Scripting News - Latest Comments

Re: Is it news if it's not reported? (Scripting News)

peteraxon — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:12:29 -0000

That's right. And I think we get into trouble when we treat "laws" of science as being too fixed. If you build a whole philosophy on a so called "law" it will fall apart when further discoveries are made and the "law" is refined or changed.

Re: Just the facts ma'am (Scripting News)

frankiecarl — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:52:08 -0000

It would have been cool if you had used AudioBoo on the trip.

Re: A link back to the beginning (Scripting News)

dave — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:43:16 -0000

Why don't you write a blog post and explain what you want, and don't
be so pitiful.

Give yourself the kind of peptalk you'd give one of your students.

Re: A link back to the beginning (Scripting News)

twitter-14994366 — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:25:33 -0000

If anyone hears of such pooling going on, let me know...

As mentioned, above I'd need sftp to use my server... Also need a place clueless users (like me) could learn & get support, sort of a "userland."
:-)
Sad that it looks like the company by that name is fading away -- no mention of the end of radio.weblogs hosting in the April renewal bill, no e-mail alert; I just stumbled on a posting on the company site when I went to check about something else that wasn't working.

Re: A link back to the beginning (Scripting News)

dave — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 18:18:19 -0000

http://rcs.userland.com/

Re: A link back to the beginning (Scripting News)

dave — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 18:16:17 -0000

Bob you just have to get someone to run a Radio Community Server.

We released the code for it way back when.

Pool together enough $40 users and it would pay for itself.

Re: A link back to the beginning (Scripting News)

twitter-14994366 — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:58:26 -0000

Terrific article, Dave. Thanks for pointing to it. It's great that you and Jorn have maintained your servers/URLs to keep away linkrot for all these years. Makes me wish I'd opted for the "your own server" option instead of using http://radio.weblogs.com/0106327 -- since Userland has posted a surprise notice that hosting ends in December.

Now belatedly trying to figure out how to move seven years of admittedly not prolific or profound posts. Open to advice. (My http://stepno.com host only allows sftp connection, which Radio doesn't do.) Export to WordPress somehow? Suggestions?

I've been browsing around other users looking for notes on how they left... not seeing anything on my low technical level, but some interesting trivia:
http://bit.ly/zPQIq

Re: Is it news if it's not reported? (Scripting News)

frankiecarl — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:48:03 -0000

Re: Is it news if it's not reported? (Scripting News)

Mark Haas — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:04:44 -0000

With the extremely rich diversity of people and their interests, I think you'd have to drill down pretty far before an event isn't news to someone. While the birth of a child who is heir to a throne may be news to a nation or the world, the birth of any child is news to that family and friends, even in the most remote parts of the world. Anything that affects anyone's life or sparks their interest, for whatever reason, is news to them.

Re: New features in FF and Twitter (Scripting News)

GarinKilpatrick — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:50:59 -0000

Agreed. I can't imagine coding an exception for hyphens is that tough of a fix, I bet Dave could do it in 5 minutes.

Re: Is it news if it's not reported? (Scripting News)

howardweaver — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:48:30 -0000

It's likewise useful to remember that what we call the "laws" of science are almost always just temporary and partial explanations. Soon enough, they will be eclipsed by other discoveries and insights. None of this is permanent or complete. Nothing.

Re: New features in FF and Twitter (Scripting News)

GarinKilpatrick — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:47:21 -0000

Good point. Disallowing hashtags or cash symbols in usernames I can understand because these need to remain isolated for hashtags and stocktwit scanning purposes. so that user names are not also grabbed when scanning for topic or stock ticker tags. Plenty of people use periods in their e-mail addresses though, and Twitter user names should be no different. Twitter should allow the usage of periods in addition to the regular character set in usernames, as well as fixing the hashtag hyphen glitch.

Re: Is it news if it's not reported? (Scripting News)

dave — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:01:15 -0000

I believe that there must be a consensus for something to become news.
And I think news organizations have a chance of working as long as
they understand that they're just mirrors. Once they lose that
perspective, they become the agenda-setters, they become Jay's Church
of the Savvy, the insiders who have become "players" -- who end up
being used as poorly paid mouthpieces for the truly powerful people,
the ones with all the money.

Re: Is it news if it's not reported? (Scripting News)

Mark Haas — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 12:52:04 -0000

Isn't everything news the moment it happens? From then on, it just becomes "news to <insert your name here>" the moment they learn about it, and, depending on who "they" are, that discovery might become news, too.

Re: Is it news if it's not reported? (Scripting News)

howardweaver — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 12:42:30 -0000

Thanks for your care in interpreting what I was trying to express in 140 characters, Dave. You got it right.

Jarvis also wrote about our tweetfest on this subject and I posted a comment there this morning. Because it's a holiday, I'll be lazy and use my response again here so Scripting News readers can see it :)

Weaver:
Of course "news" doesn't have to be professionally reported to exist, but I continue to maintain that it has to be reported. Otherwise, *everything* is news.

While that's correct in some obscure semantic or etymological sense, it would also mean that *nothing* is news. Something distinguishes "news" from "events." They are not the same; if they are, we're so completely post-modern, disaggregated and disconnected that nothing matters.

I also believe that the talent, intelligence and experience of the observer/reporter matters. If she's better than average, the report will be more useful and more important, in the aggregate.

Elitist? Well, Sarah Palin would think so.

\-\/\/

Re: Just the facts ma'am (Scripting News)

msandler — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 12:32:24 -0000

I wonder what the crime stats are now in LA ! Without a Dragnet , Superman or Batman !

Re: Is it news if it's not reported? (Scripting News)

frankiecarl — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 10:57:17 -0000

This is exactly why I love the way people are expanding info sourcing/gathering. It reminds me of the idea about a tree
http://www.spectacle.org/396/scifi/tree.html . This link is a bit of topic but I found it helps make my point.

When we discover a scientific "law" we are finding something that was there all the time. Human consciousness can reveal it to humans. Information has the potentiality to be news at any given moment for any given person. News for ME is information/content that I was not previously aware of or that I use as a step to something else that I did not know.

Of course we can debate the formal definition of news. Definitions of words are distilled for general use so we have a functional language. Most people don't really care to think about the concepts behind the definition they just want to understand usage (another issue)

FYI, I find travel - getting out of daily habitat/habits does stimulate creativity.

Re: Is it news if it's not reported? (Scripting News)

Bruce Umbaugh — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 09:18:50 -0000

This reminds me of distinguishing among events. There's history (everything that has happened), the historic (particularly important events), and the historical (events treated by historians). Weaver treats news as historical: of everything that happens, the things that newspeople single out are news.

We don't have common language (yet) for the distinction that you're making, Dave. That makes it harder for pros to grasp.

Re: New features in FF and Twitter (Scripting News)

playerx — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:08:50 -0000

Given that @twitter has no predefined blueprint, it will likely take them a little while to figure out all the #hashtag regular expressions that most people will want to use. It's not like the limited character set for @usernames. Why not have #? or #$ or #. or #^ or #& or #* etc, and then all the other variations of the tagging system we now have. Stocktwits uses the $BLAH for example. And I've seen some people use !blah for tags of some sort.

Re: New features in FF and Twitter (Scripting News)

twitter-6009792 — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:22:14 -0000

I noticed that before, it probably is because all punctuation marks are filtered, to 'fix' tags in posts like:
Just had a great #party!
Anyone heard about @SSRN? It's so 1.0

But indeed, hyphens should be excluded from that

Re: New features in FF and Twitter (Scripting News)

GarinKilpatrick — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 02:30:41 -0000

Friendfeed and Twitter both fail at #hashtags with hyphens, for example: #real-time only linkifies #real. Do you think this would be easy to fix Dave?

Re: While you were sleeping, from Berlin (Scripting News)

iamronen — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 01:26:09 -0000

Thank you for the inspired direction Dave - got me wondering: http://www.iamronen.com/?p=1309

Re: New features in FF and Twitter (Scripting News)

Jonas Smith — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:03:55 -0000

I have never seen updates from Scripting News at weblogs.com. Perhaps weblogs.com is ignoring Scripting News or Scripting News is not pinging weblogs.com. In any case, that might explain why FriendFeed is not picking up Scripting News from weblogs.com

Re: A link back to the beginning (Scripting News)

dave — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:56:59 -0000

No. I'm just talking about our sites, as opposed to the ones we point to.

Re: A link back to the beginning (Scripting News)

Mark W. — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:43:06 -0000

"For both Barger and myself, linkrot has not claimed our work -- it's all still there, many many years later."
I'm curious as to what you may do to eliminate/minimize linkrot to the material linked to within your posts. In other words, do you have software that checks the validity of the links in your old posts? Do you try to repair those broken links where possible?