According to the Slate Red and Blue quiz, which purports to determine whether you’re more culturally predisposed to being “red” or “blue.” Unsurprisingly, I find myself in the red category. I’ve lived in red states just about all my life (Texas and North Carolina mostly). I guess I’m a self-hating red stater or something.

I wasn’t surprised to read this morning that Microsoft had acquired Lookout, a company that produced a well regarded search extension for Outlook. As my Gmail volume increases, I find myself relying more and more on the search facility to find old mail, and missing that facility when I read my mail in Thunderbird. Thunderbird has decent search features, but they’re not as easily accessible as they are in Gmail. I’m absolutely terrible about organizing my mail (I have over 1500 messages in my in regular in box, not including the 200+ threads in my Gmail in box), so the idea of just tossing all my mail into a big bucket and searching it using full text search is unbelievably appealing. Obviously Microsoft recognized that, given their acquisition. Hopefully Thunderbird can be enhanced to provide similar functionality.

Adrian Holovaty posted about registration for online news sites today, basically pointing out that forcing users to register to see articles but not providing any other value to them via the registration process is pointless. I used to register for the big sites (like the New York Times), but at some point I just decided I wasn’t going to do it any more. As newspapers added registration to their sites, I just quit reading them. Now, of course, I just rely on BugMeNot. Their Mozilla extension makes it particularly easy to get a username and password for just about any news site that requires free registration. I don’t use BugMeNot out of some protectiveness over my personal information, which I know is already completely compromised, but rather out of laziness. I just got fed up with typing in my name, address, and so forth.

JK Galbraith: A cloud over civlisation

The day before Yesterday I read an article about Outfoxed, the documentary about how Fox News serves as a propaganda outlet for a certain political viewpoint, and one of the things mentioned was that Fox News talking head use a particular phrase to get a bit of information out that they don’t want to attribute to anyone. That phrase is “some people say.” For example, if you want to air an anonymous smear of George W Bush, you might say, “Some people say George W Bush has never read a book with no pictures.” Once you’re familiar with this cheap rhetorical trick, it’s amazing how well it stands out. Obviously, Fox News didn’t come up with it and doesn’t have a monopoly on it.

For example, just last night I was watching the Daily Show, and Rob Corddry was interviewing an idiot who’s trying to build a “Counter Clinton Library” in Little Rock, Arkansas so that people know the “truth” about the Clinton Presidency. The library will contain a number of exhibits, one of which is “Death,” which is, of course, about all the people Clinton had rubbed out during his political career. Corddry asks the guy how many people Clinton had killed, and he responds, “Some people say Clinton had at least 70 people whacked.”

It’s kind of depressing that I never caught on to this cheap rhetorical trick myself. Although I will say that a few years ago I started to notice how often I (and other people) used “they say” to pretend to lend an authoritative air to claims that are being made. “Some people say” is just a more nefarious mutation, I guess.

Larry Lessig has an editorial in Variety about how fair use rights justify the extensive use of clips from Fox news in the new documentary Outfoxed.

Wonkette has posted a big batch of internal memos from Fox News that illustrate just how fair and balanced the network is.

You know I often point out the problems that enabling comments on your weblog can bring, but there are some advantages as well. Like sometimes the wife of the next Vice President will stop by and let you know that she doesn’t have much time for blogging.

Here’s what I have to say about the talk of postponing the fall election. Not to be grim, but if there’s a terrorist attack between now and then, no matter how spectacular, those of us who survive vote on the scheduled date. What other scenario makes sense?

And one wonders how Bush can campaign on the idea that he’s made America safer when we’re talking about postponing the most important political event in America — nationwide elections — due to terrorism? There was no talk of this in 2002 before we removed the terrorist menace from Iraq, was there?

Andy Baio reports that the Allmusic Guide has been redesigned. It was horribly designed, so you’d have to think that a redesign would be an improvement, but not so. He lists the problems with the new design. I haven’t seen any of them myself because the site is taking too long to load.

OK, now I see that it looks like crap, and has the big warning for non-IE users posted across the top that Andy mentions. The site is one of the key reference sites I use nearly every day, along with IMDB, Wikipedia, and baseballreference.com. How can they screw things up so badly?

Update: An allmusic.com employee has sent Andy Baio an email explaining what’s going on. Here’s what he has to say about browser compatability:

Optimizing a site of allmusic’s complexity and size for all browsers and operating systems is no small feat. This isn’t a simple “brochure-ware” site of static pages. While we would love to optimize the AMG sites for all browsers and all operating systems, we simply don’t have the necessary resources to do so. Despite some users flattering comparison of our site with that of Google, Amazon and Yahoo!, we are a small company with limited resources. So, we had to pick the most widely used browser by our users (over 87%) to optimize the site for and then work on compatibility issues with the other major browsers as we go forward.

This makes no sense to me. If you’re a small company with few resources, why build your site using complex markup that breaks in everything but Internet Explorer. The one thing that Google, Yahoo, IMDB, Wikipedia, and other large, data driven sites have in common is that they use simple layouts and markups that work with anybody’s browser. Sites run into problems when they’re overdesigned. I’m surprised that they took such a retrograde approach on the site.