EdCone.com

Happy New Year, y'all.

Thanks for coming to my weblog. Thanks for reading and writing, thinking and building, daring and sharing and creating something new and powerful, in Greensboro and across the country and around the world.

May your 2005 be healthy and prosperous.

Count your blessings. I'm counting you among mine. 

Peace.

A great list of links to tsunami info, including ways to help, from Jeff Jarvis.

Don't forget: Triangle weblog conference, Feb. 12. I'm planning to go, would be happy to share the ride if anyone needs transportation or wants company.

"(Herb) Sendek's job is in danger," says the resident Woofpack fan over at ACC Hoops after last night's "horrific" loss to St. John's.

Lance Armstrong, world's greatest athlete? Sam Hieb has some thoughts.

Hoggard has some advice for sporadic blogger and Greensboro mayor pro tem Yvonne Johnson, who vows to blog more often.

Slate: How the animals survived the tsunami.

The Nit Picker's Guide to the Lord of the Rings. (via Backwards City)

Induces sympathy for Peter Jackson and dilutes the substantive criticism by mixing the pertinent (e.g., the recharacterization of Faramir and Elrond, the changes at Helm's Deep) with the picayune (e.g., "Boromir refers to Lothlorien as 'perilous' (FOTR p.439). Jackson has Gimli refer to Lothlorien as 'perilous.'")

FRM went home for the holidays and used her semester of law-school training to advantage during a drunken political argument with her dad.

Another promising local aggregation site: Urban Vancouver.

The fine new local aggregator, TriadBlogs, turns out to be the work of...GiT's TheShu.

Mr. Sun wins the guessing game and for identifying TheShu gets his choice of an EdCone.com virtual tote bag or coffee mug.

Suggestions: move the news feed from Topix out of the stream of local blog posts -- put it in a box somewhere else on the page. (Same to you, Greensboro101.) And limit the excerpted text of a post to a paragraph or two.

Henri Matisse
Bouquet of Dahlias and White Book
1923, oil on canvas, Baltimore Museum of Art

Finally got the kids down to Raleigh to see the Matisse/Picasso show. It's still great when you're sober.

The museum was jammed, the show is selling out every day, next week when school's back in session it may be less crazed. Still, you might want to get tix in advance. The whole thing closes in two weeks, and during the final weekend the NCMA will by open for 32 hours straight , from 9 AM  on Saturday, January 15, until 5 PM Sunday.

An interview with Karl Martino, creator of the Philly Future local blog aggregator.

From our conversation:

"Anyone can collect blogs and read them thru an aggregator.  I moved to highlight certain bloggers I thought were exceptional, and to point out stories they've posted that I thought should be shared."

"I've settled on some basic tenets: keep the layout simple, and place the site's focus right were you will find it loading the page the very first time."

"I want you to come to Philly Future, see an item of interest, and then
click away to whatever and wherever that is.  That's the heart of
blogging if you ask me. Sharing not capturing."

And lots more on the techie side, his local community, and temporarily losing the URL to a porn site...read the whole thing.

I've started pruning my local blogroll, but I still don't know what I'm doing. Culling bloggers who don't update is easy. Waiting til new bloggers show that they'll be around for a while makes sense. But I'm not inclined to maintain a comprehensive list, which is why the most important names on my blogroll are the three local aggregators, plus TheShu, who does try to be all-inclusive...So what is my blogroll? A list of my faves? Or those local blogs I deem to be most important in some way? Right now, it's a relic of GSO blogs, circa this fall...

The death of niche information (continued). Last fall, the Bowles campaign quit talking to me because I was reporting for an "insider publication." I tried to explain that the web made that concept obsolete...but they weren't hearing it. Here's a test of my theory: Google the name "Susan Lagana," the campaign's communications director, and note the number one entry...

(I should point out that Guy Cecil was not on board as campaign manager during much of the campaign's online foot-dragging, which may not be clear from the article.)

TriadBlogs is a fresh new aggregator for the Greensboro/High Point/Winston-Salem area. It's off to a good start, with content broken down by categories, and they've solved whatever technical problem exists around linking to posts without titles.

One suggestion: run just the top paragraph or two of aggregated posts, not entire essays...

(found via the Bloghunter, GiT)

Tone Shock is hip-hop producer, business student, and new blogger (via GiT).

Backwards City has launched a sub-blog for its reviews. But you knew that, because you are reading Backwards City with metronomic regularity...aren't you?

Alex Wayne admits he finds the tsunami entertaining. Shrugging off human loss of such magnitude makes him sound like he's trying too hard...but he's onto something -- the whole weather-porn angle of natural disaster coverage, the money shot of the waves coming over the wall shown over and over again, and the people being sucked back out to sea in an endless loop for the folks safe at home...

Related phenomenon: "the pornography of grief."

Permalinks not working at Alex's new blog -- he may be too busy drunkenly scarfing other people's cheesecake and having impure thoughts about injured supermodels to worry about such technicalities, but they do make blogging easier...

David Wharton on redeveloping the northeast corner of downtown Greensboro. I like his idea for targeted tax breaks.

Susan Sontag eulogized by Christopher Hitchens.

Lord of the Blings?

Sydney was in a rush to tell us what she read today as she digs into Tolkien, and she ran two names together, and it came out like this: "I just got to the part where they meet Pimpin."

He was always my favorite hobbit, yo.

Winter in the North Carolina Piedmont: an authentic seasonal experience, but not too much of it. Last week, cold cold cold. Today, golf with the kids. Bonus: I plopped the trick floating golf ball that I got from my Ziff Davis Secret Santa right into the middle of a pond.

Satellite pics of Sri Lanka tsunami. (via Boing Boing, an essential read over the course of this horrible story.)

Last night Lisa and I watched TV news -- something we almost never do. CNN was strong, serious and comprehensive. But gee that Tucker Carlson is not prime time anchor material.

Philly Future is a city blog aggregator worth checking out. Founder and editor Karl Martino is doing a lot of the things we're talking about here.

Over at the Barber Shop, Unkle L weighs in on the draft ("My opinions we should make the cats laying around prison go to war") and limns the congruity between barbershop banter and blogging: "It's all in whom ever willing to listen to what's going on at the time, it's going down. That's why barbershop is so luv."

More thoughts on the N&R's web presence over at PressThink, from Dean campaign vet Zack Rosen, with commentary by Dave Winer.

Zack suggests a centralized community of diarists and commenters, operating under the N&R rubric much as the community works at Daily Kos. Dave sees a more decentralized model, with writers encouraged to start their own blogs and where (as he put it in an earlier essay) "Editorial people become talent scouts. Instead of employing writers, employ facilitators and teachers."

I find myself thinking what I do in many of these discussions: it's probably not either/or.

Meanwhile, TheShu raises a question we're already on the verge of dealing with here: what happens when there is too much local online content to read on a regular basis? My answer goes back to the various portals I see arising, which will filter content into a manageable torrent. The N&R might be one such hub, along with general and targeted local aggregators and central sites that will continue to emerge, and (as I guessed in my first N&R column about blogging way back in 2002) popular blogs themselves will be portals into the web.

And some people won't try to read all or most of the stuff out there, just as some people read only the sports or the obits and business news in the paper -- they'll find the blog or blogs serving their interest (church, school, whatever) and put that on their favorites list and go on happily ignoring the noise around them.

Worst online shopping experience of '04: Brooks Brothers.

The whole point of the aging-preppy look is that it's effortless. I had a nice Christmas gift-card, so off I went to the online store. It took forever, the selection was quite limited, and I had to call them when I was done because the final invoice overcharged me by about 20%.

Another iconic brand in trouble.

Atrios says the added scenes in The Return of the King don't bring much value to the flick beyond fun, but I think the death of Saruman was pretty important to the movie.

Another insert, the face-off between the boss Nazgul and Gandalf, bothered me because when they meet in the book Gandalf seems to be his equal, and in the movie the black rider breaks G's staff, which is a clear sign of superiority. Elijah says this was OK, it telegraphs the fact that the Nazgul is a supreme badass for moviegoers who may not know the story.

I liked the mouthpiece of Sauron, but did not understand at all why Peter Jackson has Aragorn dismount his cavalry and allow his army to be surrounded -- a suicide mission to create a diversion should last as long as possible, no?

My earlier complaints about the callowness of that other Elijah (Wood) are reinforced every time I hear his lugubrious faux-British accent. He is the worst thing in the movie, with little to do but roll his eyes back in his head and look ready to vomit.

Previously: LOTR as Crusaders vs. Muslims; Dwarves as the Jews of Middle Earth.

Jay Rosen is up to number four on his list of PressThink's top 10 ideas for '04.

Tsunami news/relief blog.

NYT on blog coverage, with links. Overall Times coverage, print and web, reminds us why newspapers matter.

Now excuse me, I've got to go hug my children.

Fortune: "Blogs are challenging the media and changing how people in advertising, marketing, and public relations do their jobs. A few companies like Microsoft are finding ways to work with the blogging worldóeven as they're getting hammered by it. So far, most others are simply ignoring it.

"That will get harder"

Flashback to October '03: "The most powerful piece of software inside Microsoft may be the $40 application from a tiny vendor called Userland that Robert Scoble uses to write his weblog."

Diary of a Soldier: "(I)t is the eve of my deployment, and my troops and I are ready."

Good luck to one of Greensboro's own, and all those who go with him.

Terry Heaton asked me some questions about what's going on in Greensboro, and here's what I told him.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. This is one of the most influential blogs in the land:

"The most general area of concern, I think, arises from the whole concept of separation of church and state. The Constitution refers to no such thing, of course, but merely prohibits the federal government (but not the states) from establishing an official religion."

When he talks about "the left" in this context, I have to wonder: what the hell is he smoking? 'Cuz he's got some classic symptoms here, including fuzzy logic and paranoia.

Y'all know I love me some Christmas. But I love my Constitution, too.

When I read the Power Line piece I wonder, does he really believe that there is a concerted effort of any heft whatsoever to attack religion in this country?

Does he really not recognize the difference between wanting a secular government, which a lot of religious people do, and which the founders of this country mandated, and wanting religious people to stop being religious?

And does he recognize the dangerous forces he is playing with?

I'll be on WUNC's State of Things program at noon today, talking politics with the roundtable crew, 91.5 FM, streamed and archived here.

Jeff Jarvis has a round-up of tsunami/quake news.

Two reports on Iraq from very different angles, neither very encouraging.

This one, by Susan Watkins in something called the New Left Review, looks at the nature of the insurgency. Stripped of its cant about millionaires in the White House, it's still pretty depressing.

And this, about the strategy for Iraq after military conquest: "There was no adequate operational plan for stability operations and support operations." Not enough troops, and a basic misunderstanding of the kind of war we're now fighting, also hinder US efforts. The author: Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, an official Army historian of the Iraq campaign and former war planner in Iraq.

Stuffwriter: "Pimp My Ride, Cribs...MTV has just become HGTV for homies."

Here's a wiki for the Chapel Hill blog conference. The idea is to collect "any ideas, links, names or readings that could help make the two sessions as rich as possible." Have at it.

Already on the list to come: Paul Jones, one of the real pioneer heroes of the Web.

Jay Rosen, Wonkette, and Scott Johnson of Powerline were on WYNC, public radio in New York City, talking about blogs this morning.

Here's the link -- it's screwy at the WYNC page, but I guessed the address from the links that are posted...and voila.

Jay spoke about what's going on in Greensboro, which he says has a "very active blogging culture," and a paper that is interested in creating a public forum where the community is informing itself.

He thinks blogs will allow reporters for newspapers to extend their network of sources throughout the citizenry, beyond the traditional sources within institutions and power structures -- reporting will now extend horizontally into the citizenry, reporters will see blogs as "learning machines."

Wonkette and Johnson have some trouble grasping Jay's point about the new citizen's press informing the larger media culture. Jay: "It's hardly an abstraction, it's happening now," says it's not that hard to understand.

Johnson's tale of how Powerline busted Dan Rather was fascinating, but he sounds really arrogant. "Most of the people who do this for a living are not very smart," he blithely generalizes about professional journalists.

Sydney and I caught part of this broadcast while running last-minute errands in the NY suburbs. Gratifying to know that folks up here in the provinces are catching up on what's going on in Greensboro...

Hoggard on how he builds a blogroll. I've been thinking about mine -- have the local aggregators made it obsolete? At our conference this summer, I said all you had to do to be on my local list was have a blog, but the number of local blogs is already too great for that to be practical.

My brain is displaying the little hourglass icon on this one.

NYT: Michael Powell is expected to step down as FCC chair...but the next national nanny may be even stricter.

Powell has evolved -- devolved? -- on the job. "Once an unbridled libertarian who championed the abolition of restrictions and expressed little confidence in the government's ability to oversee the media, Mr. Powell, 41, has become an aggressive enforcer who has expanded restrictions on broadcasters."

We have standards at our house about what our kids are allowed to watch, what games they can play. Mrs. Cone and I set those standards, we don't need the government to do it for us. We are stricter than some parents, looser than others. The children and I do like to watch sports, and let me tell you that Janet Jackson's nipple was much less of a problem than explaining to my daughter what Cialis and Levitra do, and why all those old people are leering at each other in the commercials.

Reporter suspended for blog. Think before you type, people. (via Romenesko)

Winston-Salem lands Dell. A big boost for the region. Now Greensboro has to figure out ways to capitalize on the huge investment by the state and our neighbors to the west. Let's hope our economic development people can leverage this into high-value growth on our side of the county line.

Pablo Picasso
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907
© 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Sydney and I went to MoMA. It really is pretty great, the rebuild makes it feel very airy and spacious, you can look down into galleries from the floors above, and there is so much to see.

We started on the top floor and worked our way down -- picking up from the era of Seurats and Van Goghs where we left off yesterday at the Met. Some of the more modern stuff on the lower floors didn't compare, in Syd's view -- and often the conceptual work did feel like futuristic food that is pure nutrition with no flavor -- but we grooved on the Johns and Warhols and Pollocks and liked their big de Kooning Woman almost as much as the one that lives in Greensboro (we really need to build a new wing for the Weatherspoon, if anyone has a few million bucks lying around).

We were running out of gas by the time we hit photography, but that recharged us a bit, then we lounged in the sculpture courtyard for a while. Oh, and the urinals are really cool, too, they look like those pod-shaped Panasonic radios from the '70s.

Then we met Lisa and Elijah for lunch at Japonica, where the host remembers us from our Forbes days, when we started going out for sushi as friends all those years ago...and the food is still good.

Local blog pioneer seeks funding: click the ad at right from Portland Communique, and give if you wish...and have anything left to donate...me, I'm noticing that for all the commentary about the dollar's fall vs. the Euro, it ain't doing so great here in New York...

Jay Rosen is following up on his Greensboro coverage, says it's a big national story that deserves attention, and pledges to keep writing about it. And he interviews Roch Smith Jr. of Greensboro101.com, which is kind of fun for us homies.

Greensboro made a list of the most "literate" cities in the US. The N&R's Margaret Banks about the origin of her opening quote, from Francis Bacon: "But you already knew that. Because you, dear readers, are a bunch of Poindexters."

She tweaks RTP blogger Andy Wismar, who dissed GSO after reading about our blogging scene at Jay Rosen's blog.

My question: Charlotte?

Jeff Jarvis: "No one is this country is being stopped from worshipping as they please. No churches or synagogues or mosques are being shut by mob or government edict. That would indeed constitute a war against Christianity and religion; that would be illegal, unconstitutional, unAmerican, and wrong. But I don't see that happening. And if I did, I would be fighting that with my full First Amendment fervor."

Amen.