It’s not because you can read a great “takedown” of someone in the MSM or because you can read a fine “fisking” of an op-ed that you didn’t care about in the first place. Rather, it’s because you can get the inside scoop on where Savile Row tailors hang out for a pint on Friday evenings, straight from a member of the species. Spotting tips included.

Google has ignited a bit of a tempest by including a feature in their new toolbar that creates links on Web pages by scanning the content. So, for example, if there’s a tracking number on a Web page, Google will create a link to the package tracking page for that number. Or if it finds an address, it will add a link to a map to that address. Needless to say, there are some issues here. If I’m an Amazon.com affiliate and the Google Toolbar creates links to the Barnes & Noble Web site when it finds ISBNs on my site, they could very well be taking money out of my pocket. On the other hand, if I’m visiting the Web site for a local restaurant and there’s an address on the home page, an immediate link out to a map definitely improves my user experience. The balance that has to be struck is that links are currency, and by adding alternatives to the links already on a site, Google is in some ways taking away from the people who created those sites. I think that in this case, the utility of the added links is outweighed by the interests of the people who created the Web sites in the first place. The two apt examples here seem to me to be Microsoft’s Smart Tags, which everybody is mentioning, and Gator, the spyware that popped up advertising relevant to the Web pages that you visited. For this whole Web thing to work, the browser companies (and, in this case, browser add-on companies) need to respect the people who build the Web sites.

Update: Anil Dash argues the counterpoint. (So does Jason Levine.)

Jazz composer Maria Schneider won a Grammy Sunday night for an album that was distributed exclusively online. If this isn’t a prime example of the long tail at work, I don’t know what is. Jazz is very much a niche market, but I obviously I think she’s on the leading edge of a larger trend.

So tonight my wife and I tagged along to a meeting with a guy who’s running for the chairmanship of the Democratic party at the county level. He told us what his plans were, how he believed he could improve things, and why we should vote for him. I’m not used to anything related to local politics, so rather than talking about why we should preserve Social Security, or the dangers of teaching creationism, the discussion centered around whether the calendar should have more fundraisers than Valentine’s Day potluck. However, before we left, he told us that the one essential book everyone had to read was George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant because the future of the Democratic party depended upon it. He then gave one of the worst examples of reframing I had ever heard.

What I found humorous about this was that last month Mark Schmitt wrote a post about this very book and the cult that has sprung up around it. Here’s what he said:

The deeper problem is in liberals’ search for a guru, which inevitably leads to a cycle of over-expectation and disappointment, with Lakoff one day and someone else the next. What happened to the ability to take some insight like Lakoff’s, and some insight from a historian like Alan Brinkley or Kevin Mattson, and some insight from an economist like, say, Edward Wolff, and a sociologist here and a journalist or three, and put them in perspective and integrate them? Why is that so difficult? Perhaps the problem is that too many of the people in the fawning audience for this don’t have a solid, multi-disciplinary liberal arts education that enables them to do that. They’re political science majors with masters’ in public policy, and the world of linguistics is mysterious and enthralling, and the fact that it seems to be based in “neuroscience” (oooh!) makes it somehow an extra-powerful secret code.

It was funny to see this very phenomenon in action in the real world tonight. Fixating on the new fad is not something that’s unique to politics. In the world of software development, we see this very same thing regularly. Whether it’s object oriented design, model driven architecture, test driven development, extreme programming, dynamic languages, object-relational databases, or one of any number of three letter concepts, software engineers are always looking for that silver bullet, never realizing that it doesn’t exist. It’s sort of reassuring to be reminded that it’s a human being thing rather than a programmer thing.

It’s been a walk down memory lane in the weblogging world for me lately. First I met Dave Winer this weekend, then I saw that Dan Hartung was back on the blogging scene on Sunday, and today I read that Jorn Barger has resurfaced. As a point of history, Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom Weblog was the origination of the term “weblog.” Peter Merholz (who I’ll probably run into at the grocery store in the next few days) came up with the term “blog.”

And if you need proof of the “blog” coinage, check out this page in the Internet Archive.

I normally register my domain names through Dotster, but I keep hearing good things about GoDaddy.com, plus they’re cheap. I spotted a new domain name that I wanted, so I went and tried to register for it. After I picked the domain name, they immediately offered me an added cost option. I actually accepted it. Then they asked me if I wanted to see more offers. I agreed to do so, since it was my first time there, and man there were a bunch of them. I skipped over them all and went to the next page, which offered me one more thing. I declined, and was finally shown my shopping cart.

I came to the site to register a domain name for $8.95. The shopping cart total was almost $50. They had gone ahead and signed me up to register the .net, .org, .info and maybe even more variants of my domain name. There were some other things as well. That’s when I closed my browser window. I can hardly stand it when I buy something at a store and they ask if I want the extended warranty, GoDaddy’s barrage of extras was just too much to take.

James Robertson has a good post explaining why outsourcing isn’t the end all and be all for business. Time zones are just one of the must fundamental obstacles:

Sure, we can communicate just fine using all sorts of whizzy stuff on the net – so long as someone is willing to do it during non-business hours. That works fine if you have a project that requires minimal communication. I hate to break this news to Mr. Gottfredson, but software isn’t one of those projects.

Here are some numbers that will astound you, courtesy of Nicholas Kristof:

The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S. have about as much sexual activity as teenagers in Canada or Europe, Americans girls are four times as likely as German girls to become pregnant, almost five times as likely as French girls to have a baby, and more than seven times as likely as Dutch girls to have an abortion. Young Americans are five times as likely to have H.I.V. as young Germans, and teenagers’ gonorrhea rate is 70 times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands or France.

There was a big fad in the Java world urging developers to stop using JSP and instead use various templating languages in the view layer. The argument was that template languages force developers to stop putting business logic in the view layer, and that they’re easier for designers to learn. Ruby guy David Heinemeier Hansson presents a compelling argument that such languages are a waste of time. He blames unsuitable programming languages for giving rise to these templating languages, and I guess that’s probably true. I think the bigger problem is poor development practices.

Despite the moronic assertions of a certain segment of the blogosphere, Robert Fisk remains the essential reporter when it comes to Middle East issues. He happened to be in Beirut yesterday when former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated. He filed two stories:

• The killing of ‘Mr Lebanon’: Rafik Hariri assassinated in Beirut bomb blast
• Israeli spies, Syrian obsession and a peace that had to break