No Think. Link.
The news of new ownership is making my head swim. If I'm normally your ADD DJ, today add an H for hyperactivity. I'm all over the place. Can't read without the phone ringing, taking calls that begin, "What do you think?" No think. Link.
So we start with this "thought scoop" from Nicholas Carr, the ex-editor of the Harvard Business Review, headlined,
It begins:
Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," was a nice experiment in the "democratization" of publishing, but it didn't quite work out. Wikipedia is dead. It died the way the pure products of idealism always do, slowly and quietly and largely in secret, through the corrosive process of compromise.
What did it in? John Seigenthaler reading about his alleged hand in a Kennedy assassination? That helped. So did Congressional aides rewriting political history.
More Carr:
A few months ago, in the wake of controversies about the quality and reliability of the free encyclopedia's content, the Wikipedian powers-that-be - its "administrators" - abandoned the work's founding ideal and began to impose restrictions on editing. In addition to banning some contributors from the site, the administrators adopted an "official policy" of what they called, in good Orwellian fashion, "semi-protection" to prevent "vandals" (also known as people) from messing with their open encyclopedia.
The end for Carr came Friday, when Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales proposed that the site no longer label articles that are "semi-protected" - or that only registered users or non-newbies can write. Carr quotes eWeek's Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who asked: "And the difference between Wikipedia and a conventionally edited publication is what exactly?"
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NBC10 sniffs out the ugliest dog in Philadelphia. A white Mohawk, a lazy tongue, a coat like mottled leather and the breath of a pickel hound, Pee Wee Martini hails from Fishtown and is vying for the collar of ugliest dog in the world. We wish him well.
The Daily News wonders who would want to hack into the web site where the contest is being waged and get rid of most of his votes. Vote for yourself at the Sonoma-Marin Fair. (Lucille Bald is pretty good-looking too.)
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A-List music bloggers write (and link) the songs that wound up being the soundtrack to some moment in their lives. The collaboration is called "The More You Know" and sponsored by a Cleveland Mp3 blog called Good Hodgkins. Harmonium writes of Andrew Bird's "Tables and Chairs," and while it's left unsaid what moment this accompanied, the post includes the observation, "Has the idea of snacks ever sounded so joyful? I doubt it." What's interesting is that this is a collection of impassioned writing about some great songs, but there is very little evoking of personal moments going on. But there is this, Ryan from catbirdseat raving about Teenage Fanclub's "The Concept:"
Those opening squalls always make me feel 17 years-old again. And I don't mean the embarrassing, shameful part of 17. I mean the good part.
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Shoes that keep track of your workout?
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The picture at the top, via Gridskipper, is another reason why we miss Berlin. It's part of a Terry Gilliam art instillation. GS writes: You walk up to the statues and l ook inside their necks, only to find a TV monitor that shows you a short video about Berlin. The statue also takes your picture, and your face may be interspersed with slideshows of famous Berliners projected onto nearby buildings at night. Note that most Berliners do not contain torso-mounted video monitors.
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"There are some minds you don't want to get inside of" -- why one newspaper columnist does not blog.