onfocus

Brad has resurrected sxswblog for 2005 in the form of: sxswbaby! Due to changing servers and changing plans, the old sxswblog is no more. It's great to see Brad keeping the tradition alive. If you want to get an off-the-record, unofficial view of South by Southwest Interactive—and meet some folks virtually before you meet them in person—sxswbaby will be the place.

Unfortunately, it looks like I'm not going to be able to make it to Austin for the conference this year. But I'll be eavesdropping on the site and living vicariously through everyone else. :)

b!X is fighting the good fight for bloggers in some comments on a list of participants for the invitation-only "Blogging, Journalism & Credibility" conference at Harvard. b!x says:

There is a difference and distinction, however, between people who code the technology which makes blogging possible, talk about what the technology and the form make possible, or journalists who happen to also blog (on the one hand) and the many and varied people across the country who are not technologists, media observers, or traditional journalists, and who have been spending their time actually practicing the intersection of weblogs and journalism itself.

With a word like credibility in the title, I think b!X is right to question the credibility of the discussion itself. [via Brad Stenger's Tech Blog]

In a blatent ripoff of er, homage to Matt Haughey's Ask Metafilter and Ask PVRblog, I put together a site for Oregonians called Ask ORblogs. The idea is the same: anyone can ask a question, and hopefully someone reading will be able to answer the question or provide some info. Ask ORblogs won't have the sheer number of people that Ask MeFi has, but if local bloggers tune into the site once in a while, I think the concentration of local Oregon knowledge would be much higher than you'd find at Ask MeFi. Of course the questions don't have to be Oregon-specific, but I think that's where the site will be able to help people the most.

Asking the ether for tech support: Does anyone know why the changes.xml file at weblogs.com is requesting a user/pass?

oh lazyweb, why do you mock me? I'm trying to comment on a post at lazyweb, but it says:

Your comment was denied. It contains content currently banned by my blacklist.

oh yeah? Well now you're on my blacklist, lazyweb! fwiw, here's what I was trying to say—

It's not easy. I hacked my Amazon RSS tool to do UK feeds: Amazon UK RSS. A better way would be to write your own Amazon UK XSL stylesheet. People have been asking Amazon to add UK feeds for a while now. Alan Taylor put together the RSS for Amazon.com, but he has moved on, so this feature may be on the back burner for Amazon UK.

That doesn't look like comment spam to me.

blogfodder.com was a project I worked on in 2003 that tried to inspire weblog authors each day with a word or phrase, and then point to the results. The domain is expiring, and I'd rather see someone use it than have it go to domain squatters selling whatever domain squatters sell. If you're interested in doing something with blogfodder.com (beyond selling ch3ap v1agr4), contact me.

Update: Someone has claimed blogfodder.com. I'll post more details when I can.

I received a thoughtful response to my silly post about timestamps and weblogs the other day—

The main reason I (and, I'm sure, plenty of others) don't use timestamps is that I sometimes blog from work and don't want the higher-ups knowing about it or (worse) being able to "prove" that something was posted during work hours.

With the cases of people being fired for their weblog, I understand why bloggers want to be careful. (We never hear about the stories where people are promoted because of their weblog.) I still feel like a weblog without timestamps cripples one of the weblog's primary functions. I think this problem points to the need for employers to clarify their stances on weblogs, and personal use of the web. Ross Mayfield wrote about this in his post, Standard Weblog Employee Policy—

Employees want to do the right thing. They want to have a voice, get approval and use it for the benefit of their company. Right now, they can point to the Sun Policy on Public Discourse, Groove Weblog Policy and the evolving Corporate Weblogger Manifesto as examples. They can talk their executives into considering it by pointing to Jonathan Schwartz, me (heh) and Bill Gates any day now. But its still an emerging issue.

It's a bit different when employees are posting to their personal weblog on company time, but people send personal email all the time. (Which employers can easily track.) Weblogs shouldn't be treated differently.

Well, my weblog prediction for 2004 didn't come true as far as I know. I thought a prominent blogger would be sued for libelous comments. Awareness of legal issues related to weblogs definitely grew in 2004, and Dan Gillmor devoted an entire chapter of We The Media to blog law. I'm hesitant to make another prediction, but I agree there's a weblog backlash on the way. I guess my prediction is that a major old-media (TV, Newspaper, Magazine) personality will start a crusade to discredit weblogs. Rather than stopping existing bloggers, a campaign like this could discourage new people from writing weblogs. (More professionalism in weblogs could have the same effect, ironically. Maybe someone should start a "keep weblogs weird" campaign this year.)

Aloha! sk and I just got back from our Christmas in Hawaii. We went to Honolulu and stayed in one of the many, many hotels in Waikiki. (Our room had an amazing view of the beach.) It's the closest I've ever been to the equator, and as you might expect the weather was warm and humid. (Not quite as warm and humid as Nebraska in late August, but close.) The city seemed like it was inhabited only by tourists, and it was rare to see a Hawaiian going about their daily routine that didn't involve tourism. (Especially in Waikiki.)

Of course news of the tsunamis cast a shadow on our trip. The ocean is ever-present in Hawaii, and it's hard to imagine something so beautiful causing incomprehensible destruction. The local news assured everyone that a tsunami wouldn't be as destructive in Hawaii. I feel strange posting tropical vacation photos in light of the worst natural disaster of our lifetime. Even though the pictures and videos we're all seeing of waves, palm trees, and the ocean are devastating—there is a peaceful side.

Now my feet are back in their sock-prisons, I'm re-learning what day of the week it is, and I'm getting used to seeing the outside world through windows. Here are some photos from the past few days.

I had a great time in Hawaii—hopefully I'll get to visit again sometime. Happy New Year!

I was generously included in a list of People of the Year by PC Magazine for my work at Blogger. I'm amazed every day at the breadth and reach bloggers are achieving, and I feel very lucky that I could play a part in helping this form of communication spread. PC Magazine is very kind to recognize me—thanks! Congrats to Meg, Evan, Ben, and Mena!

If you want to convert a color photograph to black & white in Photoshop, there are a bunch of ways you can do it. For the longest time, I used the Hue/Saturation dialog—taking the saturation down to -100. The shortcut for this is: Image -> Adjustments -> Desaturate. This works well, but I found a new technique in the oct/nov issue of Photoshop User that I'm hooked on called ring-around. I won't go into the gorey how-to details, but it uses "Channel Mixer" adjustment layers to produce twelve separate images with different settings from the source color channels.



It's hard to tell from these tiny images, but each one is slightly different. (Take a look at the dot in the center of the clock.) Each image is a blend of color channels in different percentages. One is 100% red, another is 75% red and 25% green, and so on. Using a Photoshop action, this whole process is automated. So I create the 12 images with a click, and then I can go through each one to see which had the best conversion. From there, I go back to the original image and mix it to blue 75%, red 25% (or whatever) in the channel mixer with the output set to Gray. (If the final output is print, you could print all of the samples to see which looked best in its final form.) It takes a bit longer than hitting Desaturate, but I like the extra control over the conversion.

Observation: a weblog without timestamps is like a bicycle without tires. Sure, it sorta looks like a bike—you could even try to ride it—but it would end up being an exercise in frustration.

Update: On second thought, a weblog without timestamps is more like a play without actors. Sure, there's a lot of witty dialog, but...nope...that's not it either.

Update: Can you imagine receiving email without the time it was sent? It would drive me insane. There's a big difference between an email sent at midnight, and one sent at 4am. Same with weblog posts. So I guess a weblog post without a timestamp is like an email without a timestamp.

Update: The irony of not including the time with each update to this post is not lost on me.