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By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
July 17, 2002
Meet
the Nigerian E-Mail Grifters: It's a story
that's been begging to be done, and Wired
did it.
A Nigerian student named Taiwo, allegedly a member of
a spammer family, spills the beans during an interview in a Manhattan
coffee shop.
Among the surprises: The spam scam's real objective is
to get the gullible to come to Nigeria, where the grifters make sure their
papers are not in order.
This explains a lot: The informant swears he only wrote
the letters -- beginning at age 11:
"...he guiltily admits to taking pride in the
letters he created, and said he worked very hard to "suit the form."
The letters are intended to resemble soap operas that are popular in
Nigeria, Taiwo said, but with language that evokes someone who is "educated,
upper-class, out of touch with the common people... I was told to write
like a classic novelist would," Taiwo explained. "Very old
world, very thick sentences, you know?"
We know.
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Amazon
Light is a search engine page for the Amazon.com
site patterned after Google.
There's even a "Serendipity" link like G's "Feeling Lucky"
that serves up a random book. Much easier...
On the same site: Luciferous
Logolepsy, a collection of over 9,000 obscure english words. "Galilee"
caught my eye; besides being a New Testament spot and a Rhode Island fishing
village, it's also a "church porch, or chapel at entrance."
via Boing
Boing
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Tomorrow is Blog MeetUp Day
in 200 cities. The Providence
MeetUp page is here. The site is AS220, 115 Empire Street, 7 p.m.,
but at least four bloggers have to RSVP or it's canceled.
Unfortunately, I can't make it -- going to the K19
- Widowmaker movie premiere -- but I hope it happens. Here's the background
on the MeetUp idea.
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Shopping for a laptop? An Ars
Technica user, Al "MR HAPPY" Prescott, has started
the research for you:
"Here is a link
to an Excel spreadsheet (HTML version here)
of about a dozen laptops from many popular manufacturers. It included:
cost, processor, LCD, Video, LAN/WIFI, CD/DVD, Dimensions, weight, battery
life, warranty, etc..."
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Reader comments: Tom
Poe of Reno, Nev., writes in response to Monday's
item about Time Warner cable testing a set-top TV recorder,
"You know what I saw when I read the stuff about opting in for
a price?
"That's EXACTLY what they're all after. They take everything away,
and then pay-per-view-per-monitor-screen. Well, so much for Fair Use
and for Public Domain. Can't have both. Put that together with keyboardless-devices,
and they'll be happy campers."
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July 16, 2002
Public
Knowledge is a new public-advocacy group
"dedicated to fortifying and defending a vibrant 'information commons'
- the shared information resources and cultural assets that we own as
a people...." They hope to represent the interests of "a wide
spectrum of stakeholders - libraries, educators, scientists, artists,
musicians, journalists, consumers, software programmers, civic groups
and enlightened businesses. "
What's interesting here is that they intend to plump for
both artists and consumers; notably missing are the middlemen.
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21C
is a new online culture magazine trolling for intelligent readers. Its
lead story is by Jaron
Lanier (who, among
other groundbreaking acts, coined the term "virtual reality")
and begins, "A while back I was asked to help Steven Spielberg brainstorm
a science fiction movie he intended to make based on the Philip K. Dick
short story Minority Report..."
Among others signed as contributors
are William Gibson, Greil Marcus, Rudy Rucker, Douglas Rushkoff, R.U.
Sirius and Bruce Sterling.
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Inside-out photojournalism:
Here's a photo
essay (loosely) about fashion that the clueful Doc
Searls calls "brilliant." After checking it out, I agree.
Famous faces, no i.d.s, but the captions are a running commentary that
works. Click on each photo to advance; the last "slide" dumps
you out to the blog
of creator Tony Pierce.
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Organic businesswoman: Family
reasserts control at Rodale is a long, interesting profile in the
Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call of Maria Rodale's involvement with her family's
namesake business -- including kicking out the corporate managers at the
Emmaus, Pa., firm whose Organic Gardening magazine kicked off a movement:
"The mission was about helping people help themselves
stay well, through healthful eating, vitamin regimens and fitness. It
was fulfilled in books and magazines such as Prevention and Men's Health.
But Maria's new mission includes publishing information on healing,
for people who are already sick. It's perhaps a subtle shift to many
observers, but a sacrilege to others because it dared to stray from
the original Rodale vision."
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Blog goes to a movie premier:
Thursday night, I'll be putting on a prom dress and going to my first-ever
Big Movie Premiere, right here in Providence, thanks to my big brother
Frank Lennon, who's arranged a permanent berth in Providence for the Russian
sub that stars in the movie K19, The Widowmaker, opening nationally
Friday.
Journal film critic Michael
Janusonis writes about a History Channel documentary tonight on the
sub and the movie:
Paramount will hold the New
England premiere of its $100-million big-screen version of the calamity,
K-19: The Widowmaker, on Thursday night at Providence Place.
It will be a benefit for the USS
Saratoga Museum Foundation, which owns the former Soviet diesel
sub that doubled for the K-19 in the film and now resides at Collier
Point Park in Providence.
Tonight, The History Channel
cable network will present its own version of the tale in The Real
Story of the K-19, a documentary airing at 9 p.m.
The documentary is the first in a three-part series
called Inside the Soviet Military Machine, which will run at 9 p.m.
tonight through Thursday. Remarkably, according to The History Channel,
Hollywood got much of the K-19 story right. There are many parallels
to real life in the movie, which opens nationally Friday and stars Harrison
Ford as the skipper of the ill-fated K-19. More...
Features editor Phil
Kukielski, meanwhile, reviews the book: K-19 The Widowmaker: The
Secret Story Of The Soviet Nuclear Submarine by Peter Huchthausen,
Capt. USN (ret.). National Geographic Books. 243 pages. $16 (paperback)
I intend to blog the glitter, the glamour, the apres-flick
borscht on Friday.
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July 15, 2002
Back: Vacation's over, and
1,268 emails greet me. The Nigerians are fading, but garlic from Iran
is coming on strong in the spam race.
"Natural
remedies used to navigate menopause"
from today's The Seattle Times is a welcome introduction to alternatives
for women in the wake of the increased risks that halted the JAMA
study on Hormone Replacement Therapy. via
Paul Andrews
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Replay that again, please?
From within the AOL Time Warner empire, conflicting messages. First, the
Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle reported Wednesday, "TV
viewers gaining control: Time
Warner to add replay and more on-demand options":
The dominant cable company in Rochester (Time Warner)
will launch several new cable features this summer, including movies
on demand, a set-top recorder that pauses and records live TV, and a
way to dial up all the old episodes of cable shows such as The Sopranos.
If such gadgets sell well in Rochester, Time Warner
will launch them nationwide, part of its parent company AOL Time Warner's
drive to compete against satellite TV providers that have attracted
millions of customers away from cable.
Among the offerings,
"Digital Video Recorders -- Launching in August,
this is an extra set-top box that works like a VCR, but can record,
pause and playback live television. Instead of buying the box, subscribers
will rent it from Time Warner for $9.95 a month. This puts Time Warner
squarely in competition with another digital video recorder company,
TiVo, which currently counts more than 400,000 subscribers nationwide.
A TiVo box retails for about $400 for the unit, plus a $12.95 monthly
service fee. "
But nobody apparently told Jamie Kellner, Chairman of
Turner Broadcasting, an AOL
Time Warner company, who earlier achieved dubious recognition for
telling CableWorld magazine that viewers who skip commercials are "stealing"
programming, violating a "contract" no TV viewer remembers initialing.
AP reported Friday, Viewers
could pay for skipping ads:
Television viewers could face paying for channels they
now receive free if digital video recorders kill commercials, said Jamie
Kellner, chairman of Turner Broadcasting System. The wider use of systems
like TiVo and ReplayTV, which allow viewers to easily skip through ads,
would force a change in how broadcast and basic cable TV is supported,
Kellner said Friday. "Don't think for a moment there's a free lunch
involved in this," Kellner told the Television Critics Association.
Viewers could end up paying about $ 250 a year above any cable or satellite
fees, he said, based on his own rough calculation.
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"Behind
the news" is a nice news and reference
blog by Elizabeth Donovan, news research editor at the Miami Herald. I
found her site in my vacation
blog's referrer logs -- it's more than a pleasure to discover a colleague,
a stranger, who likes my work and says so. This one is on the blogroll.
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DoubleClick "cookies"
might turn to spam: Rebecca
Blood reports, "This is important. Online marketing services
company L90 said Monday that it has signed a deal to acquire DoubleClick's
ad sales business. What this means is that DoubleClick's privacy policy
will no longer apply to the information they have collected about you
as you have travelled around the Web (and if you haven't opted out, they
have collected a long list of many commercial sites you visit.)... You
may opt
out of your DoubleClick cookie here." L90 has since changed its
name to MaxWorldwide.
Blood, whose weblog is just one part of the Rebecca's
Pocket site, is the author of a new book about blogging,
The Weblog Handbook, and writes the introduction and one of the
articles in We've
Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture by Perseus Publishing.
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Wired
profiles Karin Spitzer, "a young fashion entrepreneur who
is building a business out of nothing but a copyrighted phrase,"
no time. "She sells bracelets
that read "no time for boys" or "no time to shop,"
mouse pads saying "no time for spam," sticky notes that read
"no time to type," and an assortment of similarly branded lapel
pins, temporary tattoos and arm bands ("no time for war"). ....She
dreamed up the 'no time' phrase while working on a bus-shelter art installation
in a busy business district and studying at the Rhode Island School of
Design."
And sure enough, on
her site Spitzer includes a photo
of the Kennedy Plaza bus shelter and it's "no time" phrases,
with a RIPTA bus and the Biltmore Hotel in the background. Spitzer now
lives in Brooklyn, N.Y
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Name that gadget: Here are its features:
* Internet: Web, e-mail, etc. Reads Handwriting
* TV: Flat/Clear image, smart remote controller
* Music: FM radio MP3, download from Internet
* Cook: Cookbook, update recipe through Internet
* Stored Food: Food List, storage time alarm
* Memo: Video, Audio, Drawn & Text messages, New Message Alarm,
Password for playing Messages
* Diary: Phone Book, Schedule Management/Alarm
* Album: Digital photo Album, Screen saver, built in digital camera
* Management: Self-Diagnosis & Cyber Service, Inform Water Filter
Change, Background & Internet Set-Up
What is this? It's an Internet
fridge by LG. The photo suggests there's ice and water through the
left door -- the right side has the flat screen -- but the cooling details
get short shrift here. No, it's not portable. And I think the "stored-food
food list and storage time alarm" only work if you log (or scan?)
your food in when you bring it from the store.
I can see it now at my house, "Joe, the fridge says we have chicken
salad!"
"Sorry, honey, I ate it and forgot to tell the fridge." via
The
Shifted Librarian
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Nice lead: "Wall Street roared into reverse again this morning,
backing over President Bush as he tried futilely to talk up the economy."
Jerry Knight filed it this afternoon on
Washingtonpost.com
Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com
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