Busted for Blogging (Again)

People Connection Grammarian Marian, a continual thorn in my side since she's one of the AOL Style enforcers (look, here's a nonconforming ellipsis... and another one... and another one... !!!!! Ooh, look that was multiple exclamation marks! And look, now I'm dilberately misspelling words!), sent this news item in for the "busted for blogging file":

A reporter for the Dover [Delaware] Post was fired after his bosses were tipped to his MySpace blog, which contained statements that the newspaper would rather not be associated with.

Now, before you go shouting "free speech, free speech", keep in mind that the newspaper, even if it is a beneficiary of free speech and freedom of the press, is still a private business; Delaware is apparently not a "Right to Work" state, and I am not up on Delaware labor law, but in many states, private business can fire you for any reason at all, unless you're a member of a protected class.

Guess what -- "blogger" is not a protected class.

Also, please note that "I was only kidding" is not necessarily a viable defense.

Anyway, "your boss" continues to be on a list of people whom you might not want to see your blog (either now or in the future). It's an ever-growing list, including:

• Your Parents
• Your College Admissions Officer
• Your Judge, District Attorney and/or Parole Officer
• Your Future Employers
• Your Future Constituents

Thanks -- Joe


Tag: Busted for Blogging

Private Journals Problems?

Hi folks: Journals Product Manager Susan hears that some people are having problems with private Journals -- people who are on a private Journal's roster are getting an error message instead of being able to read the Journal.

If this sounds familiar, please leave a comment with the address of your private Journal in Susan's blog entry about private Journals so the tech folks can take a look.

Thanks -- Joe

Why You Should Listen to Mom (Also, a Better Shoelace Knot)

Morning, folks -- I was going through the headlines and found this news article:

CAMBRIDGE, England (AP) -- A museum visitor shattered three Qing dynasty Chinese vases when he tripped on his shoelace, stumbled down a stairway and brought the vases crashing to the floor, officials said Monday.

Next up: Don't play ball in the house.

This is particularly relevant to me right now, since I broke the shoelace on my right shoe last week.

I'm wearing a temporary replacement, though not only does it not match, but it doesn't hold as well, even using an Improved Shoelace Knot (which you should try -- it's real easy and usually holds a lot better).

Thanks -- Joe

Sundays Are for Comics and Laundry

Hi folks -- if your Sundays are anything like mine, it's means reading the Sunday funnies and doing laundry. So here are a few links to go with that.

First off, Happy Chinese New Year -- it's the Year of the Dog.

Here's a Toothpaste for Dinner Comic from 2004 that's still kind of relevant:

It's a repackaging of an oldish joke used by comedians mining the lunar calendar for yuks, but I laughed anyway.

Next up, today's edition of Stephan Pastis's Pearls Before Swine comic features another blog theme (see a previous take on the subject):

Click the comic to check out the punch line -- it's all about people's (or Rat's, in this case) motivation for blogging.

Moving on to laundry items, there was a piece on Digg.com today that was getting some attention -- it's instructions on how to build a t-shirt folding machine out of cardboard [it's a video link -- the title card is in French, but the instructions are all graphical.].

It's pretty cool, though I note that there is also a commercial product ("As Seen on TV") that does the same thing, if you want to pay $15 for it.

One of the things you'll see about Digg is that you never know what's going to catch people's attention. Plus, you'll usually see multiple versions of the same link or story -- it's a little hit or miss as to what headline people react to -- another version of the t-shirt folding thing, for example, was posted five days ago, but only got 14 diggs (or votes), whereas this weekend's article has over 1,800 diggs and counting.

The earlier article also features a t-shirt folding technique video that was pretty big last year or so -- it lets you fold a t-shirt in 3 or 4 seconds. Here's a few clips found from Google Video:

It works fast, though I don't really like how the sleeves end up.

This is all kind of theoretical right now -- I have to go do the laundry before I can fold it.

Now, if only they had something like this for ironing.

I hate ironing.

Thanks -- Joe

New Guest Editor's Picks for 1/27

Hi everybody. As posted to the Journals Message Board, our new Guest Editor's Picks are up on the Journals Main Page:

This week's Guest Editor Kimberleigh, a mother of four, is using her top six picks to highlight people and moments in time. Check out her blog, I Shaved My Legs for This?

* Waiting to Exhale ...
* Adventures of an Eclectic Mind
* Letters to Gabe
* The Telling of Me ...
* Porch Stories
* A Journey Through the Fifties

A while back, we featured a picture of Kimberleigh sporting very big hair, though I was enjoined from using it on the AOL Blogs main page.

That's about it for today. I have a bunch of items I want to blog about, so I will try to get them out over the weekend (before they get too stale.)

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Guest Editor's Picks

We Seem to Be Doing Better

So, as you might have noticed, we were experiencing problems with Journals this afternoon, with some slowness and sporadic "AOL Journals is Unavailable" error messages.

Journals Product Manager Susan posted an update about it -- the tech folks think they have it fixed (it was apparently a database problem), but we'll be keeping an eye on things.

People have also reported some other random problems with rostering in Private Journals (not to mention my own problems with comment alerts) -- the tech folks are looking into those, as well.

While you're at Susan's blog, check out the entry where she's asking for your feedback and suggestions on new features you'd like to see in Journals -- some of the ideas we've gotten are already on the product roadmap, so check it out and be sure to leave a comment of your own.

Thanks -- Joe

Extra Stylish

Hi folks -- sorry I've been scarce the past two days -- I've been in a CSS training class, the fruits of which I hope you'll be seeing soon.

If you're not familiar, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets; it's a way to control how elements on a page look.

CSS is different from the regular formatting than you might see in HTML -- the idea is that you might have some content done up in HTML -- some paragraphs, headlines, etc. --  but, the way the content looks is determined by the CSS.

It's very powerful, but it's also somewhat complex, since it has elements of a  programming language. So why would you want to do this and separate content from formatting, anyway?

One reason would be for  flexibility, especially if you want to apply changes to an entire document or Web site. If you define the styles properly, you could change the entire look and feel of a Web site, just by changing a single file.

Say you had header text defined a certain way, and it's used all across your Web site. In a good-sized site, that could be dozens or hundreds of occurances. If you wanted to change the header style, font, size and color, if you do it with CSS, you would only have to change one thing, instead of tracking down each and every header and changing it.

This is what's going to make custom skinning possible.

For example, our instructor John showed us the example of http://www.csszengarden.com, which is kind of a designer's playground Web site to show off what you can do with CSS.

If you look at the page, you'll see that each designer has submitted a different CSS, which can radically change the look, feel, layout, number of columns, color and art elements of the page, without having to touch the content itself.

Here are a few different examples from the site:

* Organica Creativa

* Wilderness

* 45 RPM

You'll notice that the content (the text) is the same, but the layout and even the graphical elements are different enough that each version looks like a completely different Web page.

You can do a bunch of other cool stuff with CSS, including change your cursor and border styles. For example, here is an evil example of something that you should not do -- I'm going to make a hyperlink, that when you put your mouse over it, should give you an hourglass cursor, instead of a pointing hand cursor: This Is Evil, Do Not Do This. Ever.

I know some of you have been playing around with embedded CSS tags, with varying success. One thing to consider is that not all CSS works in all browsers -- I've seen some Journals that look fine in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but are completely illegible in Firefox or Netscape.

One thing I hope to do (with help, of course), is come up with some CSS templates that will work with AOL Journals that you can use for your entries, and that will work across most browsers. This will be kind of a stop-gap measure until we get custom skinning later this year.

Thanks -- Joe

Zombie Scalzi

Hi folks; I have some unfortunate news to report; it seems that due to all the time blogger John has spent this week waiting around in airports, I am sad to say that it appears that Scalzi has turned into a zombie:

Yes, our John is now among the walking undead.

The good news is that this shouldn't affect his Journaling one bit. In fact, he's sent me a list of the next several Weekend Assignments and Blog Photo Shoots. Granted, they all focus around the theme of BRAINS!!! TASTY BRAINS!!!, so I will have to work with him on that going forward.

On a photo note, I "borrowed" the image John used for the current Weekend Assignment. Also, I had a really hard time trying to do the blood, which is why it looks so cheesy -- the zombie-making tutorial seems to require a little bit more basic Photoshop knowledge than I possess.

Incidentally, to answer the question you're probably asking right now: Why, yes, actually I did have better things to do. Thanks for asking. -- Joe

Sharing My Pain

Okay, so I know our topic on earworms (songs that get stuck in your head, driving you crazy) was last week, but I am currently infected/afflicted, so of course I have to share.

The annoying song that's been stuck in my head today (ALL DAY) is

 "Since You've Been Gone", by Kelly Clarkson.

Now, you should know that:

* I am probably the only person left in America who doesn't watch or care about 'American Idol.'

* I'm not part of any organized backlash or anti-Idol group or resistance movement; I just don't care for the show.

* I had to double check that Kelly Clarkson did indeed sing "Since You've Been Gone" while I was doing this post.

Of course, I know that there's a lot of attention in the wide world and big ole sphere o' blogs about Idol, so I have to be a professional and keep up on things, like for example, Jennifer's Idol blogs, just IDOLing along... (archived) and The Woes and the Prose of an American Idol Junkie (current).

But I don't have to enjoy it.

Thanks -- Joe

Turnabout May Be Fair Play...

...But it is annoying.

(Hrm, that's the second consecutive ellipsis headline I've used today. Notice that I'm still not conforming to the AOL Style Guidelines on the use of ellipses.)

Anyway, I guess I kind of deserve this one. In the past, it wasn't unusual for me to get mail from Journalers saying "I'm having trouble with my Journals Alerts." Sometimes it would be other folks' New Entry Alerts, and sometimes it would be the Comment Added alerts for their own blogs.

In many of these instances, I would take a look and do some informal tests, and I wouldn't see any problems. (Again, that's the problem with partial or sporadic problems -- like when your car is making a funny noise, and you take it to the mechanic and it doesn't make the noise.)

So, right now, it looks like my own comment alerts are down, so I apologize in advance if you've left a comment that needed a response from me (and didn't get one.)

As always, if anyone else is having problems with Alerts (either Entry or Comment), let me and Journals Product Manager Susan know (here is Susan's blog: In the Know.

Thanks -- Joe

Today's AOL Campus Weather Report...

...Windy:

It actually was pretty blustery, especially around the time I took the photo. However, that particular tree had pretty much already been all sorts of blowed over from earlier in the day.

Thanks -- Joe

(p.s. Want to learn how to add big photos to your Journal entries? Check out my step-by-step tutorial.)

A Lot More on Remix Culture (and Lazy Sunday/Monday)

In a comment to my earlier entry on Next Generation Media, Elleme2 asked what the difference was between "Remix Culture" and good old fashioned plagiarism.

This is a valid question, and it starts to open up a whole 'nother discussion which I'm not qualified to lead, involving sampling, fair use, copyright, intellectual property and lawyers, so I would prefer not to go down the legalistic route and keep it to generalities if you don't mind.

In my non-expert opinion, the idea behind remixing other people's content isn't really plagiarism, since in most cases, you're building on another person's work, while crediting the source material, whether you're calling it homage, or sampling, or something else.

That's the idea -- what happens in practice may be a completely different beast, and we're still not addressing all the thorny copyright issues (hint: just because something is done for non-commercial use, doesn't mean it's not infringing on someone's copyright).

But anyway, a current example of remix culture, live and in effect, is the idea of music mashups, where two songs, preferably well-known songs of completely different genres, are mixed together.

A famous example of a mashup album is the Grey Album, which was a mashup of rapper Jay-Z's Black Album with the Beatles's White Album. It got pretty popular, until EMI, the record label that owns the rights to the White Album, issued a cease-and-desist order (though if you look around on the Web, you can probably still find it).

Interestingly, the material from the Jay-Z album had been freely released in acapella version, specifically for use in stuff like this. Sampling has a long history in hip-hop and rap; I guess this was a form of payback.

Anyway, making your stuff available for other people is as big a part of remix culture as using it -- take a look at the Creative Commons license, which is offering an alternative view of copyright, with an eye towards allowing others to build upon what an artist has done. It's the difference between "some rights reserved" and "all rights reserved."

By the way, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm cribbing a lot of the recaps and links from Wikipedia -- not only because they provide fairly neutral accounts about all this, but also because it's convenient and I am extraordinarily lazy.

The issues of sampling and using other people's content are not that new. As noted, it's been a big part of hip-hop; for example, the Beastie Boys were pretty heavy users of samples (and this was before the days of permission and licensing for the use of samples). Nowadays, they're also offering up acapella versions of their songs for the personal use of remixers.  (Another pretty famous example is when rocker David Bowie also offered up some of his material for remixers.)

Diving deeper into my pop culture memory banks, there's also a pretty famous sampling/fair-use controversy from the early '90s involving Negativland and U2, though honestly, I'm getting in way over my head when it comes to all the fair use, sampling, and copyright implications. Suffice it to say, even if your own intentions are pure, you still should probably take the wishes of the copyright owner into account.

The primary reason I started talking about remix culture was to get an excuse to talk about the remix of the Lazy Sunday video (a.k.a. The Chronic-What?-cles of Narnia music video), which I never got the chance to blog about when it hit the blogosphere in a big way in December.

You know that video -- with the gangsta-style rapping about cupcakes and Mapquest and Mr. Pibb and Red Vines (they're crazy delicious, you know)? The one that was going to save hip-hop? The one that was video bootlegged and so popular that NBC made it freely available on the SNL Web site, and as a free iTunes download over the holiday? (They're charging $1.99 for it now.) The one that was done by the Lonely Island guys, who were hired by SNL?

Anyway, two 10-year-olds, with the help of dad on the computer graphics, did their own remix of Lazy Sunday, called Lazy Monday [video link] -- check it out.

Whew. That was a long way to get from there to here.

In a kind of a postscript, Wil Wheaton (yes, that Wil Wheaton), says in his blog that SNL/Lonely Island's next digital short, 'Young Chuck Norris', is actually a ripoff of something a friend of his did.

And so it goes.

Thanks -- Joe

Journals Project & Product Managers Checking In

Hi folks... Journals Technical Project Manager Yoel -- that's Project not Product Manager, as I mistakenly wrote earlier -- has a new blog entry up; among other things, he's wearing his Feeds & Favorites hat, so stop by and see what's going on.

He's also featuring a photo of the Mountain View building taken by Greg on the AIM team -- check out Greg's blog for more cool pics and a report from his trip out West.

Representin' the Product Management side of things, Susan is also back in the game; check out her blog entry, where she talks about some of the stuff the team is working on; she also wants your feedback on features, settings and customizations you'd like to see. I know you're not a shy bunch, so leave her a comment.

Thanks. -- Joe

A Real Hack Blogger

So, there was an AP story yesterday about a true hack blogger: Melissa Plaut is a New York City cabdriver who blogs about her experiences (content note: this New York City cabdriver swears like, well, a New York City cabdriver) driving on the streets of New York.

Now, someday, stories about person X who does Y and blogs about it aren't going to be any more unusual than any other human interest, person-on-the-street story. But the whole blogging-angle is still pretty new, so we got that going for us.

(Oh, and in case you didn't know, "hack" is another slang term for cab driver.)

Thanks -- Joe

The Next Media Generation and Next Generation Media

Hi folks -- a listserve I'm on sent a link to a Sunday New York Times article about the media habits of the first truly digital generation [free registration required, or use BugMeNot.com].

It refers to the current crop of young people who are now in their early twentysomethings. They've grown up taking for granted everything digital, portable, customizable and networked. (The Times article and others call them "Millenials.")

Now, one of the perils of writing about this kind of stuff is the risk of harping too much on what those wacky kids are doing today, which is a slippery slope leading to cane-shaking, "Get offa my lawn!", "Back in my day..." clichés.

However, there definitely is a big generational element to this. I'll leave it to the sociologists and anthropologists to compare and contrast the Networked Generation to their Information Age predecessors and their Industrial Age counterparts before that. But every technological epoch has shaped the people who grew up with it, and distanced them from the people (their parents and grandparents) who didn't, as seen by all wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanied the automobile, radio, telephone, etc.

Getting back to the here and now -- talking about the new media generation is buzzword-infested territory. Some of the more common include (and please note, there's going to be a lot of overlap here):

* Convergence: It just means "a coming together", and in this context, it's the idea that the lines between different forms of media and how they're delivered become blurred. Movies become online video games (and vice versa.) Music videos are delivered to your computer. This is closely related to the idea of...

* Portability: We're not just talking about the ability to move things in space, or the ability to take stuff with you via portable DVD players, iPods, and laptops; it also means the ability to shift media in time. The VCR was a first example of time-shifting, and its new generation equivalent is TiVo, where you can watch TV on your schedule, not the broadcaster's.

* Community and Connectedness: The idea of community is not new of course, but what is new is the idea that you can be constantly connected to people, especially people who are geographically distant from you. Using cell phones, text messaging, instant messaging, wireless everything, RSS feeds and new content notifications, people stay connected and live life on the fly.

* On-Demand Culture: Again, this is closely related to portability and convergence -- new media consumers expect they can see what they want, when and where they want it ("Your Whopper, Your Way") -- the movie you see in the theater can also be seen as a DVD, on cable on-demand, on your computer as a stream, on an iPod as download -- however you want.

For example, right now, filmmaker Steve Soderbergh is experimenting this week with a simultaneous release of his movie 'Bubble' in theaters, on DVD and on-demand cable.

* Virulence: The idea that some ideas and media spread themselves and aren't dependent on a central authority to distribute them.

* Multitasked: It's not just when you're working on multiple things simultaneously -- it grows to the point where you can't consume just one form of media anymore, because it's not stimulating enough, and there are points where you actually have to wait for stuff.

I don't think I'm a hugely efficient multitasker, but I find myself pretty regularly watching TV, listening to an audio stream, working in a few browser windows, and juggling a few simultaneous chat sessions. (My efficiency while doing all this is a matter of debate.)

And if you look at the Times's graphic following one day's media habits of a specific twenty-something, you'll see that my multitasking isn't particularly notable (I don't use my cell that much, and I don't text message, for example.)

* DIY (Do-It-Yourself): The idea that people are not only comfortable with making and sharing their own content (like blogs, photos and movies), but also taking what they find on the Internet, and modifying, recreating and repacking it to make it their own -- it's the idea of the mix tape on steroids, with Internet distribution.

Anyway, I just threw out a bunch of buzzwords and concepts with no real unifying theme other than "The times, they are a'changing."  Check out the article and see what you think.

And you kids get offa my lawn!

Thanks -- Joe

Monday Morning Catchup

Hi folks -- hope you had a good weekend. It's just barely noon on Monday and I'm already way behind on stuff. How far behind? Well, for starters, I still have to send the New Guest Editor's Picks Alert (link is kind of ugly, but it should work), which in a less-imperfect world would go out on Friday.

The problem is, it's the last thing I do on Friday, and if I let it slip (as I sometimes do), I'm kind of hosed, since it usually references the latest Weekend Assignment -- it doesn't really make sense to talk about the Weekend Assignment on Monday, so I usually wait until the latest Photo Shoot is up. It's kind of my death spiral.

In other news, here are a few items from over the weekend:

* Sunday's New York Times had a column on the Rules of Effective Trolling [free registration required, or use BugMeNot.com]. It's actually more of a guide to flaming a columnist or reviewer than a general guide to trolling, but it's kind of amusing.

* Speaking of flaming a columnist, WashingtonPost.com ombudsman Deborah Howell posted a followup to her column that ignited a nice little dustup about blog comments that I blogged about. If you're following the story, you might want to check it out. Does this mean the controversy is over? Unlikely.

* Since this entry is still in media mode, here's a link from last week -- it's the The Poynter Diet, or the daily news habits of some of the employees over at the Poynter Institute, which is a "school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists."

It's good place to check out some additional resources for news junkies (including a couple of mentions of Fark.com, which is where I found the link).

Thanks -- Joe

New Guest Editor's Picks for 1/20

Hi everybody. As posted to the Journals Message Board, our new Guest Editor's Picks are up on the Journals Main Page:

This week's Guest Editor is Reneé, a freelance artist, graphic designer and ... rookie soccer coach? Check out her blog, TimelessCalligraphyStudio, and take a peek at her top six picks:

* Reflecting Mirror
* Spencer's Place
* The Love Train
* Serendipity
* Photographs & Memories Blog Too
* The Inside of Being a SAHM

In addition to all the graphics work, Reneé also works with words as a creative writer.

Have a great weekend, everybody! Thanks. -- Joe

Tag: Guest Editor's Picks

This Is Still Not Schadenfreude

Okay, so this next entry is still not an example of Schadenfreude. It might be slightly self-serving, because it shows that everyone has problems, but it's not Schadenfreude.

Brian Krebs, computer security blogger for the Washington Post (there's that name again), blogged about a security problem at over at blog provider LiveJournal.

By "security problem", we're talking about a hacker group (or is it "cracker" -- I'm never sure these days, it's like the whole "Trekkie" or "Trekker" thing) claiming to have hijacked more than 900,000 LiveJournal accounts by exploiting a Javascript hole.

You can check out the entry for more details.

Now, whenever I ask the Journals tech folks why AOL Journals doesn't let users use Javascript, they say "Because of security concerns." As the article mentions, similar Javascript exploits have been used on Xanga and MySpace. So I guess this is the kind of thing they're talking about -- if I were them, I would probably be all up in my face, saying, "See, I told [me] so!"

This is not to say that anything can ever be completely bulletproofed. One of the keys to security -- any kind of security, offline or offline -- is managing the balance between protection and convenience. For example, you could design a security system that's so effective and so cumbersome that no one -- including legitimate users -- would use it.

Another takeaway from the article involves CAPTCHAs, those swirly pictures of letters and numbers that are hard for computers to read, and slightly-less hard for humans to read.

The theory behind CAPTCHAs is that you have to complete the test to prove you're human -- this is to stymie automated software robots (or bots), used from everything from creating spam blogs, to leaving spam comments, to sending spam, to hacking user accounts so that they can be used to send spam (notice a trend?).

As I've said before, CAPTCHAs are not bulletproof either, but to date, they have been pretty effective (if annoying), so this is just another example of the ongoing race of security measures and countermeasures.

Thanks -- Joe

This Is Not Schadenfreude

So, there was a news story going around the other day about how men get more enjoyment than women from watching misfortune happen to people who deserve it.

This is known as Schadenfreude, a German word that means "taking pleasure in the misfortune of others." I have no opinion on the matter, other than to say that I can personally have known more than a few women who make me doubt the validity of that study.

Actually, I guess that is an opinion.

For another opinion, check out Journaler Onemoretina's take on the story.

Anyway, the following item is definitely not Schadenfreude -- I'm not particularly superstitious, but I do believe that laughing at other people's mistakes and indulging in Schadenfreude generates bad karma.

There's a lot of buzz going on right now in both the regular media and the big ole sphere o' blogs about the Washington Post's recent decision to shut off comments to one of their blogs, post.blog.

They did it due to a flood of personal attacks and profanity in comments made in response to a column that ran last Sunday by Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell; the column linked Democratic politicians to lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Now, other than the irony of having the ombudsman (who is generally supposed to fix problems) do something that gets the paper in trouble, I don't think this is a huge story. Maybe I'm just colored by our recent and similar experience with nasty comments in the Star Jones blog.

Another thing I found interesting is the tut-tutting from blogs that don't take comments themselves. A friend of mine sent me a link to this fishbowlDC entry entitled 'Post Wusses Out', where after calling the Posties wusses and saying "The free-wheeling world of blogging appears to be too much forthe Washington Post", they followed up with an e-mailed response by WashingtonPost.com Editor Jim Brady (whom I know personally, in the interest of full disclosure) where he said:

"Am I just missing something ot does DC Fishbowl not allow comments on any of its posts? Instead of criticizing us for not allowing comments on one of our 30 blogs, maybe you could explain to your readers why you don't allow ANY comments on posts."

Yes, he had to e-mail his response, since fishbowlDC doesn't take public comments. Glass houses and all that.

Generally speaking, it's not all that uncommon for high trafficked blogs to not allow comments (see BoingBoing.net), or to require a paying membership to comment (like MetaFilter), or limit commenting privileges to selected people (like Gawker), or take other steps to limit who can comment to the blog.

I have a hard enough time trying to do my own business, let alone try to mind someone else's. As a blogger, obviously I prefer that blogs take comments -- in my personal opinion, a blog that doesn't take comments isn't a blog... it's just kind of "bloggy."

But like I said earlier, celebrity and other high-profile, high-traffic blogs and Web sites have whole other considerations when it comes to managing comments. It's up to each individual organization or blogger to determine at what point managing comments and feedback overwhelms whatever else they were trying to do with the blog.

Anyway, you can see the discussion transcript from the live chat today where Executive Editor Brady discussed the issue to find out what he has to say on the matter.

Generally speaking, I'm a big fan of the way the Post is trying to integrate blogs and other interactive community content into the Web site. Not to say I agree with everything they do, but they are trying new and interesting things -- they're going to make mistakes and mis-steps, just like everyone else, but that comes with the territory.

By way of background, here's a Washingtonian magazine article on the Post's blog strategy, which I'd been planning to discuss in the larger context of online journalism.

Also,you might want to check out Post columnist and blogger Joel Achenbach's comment policy, which in part says:

But as we refine the policy, this blog takes a giant leap and hereby announces a new and incontrovertible rule. We will not permit comments that employ the following words: is, are, am, was, were, be, have been, being, and any and all permutations, conjugations and excitations of the verb "to be."

[In the words of esteemed pundit Foghorn Leghorn, "That's a joke, son, dontcha get it?"]

Thanks -- Joe

A Much Better Explanation of RSS, Feeds & Feedreaders

Yesterday, I briefly touched on how using feeds can help you improve your blog-reading experience; I just read a good article in the Christian Science Monitor that put me to shame. It's an overview of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and feeds, and it shows what a poor job I did talking about feeds. You should check it out, since it explains RSS much better than I did.

Basically, I left out the part that really makes RSS feedreaders shine -- using a feedreader, you can easily keep on top of anything you're interested in that has a feed. Nowadays, this means more than blog entries and news headlines -- pretty much everything that's published on the Web can (or should) have a feed associated with it.

I'm still doing a bad job of explaining this -- the best way for you to see the benefits of using an RSS feedreader (or aggregator) is to try one for yourself.

The other point that the article makes is that RSS is one of those things where, if we do it right ("we" being everyone in tech), it will pretty much become invisible -- you won't have to know what an RSS feed is, just what it does, and how to get it to show up in a way that's useful to you.

I will be talking more about this in the future, but for now, I'm going to go stand in the corner. Thanks -- Joe

Tags: feeds

Contrails and Clouds

Hi folks -- lots of interesting blog stuff going on today; I will get to as much of it as I can (while still putting up the Guest Editor's Picks and everything else that I have to get done).

Also, our Keyword: FTP problem that I mentioned earlier is now fixed... sorry for any inconvenience.

In the meantime, I realized while driving in this morning, that one of the nice things about working near an airport is that you get to see a lot of interesting clouds.

We're right by Dulles Airport, so you see a lot of clouds that form from the contrails of planes:

Thanks -- Joe

Fixed: File Uploading Via Keyword: FTP (Other Methods OK)

Morning folks -- bloggers Lori and Brandi have both written to me to let me know that file uploading via Keyword: FTP is broken right now. [Update: Problem is fixed, see below.]

I've checked and confirmed it -- when you try upload a file, you will see a dialog box that says "Cannot make local file (contact FTPAdmin)":

The FTP folks know about this and are working on it.

The good news, however, is as you can see from the photo above, the Web-based File Manager is still working, which should work fine for uploading files (as long as they're under 500K) -- check out my step-by-step instructions on how to use the Web-based File Manager, as well as my tutorial on how to use the File Manager to Add Photos to your blog.

If you use a standalone, 3rd-party FTP client over your AOL connection, that appears to work fine, as well.

I will post updates when I get them.

[Update, 10:44am ET: File uploading via Keyword FTP is now fixed. Word is that there was a bad config change on one of the servers. We should be okay now. Thanks -- Joe]

Thanks -- Joe

Management

So, if you're sick of seeing photos of me (and who isn't?), Journals Tech Product Manager Yoel [Update: oops, I meant Tech Project Manager -- there is a difference. Don't ask me what it is, though.] is in town for some meetings -- in addition to Journals, he works on Feeds and Favorites, so he's a popular guy.

I just snapped of photo of him and Journals Product Manager Susan together [Update: Susan asked me to leave her out of this wacky entry business, so I've updated the photo]

I was sitting down in my chair, which is why Yoel seems to be looming over the camera.

Looking over at Yoel's blog, I see that he's got a little feed icon icon in his All About Me area ( ) so that people visiting his blog can easily add his blog's feed to their My AOL page.

I'm going to be talking more about Feeds soon. Feeds sound a lot more complicated than they actually are -- it's just another way to read people's blogs.

When you subscribe to a blog's feed, you can see a summary of its entries (or the full text, depending on how it's set up) in a a custom Web page (like My AOL, My Yahoo, My Google, etc) or a program called an RSS reader (or feedreader).

If you read a lot of blogs, it can be a lot more convenient to use a feedreader to keep track of new entries.

Anyway, we're trying to figure out ways to make it easier for people to subscribe to your blog's feed (no point in making it hard for people to read your blog), without having to cover the page in these little icons.

In the meantime, I'm going to steal Yoel's My AOL icon. If you'd like to use it, just modify the code below with your blog's URL -- just replace the red bolded part below with your blog's URL (please note that capitalization counts when it comes to Journals addresses, so it's usually better to copy-and-paste) and put it in your All About Me area:

<A href="http://feeds.my.aol.com/add.jsp?url=journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/">
<IMG alt="Add to My AOL" src="http://myfeeds.aolcdn.com/vis/myaol_cta1.gif" border=0></A>

[Update, 1/20: Blogger Steven points out that the easier way to get the code for your button is to use the button generator at http://feeds.my.aol.com/button.jsp.]

With regards to doing this:
* Whenever you're pasting HTML code, make sure the formatting toolbar says "HTML", not "Text"
* I am still pushing to get an increase in the All About Me character limit in an upcoming release, though I don't have a timeline yet. Until then, if you're up against your character limit, take a look at your All About Me area in the HTML view -- sometimes there are extra spaces, or other funky characters that you can take out, if you need to squeeze out a few more characters.

Thanks -- Joe

A Man of Letters?

Hi folks -- So, if you're a regular reader of Digg, you'll see that digital photo editing tips, tricks and tutorials are pretty popular topics, so they pop up fairly regularly.

The other day, I came across a neat Photoshop Tutorial on How to Create a Text Montage. You've probably seen the effect before. I thought I would give it a shot.

The instructions are specific to recent versions of Photoshop, though you can probably find similar functionality in other graphics programs, including the free alternatives I've mentioned before.

Anyway, it took me a little longer than I planned, and my nose seems to have disappeared, but I wouldn't say it's horrible for a first try:

For the text (which you can't really read anymore), I grabbed the content from my most recent blog entries.

Here's the source pic:

Just so that you know I'm not a complete narcissist, I originally took the source photo to show off the wicked cowlick I had on the front of my head.

If you do your own text montage pic, post a link to the comments so we can check it out.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: You Really Are It

In case you missed, it, check out Journals Tech Manager John's blog thoughts on private and social tagging.

If you've ever used a social sharing site like Flickr (for photos) or del.icio.us (for links), you'll know what I'm talking about: it's the ability to label content (your own or someone else's) with descriptive tags.

It's kind of a communal self-categorization system -- the current hip term to describe it is Folksonomy, which is a mashup of "folk" and "taxonomy".

It's different from a traditional taxonomy (say, the Dewey Decimal System), in that there's no one at the top of the hierarchy saying "this goes in this category and that goes there."

Instead, it's a completely open model. If you and your friends want to have a tag specifically for your photos of you wearing baseball caps inside out, you can do that. Plus, in a social tagging model, other people are free to add their own tags.

If it seems like chaos, it kind of is -- but in the weird way that these things sometimes happen, it's a useful form of chaos. Patterns emerge -- people latch on to popular tags, and conventions evolve (they're not imposed from a central authority).

Ideally, it becomes the ultimate meritocracy. Although, if you want to be cynical, maybe it just means the errors cancel out.

Tagging is useful in blog entries, too, just as with any other form of content. For example, taking Technorati as an example, say you and your friends all have blogs about underwater basketweaving. If you tag all your blog entries with "underwater basketweaving", when someone does a search on that tag, it should pull up all your tagged entries. (Right now, there aren't any entries with that tag.) It's a useful way to gather related entries, from across your blog, as well as across the entire blogosphere.

Personally, I'm probably going to be doing more self-tagging of my blog entries. For example, I can tag all of the Guest Editor's Picks entries, so that they'll come up when you search on that tag. Right now, it's all manual -- here is the HTML you'd type into your blog to do a tag on underwaterbasketweaving:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/underwaterbasketweaving" rel="tag">underwaterbasketweaving</a>

The red bolding is just to illustrate the parts you would replace to make your own tags.

We're looking into ways that we could make it easier for Journals users to tag their own stuff in a future release. This would be kind of useful, especially because the current Journals & Hometown category system -- well, it pretty much sucks.

Tagging isn't going to be the panacea to solve all of our blog search problems, but it is pretty useful.

Feel free to play around and see how you can make it work for you.

Thanks -- Joe

Updates on Previously Mentioned Issues

Hi folks -- here are a updates on items that I'd mentioned earlier:

* Hit Counters: Last week, I started getting mail from some of you who'd written in to say that your hit counters had reset. I still don't have any definitive answers as to why this happened -- as you recall, counter resets used to be a much more common occurance, until the Hometown folks took some steps to reduce the "write-lock" problem that caused the problem.

I haven't heard widespread reports of counter problems for some time, so those steps seems to have worked up until recently.

In the meantime, if your counter has reset (or you just generally want to mess about with the numbers on your hit counter), you can use the Web-based File Manager to manually change the number of your counter. Admittedly, it's a slightly involved process, but it's not terribly difficult.

* Blogger.com Comment Notification E-Mails: I don't have an official update from the Mail Ops team yet, so I wouldn't quite count this as closed, but in my own testing, and as some of you have noted in a group blog, the problem I blogged about last Friday regarding blogger.com comment notification e-mails not making it to AOL.com users appears to be better.

I will post any official word when I get it.

* The Star Jones Reynolds Blog: Sorry, this item has been in my "pending" hopper for a while. The Star Jones Reynolds blog, which I originally blogged about when it launched on January 6, pretty much lasted a day and a half -- by Sunday, January 8, it had been made private. The following Monday, it was back up with comments off, but then it was taken down completely Monday or Tuesday.

That's the basic timeline; as to the reason why it was taken down, well, there's not that much to tell: Her first entry with her rules of blog behavior kind of rubbed people the wrong way, but things didn't really get rolling until the hardcore Star Jones haters got into the act.

Here's an independent account by one gossip blogger.

Anyway, there are apparently a lot of folks who purport to hate Star Jones for whatever reason, and a bunch of them got together to raid the comments and try to overrun them with a couple hundred vile, homophobic and generally obscene comments.

As I blogged earlier, celebs are different from us, in that people react to them in a way that's different from regular folks, so in that sense they are exceptional.

The advice that I would normally give to a blogger regarding managing comments doesn't necessarily work when you've got a few dozen or hundred people intent on driving you offline.

Different people handle comment moderation in different ways. I just looked over at the Rosie O'Donnell blog, just to see what she's doing (since she's another high-profile celeb whose blog attracted a lot of attention)  -- some of her entries allow comments, others don't.

Naturally, as a blogger, I would have preferred it if Star Jones had continued her blog (even if she had to turn comments off), though I can understand it if she didn't want to put up with it right now.

Just my opinion. Thanks -- Joe

Look at Me, I'm Invisible!

Morning, folks -- here's a little photoshop fun to start the day (This is most definitely not a interesting little trifle designed to keep you occupied while I work on other, more substantive stuff):

Found on Digg: Here's a neat tutorial on how to make yourself "invisible" in photos, using PhotoShop or another graphics program (like PaintShop Pro or the GIMP -- I blogged previously about free graphics editing programs).

It involves using layers to trace out an outline of a photo, then using that tracing to select and delete the photo part, leaving only the tracing.

There are step-by-step instructions in the tutorial; the artist has a whole gallery [content advisory: some artistic, traced nudity] of photos done like this.

Here's my own fumble-fingered attempt, with the original  (taken from my earworm entry) below:

If you try this, I recommend you don't do it to a picture featuring a striped, patterned shirt.

Also, you might want to skip that extra cup of coffee.

Thanks -- Joe

More Fun in our Nation's Capitol

I wasn't planning on blogging this, but it's a quick hit and too good to pass up: As found in this DCist entry, a self-proclaimed legendary deaf gay militant blogger is featuring a bunch of photos of some of DC's finest carsurfing -- that is, riding on the hood of a car.

The photos were taken by his friend and fellow blogger Jason Lamberton.

Pictures being what they are, I should stop talking and you should go see for yourself.

Thanks -- Joe

Today's SHOCKING Blog Facts About Teens and Blogs

Hi, folks -- hope you had a pleasant and/or productive long holiday weekend. Right now, I'm up to my eyeballs on stuff that I have to catch up on, but I wanted to mention today's shocking blog fact, brought to you by the Washington Post:

Not only may some teenage bloggers reveal too much personal information when they blog -- they may also exaggerate when they blog.

This juicy tidbit comes in the context of an article about how some DC-area schools are starting to get wise to teen blogging, and how they're starting to apply restrictions on blogging. [free registration required, use BugMeNot.com if you need to]

Now, this is very much not a new thing -- just about every week, you'll see a news article about how some young person has gotten into trouble because of his or her interactions on a teen-oriented blog or social networking site like Facebook or MySpace.

And I've also written previously about how some schools have tried to ban blogging.

From the Post article:

* Officials were "shocked and amazed" to see how many students use Facebook (not new)
* Beyond the regular fears of cyberstalking and sexual predators, parents and administrators are concerned how college admissions officers and future employers will react after reading about some blogged exploits (not new)
* Sidwell Friends School in DC (also known as Chelsea Clinton's alma mater) has prohibited students from using their school e-mail address to sign up for Facebook. (This is new. Facebook, the student social networking site, requires the use of a school .edu e-mail address to sign up -- they also recently launched a version of the site specifically for high school students.)

The article primarily focuses on the steps being taken at tony private prep schools like Sidwell, Barrie and Georgetown Day, though also mentions Fairfax and Arlington County public schools.

Now, the article also goes into some of the motivations for teens to blog (they're not all that different from the reasons why anyone would have a personal blog), as well as some of the pressures bloggers face to try to be interesting or outrageous when they blog -- either to keep up with their peers, or just to get noticed. Call it image control, if you will:

"Experts, and teenagers themselves, say that much of what is on the sites is made up.

Teenagers often act online in ways they wouldn't off-line -- bullying each other, posing in underwear, using foul language or sporting guns and Ku Klux Klan hoods.

Increasingly, many teenagers feel pressured to show themselves doing more risque things, even if they are not actually doing them. Aftab cited an example of girls who had blogged about weekends of drinking and debauchery, while in reality they were coloring with their younger siblings or watching old movies with Grandma.

"Even if you weren't out drunk and partying on the weekend, you have to pretend you were," [Parry Aftab of Wiredsafety.org] said. "Maybe parents should be relieved."

Personally, I wouldn't rely on this - it kind of ranks up there with "That's not mine, I was just holding it for someone else," but it does add a level of plausible deniability.

Thanks -- Joe

Wrapping Up

(Not sure if anyone's noticed, but I've been listening to mostly Mozart today. This is partially to protect myself from the effects of the latest Weekend Assignment, which asks  "What's the worst song to get stuck in your head?")

Well folks, that's about it for this week. Don't forget, Monday is a federal holiday, commemorating the birth of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (see more info in the Wikipedia entry).

Other things I will hope to address next week include:

* Additions to the Guest Editor program

* What the heck happened to the Star Jones Reynolds blog?

* A geek slumber party

Oh, and a few folks have written to me recently saying that their Journals' hit counters have spontaneously reset to zero. I have a question out to the Hometown folks as to why this might be happening again -- if you'll recall, back in October, I blogged about a change in the hit counters that was supposed to make the counters more robust, by reducing the chance of write-locking, which was the primary reason counters blew up.

In the meantime, if you want to manually change the number on your hit counter, please see my instructions on how to do this.

Thanks, and have a great weekend. -- Joe

A Stunning Display of Hypocrisy

In a shocking moment of clarity, I just realized that I don't leave as many comments as I should in the blogs I visit -- especially the ones that I link from this blog and in the other areas I publish to.

Leaving comments in people's blogs is important -- not only does it let the author know that you saw what they wrote and how you felt about it, but it also helps to keep the conversation going (especially when you provide a link back to your blog).

Now, of course, it doesn't mean you should comment in every entry in every blog you see -- that's pretty much spam. But if you have something substantive to add -- if you agreed, disagreed, or even if you didn't understand what the author was saying, let them know.

I will have to work on this.

Thanks -- Joe

Scrabble Football, Blogger's Dictionary, Slashdot vs. Digg and Mostly-Free Photos

Hi folks -- I'm not going to link to anything about today being Friday the 13th. That's right, I'm bucking the trend! I'm a wild man! Watch out, who know what I might do next!

Urm, yeah.

Here are a few tidbits you might be interested in:

* I sent this item over to Jamie for his sports blogging pleasure, but there's no reason why you can't have it, too: According to blogger Matt Sussman:

"...there may be some underlying merit on what the best possible starting lineup of NFL players would look like if their performance was based on the value of their last names in Scrabble."

So, presented for your perusal, here's the NFL All-Triple Word Score Team (found via Fark.com). Finally, a football team that Scrabble fans can really get behind.

If you're a fantasy football player, keep this lineup in mind. It's crazy enough that it just might work...

* Keeping in a literary mindset, Blogcritics highlighted a new Blogger's Dictionary. Here are a few definitions from it:

Blog:
(1) An unforgivably ugly sounding word. (2) A collection of writings which usually lives up to the sound.

Blogger:
(1) A diarist in search of an audience. (2) A patient in search of a therapist but unable to pay by the hour.

Counter:
A popular depressant.

Editor:
(1) An individual who reviews a written work to ensure its accuracy, quality of writing, and interest to the reader. (2) A being not found in the blogosphere.

Hey, that last one... wait just a second!

Of course, Jumper Bailey's Blogger's Dictionary is an moderized take on Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, which is an infamous glossary of cyncial (some might say "realistic") definitions of everyday words.

* If you're one of those people who pay attention to these sorts of things, there's a lot of noise right now in the big ole' sphere o' blogs about whether Slashdot is going to be overtaken by Digg, and what that means for community sites all over the Web.

Slashdot follows a more centralized moderation model, where a team of editors or authors culls through the submissions people send in, then pick the ones that show up. Digg uses a newer model, where stories are selected by everyone -- that is, the community votes on the stories that get bumped up to the front.

Digg is still a relative newcomer, but it's been growing really fast. Both models have their pluses and minuses, and there should be room for both types of site, though that still doesn't stop the debates -- it's kind of an updated version of Ford vs. Chevy or Mac vs. PC.

Anyway, Jason Kottke over at Kottke.org had the same article from his blog featured on both Slashdot and Digg last week, so he took the opportunity to do an in-depth traffic analysis, complete with lots of graphs and numbers. Check out the similarities and differences he noted.

* Speaking of Digg, here's an item from there about a graphics blog's listing of free stock photo resources, available for use by folks who need photos to incorporate into their blogs or Web pages.

As the blog entry notes, "free use" doesn't just mean you can grab everything and go wild -- when looking for royalty-free, public domain, or copyright-free images, always check for restrictions or limitations on use. For example, some sites may require you to credit the source... that's the "price" you pay for using the image.

Thanks -- Joe

New Guest Editor's Picks for 1/13

Hi everybody. As posted to the Journals Message Board, our new Guest Editor's Picks are up on the Journals Main Page:

Our Guest Editor this week is Brittany, an Air Force wife and graphic tag artist. Check out her blog, Pixie Dust Pages and see her top blog picks:

* Angel Whispers
* Jessica's Thoughts & Feelings
* Kinky Pinky's Dreams [Mature Content]
* saysomething
* Brie's Blog
* Just Me

Brittany isn't a stranger to the Journals main page -- last year, I'd highlighted one of the blogs she'd done when I did a feature on the blogs of service members and military families. Her blog had chronicled her husband's various deployments around the world.

I owe you a few more entries today, so watch out.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Guest Editor's Picks

The World's Most Evil Blog Topic

Hi folks... since I'm pretty much responsible for blogger John's latest Weekend Assignment: Evil Earworms, I figured I better participate.

In case you hadn't heard, "earworm" is a term for a song, especially an annoying one, that gets stuck in your head.

It could be a song you like; it could be a song you hate. Children's songs and pop songs are particularly pernicious, since they tend to have simpler, more repetitive melodies and hooks.

For example, songs that easily get stuck in my head include:

* It's a Small World After All
* Hanson's MmmmBop
* The Macarena, The Electric Slide, The Chicken Dance, and pretty much every other wedding/bar mitzvah deejay song

Now, what do most people do when they have a song stuck in their head? Why, they share it with everyone around them! Sometimes it helps, but mostly, it's an attempt to get everyone to suffer along with them.

Earworms are a type of meme, which is basically an idea that spreads itself.

Anyway, my worst earworm is also the best antidote to other earworms. It's kind of in "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly" territory, since the cure is usually worse than the disease. Ready?

It's Achy Breaky Heart, by Billy Ray Cyrus. But it gets better -- it's not the original version:

It's the Chipmunks' cover version of Achy Breaky Heart

If you're too young to remember Billy Ray Cyrus or the Chipmunks, consider yourself lucky.

As an antibody and cure to earworms, I find that listening to good classical music (or even mediocre electronic remakes of classical music), usually does the trick, since the complex nature of classical music, with all the themes, recursions, variations and patterns, tends to overwhelm the simplistic nature of most earworms.

Oh, and the photo that blogger John treated up? Here you can see his version:

and the original as I sent to him:

It's kind of hard to see, but I am wearing headphones in the photo.

Thanks to Jamie for taking it.

Talk to you. -- Joe

Open Problem: Comment E-Mails From Blogger.com

Hi folks -- bloggers Judith (http://judithheartsong.blogspot.com/) and Mâvarin (http://outmavarin.blogspot.com/) have both written in to let me know that AOL members using Blogger aren't receiving comment notification e-mails.

I have tested and confirmed this.

Blogger's comment notification e-mails function in similar fashion to AOL Journals' comment alerts -- if you turn them on, you get an e-mail whenever someone leaves a comment in your blog.

The AOL Postmaster/Mail Operations team is looking into this right now; the Blogger IP addresses (the numbers that tell where something lives on the Internet -- IP addresses are dotted quads, or a set of four numbers separated by dots, e.g. 255.255.255.255) are on the whitelist, which means that e-mail from those IPs is allowed, but they're still not getting through for some reason.

The AOL Mail team will work with the Blogger folks to get this fixed.

Some of the more suspicious among you may ascribe sinister motives to this problem, but this isn't the case.

Anyway, I will post more information when I get it.

[Update, 1/18: I don't have official word yet from anyone, but my test accounts are getting the comment notification mails again.]

 Thanks. -- Joe

Resolved: Brief Journals Outage, 2:15pm ET

Hi folks -- we had a brief Journals outage this afternoon; it started about 2:05pm ET, when some users started seeing a really ugly 404 Error ("Page Not Found"); the Ops folks did a rolling bounce of the servers, which means they rebooted each of the Journals servers in turn, causing partial outages as each server rebooted.

It was all cleared up by 2:15pm ET.

The Ops folks think it may be related to some of the problems we've been seeing lately with nondelivery of Journals New Entries Alerts (I've noticed New Entry Alerts seem to be okay today).

As always, in the event of a Journals outage (even a brief one), this here Journal will probably not be available (since I'm using the same Journals platform you all are).

Should that happen, you can always go to the AOL
Journals Message Board to get the latest updates. (I still need to get a status widget up on the Journals main page. It's on my list. It's a pretty long list.)

(By the way, when we aren't having problems, the Journals Message Board is also a good place to tell people about your Journal, to see other Journals and meet other Journalers.)

If you have any Journals problems, please let me or Journals Product Manager Susan
know.

Thanks -- Joe

We Be Foggy

Morning, folks. A wall of fog rolled in last night and into this morning. It was fairly... dense. I think I barely avoided a few low-flying planes on the way in:

Of course, since it was daytime, there's always a bunch of drivers who figure they don't need to turn their headlights on.

Even if you couldn't see 50 feet in front of your car.

I guess they're trying to save money on headlight lamps. Anyway, it's mostly burned off now.

I'll have some updates on more substantive matters later on today.

Oh, and the headline is a reference to a blog/Web site of a friend of mine. I hope it doesn't mess up their place in Web search results.

Thanks. -- Joe

I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means...

Hi, folks.

Sorry for the late-night post; I was kind of slack with entries today, so I thought I would do a make-up.

So, I was driving home tonight, listening to NPR's All Thing's Considered.

One of the featured stories was an interview with blogger Tian Tang, of HanziSmatter.com.

Tang's blog is all about chronicling the various misuses and abuses of Chinese characters by Westerners.

Now, you may be familiar with the other side of this -- Engrish.com, for example, is a site where people share sightings of humorously mistranslated English.

It's much the same with Hanzi Smatter, though it would appear that a lot more Westerners make their mistakes more prominent (and permanent), by tattooing Chinese characters on their bodies.

Now, just to be clear -- I can't read Chinese (or Japanese, or any other Asian language), though I can always ask my Mom to translate for me -- so I don't have any special expertise in this area.

From what I do know, though, is that there are a lot of ways to make mistakes when it comes to trying to convert Western concepts into Asian characters.

For starters, some people try stringing together characters, that when pronounced, kind of sound like English words.

Other times, people will combine characters that are direct translations of English words.

In both of these cases, the actual meaning to someone familar with Chinese will probably be nonsense, just as if someone started stringing random English words together.

Other mistakes include not drawing the characters properly; flipping the characters horizontally or vertically; or using the characters in such a way that the actual usage of the characters is a lot different from the intended meaning.

You can see examples of all of these kinds of mistakes (and more) on his blog.

Generally speaking, if you're going to get a tattoo or other work done in a language that you don't understand, you would be best served by asking a native speaker whom you trust to give you a translation.

Then, get a second opinion.

Thanks -- Joe

Wednesday Update, Plus Journalers in the News

Morning folks, couple of things to start off Wednesday:

* I'm getting a few reports of people having problems not receiving New Entries alerts; if this is happening to you, please let me know with whatever details you can provide, and I will pass them to Journals Product Manager Susan (see her blog) and the Alerts team.

There also appears to be some ongoing weirdness with Alerts on AOL UK Journals -- I'm not sure if that's related. I will ask Susan to blog one possible explanation for the UK Alerts problems.

* I was surfing around yesterday, and found that blogger Marsha, whose Journal is FIGments of a Fan (a fan blog dedicated to 'Late Show With David Letterman' drummer Anton Fig), got a nice write-up in her area paper, the Times of Northwest Indiana.

Congratulations to Marsha!

Thanks -- Joe

Busted for Blogging (With a Twist)

Okay, so just so you know, I'm not just repeating everything that shows up on BoingBoing a day late. (Sometimes, I'm two days late.)

When I first saw the item, 'Facebook prank on police', I thought it was going to be yet another instance of the whole "college students busted for blogging their underaged drinking" thing we've heard about before, invariably involving Facebook, the online directory and social networking site for college (and high school) students.

However, this one has a shocking twist.

As detailed in Sunday's New York Times article [free registration required, try using BugMeNot.com if you don't want to], a bunch of students at George Washington University in D.C. (practically right next door), had previously gotten busted for underaged drinking at a party that they'd planned and promoted on Facebook.

They figured that the campus police had found out about it by reading Facebook, so they promoted another "beer" bash; when the cops came, instead of alcohol and underaged drinking, they found a bunch of students eating cake and cookies (decorated with the word "beer" written in icing).

It was kind of a reverse sting operation. What a cheeky bunch.

Anyway, you can read more about it, including the blog account of attendee Kyle Stoneman, the Cake Party Web site ("Cake Party" sounds like "Keg Party", get it?), and photos from the event for those of us (fogeys) who don't have Facebook logins.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Busted for Blogging

Is Being Annoying a Federal Crime?

Blogger Dianna pinged me with an e-mail today, asking me if I'd seen a News.com article from yesterday headlined 'Create an e-annoyance, go to jail,' by technology writer Declan McCullagh. (I had, incidentally.)

The article claimed some scary stuff: That, buried in a law signed last Thursday, it became illegal to post "annoying" Web or e-mail messages without giving your real name.

Basically, it was feared that flaming someone anonymously (or using a screen name, or anything other than your real name), was now a federal crime.

Needless to say, even if it was enforceable (which I don't think it is), it would have a severely chilling effect on speech.

Now, before you panic, check out the BoingBoing entry (and its followups), which has a bunch of lawyers trying to figure out if the law meant what the News.com article thought it meant.

Frankly, my brain isn't wired for legalese, so I'm having a hard time following the discussion. But I don't think the sky is falling just yet.

I will post more about it when people smarter than me come to a consensus on what it all means. In the meantime, you might want to check out some of the linked blogs and resources from the BoingBoing entry.

Thanks. -- Joe

Bloggers Lie!

This item has been floating around the big ole sphere o' blogs today; it comes from blogger Hugh Macleod (a.k.a. "that guy who draws cartoons on the backs of business cards"), who's popular among the "blogerati" (which is a term derived from "literati" -- blogerati means "a bunch of really annoying status-hungry, self-important windbags who think they and their blogs are a lot more important than they actually are.").

Top Ten Blogger Lies

1. I don't consider myself an A-Lister.
No, but I turn up for speaking gigs at all the big conferences anyway. Uh-huh.

2. I don't care about traffic.
Of course I don't. Even though I'm a freelance consultant, and my blog is my primary way of marketing myself. Rock on.

3. I've read your blog.
Yeah, well I read the "Musings of an unemployed tech consultant" bit on the title bar, before clicking off. That counts.

4. I started blogging back in 1999.
Of course, back in 1999 a Flash-animated, brochureware homepage was considered a blog. Kinda sorta.

There are 6 more items (hence the whole "Top 10" thing) -- check out his blog to see the full list. He does use some raw language in other entries of his blog, but he's a good read.

Thanks -- Joe

Editor Joe's Toes

Hi folks -- I have a ton of other entries that I should be doing (mostly regarding stuff that's actually interesting), but I couldn't let this one go; it's in response to blogger John's latest Body Parts-Themed Photo Shoot:

This is a photo of my foot. My right foot, to be precise. I snapped it at the end of December, the morning after I'd stubbed my toe pretty badly on a side table that jumped into my path.

For your sake, I've desaturated the photo, so it's black-and-white.

Thanks -- Joe

R3 Successfully Installed

Morning, folks -- looks like Release 3 of Journals 2.0 (otherwise known as R3) was successfully installed early this morning.

Again, you can check Journals Product Manager Susan's entry about the R3 features, though in a nutshell, they're:

* Blog About This Entry: When you're visiting another AOL Journal, and you see an entry you want to blog about, you can click the "Blog about this entry" link in the footer, which will open up a compose window that will have that entry's link prepopulated.

Also, for users of the Internet Explorer browser (like the one that comes with AOL), you can easily quote from the blog you're looking at: Just highlight the text you want with your mouse before you click "Blog about this entry." You can see my detailed instructions on how to do this.

You can then edit it like a regular blog entry, and choose which of your blogs you want it to publish to.

For example, that's how I'm posting this entry right now -- I visited blogger John's entry on Your Monday Photo Shoot: Body Parts, and have edited it to make this entry.

* Notify AOL Link on Every Post: This one is pretty straightforward -- there's a notify link in the footer of every entry, instead of just in the top nav bar.

I know some of you are concerned that this will lead to an avalanche of spurious flagging, but I doubt it -- as noted, there was already a Notify AOL link in the top nav bar, which pretty much showed up on every post, anyway -- this footer link primarily affects posts on your blog's main page, and the effect should be that it will make it easier for the CAT team to verify valid TOS complaints and dump spurious complaints, because they'll be looking at specific entries, not hunting around trying to find the entry someone complained about.

* Buddy List Rostering: A neat feature, though you don't have to use it. If you have a  private Journal, you can click a check box, and make it so that your entire Buddy List can read your Journal (instead of having to add them one at a time). Plus, as you update your Buddy List, your private Journal will keep up with the changes (it only goes one way, though).

We'reworking on making this more useful, so you can add specific groups instead of your entire Buddy List. See Susan's entry about R3 and rostering for important information on using Buddy List Rostering.

Thanks -- Joe

Heads-Up: Journals Install, 4-6AM ET, Jan. 10

Hi folks --

Darn it, this entry pushes my PostSecret entry out of the top spot, but I have to do it...

Normally, this would be Product Manager Susan's to blog about, but she's on a plane right now, so you're stuck with me.

The Journals tech folks will be installing Release 3 (or R3), tomorrow, January 10, from 4-6AM ET. During this time, Journals will be unavailable (or if they are available, you may see some weirdness, especially on private Journals).

R3 was originally installed early morning December 22, but was rolled back later that afternoon.

You can see Susan's entry about the primary new features of R3, which haven't changed: Blog About This Entry, Notify AOL on each entry and Buddy List Rostering.

Buddy List Rostering is the thing that broke the launch last time -- or more accurately, it worked for us, but broke rostering for everyone else. That's a bad thing, so it was rolled back.

Believe me, the entire Journals team wants this to go off smoothly, since getting R3 finally  out of the way means they get to work on much cooler stuff for Journals.

If you have any Journals problems after the 6AM install window completes, please leave a comment here so the tech folks can see it. Thanks. -- Joe

I've Got a Secret...

...but I'm not gonna tell you what it is.

That makes me different from the thousands of folks who've participated in the PostSecret project, which I and others (like Guest Editor Dan) have blogged about.

Now, before I give you the hyperlink, I'll give you a content warning and note that PostSecret's content includes some adult themes and situations, including but not limited to sex, crime, and bodily functions -- after all, these are people's deep and/or dark secrets that they're revealing anonymously. Take, for example, this shocking confession:

So, as many of you know, PostSecret is the creation of Frank Warren, an artist based in Germantown, Maryland.

From his description, "PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard."

PostSecret got its start from an installation at Artomatic, a DC-area arts event, where Frank set up stacks of postcards available for visitors to fill out with a secret. And they did. Boy, did they.

From there, PostSecret has grown into a blog phenomena; Frank says he gets upwards of 350 postcards a week, from all over the world; he publishes a new batch to his blog every Sunday; he's got a new PostSecret book out, and he's working on installations all over the country.

This includes a run that just ended this past Sunday, at the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran gallery space in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

I went Sunday night (the last night of the exhibition, of course), and took the admittedly bad snapshots you'll see here in the blog and gallery. (You can see better pics from the exhibition's opening.)

Now, I was interested in seeing the postcards, especially in the context of a museum or gallery, but I was particularly interested in seeing how people interacted with the cards.

Being the last night of the exhibition, plus being after 9pm on a Sunday night in Georgetown (which is known for its bars, clubs and other social spaces), I wasn't sure if it would be crowded or not.

It was pretty crowded:

I got in line to wait, but after about 10 minutes of not moving, I decided to roam around and look.

The gallery space used to be a Staples store. They had big blowups of some of the cards on the walls, but they also had printouts of e-mails Frank had received. A lot of people have been found comfort from the site, since they see that a lot of people have secrets similar to their own. Plus, the confessional nature of things seems to really resonate.

There was also a hanging installation of cards, which I kept coming back to, since it was pretty neat:

One of my favorite parts of the exhibition was a couple of tables set up with boxes of cards that you could look through. It was very high-touch -- you could turn over the cards and look at the postmarks, plus you knew that you were handling something that had been touched by the author:

Going through the cards, both on the table, and in the rest of the exhibition, there were all sorts of cards and observations. Some were poignant, some mundane, some downright scary. A lot of them were really funny, some were quite twisted, and others spoke of despair.

I also got the sense that some people were showing off (albeit anonymously), either with their secret or their card, many of which were really elaborate.

Anyway, you can see some of the cards I snapped in the photo widget, though I did want to call out this one:

It confirms all of our suspicions.

Now, I got there a little after 9pm; the gallery closed officially at 10pm, but if they hadn't made the announcement about 10:30pm, "We're turning out the lights in 10 minutes," there'd probably still be people there.

On the way out, I passed a mailbox made out of transparent tape:

It's a sculpture done by another local artist, Mark Jenkins (you can see his blog entry about it).

Now, as I was leaving, I did get a chance to meet and talk to Frank Warren, which was cool. Of course, did I take a picture of him? No. And did I take a picture of me and him? No. So I fail at self-promotion in that particular case.

Anyway, check out the photos I took, then check out Frank's site at PostSecret.com if you're interested. Thanks -- Joe

Tag: PostSecret