Month: October 2007

Dave Winer (early blogging, podcasting, syndication pioneer and all around scripting god) has put together a new disruptive (and better in my opinion) means of reading the New York Times.

Great stuff…

NY Times outline

NY Times outline

There is an interesting piece in the NY Times today on the problem of web analytics.  Briefly, the web might allow for radical transparency of authorial intention, statistical reports and click counting… but when you try to hammer down the attention value of individuals using or viewing web pages, it gets very murky.

This won’t get better until advertisers realize that performance is a much more accurate thing to measure than interaction or eyeball interaction.

But far from solving the squishy-numbers problem, the Internet seems to have added more confusion. Many advertisers pay Web publishers each time their ad gets an impression, meaning that it is viewed by a reader, but each company uses its own methodology to count impressions.

“One of them can be right, or the other one is right, but they can’t all be right,” said Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting System. “It’s interesting that people keep talking about it as much more accountable than other media, but we’re not finding that to be the case yet because there’s no agreement on metrics or accounting methods.”

How Many Site Hits? Depends Who’s Counting – New York Times

http://research.uchicago.edu/highlights/resources/media/roth_512k.mov

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is coming to completion (if that’s possible for a dictionary of this scope!) after 80 years of hard work:

Martha Roth, Ph.D., Professor of Assyriology, discusses the final volume of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, a comprehensive lexicon of ancient Akkadian dialects 86 years in the making. Roth has served as Editor-in-Charge of the project for the past 11 years.

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary: The Final Chapter

Um… yes.

I was fortunate enough to take a couple of courses on Shakespeare from the great Dr. John Cobb at Wofford College.  Prof Cobb was beyond phenomenal and his presentation of Shakespeare changed my life and helped me understand the power of word, language and literature.

Evidently that’s not the case for almost half of NC college students (unfortunately):

According to a study by The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy study, 48 percent of North Carolina colleges and universities do not require English majors to take a Shakespeare class to graduate. The center is a Raleigh-based nonprofit.

CITIZEN-TIMES.com: Schools mixed on requiring Shakespeare-devoted classes

DSCN2211 on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

ConvergeSouth is a tremendous conference held in Greensboro, NC that you should definitely attend next year.  It’s hard to classify since there is a mix of students, middle age folks, bloggers, old folks, whites, blacks, hispanics, asians, social progressives, tech geeks and people who are dedicated to the causes of good barbeque and citizen journalism (or both).

I led a workshop on “affiliate marketing and web.20 convergence” at the conference and had a full room and tons of questions and insights from the attendees.  I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but by the end, I was wishing that we had two hours to converse rather than the allotted 1 hour.  I guess that’s the sign of a good crowd and conference, though.

There’s a film festival tonight and I’m sad that I won’t be able to make it.  However, I wish my new friends Farrah and Mitchell Davis good luck as they present a film tonight.  It was great to also meet people like Francis Shepherd and gain a few new friends on Twitter and Facebook (Jason Calacanis led a great workshop on the social force that are platforms like Twitter and I think he made a few new converts).

I’d also like to thank Sue and the great folks at ConvergeSouth, North Carolina A&T and the City of Greensboro for having the guts and vision to put on such an ambitious and diverse conference.

I’m presenting a workshop that’s sort of a “how to” on affiliate marketing and “web2.0” (blogs, video, etc).

You can see the slides from the presentation here:

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=ahndmmnhz3b_2475n7xvp

I’ve been loving Tumblr since the early part of this year. In a nutshell, it’s a tumblelog service which allows you to aggregate feeds from various parts of your online existence (like Flickr, blogs, YouTube, Digg, etc).

You can see my Tumblr page at http://www.samharrelson.net

We’ll see what the new Tumblr has in store soon it seems!

11-1-07 « Davidville

I was amazed at the last Buncombe County Democrats convention that there was such a strong presence of delegates who wanted to pass a measure stating that the NC State Gov’t should not require vaccinations of children based on fears of heavy metal poisoning, autism, etc. 

I’ve followed some of Robert Kennedy Jr’s work in this area, but I have to tell you that I’m not convinced.  Anna (who is a physician) and I have had many conversations about childhood vaccinations, especially since the birth of Mary Hudson.  Sure there is some corruption by the big pharma companies, but in general, I’d rather have MH protected from such preventable things as the whopping cough (which seems to be prevalent here in Asheville b/c of the number of children that aren’t vaccinated by choice). 

Here’s a fun riff on the subject:

On the other hand, pharma-funded think tank wingnuts say the real problem is baseless lawsuits by money-grubbing autistic kids. Either way, you just know the issue is screwed up when Mississippi and West Virginia come off sounding like the reasonable ones.

Crazy Hippies Pose As Jesusfreaks To Avoid Vaccinating Their Kids — Daddy Types

JANES (Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society) is online at the Jewish Theological Seminary!  Lots of fun Assyriology and Hebrew Bible material to dig through!

Thanks to PaleoJudaica for the tip.

JANES, the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society, was founded in 1968 at Columbia University, and has been housed at the Jewish Theological Seminary since 1982. Over these approximately forty years 30 volumes have been published under the editorship of JTS professors Ed Greenstein and David Marcus.

Articles have been written on all aspects of the Bible and Ancient Near East covering areas such as art history, archaeology, anthropology, language, linguistics, philology, and religion. There are articles on Assyriology, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hittite, and all areas of Hebrew and Aramaic and on almost every book of the Bible.

JANES at the JTS

Since Google owns my email, feed reading, docs&spreadsheets, web history, attention data, calendaring, etc I could proclaim them as a deity as well (thanks to Larry McGehee for the link):

The Church of Google – Googlism – Proof Google is God!
We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favour of Google’s divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods.

» The Church of Google