Never in my lifetime did I imagine I would witness the use of the <a “http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html">Robot Exclusion Protocol for political means. (There are also perfectly plausible, non-nefarious explanations of this, but it’s too good to pass up either way.)
Useful: Optimizing your RSS feed for FeedDemon. Most of these tips go for all RSS readers.
Fred Kaplan summarizes the Rumsfeld memo thusly: What is being stated here can be summed up as follows: We'll probably win the battle for Afghanistan and Iraq (or, more precisely, it's "pretty clear" we "can win" it, "in one way or another" after "a long, hard slog"), but we're losing the struggle for hearts and minds in the broader war against terrorism. Not only that, we don't know how to measure winning or losing, we don't have a plan for winning it, we don't know how to fashion a plan, and the bureaucratic agencies put in charge of waging this war and drawing up these plans may be inherently incapable of doing so.
Wired Magazine had a story about Amazon’s full text search feature set to be published in their next issue, but since Amazon launched the feature, they went ahead and published the story online. Just as Google News forever changed the way I consume news, I expect that Amazon’s full text search will change the way I read and purchase books. Sometimes I just sit and wonder how I managed to get through life before the Web. Update: Joi Ito points out that Amazon’s Search Inside the Book provides yet another venue for ego surfing. ...
Michael Kinsley: Taking Bush Personally. This piece is specific, not abstract.
Over at Brad DeLong’s weblog, I spotted a link to this weblog entry, busting Donald Rumsfeld for lumping in Gulbudin Hekmatyar with the rest of the Taliban in Afghanistan. I noticed the error but skipped it, assuming that Rumsfeld was glossing over the details for the sake of brevity. Hekmatyar is a scumbag, but he’s not a member of the Taliban. I’ve read lots of other interesting comments on the Rumsfeld memo as well, most of which have convinced me that my general enthusiasm for it are a product of my low expectations for the Bush administration. Clearly the memo is meant as yet another argument for Rumsfeld’s long held ideas on the transformation of the military, and in that sense, it’s just a basic call for doing more of the same stuff he already wanted to do. At the same time, it’s a rare glimpse of the Bush administration admitting that things aren’t just peachy in every way, even if only to themselves. Update: Speaking of people latching on to specific bits of Rumsfeld’s memo, Phil Carter posted an interesting riff on Rumsfeld’s call for metrics to measure how effective our efforts in the war on terror are. (Perhaps the ultimate example of bending strategy to suit metrics rather than actual desired outcomes is the phenomenon of “teaching to the test” in public education. When teachers and schools are rated based on how their students perform on standardized tests, then they tend to focus on those tests to the exclusion of other things.) ...
Yesterday, Fred Kaplan posted a piece discussing President Bush’s ill-considered comparison of Iraq to the Philippines. Today, the Slacktivist posted a roundup that included a link to Kaplan’s piece and two others questioning the wisdom of making such a comparison. I should probably just recommend reading everything from the Slacktivist and Fred Kaplan and save the drive space I spend linking to them all the time, but I can’t help it.
Here’s another piece on the potential slippery slope of buying music through the iTunes Music Store (via Boing Boing).
I was just wondering the other day whether we could add up the version numbers of Firebird 0.7 and Thunderbird 0.3 and refer to them as a 1.0 release? They seem up to it from a quality standpoint to me.
A few weeks ago the results of a Zogby poll taken in Iraq were much discussed in the media and in the weblog world. Yesterday, James Zogby (who runs the Zogby poll), wrote an op-ed aimed to disabuse people of the false conclusions that were reached based on intentional misrepresentation of the poll’s results. One wonders why you have to go to the Arab News to read this piece, which probably should have run in the major US papers. I had read a blog entry somewhere a few weeks ago providing more context for the poll results, but Zogby’s piece indicates that the actual poll results are exactly the opposite of what the administration portrayed them to be. Does that surprise you? Update: someone tells me that James Zogby is the brother of the guy who runs the Zogby poll. Looking at the Zogby International about page, it seems John Zogby runs the poll, and no James is listed at all. Another update: Simply typing James Zogby into a Google search reveals that he is president of the Arab American Institute. He and John Zogby (of the Zogby Poll) are, in fact, brothers. ...