This is a blog by Fred Deutsch, a school board member in Watertown, South Dakota. Corey turned me on to it, and it’s one of the best education blogs I’ve seen. I don’t seek these types of blogs out, but I’m really impressed in the depth of it, the technical prowess, and the guy’s obvious devotion to the craft of education.

However, the fact remains that this guy is way more into education than I am, and I’m quickly out of my depth. I’m unsubscribing because, more often than not, Fred is talking about things I don’t understand and have only a tangential relationship to.

So why post about a blog I’m unsubscribing to? Because I want a blog like this to succeed. It’s good, and we need more like it. So, if you’re an educator, or if you know one, please send them this link and encourage them to take a look.

I have always been convinced that the culture of sf fanzines contributed heavily to the formative culture of the early Web, and generated models for web site and blogs. The very tone of the discourse is similar, and like fanzines, the Web took new word coinages, turned them into acronyms, and ran with them. Think about it. Science fiction fans in the decades before the internet were already interested in computers, big-time — first with the supercomputers of science fiction myth, and then with the earliest home-built models. Fans tended to be youngish, male, geeky, obsessed with popular culture, and compelled to circulate their ideas. In the reviews and criticism they ran, they slanted heavily toward expertise in narrow pop fields.

Ebert rules.

(Roger Ebert emailed me, not once, but twice. Have I mentioned that recently? Seriously. Twice. Two friggin’ emails.)

At Berkman we’re studying weblogs, how they’re used, and what they are. Rather than saying “I know it when I see it” I wanted to list all the known features of weblog software, but more important, get to the heart of what a weblog is, and how a weblog is different from a Wiki, or a news site managed with software like Vignette or Interwoven.

There’s a lot of technical information about templates and calendars and such, but in my mind, the differences is in perspective and tone, and Winer hits it on the head right here:

The personalities of the writers come through. That is the essential element of weblog writing, and almost all the other elements can be missing, and the rules can be violated, imho, as long as the voice of a person comes through, it’s a weblog.

When people read a weblog, they’re getting the voice of an actual person, not some nameless, faceless organization. That’s really the trick.

After turning down a $100 million buyout offer, Federated Media Publishing has opted instead to raise $50 million in a C round led by Oak Investment Partners. As was reported two weeks ago, the rumored valuation is $200 million. While the company is not confirming that number, publisher Chas Edwards quips, “We have to be worth at least $101 million.”

[…] In 2007, according to Edwards, Federated Media sold $22 million worth of ads across its network, up from $4 million in 2006. It generally splits the ad revenues with publishers, taking 40 percent for itself.

Two problems:

1. Bad: They only put abbreviated parts of the feed in each post. So you couldn’t read the whole thing in your feedreader, and kept having to click-through to the New York Times to read all the posts.

2. Worse: All they did for the excepts was take the first X words from the full post. This sucks on its face, but it’s worsened by the writing style of the authors. They tend to start off with something irrelevant, then work around to their point. This means that all that was in the feed was something completely random that got cut off and gave me no indication if I wanted to click-through to read the rest of it.

   If you’re going to abbreviate your feed and make people click through, write explicit excerpts that are designed to give your reader the information they need to decide whether or not to click-through.

I’m sad because the blog didn’t live up to the book, largely for nothing but usability reasons. Too bad.

The Action Streams plugin is an amazing new plugin for Movable Type 4.1 that lets you aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web as well as a list of your profiles on various services. With the Action Streams plugin you keep control over the record of your actions on the web. And of course, you also have full control over showing and hiding each of your actions. The Action Streams plugin, by default, also publishes your stream using Atom and the Microformat hAtom so that your actions aren’t trapped in any one service.

(Note: If you’re reading this in RSS, it refers to an audio widget only available on the HTML side. Click the post title to go to the page which contains the widget.)

Okay, here’s the first one. I hope it goes well. (And I’m purposely not calling this a “podcast,” because I have no idea just how to get this into RSS. Maybe with the next one…)

Comments are open. Be gentle. (I’ve already been notified by Karla that some of my complaints have been addressed already in various podcasting platforms, so it’s just more evidence of how much of a noob I am…)

This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits.

• The Dyson DCO7
• My Roomba

Even if you don’t like house-cleaning, they’re both pretty interesting.

Disclaimer: FM sells the advertising on Gadgetopia, and Blend designed and implemented the Holiday Gadget Guide site.

Is Your Blog Worthy of a $10,000 Scholarship? […] Do you maintain a weblog and attend college? Would you like $10,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs? If so, read on.

We’re giving away $10,000 this year to a college student who blogs.

But how do they define blog? In some cases, the differences between “blog” and “site” are not clear.

Your blog must contain unique and interesting information about you and/or things you are passionate about. No spam bloggers please!!!

i am a middle class 20 year old with hopes, dreams, fears, and a visa check-card

Reminds me a little of PostSecret.

This is a bookmark I have in my sidebar. When I click it, I get the permalink of the next item in my feeds. So, if I click it now, it might take to to a Metafilter post, or a Gadgetopia comment, or whatever the next item in my list of feeds is.

The thing is, it doesn’t take me to that item in Google Reader. It pushes me to the permalink URL of that item, so I get the actual page of the post at MetaFilter or the actual comment at Gadgetopia. (Funny how I felt the need to italicize “actual page.” As if that’s so odd now.)

I don’t know I like this so much — it’s just neat. You can just hit this bookmark, and you’ll get whisked to a page that is probably something you’re interested in. It’s like a contiuous “I’m feeling lucky” button.

And you just keep hitting it until you get this.

Seriously. That’s what you get when you don’t have anything unread left in your feed. Clicking the bookmark on that page takes you here.

• Best. [ultimate thing or experience.] Ever/Evar.
• [undesirable counter-example], not so much.
• [Argument], wait for it, [rhetorical flourish].
• etc.

Answer: a lot. Way more than me, that’s for sure. Some of the numbers are just nuts. Good for them.

Media groups blasted the NCAA yesterday for ejecting a Courier-Journal reporter from the press box at Sunday’s University of Louisville super-regional baseball game after he posted live updates on the newspaper’s website.

“This is appalling, but in no way am I surprised,” said Lucy Dagleish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “The television networks pay a lot of money for the rights to live reporting, and the NCAA makes a whale of a lot of money. This is all about money and not about the First Amendment.”

Reminds me of the Digg revolt that happened last month. People, people — make sure your fight is one you stand at least a small chance of winning.

If it’s obvious that you’re going to lose, perhaps you should look further down the road and figure out how you can adapt and thrive in the the new reality. As an example, I give you the TV show “American Heiress,” which I blogged about a few weeks ago.