RSS feedThe wonderful Gina Trapani talks about fact and fiction and personal exposure, in her item If ever a wiz there was. Timely, considering my A jigsaw of me (and you) and follow ups from last week.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)
I only discovered William Hung through my brother inlaw, who just happened to be watching it on TV a few months back. Somehow I just managaed to stumble across his web site. Amusing or denegrating? For health reasons, I’m not going to make a judgement. Regardless, I still think his rendition of She bangs is pretty funny.
In mid-2003, U.S. company Deckers started selling australian ugg boots, under the name UGG Australia. The boots are supplied through a company of the same name, whose domain name is owned by Teva Sandals, another U.S. company.
The ugg boots themselves are apparently being made in China, as are those sold locally (here in Australia) by Myer (don’t get me started on their stupid name change from Grace Bros.). The problem is the 30 odd Australia businesses which have been hand making and selling ugg boots for the last 60 years, and are now selling them on the Internet. Deckers are suing companies using the name “ugg”, when you can’t even get “UGG Australia” boots in Australia (Deckers don’t exist here).
This Sydney Morning Herald article covers the full story, including how local manufacturers are being thrown off eBay because Deckers sees it as trademark infringement.
Ugg is a generic term that Australians and Australian businesses have been using for decades. When a U.S. company with no presence in Australia, trademarks our own language and forceably damages our local industry, something must be done.
To quote the Deckers web site:
UGG is a line of authentic sheepskin footwear, popularized in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. These sheepskin boots, slippers and other footwear styles have high-grade sheepskin linings which act as a natural insulator, keeping feet warm and comfortable.
“…and can no longer be sold or promoted in Australia, because it affects our bottom line.”
Think global, act local. Buy our local product, and tell Deckers what you think about their bottom line. (We have three pairs of boots in our house, proudly Australian made)
Note: As of January 2006, the term has been finally removed again from the Australian Trademark Registry. For more information on why, and the dodgey and deceptive marketing practices of U.S. companies Deckers and Ugg Australia, please see the Wikipedia entry for ugg boots under the section Trademark controversy.
Also please note that I think some of the negative comments below are from competitors trying to trash other retailers. There are a LOT of ugg boots sellers in Australia, and it’s a competitive market, so don’t use this blog as a recommendation for or against any particular retailer.
Here’s a great photo of a milk drop, from my favourite photoblog [daily dose of imagery].
Keeping the theme…
Having defined the main blogging types, I now sort my (RSS and Atom) feeds by their collection or connection value, in other words by their value as item catalogues. I then sort these within each of my information categories. So for miscellaneous items for example, I have the collections at the top, like BoingBoing, followed by individual feeds which aren’t as regular or are more inventive.
Surprisingly, I found I’d been sorting things this way anyway, but had never realised why. Whenever I launch my reader, I want to see a summary of everything I’m about to digest, which is where the collections come in. Then I want to drill into individual items, both from the collections and from the specialist feeds I’ve subscribed to.
This fairly clear distinction compares quite well to portals vs. sites, or even directories vs. documents. And when you explain this to people, they’re more likely to understand the big difference between RSS format (sic) and the Atom API/protocol (sic) (visual clues provided free of charge 🙂 ). It is not the critical difference, but should be a compelling one for bloggers.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)
Since 1981, the Macquarie Dictionary has been the definitive dictionary of Australia English. Since early 2003, they no longer provide a free web based interface, meaning that everyone I know who used this great Australian dictionary, now uses the American English based www.dictionary.com. Good to see the Macquarie folks not just throwing away their support of everyday Australian English in favour of purely academic pursuits, which is of course their right, but by defaulting on a free public service, they are actively forcing the rapid decline, and perhaps ultimate death, of Australian English. It takes smart academics indeed, to do themselves out of jobs.
It seems like a simple formula, discover why people blog, then develop the tools to satisfy their needs and desires. The key of course, which many seem to miss, is the differentiation between need and technology. Is blogging part of the reason, or just a cool technology which facilitates those needs?
Either way, the 4.6 million pages already discussing the question all seem to be looking for a single definitive reason, when it is more likely that weblogs just happen to be a useful and rather timely facilitating technology which satisfies a vast range of social and technical needs. Timing is everything.
Those who’ve tried to answer the question Why do people blog?, usually end up brainstorming a list of things which blogging provides or achieves, such as ego, communication, mass publishing etc. What they’re really answering is “What does blogging technology give to the individual?”, which is not exactly “Why do people blog?”
Blog patterns are a more interesting and significant technique for identifying why bloggers blog. Some work has been done on this in the blogosphere already, including some nice definitions by Edward Lee, but there is more to do.
With patterns, we can identify the types of information, the source, the value, and the value-add provided by bloggers. From this, amongst other uses, we’re able to categorise the A-List bloggers into those who are inventing, pontificating, simply reiterating, or a mix of each. This also quite nicely links with Gladwell’s Tipping Point theories of connectors and mavens.
As an example, the two most important bloggers for my work, are connector/mavens, which direct me to a multitude of sources for information. They provide their own limited embellishments or political bent, but in most cases they are simply a conduit to the original item, which then provides the real value. From these major starting points, lesser known bloggers, typically the inventors, appear and disappear from my reader as they intersect with my current interests and needs.
Subsequently, the A-Listers are mainly collectors of content. That’s not to say they’re not valuable, relevant or not inventing, but by their nature they tend to invent less or add less value to individual entries. The sum of the parts is the value, not so much their embellishments.
Coincidentally, Wired’s recent article on exactly this, came from a cronological analysis of weblog cross links. Different data, same conclusion. Although now it looks like we simply ripped them off, and by linking to it, I’ve perhaps, somewhat ironically, contributed to their results.
Oh well, at least we know we’re on the right track.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog.)
Flawed article on OS News concludes that:
All users, after an initial bootstrapping phase, preferred the CLI “discussion” method for interacting. All reported that they felt more in control and better able to find things out. This probably was due to the higher amount of interface consistency and more task-based interface that the CLI tends to encourage
Ignores the biased task based examples being taught, focussing on command line strengths but not GUI strengths. Also, no mention was made of which GUI was used, so I assume it was one of those inconsistent and unintuitive Linux GUIs.
I would ideally like to extend my little trial into a full newbie computing course where I teach the command line first before moving up into GUIs. I feel that my experiences here show that the CLI provides a far better environment for first-time computer users to find their feet.
Pity, because the GUI desktop is a flawed metaphor anyway, and it would have been good to see a proposal for something better.
Perhaps these things could be combined into a new shell. One that also had a more unified method of job control, perhaps introducing ‘inbg’ as a built in function.
Continuing the mainstream media’s ignorant bias of Apple technology, here’s CNet announcing Virgin’s new online music store, using tainted language to report that the service only supports WMA (Windows Media)…
will support Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio, or WMA, format
…and then implies that Apple’s non-support of WMA makes it an exception…
WMA files work on a host of digital music players, except Apple’s, which does not support WMA.
…when in fact they could (and should) have said:
only works on players which support Microsoft’s proprietary WMA format
Robert Scoble gets it slightly wrong, talking about ArtRage by Ambient Design. Great product, and great results. He says:
Too bad Steve Jobs doesn’t work for Microsoft. He made GarageBand seem like musicians were going to revolutionize the PC business. Now, imagine Steve Jobs was showing off this app. ArtRage should get just as much hype as GarageBand got. If not more.
Here’s a product called Painter on the Mac, now owned by Corel. The original version of Painter did much the same as ArtRage, but was released in the early 1990s, for the Mac of course. But yes, it got the hype back then.