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Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Several things of interest today, including a new Blogger!

(I'm adding new links at the end of this posting. Scroll down.)

Well, not quite there yet, but there's news about a new version of Blogger we've all been waiting for. It's in Beta and so far can only be used to create a new blog, but it has all the things I've been waiting for: tags, editing of templates, comment feeds, one sign-up using Google accounts, private blogs, instant publishing, RSS 2.0, more. More from Blogger Buzz. (Oh, and more templates! Good, now maybe I won't look so much like Stuck on the Palmetto.)
How long before I can convert my blogs? I'm waiting.

Global Voices has lots of links to news, blogs and comments on the recent photos of Fidel Castro, a huge topic of controversy.

In Eat the Press, Eric Boehlert, author of Lapdogs, discusses the media success of Little Green Footballs blog's reporting on altered news photos from Lebanon:
...for some reason today when media outlets rush to honor LGF for its dogged investigative ways, reporters refuses to highlight some of LGF's previous, less successful jihads against the press.


I was fascinated by Mike Wallace's 60 Minutes interview with Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Now The Guardian reports he has a blog. The blog is in Persian but the Guardian reports English version is available. I didn't wait for the link to load.

For those who followed the Jill Carroll story, if you haven't seen it yet, her story is now on the Christian Science Monitor website in 11 parts.

There's a new Seymour Hersh investigation in the New Yorker: Watching Lebanon: Washington’s interests in Israel’s war. Hersh:
The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks.


In Oil Safari, the Chicago Tribune followed a gallon of oil from the Middle East to a Chicago filling station. Lots of multimedia, including a ticker of the barrels of oil sold while you're looking at the site. Scary.

In the New York Review of Books: The Foreign Policy the United States Needs, by Stanley Hoffman.
These proposals may appear utopian. And yet striving to realize them would make for a safer world; they would not abandon or damage any of America's main interests; they would allow regional disputes to be dealt with primarily by the members of the regions, and with the assistance of international and regional agencies.


(Added later:) Dave Winer wants to know if we can survive George Bush:
Everything we do seems predicated on the assumption that we have an infinite amount of money, and that an American (or British or Israeli) life is worth an infinite number of Muslim lives. We don't have an infinite amount of money, and an American life and an Arab life have exactly the same value.


Kevin Kelly's started a new blog, to go along with his great Cool Tools blog: Street Use. It's about how people come up with new ways to use things. Carrying on the Whole Earth/Coalition Quarterly tradition.

Lots of reaction to Sen. George Allen's racist-sounding remarks at a recent forum in Virginia: Michael Froomkin, James Wolcott, Joel Achenbach, for example.
Is this what it comes to? I'm thinking a lot about a small town politician in Tennessee these days: haven't seen her story anywhere else but Chattanooga's WRCB has been covering it: June Griffin, who ran for nomination Congress recently, went into a Mexican tienda and ripped down a Mexican flag. She was charged with harassment, among other charges, but claims it was her right. She told an interviewer: the flag represents occupation, and she wasn't going to stand for it in an area where local boys fought for freedom: 'I remember Davy Crockett....'
That was in Dayton. Home of the Scopes Trial.

3 Comments:

  • Do you know if Blogger will allow us to have UNIQUE URLs without "BlogSpot" in the address? I would be willing to pay for that privilege.

    By Blogger PJ-Comix, at 10:21 PM  

  • I didn't see anything like that. But it can be done, not through Blogger. If you get your own domain name thru any ISP or domain seller, you can move your Blogger content to that server and blog thru FTP. Once it's set up everything pretty much works the same, I assume.
    I've seen deals on domain hosting from some companies for just a few $$ a month.

    By Blogger liz, at 9:54 AM  

  • Hey! I just found out I can get a "masking" service over at GoDaddy.Com. What that service does is allow folks to go automatically to my BlogSpot Blog whenever they type "DUmmieFUnnies.Com" into their address bar. And best of all that address REMAINS on the bar when they are redirected.

    I will wait a bit and see if BlogSpot will allow removal of that part from their URL. If not, I'll just use the GoDaddy service. That way I can print up a whole bunch of "DUmmieFUnnies.Com" material including Li'l Beaver (our mascot) T-Shirts with the simpler URL on it.

    Check out GoDaddy because others might want a heads up on that service.

    By Blogger PJ-Comix, at 3:05 PM  

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