Posts

I’m down two wisdom teeth today, so I doubt I’ll be posting much of anything.

Kurt Vonnegut strikes again. (via BoingBoing)

Kevin Werbach has a good point to make about LinkedIn, which is that it’s not yet a killer app, but that as it evolves, a killer app may emerge. I think he’s right on the money here. In many cases, it makes sense just to build something and hope to be in the right place to get run over by something great. The challenge they face is getting the people who are early adopters to find the application useful, and eventually indispensible. I’d be curious to learn what people with massive rolodexes think of the application. My work doesn’t really revolve around contacts, so having a network at all is an improvement. For people who work their networks all the time, I wonder what it will take to get them to rely on LinkedIn. ...

I originally wanted to sign up for LinkedIn because it looked cool and to see if I could stoke my ego by seeing how big my network could become. I’m one of those people that, for good or ill, pretty much sees anything where a score as kept as a game, and LinkedIn does a great job of keeping track of the growth of your network. Seriously, though, I’ve already dredged one useful contact out of my network, and I expect that there will be more. Considering it’s only been live for a week, I give it high marks for effectiveness. ...

John Udell has an interesting item on when it’s right to use J2EE/EJB. Like I said awhile back, the most important thing I learned reading Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans is that I’ve never worked on a project where EJB would have helped.

Best story I’ve read so far on the Jayson Blair issue: Farai Chideya’s discussion of being a black reporter that discusses the impact of race on newsrooms and how liars get ahead.

Molly Ivins sees the big picture when it comes to lying about Iraq’s WMD.

I got a two for the price of one deal on interesting op-eds on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page today. I went looking for Jay Bookman’s followup to the piece in which he coined the term Pax Americana. It’s here. (The original piece is, unfortunately, no longer available at the old link.) The special bonus piece states plainly that Karl Rove led the nation to war to improve George W Bush’s political prospects. ...

I was hoping somebody would write about what a poor idea challenge-response systems are for getting rid of spam, and indeed, John Levine has.

Tim Bray posted a nice little piece on flaming this weekend. I have a confession to make: when I was younger, I loved to flame people. Loved it. For me, it was the reason to go online. I have improved myself and now consider it to be an exhibition of personal weakness when I flame people, even if they deserve it, and even if I’m clever about it.