Feed: Life On the Wicked Stage: Act 2 - AggScore: 50.3
Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. For the last several years there have been reports of methane gas emissions from livestock contributing to global warming.
Well, it looks like there is move afoot to tax livestock to try and curb the effects of those emissions.
You know where this is going people. It is just one big slippery slope before some one wants to start taxing each human for the gases they expel as well. I’m warning you, that day will come.
Hot on the beginning of MacWorld and CES 2009, Twitter and Twitter users are getting hit with a phishing scam. Apparently a number of the Twitteratti have been hit, along with Fox News, CNN, and well, how knows who else.
The latest is that the scam seems to promise a method to win a new iPhone. Given how fast an furious new requests come in when folks meet at MacWorld and CES, prompting pretty quick replies, this looks like it will be a hot topic at the two gatherings this week.
Nailed.
We’re back in Chicago after some fun at Lake LuLu in Wisconsin. Cold there, but not bad weather over all. We had a good time with family and some new friends, and boy was it relaxing.
This is a recurring story and recurring theme in Virginia. Wal-Mart (or another developer) finds an area it wants to build a new store on and it turns out that it is too close or actually on a battlefield from the Civil War. Everyone gets up in arms. The saga goes on for awhile and then a compromise will eventually be reached, although some times not what others had hoped for.
The current battle is over a site used as a staging area for Union troops in the Battle of the Wilderness in the American Civil War. County leaders see revenue, historians and enthusiasts see desecration, Wal-Mart sees aggravation.
There’s plenty of land to go around, and while it is hard to find land that doesn’t have some sort of historic memory attached to it, I imagine the supervisors are going to win this round. Until it hits the courts.
So, yes it is cold here at Lake Lulu in Wisconsin, but that’s not stopping any outdoor fun. We were out walking on the lake earlier today and having fun. Nothing like a little slipping and sliding along to get some exercise.
The things that young ones get to play with these days. Amazing. Here my three nephews play with a GigaBall.
Who thinks up this stuff?
Take a breath, hold or talk to someone you love, and get ready for whatever 2009 will bring. Happy New Year!!!!
Being back in my old haunts in the Windy City, which currently is the center of the political universe, reminds me just how much of a crazy farce politics can be.
Yesterday's news of Blagojeveich's appointment of Roland Burris to Obama's Senate seat was met with general good old fashioned Chicago derison and mocking. Most folks I'm talking to treat it as a sideshow and are not surprised by Blago's brazen stupidity and cluelessness.
Of course that belies the seriousness of the issue. But then that's Chicago for you.
Not for the young one’s but the JibJabbers have some fun ringing out the old.
Geez. When I was a kid I would get in trouble for drawing on windows. Now they make special markers to do so.
We're back in Chicago.
Some Sunday morning reading to share before the big trip begins.
What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting from the New York Times. What a racket.
The Twitter authority search comedy continues. Arrington says bloggers have lost the plot. Scoble thinks Arrington took us into idiot land.
The NY Times highlights a trans-Atlantic theatre initiative supposedly aimed at making it easier for the Brit and American actors to work on the others’ stages in classical repertory.
The Wild Side says we should be celebrating the birth of Sir Isaac Newton regardless of whether he was born on December 25 or Jan 4.
I’m not sure which is worse here, the choices or the choosing of them. Newsweek asked its cultural critics to pick one work in their field that defined culture in the age of Bush. The choices in and of themselves are pretty mediocre. Is this the best these folks can do?
Dave Barry’s Year in Review. Hysterical and wonderful.
The burning of the Swedish goat continues.
Steve Gillmor’s take on the year now behind us.
Maybe I’m just out of it having enjoyed the holidays too much, or maybe I’m just being extraordinarily naive. In any regard this entire discussion about Twitter needing some sort of authority measuring stick for search seems a bit silly.
Loic Le Meur brought it up and of course the heavyweights are weighing in with their views. Loic stirred a pot with his plantation-like thinking about equality. He says:
We need filtering and search by authority. We're not equal on Twitter, as we're not equal on blogs and on the web. I am not saying someone who has more followers than yourself matters more, but what he says has a tendency to spread much faster.
Sarah Lacy calls that anti-web thinking, and as true as that might indeed be, behind Loic’s point lies an essence that is also true, brazen and elitist though it may be.
Here’s why I think this isn’t such a big deal. Anyone who follow the tech game or Web 2.0, or whatever it is going to evolve into in its next iteration, follows everyone they think matters anyway. And given that the blogosphere/twittersphere/carnivalsphere dredges up the echo chamber meme about every sixty days or so means that everybody is talking about the same thing anyway. So what would an authority weighted search yield but the same stuff we currently find. My hunch is it would only yield another ranking service or mechanism destined to fail as soon as someone declares it is broken.
So, lets’ move away from the tech world and look at Twitter as it relates to non-tech topics. Pick one, flood, famine, pestilence, war, it doesn’t matter. Is anyone really going to check out the rank of someone who tweets a disaster or big news story before passing it on? I don’t think so. Are we really going to pay more attention to a highly followed Twitterer over someone at the source, (i.e. the recent plane crash)?
Scoble lists some metadata he thinks is more important than the number of followers someone has, and his point about who you follow versus who follows you makes a lot of sense, but that’s not the end of the story.
While who delivers the info can be as important as the info itself, in the long run it matters not. Authority comes and goes. As Shakespeare said:
But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.
Measure for Measure act 2, sc. 2