were a thing of the past. I can type almost 100 words per minute, but text messaging slows me down to about five. In-jokes and incomprehensible trivia presented as earthshattering news.[You can take a look at Mitch's current research project for a visual representation of how different Web sites connect and network.]

Brian Hecht of CEO of Kikucall, has clients like HBO and Absolut and was smart enough not to make his picture available. Actors and musicians can subscribe to casting calls through his service, which seems like a good idea. Like Heidi Fleiss, his service has a "sophisticated back end" and is "all you can eat." He championed citizen journalism until he read this.

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Webstock? Miami Herald blogger Liz Donovan last week noted that I had linked to Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom -- he's the proto-blogger, the man who coined the term "weblog" -- and until then she hadn't realized he'd come back online after a hiatus. Then she riffed on Barger:

...fascinating to see, according to his bio page, that Barger spent several years at The Farm, in Summertown TN, back in the late 70's-early -'80s and has put together a Web page on the topic and on founder Stephen Gaskin. I still have a couple books about The Farm and Gaskin, including a book of his Monday Night Class talks. The man was inspirational in a very common-sense way. He led his followers from San Francisco to found a communal farm in Tennessee in the '70s, and The Farm is still going strong. On its Web site, a link to the Hippie Museum, with a Kerouac quote: "I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier..."

It's a vision that still lives in some parts of this sad country....and in this happy old girl, quickly approaching 60. And interesting that the Web is where many followers of the vision have ended up.

In comments at her site, I added that Stephen's wife, Ina May Gaskin, had published a book titled Spiritual Midwifery that got me through childbirth.

That's Ina May on the right, getting to be an old girl herself now.
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Right on time: T-shirts from The Time Traveler convention are ready.
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Blogger found: Craig Jensen of Craig's Booknotes emailed today to say it's not dormant, it simply moved -- without leaving a forwarding address. Eventually the old site went away, and I dropped 'Booknotes' into the "dormant" pile at the bottom of the blogroll. (I never give up hope on blogger resurrections.)
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Guest post: Eric Lilius: My "Canadian correspondent," Eric Lilius of Eagle Lake, Ontario, sends links he thinks we might enjoy delightfully often. Here's the last few days of Eric's picks:

An American's Guide to Canada

Most Americans know next to nothing about their neighbo(u)r to the north, except that Canadians play a lot of hockey, drink beer, and end sentences with "eh?"

These pages, written by an American who has been living in Canada since 1992, are intended to give Americans a better idea just what goes on in the Great White North.

I just discovered this site...thanks to wood s lot

I am listening to Bill Moyer's speech to the recent National Conference for Media Reform. What a treasure he is. (text of the speech via Craig Jensen, who thinks Moyers should be President.)

The Climate of Man by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. Published in 3 parts: 25 April, 2 May & 9 May 2005. Last paragraph:

"Climate records also show that we are steadily drawing closer to the temperature peaks of the last interglacial, when sea levels were some fifteen feet higher than they are today. Just a few degrees more and the earth will be hotter than it has been at any time since our species evolved. Scientists have identified a number of important feedbacks in the climate system, many of which are not fully understood; in general, they tend to take small changes to the system and amplify them into much larger forces. Perhaps we are the most unpredictable feedback of all. No matter what we do at this point, global temperatures will continue to rise in the coming decades, owing to the gigatons of extra CO2 already circulating in the atmosphere. With more than six billion people on the planet, the risks of this are obvious. A disruption in monsoon patterns, a shift in ocean currents, a major drought—any one of these could easily produce streams of refugees numbering in the millions. As the effects of global warming become more and more apparent, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing."

An impish spirit: Praises for Annie Dillard, in The Guardian. "Robert Macfarlane sings the praises of Anne Dillard, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"

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QuirkyMuseums: They're all in Japan, and strange, indeed. For instance,

The Meguro Parasitological Museum, with its metre-long tapeworms, mosquitos, cockroaches, mites and lice, photos of men with elephantitis, and sure-to-make-you-shiver descriptions of symptoms is the most bizarre museum that I have ever visited.

Visit their creepy home page at Parasites, Parasites, Parasites. It even has a virtual tour of the museum!

There's also a Ramen Museum (yes, noodle stuff), and museums devoted to kites, salt and tobacco, laundry, rubber baseballs, toys, criminology, The Little Prince and more.
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May 17, 2005, 8:00 p.m.-- Last week's weblog

Howls erupt as N.Y. Times plans to charge for Op-Ed, news columnists: Reaction to The New York Times announcement yesterday of its intention to charge $49.95 a year to read its Op-Ed and news columnists, online archives, multimedia, and stories released early, before the print deadline, has been swift and largely negative. Here's a headline wrapup from the blogosphere:

The NYT Withdraws From the Blogosphere -- Andrew Sullivan

The Times wants less links -- Megnut

Kiss the NYT Goodbye -- CMoore.com

The NYT Takes Bat and Ball Home, Won't Play No More -- Culture of Life Media News

They've Got To Be Kidding -- Res Ipsa Loquitur

The Pursuit of Irrelevance -- Joshua R. Canel, a.k.a. QuickSauce

NYT takes steps to curb Web traffic -- SiliconValley.com (San Jose Mercury News)

Is the NYTimes Really That Crazy? -- Furd Log

NYT: We Don't Want People to Read Our Op-Ed Columnists -- Ernest Miller, Corante.com

NYT's subscription plan raising eyebrows -- The Media Drop

TimesSelect: Free the Columnists! -- Steve Outing, PoynterOnline

Kevin Drum, whose blogging as Calpundit earned him the front page of Washington Monthly every day, has stopped linking to the Times already.

SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE WORDS....This isn't the biggest deal in the world, but I think I'm going to stop linking to New York Times op-eds and columns starting now. Yesterday's announcement made it clear they no longer want to engage with the hoi polloi, and in any case their op-ed page will be off limits to all of us nonsubscribers in September anyway. So why wait?

It was nice while it lasted, though.

Paid Content has the whole story, as you might expect. Staci D. Kramer interviewed Martin Niesenholtz, SVP-Digital, NYTCO.

Mention was made there of an attempt to placate bloggers with a share-the-wealth plan, although there are few details.

On an affiliate program: We also hope to roll out an affiliate program so the long tail can create a revenue stream for itself. If you're a blogger who uses a lot of Times Op-Ed content in your blog you can continue to (by subscribing to TimesSelect)... and, through an affiliate network, extend that to their base and they can make money on the backend off that. We think the blogosphere needs more revenmue streams."

It sounds like cybernewskids -- buy the papers (access), hawk the headlines (blog them), sell them (access to the full story) to others and you get to keep some of it.

Perhaps the funniest reaction came in a comment at Reason Online's Hit and Run blog, by a poster identified only as Aaron:

Now if we could just figure out how to convince Rush Limbaugh to go behind a firewall somewhere...

I am trying to imagine the scene in the newsroom where an odd professional death-by-flattery is under way: You, Maureen Dowd and David Brooks and Krugman et al are so important we will reduce your readership and remove the annoying links from bloggers. (Kramer quotes Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles: "One reader's prediction? At least one Times columnist will leave the paper, in an effort to preserve his/her prominence on the 'free' Web.")

If you're not linkable, you don't exist. Here are the non-personed:

David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Bob Herbert, Nicholas Kristof, Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, John Tierney, Dave Anderson, Peter Applebome, Harvey Araton, Dan Barry, Clyde Haberman, Gretchen Morgenson, Joe Nocera, Floyd Norris, Joyce Purnick, William Rhoden, Selena Roberts, George Vescey, Roger Cohen, and John Vinocur.

Can you live without them? The Times bets you'll weaken. The Web is readying darknets feeds. (That link goes to J.D. Lasica, who yesterday began posting chapters of his new book, Darknet, on his site. Today, J.D. blogs Niesenholtz's answers to questions during an appearance at IDG's Syndicate conference in NYC.)

As with music file-sharing, there only needs to be one copy, one subscriber.

Will the Times sue file-sharers as RIAA does? For unauthorized distribution of the news?

" But, your honor, I read somebody else's paper at the breakfast place every morning. Nobody sues me for not buying my own. They brag to advertisers how many people read it, no matter how many people actually pay for it. They pay somebody to find out how many people who didn't buy it read it, and they brag about it."

The L.A. Times just ended its paid-subscription experiment with CalendarLive. Their good work went unread, and evidently unsupported.

"Modest fee"? For $49.95 a year (to start) for one site? Then $49.95 for WaPo? And again for every other news site you drop by?

Nope. Nickel and diming that starts at $50, not .05, is a slippery slope. What ever happened to micropayments?

"This is a great offering," said Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations. "TimesSelect combines the insights and ideas of distinctive voices from The Times and IHT with seamless access to our archives in an unprecedented way and at a terrific price point. At the same time, by keeping the majority of the site free, we will continue to scale the business through strong advertising growth.""

Since when have grey ladies stooped to hyping price points? This is the tacky side of the family.

News abhors a vacuum. If your guys are out of the conversation, their sources will get their stories to other guys.

Information wants to be out there.

I saw a website today saying, "Make EPIC happen!"

In Epic 2014, the Times is off the Web, a private, subscription-only publication for the elite. (See this link from last week for full details.)

We'll trace it back to this moment. We just didn't think it would begin so quickly.

Out of time, on deadline, the email version goes out in a few minutes. More tomorrow.
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May 16, 2005, 8:00 p.m.-- Last week's weblog

How Lightsabers Work: From How Stuff Works, of course. Here's a sample:

Another important use of a lightsaber is deflection, in two different ways:

1. A lightsaber blade can deflect another lightsaber blade and block its path.

2. A lightsaber blade can deflect blaster bolts. In most cases you will want to deflect the bolts back at the person who shot them at you in the first place, but it is also possible to deflect them toward other objects and people in the room.

A lightsaber user with a strong affinity for the Force has a distinct advantage in the latter situation. By using the Force, the wielder can anticipate the path of the blaster bolt and align the blade with that path prior to the bolt's arrival. Using normal visual tracking to accomplish the same effect can be far more difficult.

Here's another take on it. And yet another.
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The new podcasting tools at Cnet. How to make your own Wayne's World radio show.

Most of the podcasts I've heard are truly awful, and now that former MTV VJ Adam Curry has traded his podcasting for Sirius broadcasting, and leaving Dave Winer out of the glory in his Wired interview (Audience With the Podfather) , Dave has publicly reviled him.

Doc Searls has pointed more than once to the best podcast around, the one exception to generally dismal podcasting, Tony Steidler-Dennison's weekly The Roadhouse (Subhed: The finest blues you've never heard). His secret: He spreads the best by unsigned blues bands at garageband.com.

If you're still game, an want to go deeper, Podcasting Tools is all over this subject.

Related: KVNF ("Mountain-Grown Community Radio") is not a podcast:

KVNF is grassroots, creative, volunteer based, community oriented public radio serving Western Colorado for 25 years.

Dozens of local folks volunteer as DJs, bringing in their own music collections, and what we've heard is always good. Here's the schedule.
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AfricanHipHop.com seems to have its own podcasts. (Oh, I forgot: The blogosphere has deemed it's not a podcast unless it has an rss feed). Call it what you like:

AfricanHipHopRadio.com is the continuation of the Rumba-Kali webcast which has been online since 1998 playing those tunes that you won't hear anywhere else. In the new format we have added live presentation by the AfricanHipHopRadio team of Drew MC and Juma4, radio contributions from our correspondents across the continent, playing white labels and promos, newly released albums, old school tunes, sample sources and more.

Listen now - second show of March 2005
You can listen to two hours of African Hip Hop Radio on your pc by clicking the links below.

Also,

Check out Senerap.org! Contains our Senegal pages, plus an audio library, newspaper cuttings from Senegalese papers, lyrics, and more...

Some of it is in French.

Related: Wikipedia traces hip hop music back to the griots of West Africa.
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Italian recipes from London's River Cafe: In The Guardian

Welcome to the first of two extracts from River Cafe Two Easy, the second volume of River Cafe Cook Book Easy. In the first book, we featured many of the simple dishes from the restaurant menus; in this one, we set out to find the easy recipes from some of our favourite regions of Italy.

This week's extract focuses on antipasti, pasta and soup...Antipasti and salads, for us, are simple combinations of vegetables served at room temperature, be they grilled, boiled, roasted or raw. The pasta section includes two tomato-based pastas, as well as four of the most intriguing fish pastas. We end with some of those thick soups from Milan.

River Cafe Two Easy by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, founders of London's River Cafe, is to be published in the U.S. June 28.

Random House, the publisher, says it offers more recipes from the book -- and not just the first courses. But they're blank in Firefox. You might get them in some other browser. (One that's breaking the Web, somehow.)
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Web 1.0 Summit: My Garage, San Francisco on Flickr. I have finally seen how to bridge the gap between citizen journalism and the digital divide.
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Bayosphere: Dan Gillmor quit the San Jose Mercury News a few months ago to start some up grassroots media. Here's the tip of the first one.

Dan has also moved his blog there.
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New garden blogs: Author, programmer andphotographer Shelley Powers (Burningbird) linked to the Garden Blogs page last week (in a wonderfully titled post, The Haiku of Gardens and Pillows) and here's the first newcomer as a result.

SB writes,

My blog isn't a garden blog, exactly -- it's a personal blog by a poet and gardener, with lots of garden photos -- Watermark:

I found you through Burningbird -- what a great resource!

And fine photos they are, with more at Flickr.

The Nature Nut, is a garden blog by Mia Goff of Ottawa, Canada. Her zone 4 garden, she writes, "contains 400+ perennials and shrubs hardy in this zone. I am a hosta nut, but also adore pulmonarias, heucheras, astilbes, sedums. stop here (I love all plants).

"My blog is written to be shared with anyone who has an appreciation for plants and nature, and I plan to stay on topic with daily posts on plant information, photographs and garden activities."

Mia plans "daily posts on plant information, photographs and garden activities." Definitely one to watch. And whatever she plants, we should be able to plant here.
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