PIppa and I will soon leave to pick up Nate and Laura in Philadelphia, stopping en route to buy a rutabaga. After the travelers catch their breath, we’ll open the gifts that we ignored yesterday, and have our choir director over for dinner.
Briefly noted, then:
¶ A while ago, in the sad aftermath of Anita’s and Marc’s deaths, Dave Winer noted that bloggers risk disappearing from the Web once they’re no longer around to pay their hosting bills. Subsequently Tim Bray has weighed in with his very cogent thoughts on the topic. For the record, and since Dave is very exercised about keeping track of the historical record with regard to “firsts,” I blogged about this problem way back in 2003 — as Joi and David noted at the time. It even turned out to be the hook for my TV interview on France 2. So although I didn’t invent the Internet or blogging, my concern about archive death predates Dave’s.
¶ I don’t remember the chain of links that led to it, but yesterday I discovered The Head Lemur’s “new Greek” page of meaningless boilerplate prose to fill up a given text frame. He’s the guy behind pixelview.
¶ I frequently look for song lyrics online, a practice beset by dire danger of running into pop-up, pop-down, pop-behind, polypop, spam-infested traps. The safest site (I think) that I’ve run into is Song Meanings, which adds the debatable value of site members appending their interpretations to lyrics.
¶ Thanks to the remarkable Stephen Downes, I’ve been impressed by links to an open-source flight simulator, a concise demystification of how people learn online, and Stephen’s own thorough account of how creators benefit from freely-distributed work.
¶ I haven’t figured out how best to use it yet, but the Vatican’s Bibliaclerus site looks promising.
¶ I haven’t been really knocked out by the music releases of 2007; I’ll post a longer entry about the year in music eventually, but as I accumulate more and more digital recordings, I spend less and less time to listening to brand-new releases. For a similar reason, I hardly ever listen to “albums.” Off the top of my head (where hair used to grow), though, I can affirm my positive response to Springsteen’s Magic and to Lyle Lovett’s It’s Not Big It’s Large.