Blogging Now Considered Normal

Well, okay. Maybe mainstream America doesn't consider blogging to be "normal" just yet. However, blogging is definitely within the bell curve of things that are no longer weird.

Back in September, CNET's Webware reported that bloggers are now creating nearly 1 million posts per day.

Webware notes that the mainstream media is using blogging as supplementary and complementary to normal online news reporting. Evidence for this is easily found on my two most visited news sites, nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com. The Times has its own index of Times staffer blogs. The Post even has its own blog subdomain. These news blogs seem to be comprised mostly of not-quite-newsworthy news or, more fascinatingly, subjective analysis of the threads and trends that tie news stories together. They are all themed and just browsing through the Times blog index is a good way to unintentionally double your feedreader's subscription count.

A Technorati survey of 1,000 bloggers found that the mean advertising revenue was $6K per year, with some bloggers making over $75K. Watching blogging mature from pure narcissism to legitimate media has been fascinating. Everytime someone makes fun of Twitter (I have a Twitter account, see left), I think to myself, "Hey, this is exactly how blogging was first received.".

Still, the medium deserves a healthy skepticism. Blogging, and internet-based media in general, have a long way to go before they become sources as trusted as magazines and newspapers. There is no Audit Blog of Circulations. You can't rely on frequency of posting and most bloggers don't post their web traffic.

Counting Calories to Become Law?

The New York Times has reported that "nearly three dozen states, cities and counties have passed or introduced laws that would require calorie posting in some form... Two proposals moving through Congress would make calorie postings uniform nationwide."

"The makers of Coca-Cola and M&Ms will soon print calories on the front of packages...New Yorkers got a harsh dose of calorie reality this summer when restaurants with 15 or more outlets were forced to post the calorie content of food next to the price."

Food makers are jumping on the calorie counting trend by reducing portion sizes and posting caloric ratings on their menus. But are they reducing the price? Don't be silly!

Chemical Industry Wrote FDA's Bisphenol-A Assessment

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has reported that the American Chemistry Council, a trade association and lobbying organization representing the chemical industry, wrote much of the FDA's August assessment of bisphenol-A.

A day after the Journal Sentinel ran its story, a group of scientists criticized the FDA for allowing this obvious conflict of interest.

The Environmental Working Group has been criticizing the FDA's position on BPA since this spring and offers this brief review of the conflicts of interest involved.

See all Mediocre Polymath posts about bisphenol-A.

I got to play with a Kindle

I was sitting on the plane last weekend when the late 30-something woman to my left opened her purse, took out a Moleskine notebook, and opened it. I instantly pegged her as an English nerd. I didn't realize how right I'd be; it wasn't a Moleskine, it was a Kindle.

I blurted, "So howww do you like it!?".

"I love it!", she said. "Would you like to check it out?"

"Yes, yes I would."

She gave me the walkthrough, beginning with her list of books, one of which was some sex counseling thing -- little awkward.

After a minute of Kindle network connection troubles, she let me buy Friday's New York Times, which took seconds to download. All the while, she gave me Amazon's party line on battery life, usability, etc. I never thought to ask her if she worked for Amazon, though I did confess to working for a publisher.

I flipped through some pages, noting the reassuring heft of this machine. The screen clarity really is amazon, er, amazing. I found the refresh rate to be a little slow. The screen going black as it refreshes unsuspended my disbelief, and I can see this being a problem for the ebook reading experience. Perhaps one gets used to it as we're all used to flipping pages.

I held the Kindle with both hands, one on either side. I asked her if she accidentally flipped pages.

She admitted to such frequent unintentional page turns that she used the Kindle's "placemark" feature about every five pages just to avoid...something. I'm not sure what, though. Maybe you can fast-forward a Kindle? Either way, it sounds as if the page turn bars could use more than a little fine tuning.

The scroll bar, just right of the right thumb in this photo, needs work as well. The scroll bar is the main navigation device when the Kindle is not in a book. In other words, you choose what book to read, what chapter to open, what newspaper to purchase, etc. using the scroll bar, which you thumb up or down. To make a selection, you press down onto the scroll bar. Many times during my 15 minutes with this Kindle, I accidentally scrolled when I meant to select.

An exacerbating flaw is the slow processor speed. Pages "turn" with reasonable speed, but to do anything other than turn a page -- to navigate between books or to browse the Amazon Kindle store -- the page takes more time to load. So with every click of the scroll bar, I had to wait to see if I'd clicked or scrolled. If I'd accidentally scrolled-then-clicked, I had to navigate back to where I was and try again. The speed is definitely not as quick as, say, browsing the web on a computer. I found it a little tedious.

So hopefully Amazon will eliminate these flaws in the Kindle 2, which seems to be imminent.

An Internet without ads?

I remember the first time I logged onto the world wide web. It was back in 1994 in the college computer lab. A friend of mine had returned from the computer lab that week all excited about the world wide web, Internet Explorer, something called "Yahoo", and the Pearl Jam website.

At the time, my total experience with the Internet had been using the Pine email... um, software. I hesitate to call it software since it was basically a command line program: the screen was black and the text was green, a la The Matrix. I was no Neo; checking Pine for email from my three friends who were using email required at least 15 minutes of fumbling clumsily through botched commands and login attempts.

Oh, and I should mention that I was "MUDding". MUDding was the ultimate nerd activity. It was black-screen/green-text Dungeons & Dragons without any extraneous or potentially embarassing face-to-face human interaction. It was also terribly boring after about two weeks.

So I went to the computer lab after dinner one night with hype in my head and very low expectations. I sat down at a terminal, much as I do today when I'm forced to use a Mac, and stared at the screen, not knowing what to do. I opened up the command line and typed "internet". Then "world wide web". Then "yahoo" and "pearl jam". Naturally, a lot of cryptic error messages. How was I supposed to know to double-click on the big, blue, lowercase "e" on the desktop?

I finally tried the "e". It opened and there was Yahoo.com, not terribly different from today's Yahoo portal. And there, greeting me with epileptic glory, were animated gifs (Flash not yet having been invented).

That same friend introduced me to Google.com in '99 or '00.

Since that time, as we all know, the web has been slowly but surely taking over the desktop computer. And the desktop computer is slowly but surely replacing traditional office hardware, like fax machines and phones. With a web browser and broadband internet connection, you can check email, write a novel, create a spreadsheet, design a presentation, touch up photos, assemble a video, phone a friend--all without paying a single penny.

How? The web today, as it was in 1994, is ad-supported. There are two types of ads:

1. epileptic seizure inducers: static images, animated gifs, Flash videos, etc.
2. text-based ads: ads that appear to the right of a Google search, for example

But the web is not supported only by image and text advertising. Many "web 2.0" services sell the information they glean about you as you use the web. How your information is used is nearly always explained, not always with clarity, in the web service's "terms of service" statement.

Using extensible web browsers like Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera, it is now possible to block image-based ads. Here's how:

• use Adblock to block ads in Firefox
• prevent ads from appearing in Google Chrome
• remove ads in Safari
• create your own list of ads to block
• stop ads in YouTube
  

And--blow my mind--now you don't even have to hack your browser to block ads! You can now hack your router so that it blocks ads before they even get to your browser. Note that Lifehacker, an ad-supported blog, brought all these techniques to light for their tens of thousands of daily readers. Lifehacker's editors nearly beg their readers not to block ads hosted on Lifehacker.com.

Something like 75% of internet users are still using Internet Explorer, which to my knowledge, doesn't yet have any easy, browser-based ways to block ads. Given the drubbing Microsoft's taken from the web 2.0 movement, I imagine it's only a matter of time before Redmond opens up IE to add-ons, a la Firefox. (Google plans to do this with Chrome soon, too.)

This leaves the Internet with 25% of its users able to block ads on the web. And why wouldn't users block image advertising? It can be pretty obnoxious and really slow down the web-surfing experience. If trends continue and more people move to Firefox and Chrome, the web business model might be in serious danger. What happens then?

A few ideas (updating with new ideas as they occur to me):

• Text-based search advertising becomes the only viable revenue generation model on the web, Google totally dominates.
  
• Online privacy becomes impossible as web 2.0 companies demand more information in exchange for their free, non-ad-supported services.
  
• The web divides into classes. Stone age Americans, poor saps, are left sucking advertising while savvy users enjoy an ad-free web.
• Image ads fade away. Congress legislates against more intrusive privacy policies. Still without any source of revenue, Web 2.0 sites crumble. Broadband fees rise to offset the lack of ad revenue, much like the early days of cable TV.
  

What might an ad-free web look like?

John McCain: Family Man (and oh, what a family)

Chastising the media for its intrusions and scrutiny, politicians have long argued that their personal lives are irrelevant to their capability in public office. The American public, which devotes rapt attention to media coverage of personal scandal, obviously disagrees. 

Nothing's more entertaining than watching a politician try to wiggle his way out of directly addressing an ethical question, and nothing's more self-satisfying than passing judgment on a politician. Whether personal ethics are relevant to public service makes for a spirited academic debate, but I'll venture to claim that most reasonable, mainstream Americans would agree with this statement: the choices you make in your personal life say something about who you are.

In 2000, I would have been delighted to vote for John McCain. Today, I'd like to bring attention some facts about McCain and his personal life that I've only recently learned, courtesy of today's New York Times and Wikipedia. (Before you laugh at Wikipedia as a source, consider that McCain's campaign has no doubt scoured it line by line.) A timeline of the highlights:

• McCain first marriage was to a model, Carol, who had two kids. McCain adopted those two kids. He and Carol later had a kid together.
• McCain requested a combat assignment during the Vietnam War.
• After his time as a POW, which was highly covered in the media since McCain's father was an admiral, McCain returned to the US and his wife, who had stood by him during his 5 1/2 year imprisonment. Carol had been in a crippling car accident while he was away.
• Three years later, McCain had several affairs.
• Two years later, McCain met Cindy and they began dating while McCain was still married. Cindy was 20 years younger than Carol and daughter of millionaire businessman.  
• McCain and Carol got divorced 10 months after John started dating Cindy.
• McCain married Cindy, one month after the divorce become final, one year after meeting her.
• McCain continued to provide some financial support for Carol, who continued to recover from her auto accident.
• McCain brought Cindy to Washington, where she was shunned. Cindy returned to Arizona. McCain spent the week in Washington and flew home on weekends, where he spent time campaigning.
• Cindy had several miscarriages while McCain was in DC.
• Cindy's parents often bought jewelry as gifts to be given "from John".
• During McCain's investigation during the savings and loan scandals, Cindy became addicted to painkillers and stole prescription drugs from an orphanage she was running. McCain claimed he had clue about Cindy's addiction. (And why would he? They were rarely together.)

Some other facts:

• McCain has 7 kids whose ages span 40 years.
• McCain is 71. McCain's oldest kid is 48, 4 years younger than Cindy.
• His youngest kid is 20; she's the adopted one from Bangladesh.

From the Times article: "Some of Mr. McCain’s Washington friends say they have barely met Mrs. McCain, while fellow mothers at their children’s schools say they have little sense of her husband. The two often relax in separate places: Mr. McCain prefers the family’s ranch in the Arizona desert, while Mrs. McCain’s refuge is a high-rise condominium on the Pacific."

On the campaign trail, when Cindy McCain stands by her man, it's no wonder she looks tense and uncomfortable. Scorned by Washington and married to a 70-year old man she barely knows, McCain declines to speak with the media, in part out of fear that someone will ask her a question about her husband.

I admit no one's perfect, including me. I'm also not applying to run the country. Many of these points above aren't necessarily right or wrong, but there sure are some wierd happenings in John McCain's life and family.

Boulder earns highest bike-friendly ranking

Jeez, this took awhile.

You'd think the town that has better maintained bike paths than roads and its own bicycle "driving directions" service would have been top notch already.

Boulder's bike-friendly rank bumped to the highest tier

Basic Computer Tips for Stone Age Americans

I once knew a guy at a previous job who came in to work at 6am every morning. The rest of the office strolled in, coffee in hand, around 9am. One morning, this guy, who was in his fifties, asked me for some computer help. He was having trouble attaching a file to an email.

As I stared at his monitor trying to keep my lower jaw in contact with my upper jaw, it struck me: the two dozen post-it notes framing his monitor were his Address Book. He came in at 6am every morning to give himself enough time to key in all 200+ email addresses that were scrawled on the post-it notes.

At first, I was sick to my stomach. Then I was furious. In today's computer-driven office, how are there still people who don't know how to attach files to emails or copy-paste an address list, or create a distribution list of contacts? As politely as I could, and in as soft a voice as I could muster, I showed him the light.

Please, don't be a Stone Age office worker in Internet Age America. Take a computer class or hire a teenager to be your tutor. There are few better examples of the potential productivity gains from just a little learning than in using a computer.

In that spirit, here are a few tips from the NYTimes's tech columnist recent blog post. Read his post to make sure you're not a techno-dinosaur.

• You can double-click a word to highlight it in any document, e-mail or Web page.
• When you get an e-mail message from eBay or your bank, claiming that you have an account problem or a question from a buyer, it's probably a "phishing scam" intended to trick you into typing your password. Don't click the link in the message. If in doubt, go into your browser and type "www.ebay.com" (or whatever) manually.
• You can hide all windows, revealing only what's on the computer desktop, with one keystroke: hit the Windows key and "D" simultaneously in Windows, or press F11 on Macs (on recent Mac laptops, Command+F3; Command is the key with the cloverleaf logo). That's great when you want examine or delete something you've just downloaded to the desktop, for example. Press the keystroke again to return to what you were doing.
• You can enlarge the text on any Web page. In Windows, press Ctrl and the plus or minus keys (for bigger or smaller fonts); on the Mac, it's the Command key and plus or minus.
• When someone sends you some shocking e-mail and suggests that you pass it on, don't. At least not until you've first confirmed its truth at snopes.com, the Internet's authority on e-mailed myths. This includes get-rich schemes, Microsoft/AOL cash giveaways, and–especially lately–nutty scare-tactic messages about our Presidential candidates.
• You can tap the Space bar to scroll down on a Web page one screenful. Add the Shift key to scroll back up.