Here are a few items from my blog topic slushpile -- I need to cut it down a bit before it topples over and crushes me:
* "I'M IN UR NEWSPAPER WRITIN MAH COLUM" (That's the actual article title): In case you've missed it, there's a raging Internet meme right now that involves cute pictures of cats, accompanied by alternatively-spelled and -grammared captions (think "baby-talk"): LOLCats, or cat macros.
(Blogger John has riffed on the phenomena a few times.)
Today's Houston Chronicle has an article that attempts to explain what's going on with the cats. (The Charlotte Observer had an article last month, though it's not available any more.) [link via Obscurestore.com]
If you still don't get it, check out I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER for lots and lots of examples (if you can stand the cuteness -- wait, oh my god, the commenters actually post like that, too. That scares me.), and if you want to make your own, try the LOLCat Buildr.
* "Blogging the Block": Sunday's Washington Post looked at a couple of neighborhood (or "hyperlocal") bloggers -- folks who blog about what's going on in their neighborhoods, and provide a few local examples from the DC Metro area.
Neighborhood blogging can cover everything from restaurant reviews, politics, commuting, quality-of-life and zoning issues and more; the more widely-read ones tend to cover things that affect other people in the neighborhood, as opposed to those that focus more on personal observations of life.
* "Thinking is so over": From the UK's Sunday Times -- Andrew Keen is an author whose book, "The Cult of the Amateur," takes a contrarian view of Web 2.0. He says that the mass influx of amateurs posting blog entries or Wikipedia articles devalues and threatens to overrun the contributions of actual experts.
While there is a case to be made for quality as well as quantity, methinks Mr. Keen may be overstating the problem a tad.
Thanks -- Joe
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3 comments:
I recently did an entry on a site that lets you turn the rss or atom feed for your blog into LOLCats. It's fun. Crazy fun.
http://journals.aol.com/dpoem/TheWisdomofaDistractedMind/entries/2007/05/31/im-in-ur-feedz.../862
-Dan
http://journals.aol.com/dpoem/TheWisdomofaDistractedMind/
That's the usual slam against Wikipedia, and while there's a kernal of truth in it it's far from reality overall. Thousands of Wikipedia editors have an ongoing crusade to make everything conform to guidelines about "reliable sources". Basically, any fact or claim that isn't directly from the primary source (say, a book, in an article about that book) needs a citation, and not just to Mary Doe's blog or the Cat Fun fan forum, either. Stuff can still be inaccurate if the underlying source is inaccurate, and accurate statements get deleted sometimes for want of a good cite. But overall, it doesn't matter that much who edits the article, as long as the prose is decent and the facts are supported. And if someone adds nonsense (last night someone claimed that Mr. Magoo owns a meat-packing plant or somesuch), there are armies of recent changes patrollers and anti-vandalism bots to make sure it isn't there for long. It's far from perfect, butby and large it works. - Karen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mavarin
The thing I find interesting about Keen is how his argument has been branded as trolling. I've seen a few references to him as a troll. Since when did having an opposite or differing viewpoint become trolling? Odd reaction to an argument that has been made by others and not just Keen.
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