firehose

Famous Weapons

Movie Posters

lzbth:

don’t talk to strangers on the internet because they’re great and hot and funny and live miles away and highlight the lack of people in your daily life that you can tolerate

Oscar winner, Jennifer Lawrence

Woot-opoly Game:

Staying up until Midnight Central is now combined with the game that destroys families

obligatoryblogtitle:

train trestle by ~estallidos

Poorly Drawn Lines

Movie Secrets: Kill Bill is outlined at dinner in Pulp Fiction by Mia Wallace

(See also: The Pulp Fiction Coffee Shop)

The post An Apology To My RSS Readers – But I Had To Do It. (Updated) appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

If you’re a fan of this site, you’re also probably a fan of RSS – a once-ascendant technology that has been on most everyone’s deathwatch for five or so years. According to Google’s (almost totally outdated) Feedburner service, nearly 450,000 people subscribe to this blog via RSS – although the number of you who actually read my posts is far smaller (according to Feedburner statistics, which I’ve never fully understood).

In any case, from time to time I’ve poked at you poor RSS readers, just to find out if you’re alive. Remember this piece – Is RSS Really Dead? Or this one - Once Again, RSS Is Dead. But ONLY YOU Can Save It!?

In those posts, I asked if my beloved RSS readers were really out there. Turns out, I got tons of comments back – a very high number given the work involved in declaring fealty to the creaky old standard. (It kind of felt like a reshoot of that wonderful final scene in Horton Hears a Who – “Everybody yell real loud, and maybe Google will hear, and not deprecate Feedburner…”  But I digress.)

I’ve always kept my RSS feed “full text” – which means the entire post, pictures, words and all, goes out over RSS, and can be picked up by any RSS reader anywhere on the planet. I always have held the belief that it’s more important that my work get distributed than monetized. But not everyone can afford such high minded principles. Many publishers cut their feed short, teasing folks with headlines and a snippet of the story in the hopes that people will click through to the site, where their visit can be properly “monetized” via advertising.

After much thought, I’m going to do the same. But not for the extra clicks and ads. It’s due to the fraud that’s taken over the content space in the Indpendent Web. Untold legions of bad actors use RSS to scrape “real” sites like this one, then wrap them with ads from exchanges to make a quick buck. The rise of programmatic fraud has made this even worse (see It’s Time To Call Out Fraud In The Adtech Ecosystem for more on this). And no, I’m not going to link to examples – but you can Google “Content Scraping” if you want to learn more.

So, consider this an apology. I am very sorry that you have to click a link to get to the content I make here every day. But also consider this a plea – as in, please do click that link at the top. I very much want you to be part of this conversation.

(And if enough of you complain, you know I’ll listen, and figure out some way around this).

 

UPDATE: I turned full feed back on. Thanks for all the input.

The post An Apology To My RSS Readers – But I Had To Do It. (Updated) appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

nbauman writes "A New York Times consumer columnist tracked down the people who run a 'This is your second and final notice" robocall operation. The calls came from Account Management Assistance, which promises to negotiate lower credit card rates with banks. One woman paid them $1,000, and all they did was give her a limited-time zero-percent credit card that she could have gotten herself. AMA has a post office box in Orlando, Florida. The Better Business Bureau has a page for Your Financial Ladder, which does business as Account Management Assistance, and as Economic Progress. According to a Florida incorporation filing, Economic Progress is operated by Brenda Helfenstine, with her husband Tony. The Arkansas attorney general has sued Your Financial Ladder for violating the Telemarketing Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act. The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services investigated Your Financial Ladder, but the investigator went to 1760 Sundance Drive, St. Cloud, which turned out to be a residence, and gave up. The Times notes that you can type their phone number (855-462-3833) into http://800notes.com/ and get lots of reports on them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

meme4u:

http://memeblock.com/

Several readers sent word of a Mozilla announcement that 18 carriers have committed to launching phones running Firefox OS. The carriers are primarily from markets in South America and Europe. They include Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, and Sprint. The devices running Firefox OS will be made by LG, ZTE, Huawei, and Alcatel, and all will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset. The new mobile operating system is built to allow HTML5 apps to run directly on the device, a solution Mozilla thinks will give it an edge when playing catch-up to all the software available for Android and iOS devices. "Developers are busy and don't have time to learn a new programming language. We believe that the only remaining eco-system is the web and there are more developers for the web than for any other platform in the world," said Jay Sullivan. According to Reuters, "Mozilla will initially look to compete in so-called 'emerging economies' in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia, where many people still use older phone models and have yet to upgrade to more expensive smartphones that feature touchscreens and high-speed Internet connections."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dimestorepoet:

what the fuck is this thing meant to be

0/10 worst dot to dot ever would not recommend

Never mind whiskey aficionados; tongues on even vodka lovers were wagging earlier this month over a rare public relations stumble in Kentucky. Rob Samuels, COO of Maker's Mark, announced that the alcoholic strength of the company's signature bourbon was to be lowered from 90 proof to 84 proof.

The company had announced, quite literally, that it was watering down the product.

The ensuing uproar was immediate, vocal, and sustained. On Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, indignant fans deplored the decision and excoriated the firm. Bartenders who prefer overproof spirits that can stand up to the dilution of mixers and ice in cocktails bemoaned the new direction. Users howled indignation and pundits prognosticated the future of the brand (opinions ranged from “I’ll never buy Maker's again” to “In a year, who will even remember?”). It became a national story. Up in Vermont, WhistlePig vowed to increase the proof of its rye whiskey. I stayed mostly mum on the topic. Regardless of what others recalled next February, I would remember who did this.

I was struck immediately by the resonance of Samuels' announcement with Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle. The book depicts a world in which Germany and Japan emerge victorious in World War II. Between them, they conquer and divide a disgraced former United States. I must have been ten when I read it first, but Dick's depiction of wu — a slippery concept applied to handcrafted jewelry in the book, but applicable to whiskey here — has stayed with me for more than thirty years.

It wasn’t indignation over the decision to dilute the whiskey or even anger, really, I felt. Rather, it was sadness. Another layer on our ever-thickening patina of loss. True, Americans have experienced great gains in recent decades in fields such as medicine, technology, and publishing. But we have suffered a concomitant erosion of our greatness. Heroes once idolized have been exposed as flawed — sometimes deeply flawed — humans; OJ Simpson, Lance Armstrong, Joe Paterno, John F. Kennedy, Michael Vick. Endless obstructionist caviling among our politicians have led many to despair that we will ever be better off than our parents.

Our entertainment has grown recursive; witness the remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Arthur, The Karate Kid, or Gus Van Sant's scene-by-scene reshoot of Pyscho, movies that did not need to be remade, that arguably should not have been remade, that do not leave the world a better place in their passing. Our homes, by and large, are not built as well as those of a hundred years ago. On it goes. NASA's space program: gutted. New Orleans: flooded and nearly lost to us. The lunacy of creationism taught as fact to defenseless children who will be unable to compete for jobs as adults because they simply will not understand how the natural world works as well as their grandparents did.

Into this morass steps Maker's Mark with another assault on our faith in the goodness of humanity. And why? Why reduce the proof of this iconic whiskey? Profit. Global thirst for American whiskey has grown steadily in recent years and supply has not consistently kept pace with demand. Maker's in particular has experienced shortages, despite a 2012 expansion that increased production capacity by some 45%. Watering the whiskey was seen as a way to increase almost instantaneously the available inventory by 6%.

Deplorable things happen. Every day. Drove my Chevy to the levee and all that. But it's not all odious Kardashians, pedophile priests, and watered down whiskey. Not even close. There are good things as well. Whether it's the residuum of my midwest upbringing or a Catholic education that drives me to be what the Jesuits dubbed a man for others, I choose to spend time making and pursuing things that make the world better. As the California designer Mike Monteiro writes in Design in a Job, "[Y]ou are responsible for what you put into the world...and you can only stand as proud of the work as its benefit to society entitles you to." Amen, brother. Whether it's websites or whiskey, we shoulder a moral responsibility for what we bring into the world.

For the past twenty years or so, there's usually been a bottle of Maker's knocking around the house, but when Samuels made his initial announcement, my thought simply was to abandon the label quietly. No point in making a fuss. I'd never tasted the lower-proof version and the erosion of quality is arguable. We were assured the taste was nearly identical. That was beside the point. For decades, Maker's has presented itself using the language of heritage, tradition, and craftsmanship, a brand — a family — hitched to the yoke of history. Through it all, that squat bottle with its red wax top remained unchanged. The trope of Maker's as custodian to an unbroken legacy of quality suffuses marketing materials, bottle design, and even the grounds of the distillery itself which in 1980 was declared a National Historic Landmark. Your haircut, your president, and your wife may change, but Maker's would always be Maker's.

Until the day it wasn't, the day we were told it was to be cheapened for the masses. And that brings us back to Dick's novel. In The Man in the High Castle, Robert Childan, a dealer in historic Americana — Colt revolvers, Buffalo Bill's head in a jar, Civil War recruitment posters and the like — has presented a piece of modern American jewelry to Paul Kasoura, a wealthy young Japanese civilian newly stationed in occupied San Francisco. Kasoura secretly laughs at Childan for presuming to present such a piece, but soon develops an unexpected attraction to it.

"Here is a piece of metal which has been melted until it has become shapeless. It represents nothing. Nor does it have design, of any intentional sort. It is merely amorphous. One might say, it is mere content, deprived of form.”

 He goes on.

“Yet,” Paul said, “I have for several days now inspected it, and for no logical reason I feel a certain emotional fondness. Why is that? I may ask. I do not even now project into this blob, as in psychological German tests, my own psyche. I still see no shapes or forms. But it somehow partakes of Tao. You see?” He motioned Childan over. “It is balanced. The forces within this piece are stabilized. At rest. So to speak, this object has made its peace with the universe. It has separated from it and hence has managed to come to homeostasis.”

“It does not have wabi,” Paul said, “nor could it ever. But—” He touched the pin with his nail. “Robert, this object has wu.”

Wu, Dick tells us though Kasoura, is a quality that allows us to experience a tranquility associated with holy things. It is not necessarily apparent, even to its maker who may recognize only that the object satisfies, that it is complete. By contemplating such things, we gain wu ourselves. Kasoura is profoundly moved by it. With subtle discomfort, he informs Childan that an associate wishes to replicate the piece in plastic or base metal — tens of thousands of units — for sale to the poor and superstitious in Latin America and Asia. The deal, he confirms, would be worth a great deal of money. “What about wu?” Childan asks. “Will that remain in the pieces?”

Kasoura is silent, but we know the answer. It will not.

Childan could take one of two paths. One could make him immensely wealthy. The other is less clear. He seizes the decision to meet the exporter. Then, in a moment of clarity, he realizes the trap.

Whole affair a cruel dismissal of American efforts, taking place before his eyes. Cynicism, but God forbid, he had swallowed hook, line and sinker. Got me to agree, step by step, led me along the garden path to this conclusion: products of American hands good for nothing but to be models for junky good-luck charms.

Which path does Childan take? Read the book.

Maker's Mark, however, made the honorable choice. Chairman emeritus Bill Samuels, Jr. joined Rob Samuels in a conference call to confirm that fans' protestations were heard loud and clear. Geoffrey Kleinman relates their conversation here at DrinkSpirits.com and confirms that, after just a few days of online furore, the whisky will return at 90 proof.

Well, I'll be damned. Turns out there's room on my shelf for Maker's after all. And if, from time to time, it's not available, that's ok.

Goes well with:

• Mike Monteiro's 2012 Design is a Job is ostensibly selling design for web designers, but it's a practical little manual for creative types of all stripes — and those of us who work with them.
• We also disdain watered down bacon. Maynard Davies aims to show how bacon was done the old way. 
• Don't know Dick? You may know more than you think. His stories have been made into movies such as Minority Report, Blade Runner, Total Recall, and A Scanner Darkly. Pick up a copy of The Man in the High Castle at your neighborhood bookstore or online here. 
• Got a thing for Dick? You may also enjoy these Charles Bukowski postal stamps. 
• David Toczko's 2012 book, The Ambassador of Bourbon: Maker's Mark and the Rebirth of America's Native Spirit, presents over 250 photos of the Maker's Mark distillery, including fermenting mash, barrels in the rickhouse, hand-dipping of the those red wax seals, and some archival material. Introduction by Bill Samuels, Jr. and foreword by Rob Samuels. Pick up a copy here. 

DR. ZAIUS, DR. ZAIUS.

DR. ZAIUS, DR. ZAIUS

DR. ZAIUS, DR. ZAIUS.

DR. ZAIUS…OOOOOH DR. ZAIUS!

(a Civic lunch liveblogged with Nathan Matias and Rahul Bhargava)

Today, we're hearing from the National Archives and Records Adminisration about the archives they maintain, how they're making those archives available online at Archives.gov, and approaches to sharing the archives to broader audiences.

Pamela Wright is the Chief Innovation Officer at the National Archives and Records Administration. Bill Mayer is the Executive for Research Services at NARA. Michael Moore is the Access Coordinator for Research Services East (right here in Waltham, MA).

About the US National Archive
The US National Archives keeps over 4.5 million cubic feet of traditional records: paper records, audio, video, maps, and over 500 terabytes of electronic data. Their records span US Federal agencies, courts, records from Congress, and 13 presidential administrations. Only about 5% of Federal government records are preserved in the National Archives; the sheer volume requires them to be selective. There's a lag of at least 15 years before the records are sent over to the Archives from the agencies that created them.

The archives cover any issue the federal agency touches, from the environment to housing to health. There are studies, reports, case files, hearings files, aerial photos, and more.

Environmental scientists from Maine have studied fishing records to learn about changes in the region's stock over the years. The archives keep project files for the US space program, traffic data from America's cities, and much more. Now that the US space shuttle program has been shut down, records are already being "palletized" for archival.

How Can You Find Records from NARA? In addition to checking the Archive website, researchers can talk to archive curators directly. To help, NARA also offers residential research fellowships for anyone who wants to explore the archives more closely.

The Archive would like to expand access to their records, but archives are often held hostage by their format, their location, and the challenge of indexing, says Bill Mayer. There are 15 locations nationwide, but ideally, researchers have the same experience accessing records no matter where in the US they are located. So far, this remains an ideal.

Setting free these records is at the heart of the Archive's mission. It is an awesome responsibility that supports the democratic process in this country by allowing citizens to hold the government accountable for its decisions. Archives can be personal. Bill tells us of the time he met a Vietnam vet who spent 43 years gathering the emotional courage to visit the Archives and look up his unit commander. It took the curator 30 seconds to find the commander's name. These records change peoples' lives.

How do we set the records free? Records on paper fill miles of storage space. The Archives' current footprint consists of miles and miles of shelving, "from the limestone caves of Kansas to compact shelves in downtown DC."

The records come in from agencies with varying degrees of metadata. Bill gives us "a snapshot of the pain" of the archives, showing us the process of obtaining, processing, and sharing data to the public. For example, the Archive also deals with Freedom Of Information Act requests. They have sealed records that are subject to FOIA requests, and if the request is approved, they must find the record, redact it, and share it.

Pamela Wright, Chief Innovation Officer for the Archives, tells us that the archives just set up their office innovation in October. It covers social media, the web, the online public catalog, the standards program, and presidential libraries. They're also responsible for coordinating NARA's Open Government program and Digital Government strategy. Pamela comes to the Archives from a research career focusing on water issues for a Native American tribe in Montana.

Pamela tells us about recent culture changes in the archives. They started to dabble with social media for the first time in 2009. At the time, the organisation faced the fear coming from a desire to stay in control. People in the organisation weren't interested because they thought that social media wouldn't serve the mission. NARA tried short, three-month pilot projects, which convinced people.

A new Archivist, David Ferriero, came on in 2009 with a new energy and created a culture where employees could assume the answer to new ideas was "yes until no", drawing inspiration from Joshua Greenberg's work at the New York Public Library. The social media team adopted this motto.

The Obama Administration initiated an Open Government Directive, in response to which Federal agencies were required to develop plans. President Obama established the expectation that the government doesn't have all the answers, and needs to be more open. Some staff were thrilled by this shift, while others were upset.

The Archive launched a document-of-the-day series on Tumblr, with wild success. But the relative scale of the following there wasn't enough for the National Archives. Recognizing the role of Wikipedia in Americans' research habits, they hired a Wikipedian in residence. In just the month of April, 2012, National Archive articles received hundreds of millions of views. The Archive has also uploaded public domain images and started a Wikipedia document transcript project. Pamela credits the strategy of 'skating to the puck' online with helping them reach many more Americans.

After these successful experiments, the team developed a coherent social media strategy to support the Open Government Initiative. They shifted away from a broadcast model.

In 2012, over 135 external projects were published on 13 platforms, generating tens of millions of views. Pamela's big, hairy, audacious goal is to get all of NARA's records online. They have 30,000 linear feet of records a year.

Government organisations often pressure their employees to speak with only one voice. There's a fear of staff or the public saying something wrong and hurting the brand. Pamela says that single voices strangle and paralyze institutions, preventing them from having an authentic conversation with the public.

Pamela tells us about the Citizen Archivist Dashboard, a platform that enables users to tag, transcribe, and edit online records, adding their own uploads and sharing them with their friends. They've treated these as pilots, to see what gets traction with the public (and fly under management's radar). They list some of these projects on Challenge.gov, government public engagement platform. One real-life outreach effort was the "History Happens Here" initiative, which challenges people to find a catalog picture and take a current photo of that in the same location today. It was inspired by the Museum of London's augmented reality historical photo app.The top twenty photos were choosen for a postcard book. The transcription pilot was a succes for them, with the 1000 trial documents getting transcribed in just 2 weeks.

Internally, NARA has been using the Jive platform to encourage more horizontal, social information sharing among people working at different archives across the country.

They want to engage software developers, in additon to the historians, archivists, librarians, etc, by making more datasets available.

Electronic records are the next great challenge for NARA. Agencies are under a directive from Obama that by 2019 they will manage all of their electronic records electronically. "That seems so delightfully rational." But agencies have legacy, rigid, monolithic technologies stuck in contracts. Once the data comes in, NARA needs to find ways to keep it safe and provide access. Things have changed from 2007, when George W Bush tried to claim that presidential email didn't count as records. Now that attitudes have changed, NARA faces a huge challenge to process and make that data avilable.

What kind of data does NARA currently have? Bill's work includes classified, private data. Pamela focuses on much more open information. Structured data is often tough to process, and NARA will often take in flat files that can be redacted before sharing. In fifty years from now, how will it be possible to share data? NARA also needs to navigate its relationship with other agencies that are opening up their data more directly and engaging the public with hackathons.

Pamela tells us that constant access and interest is one of the best ways to ensure that something is preserved. That's why NARA is trying to find interfaces to share that data with the public.

Chris asks about the challenge of digitization. Pamela explains that NARA has an internal set of labs that work on this, and they have external partners (like Ancestry.com). Chris wonders how the transcription pilot fit into this. Pamels explains they have millions of documents in their catalog digitized. Some clearly important ones are done manually, others are just digitized en-masse.

An audience member asks about controversial material (like Wikileaks). Its not easy, Bill says. The mission is access, but there are laws that govern how an agency releases that material. They work with the general counsel and the national declassification center.

Following 9/11, the federal government became concerned about "records of concern", or potentially damaging information that had been made public. The result was that a number of records groups were shut down, including Vietnam War records that were previously available.Bill expressed frustration with a recent Fresh Air piece that wasn't able to go into details about why that happened and how they might use a FOIA request to access those records now.

An audience member asks about which open datasets have been flagged as "interesting". Pamela says the open ones have been added to the catalog (for download). They have 85% or all the records they hold described in the catalog. The elecronic records operate on more of a pipeline - NARA takes them in as they are being created, but the agency still owns the access (legally NARA can't legally provide access yet). This is one of the more complicated issues they face. Matt adds that you can create a FOIA request asking what other FOIA requests are being made - so that can be a source for what might be interesting.

George W. Bush emails will be available for FOIA in Jan 2014 - NARA needs to be ready for this.

Andrew mentions some examples with Flickr, and asks where NARA draws inspiration from. Parmela mentions some neat NASA + Angry Birds and Smithsonian 3d printing examples.

Sites and datasources managed by the National Archives:

• NARA projects at Challenge.gov
• History Happens Here
• Citizen Archivist Dashboard
• Open Government Initiative
• Citizen Transcription Site
• https://www.federalregister.gov/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/
• http://todaysdocument.tumblr.com/

Civic media government

• “raisins” are now “shitty grapes”
• “sandwiches” are now “slappers”
• “blog” is back to “weblog” again
• “tom cruise” is now “shitty old jeremy renner”
• rap music is still rap music