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Latest posts from: CraqueCast, Extra! Extra!, AlienFlower Blog, Life Less Literary, scot hacker's foobar blog, Literary Kicks, The Fever Of Phineas, Mediajunkie, xian's running monolog, Yes Justice Yes Peace!, Zeigen

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genderindex.org
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 10 Mar 2010 | 5:07am GMT

Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome genderindex.org, which is actually two related sites running on two related platforms. genderindex.org runs on Drupal, while my.genderindex.org runs on Django.

The Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) is a new composite measure of gender discrimination based on social institutions. It measures gender inequality in five areas: Family Code, Physical Integrity, Son Preference, Civil Liberties and Ownership Rights in 102 non-OECD countries.
The Top Ten Crime and Mystery Novels of 2009
→ Literary Kicks | 8 Mar 2010 | 9:22pm GMT

You may be wondering why someone would write a top ten of 2009 list three months into 2010. Well I have two excuses. One: I didn't want to write a list until I was absolutely certain I had read every book that had a chance of making it on the list. All that reading takes a lot of time. Now, with my eyes blurry and my dreams dark, I can honestly say that I've read every book worth considering (with one exception, which I will admit to later) for the top ten.

Reason two is a tad more subjective: I've noticed with horror that nearly every Top 10 of 2009 list on the internet picks Michael Connelly's mediocre thriller The Scarecrow as one of the best of the year. Come on, folks! We can do better than that! I trust that anyone who included that one (not to mention some of the other stinkers I saw) on their list didn't have a chance to read the following titles. So, I finally decided to break my silence. 2009 was a banner year for crime fiction, and the following books deserve to be talked about. Enjoy.

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zip vs. tar + gzip
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 8 Mar 2010 | 6:50pm GMT

Just had the need to create an archive of a folder containing 91 large text files, totaling 370MBs. Decided to pit zip against tar + gzip in a little speed test, using these commands:

tar cvzf awstats.tgz awstats zip -9ry awstats.zip awstats

On the server in question, these were the elapsed times to accomplish this very similar task:

zip: One minute, 21 seconds
tar: 41 seconds

This is, in part because tar only has to compress once, after concatenating all the bits together (but that’s not the full story). In contrast, zip has to compress each file individually. And resulting archive sizes?

-rw-r--r-- 1 cdt cdt 141877473 Mar 8 10:31 awstats.tgz -rw-r--r-- 1 cdt cdt 140081519 Mar 8 10:29 awstats.zip

So zip did have a slight advantage in the output size. But wait.. no fair! We used the “-9″ option with zip for maximum compression. To make it more fair, let’s use the “-9″ flag with gzip as well. Unfortunately, to do that we’ll need to run two consecutive commands:

$ tar cvf awstats.tar awstats ; gzip -9 awstats.tar

This caused the compression time for gzip to go way up; that command took 1:17 to run. But now the filesizes are approaching identical:

-rw-r--r-- 1 cdt cdt 140090837 Mar 8 10:42 awstats.tar.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 cdt cdt 140081519 Mar 8 10:29 awstats.zip

Of course these kinds of things are very circumstantial – doing a similar test on a folder full of pre-compressed files like MP3s would yield very different results (in that case you’d be way better off just using tar without gzip, and definitely not zip). But the upshot is that when trying to decide whether to use zip or tar + gzip, compression times and output sizes are close enough to just not matter in general usage.

Update: I did end up doing a later test on the same dir with bzip2. Result: significantly smaller file size:

-rw-r--r-- 1 cdt cdt 104698994 Mar 8 14:17 awstats.tar.bz2

but at the expense of much longer compression times. If I use gzip and bzip2 side by side on the same 370MB tar file, I get these times:

gzip: 41 seconds
bzip2: 1 minute 36 seconds

Making bzip2 almost twice as slow as gzip (though it does generate smaller output files).
Reviewing the Review: March 7 2010
→ Literary Kicks | 7 Mar 2010 | 2:21pm GMT

Why is there so little good old-fashioned literary satire on the scene today? Reviewing Sam Lipsyte's The Ask in todays New York Times Book Review, Lydia Millet examines:

Literary satire has become a rare form in America over the past three decades. When it does make an appearance, it almost passes for a nostalgic gesture despite its typically cutting-edge content. As a result, Lipsyte is one of a handful of living American satirists (and when I say “handful” I mean a very tiny hand, with three fingers at most, including the thumb) who can tell a traditional story while remaining foul-mouthed and dirty enough to occupy the literary vanguard. This stuff wouldn’t play well at, say, meetings of the D.A.R. — too bad in a way, because it might not hurt them to hear it. Lipsyte is not only a smooth sentence-maker, he’s also a gifted critic of power.

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What If The E-Book Revolution Never Gets Here?
→ Literary Kicks | 5 Mar 2010 | 12:03am GMT

If you've been hanging around here, you know I'm a big advocate of e-books and digital publishing. I don't consider myself an expert in this business, but I read and usually agree with knowledgeable industry observers who advocate for change, radical experimentation and quick adoption of digital technologies, such as Kassia Krozser, Clay Shirky and Richard Nash.

But I'm stepping out onto my own limb with today's digital publishing headline, and I'm surprising even myself, because it's not the kind of thing I'd expect me to say. I don't know if any of my fellow digital progressives will agree with me, but here it is: I'm starting to wonder if the e-book revolution is going to happen at all.

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Little Known Literary Facts
→ Literary Kicks | 3 Mar 2010 | 2:28pm GMT

1, A font face captures Franz Kafka's handwriting, which turns out be rather pretty in a Kafkaesque sort of way.

2. Tablet Magazine interviews eternal Fug Tuli Kupferberg and points us to his excellent YouTube Channel. I love the audience participation in this little-known literary facts video, in which Tuli reveals that T. S. Eliot was Jewish, that Walt Whitman was heterosexual, that Homer's Iliad was actually written by a guy named Iliad, and that when Dylan Thomas drank himself to death his drink of choice was strawberry milkshakes. All true.

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Four Eyes
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 3 Mar 2010 | 9:33am GMT

I’m in alien territory here. Over the past few months my vision has become increasingly blurry, both when reading and when reading signs at a distance. I’ve been lucky enough to have enjoyed a life of perfect vision so far, but those days are gone. I’m officially old. Had my first encounter with an optometrist yesterday, went through the whole dilation and eyeball pressure gizmo thing, and walked away with a prescription.

Now I’m about to join the “other” half of society and think about frames. No idea which way to go. Took some shots in a glasses store today. I think some of these are downright goofy, but I’ll let you be the judge of that. Any of these look halfway decent, or should I keep shopping? Refer to row/column if you have opinions.

And yes, I’ve always wanted a monocle, but doesn’t seem like that’s going to be practical this time around.

Click through for pix.
Home Backup to the Cloud
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 2 Mar 2010 | 7:55am GMT

Four years ago, long before Time Machine and the wide availability of cloud storage, I purchased a RAID/NAS for home backups. It’s done its job admirably, and has given us the confidence to back up the whole family without fear of drive failure. Even went as far as drilling holes in the floor and threading CAT-5 under the house so I could keep the Infrant in the closet, where it would make less noise.

It’s worked well, but the big problem it didn’t solve is the fire/flood/theft scenario. One good earthquake and all those images and videos of our child’s early years would be Gone Daddy Gone. Plus, my backup system was based on rsync. That worked fine, but was a bit too manual, and I had had occasional problems getting backups to complete to the non-Mac filesystem on the Infrant.

This problem had been hovering in the back of my mind for quite a while, when a dad at the local park mentioned that he had had success with Backblaze. For $5/month, you get hands-off unlimited backup of your entire system to their data center. Drive space is dirt cheap these days, so it’s tempting to rely on purchased drives, but let’s do the math. Let’s say you spend $100 for a 500GB drive. That’s the equivalent of 20 months of Backblaze service. If you go for the one-year commitment, you get the service for $4/month, so let’s say two years for the drive you just bought “cheap” to pay for itself. And you still haven’t got fire/flood/theft insurance. Seemed like a no-brainer to me, so I went for it.

My starter data set was 300 GBs – a healthy pile of bytes. Backblaze noted that the initial backup could take a couple of weeks, but in my case, the initial backup took more than three weeks, even over a fast broadband connection. After the initial backup is complete, incrementals happen quickly, with no interaction required.

Installation and backup management takes place through a preference pane on the Mac. It’s elegant, but I did have some problems along the way. At a certain point, halfway through the initial backup period, the pref pane informed me that the backup was complete, even though it wasn’t. It continued to report this for the next 10 days, even though I could see the bztransmit process chugging away in the background. The pref pane provides a count of the number of files and their total size; to get this to update, I’d have to unmount and remount my external data drive, then wait 3-4 hours for the process to rescan volumes and report new information.

At this point, I’ve made it through the initial backup and have added 150MBs of new data to the external drive. The preference pane does not report any change to the totals, even though I have confirmed that the newly added files are available on Backblaze servers. I also had a number of instances where the bztransmit process would swell to consume very large (> 2GBs) amounts of memory. In some cases, the process memory would eventually come back down on its own. In others I had to manually kill all bz* processes and restart the backup process. It’s as if the backup process is running fine, but the preference pane is unaware of what those processes are actually doing. Annoying, but not a deal-breaker.

I corresponded with Backblaze tech support during the process, and found them super-responsive, and not afraid to share detailed technical analysis of the process. They weren’t able to answer all of my questions about why the pref pane didn’t seem to know what the backup process was actually doing, but they were super detailed and quick, and I appreciate that.

Despite these glitches, my test restores have all gone well.

There is one little financial hitch in my plan: That $4/month is only for one machine. I’ll have to spend more to be able to back up other computers in the house. I’m still mulling that one. In any case, it feels great to know that my backups are complete, even if disaster hits the home some day. And now that the glitches of the initial backup period have passed, it should be pretty smooth sailing ahead.

There are other cloud backup systems for the home out there, like CrashPlan and Amazon S3 with S3Hub. I haven’t tried them. If you have, what have your experiences been like?
Reality Hunger by David Shields
→ Literary Kicks | 2 Mar 2010 | 12:07am GMT

Reality Hunger is a book-length essay about literature and culture by David Shields that's getting a lot of attention for its provocative key argument: we are wrong to think of fiction as the most exalted form of literature, because as readers we mostly value writings that bring us reality and truth -- which are, by strict definition, beyond the scope of fiction. Shields presents today's literary community as blind and confused, trained to pine after the ideal of the perfect novel, the sublime work of art, when in fact we crave something more primal than artistic excellence when we read.

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AIDS Life Cycle
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 1 Mar 2010 | 10:00pm GMT
My new friend and colleague Rhett is riding in the AIDS Life Cycle. He's been training for months. He writes:
How You Can Help Me Fight To End AIDS

I know I'm one of those "crazy bike guys." I need lofty goals and it helps if they're socially beneficial ones. That's just who I am. Still, hear me out.

I grew up in the AIDS generation. There is no part of my life that has not, in some way, been shaped by the spectre of AIDS. I spent much of my childhood knowing that the world had a horrible plague on its hands, and a young victim named Ryan White made it painfully clear to me that AIDS would not show quarter to me. As I got older, I began to find friends, often not much older than me, who had suffered the misery of watching a friend decline and pass away from this terrible disease. AIDS dictated the context in which my generation has viewed sexuality and relationships. It's taught horrible lessons to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) among us, as it gave a medical excuse to those who wanted to marginalize them. For those lucky enough to not be in an easy-to-hate sexual minority, AIDS still brought enough fear to completely change the way we'd look at one another.

Amazingly, people today seem to think that AIDS is cured, but it's not. Treatments to mitigate AIDS just keep it out of the spotlight here in America. In parts of the world where life-prolonging drugs don't reach, AIDS has not just changed a generation. It's wiped it out. So, consider that. A plague with no cure has been the reality for my entire life.

If I could get up and drop-kick AIDS, I would. I'd do it for every friend-of-a-friend who died before I could know them. I'd do it for the untold loss of human potential in Africa. I'd do it so that I knew my friends' young children will never have to live in a world where their future adult lives won't also include fear of death. Enough of my friends have enough children that, odds on, at least one will grow up to be GLBT. I'd absolutely drop-kick AIDS for that little boy or girl.

Alas, I'm a computer scientist, not a doctor or molecular biologist. I kinda lack the skill set to drop-kick AIDS. But...I do have a bike and legs to use it. I can raise money to combat this awful, awful disease. You can help me do it.

From June 6-12, 2010, I'm bicycling in AIDS/LifeCycle. It's a 7-day, 545-mile bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles to make a world of difference in the lives of people living with HIV and AIDS. I have set a fundraising goal of $5,000 which I must meet before I can join the ride. You can help me reach my goal today by donating to this cause. We're all in this push together, and every last bit counts. Help me make a difference to others and raise awareness by raising the funds to get me to this ride.

Help me support the San Francisco AIDS Foundation by giving what you can. We'll keep riding until AIDS and HIV are a thing of the past.
If you wish to support Rhett's ride and to help stop this plague, please donate here.
Reviewing the Review: February 28 2010
→ Literary Kicks | 28 Feb 2010 | 3:48pm GMT

I've spent this weekend reading David Shields' exciting Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, a book that urges us to reject the notion that fiction is artistically or philosophically superior to nonfiction. This impressive book is empowering me to accept and embrace for the first time the dread and boredom I have always felt when I pick up a new issue of the New York Times Book Review and see a bunch of articles about novels and short story collections I've never heard of and have no clear use for.

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Pacific Coast Tsunami warning.
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 27 Feb 2010 | 7:45pm GMT

http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/2010/02/27/725245/09/webeta725245-09.txt

The following list gives estimated times of arrival for locations along the North American Pacific coast from a tsunami generated at the given source location. The list is ordered by arrival time starting with the earliest. Since tsunami speed is directly related to water depth, tsunami ETAs can be computed independent of tsunami amplitude. THE LISTING OF A TSUNAMI ARRIVAL TIME BELOW DOES NOT INDICATE A WAVE IS IMMINENT. The listed arrival time is the initial wave arrival. Tsunamis can be dangerous for many hours after arrival, and the initial wave is not necessarily the largest.

Source:
Lat: 36.1S
Lng: 72.6W
Mag: 8.8
O-time: 0634UTC
Date: FEB 27
- DART 46412 1144 PST FEB 27 1944 UTC FEB 27
- La Jolla, California 1202 PST FEB 27 2002 UTC FEB 27
- the California-Mexico border 1204 PST FEB 27 2004 UTC FEB 27
- Newport Beach, California 1212 PST FEB 27 2012 UTC FEB 27
- San Pedro, California 1215 PST FEB 27 2015 UTC FEB 27
- Point Concepcion, California 1217 PST FEB 27 2017 UTC FEB 27
- Santa Monica, California 1225 PST FEB 27 2025 UTC FEB 27
- Santa Barbara, California 1231 PST FEB 27 2031 UTC FEB 27
- Point Sur, California 1232 PST FEB 27 2032 UTC FEB 27
- Port San Luis, California 1235 PST FEB 27 2035 UTC FEB 27
- Monterey, California 1243 PST FEB 27 2043 UTC FEB 27
- DART 46411 1257 PST FEB 27 2057 UTC FEB 27
- Point Reyes, California 1259 PST FEB 27 2059 UTC FEB 27
- Point Arena, California 1304 PST FEB 27 2104 UTC FEB 27
- Fort Bragg, California 1307 PST FEB 27 2107 UTC FEB 27
- Cape Mendocino, California 1322 PST FEB 27 2122 UTC FEB 27
- San Francisco, California 1326 PST FEB 27 2126 UTC FEB 27
- DART 46407 1332 PST FEB 27 2132 UTC FEB 27
- Humboldt Bay, California 1333 PST FEB 27 2133 UTC FEB 27
- Crescent City, California 1346 PST FEB 27 2146 UTC FEB 27
- Cape Blanco, Oregon 1350 PST FEB 27 2150 UTC FEB 27
- the Oregon-California border 1350 PST FEB 27 2150 UTC FEB 27
- Charleston, Oregon 1402 PST FEB 27 2202 UTC FEB 27
- DART 46404 1406 PST FEB 27 2206 UTC FEB 27
- Cascade Head, Oregon 1426 PST FEB 27 2226 UTC FEB 27
- Newport, Oregon 1429 PST FEB 27 2229 UTC FEB 27
- Tillamook Bay, Oregon 1434 PST FEB 27 2234 UTC FEB 27
- the Oregon-Washington border 1439 PST FEB 27 2239 UTC FEB 27
- DART 46419 1440 PST FEB 27 2240 UTC FEB 27
- Seaside, Oregon 1446 PST FEB 27 2246 UTC FEB 27
- La Push, Washington 1456 PST FEB 27 2256 UTC FEB 27
- Westport, Washington 1457 PST FEB 27 2257 UTC FEB 27
- Point Grenville, Washington 1459 PST FEB 27 2259 UTC FEB 27
- the Washington-British Columbia border 1501 PST FEB 27 2301 UTC FEB 27
- Neah Bay, Washington 1507 PST FEB 27 2307 UTC FEB 27
- Astoria, Oregon 1511 PST FEB 27 2311 UTC FEB 27
- Tofino, British Columbia 1515 PST FEB 27 2315 UTC FEB 27
- the north tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia 1516 PST FEB 27 2316 UTC FEB 27
- Port Angeles, Washington 1544 PST FEB 27 2344 UTC FEB 27
- Langara Island, British Columbia 1551 PST FEB 27 2351 UTC FEB 27
- DART 46409 1505 AKST FEB 27 0005 UTC FEB 28
- DART 46403 1508 AKST FEB 27 0008 UTC FEB 28
- Port Alexander, Alaska 1515 AKST FEB 27 0015 UTC FEB 28
- DART 46410 1519 AKST FEB 27 0019 UTC FEB 28
- DART 46402 1524 AKST FEB 27 0024 UTC FEB 28
- Sitka, Alaska 1529 AKST FEB 27 0029 UTC FEB 28
- DART 46408 1538 AKST FEB 27 0038 UTC FEB 28
- Elfin Cove, Alaska 1538 AKST FEB 27 0038 UTC FEB 28
- Seattle, Washington 1641 PST FEB 27 0041 UTC FEB 28
- Ketchikan, Alaska 1549 AKST FEB 27 0049 UTC FEB 28
- DART 46413 1553 AKST FEB 27 0053 UTC FEB 28
- Craig, Alaska 1600 AKST FEB 27 0100 UTC FEB 28
- Yakutat, Alaska 1619 AKST FEB 27 0119 UTC FEB 28
- Prince Rupert, British Columbia 1720 PST FEB 27 0120 UTC FEB 28
- Atka, Alaska 1622 AKST FEB 27 0122 UTC FEB 28
- Nikolski, Alaska 1624 AKST FEB 27 0124 UTC FEB 28
- Akutan, Alaska 1625 AKST FEB 27 0125 UTC FEB 28
- DART 21414 1626 AKST FEB 27 0126 UTC FEB 28
- Bella Bella, British Columbia 1727 PST FEB 27 0127 UTC FEB 28
- Kodiak, Alaska 1628 AKST FEB 27 0128 UTC FEB 28
- Sand Point, Alaska 1629 AKST FEB 27 0129 UTC FEB 28
- King Cove, Alaska 1634 AKST FEB 27 0134 UTC FEB 28
- Juneau, Alaska 1635 AKST FEB 27 0135 UTC FEB 28
- Perryville, Alaska 1637 AKST FEB 27 0137 UTC FEB 28
- Dutch Harbor, Alaska 1638 AKST FEB 27 0138 UTC FEB 28
- Old Harbor, Alaska 1638 AKST FEB 27 0138 UTC FEB 28
- Amchitka, Alaska 1639 AKST FEB 27 0139 UTC FEB 28
- Seward, Alaska 1639 AKST FEB 27 0139 UTC FEB 28
- Adak, Alaska 1642 AKST FEB 27 0142 UTC FEB 28
- Valdez, Alaska 1657 AKST FEB 27 0157 UTC FEB 28
- DART 21415 1702 AKST FEB 27 0202 UTC FEB 28
- Cordova, Alaska 1706 AKST FEB 27 0206 UTC FEB 28
- Alitak, Alaska 1708 AKST FEB 27 0208 UTC FEB 28
- Cold Bay, Alaska 1709 AKST FEB 27 0209 UTC FEB 28
- Shemya, Alaska 1721 AKST FEB 27 0221 UTC FEB 28
- Attu, Alaska 1727 AKST FEB 27 0227 UTC FEB 28
- Homer, Alaska 1739 AKST FEB 27 0239 UTC FEB 28
- St. Paul, Alaska 1750 AKST FEB 27 0250 UTC FEB 28
- Port Moller, Alaska 2002 AKST FEB 27 0502 UTC FEB 28
- Saint Matthew Island, Alaska 2026 AKST FEB 27 0526 UTC FEB 28
- Cape Newenham, Alaska 2134 AKST FEB 27 0634 UTC FEB 28
- Gambell, Alaska 2243 AKST FEB 27 0743 UTC FEB 28
- Dillingham, Alaska 2324 AKST FEB 27 0824 UTC FEB 28
- Hooper Bay, Alaska 0044 AKST FEB 28 0944 UTC FEB 28
- Little Diomede Island, Alaska 0140 AKST FEB 28 1040 UTC FEB 28
- Nome, Alaska 0335 AKST FEB 28 1235 UTC FEB 28
- Unalakleet, Alaska 0626 AKST FEB 28 1526 UTC FEB 28
Beyond the Bayou Auction and Soiree
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 26 Feb 2010 | 8:07am GMT

Miles attends the most excellent co-op elementary in Richmond, CA. Very strong parent participation, rich involvement in music and the arts, strong emphasis on science and the environment, loving teachers, etc. But the school struggles to make ends meet. Every year we host a public auction/soiree’. Local businesses donate products and services, great food comes out of the woodworks, hot bands play.

This year the auction night will be Bayou themed, and we’re really looking forward to it. Live in the Bay Area? This is a night not to be missed, especially if you’re looking for a fantastic elementary school. But even if you aren’t, there are great deals to be found on everything from days at the Chabot Science Center to bottles of absinthe. I’m donating a year of Plan B web hosting. Pre-bidding on items starts at biddingforgood, with additional bidding continuing at the event.

It’ll be a great night out. Interested? Contact me, or see the school’s auction page for more info.
In Gatsby's Tracks: Locating the Valley of Ashes in a 1924 Photo
→ Literary Kicks | 25 Feb 2010 | 11:57pm GMT

I'm really impressed that 104 of 148 commenters who guessed about the mystery literary photo I posted on Wednesday correctly identified The Great Gatsby as the novel in question. Four other novels that got some mentions were To Kill A Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Reasonable guesses all, but the fact that the photo was taken in 1924 was the giveaway.

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A Murder and a Metaphor: Litkicks Mystery Spot #1
→ Literary Kicks | 24 Feb 2010 | 11:00pm GMT

Can you identify the famous literary work represented in the photograph above? Here are a couple of hints:

• You have definitely read this novel. It's one of the most widely loved novels of all time.

• A person is killed, during one of the novel's climactic scenes, by the forked road near the top right of the photo.

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The Bicycle Accident of Yichao Wang at Stanford, California on February 3, 2010
→ Zeigen | 24 Feb 2010 | 2:07am GMT

(This essay was written by Kimi, and I’m posting it here on her behalf. There is news coverage of the accident from the unofficial Stanford blog, the San Jose Mercury News, Stanford University News, The Stanford Daily, and The Palo Alto Daily News. To donate to Yichao Wang’s family, please see the Chinese Mutual Aid International Network site.
—Stephen)

My friend X and I were leaving a night class at Stanford University. We had been learning about “how to raise balanced children in a fast-paced world.” We were discussing some of these ideas as we left class. I had parked off campus because we had carpooled to class. As we turned out of the parking lot and drove down Palm Drive toward El Camino, her Audi’s headlights swung out onto a body lying in the road. The body’s arms and legs were splayed out in a terrible, unnatural pose. At that moment, every cell in my body was perked. I tried to attach thoughts to my observations. “This can’t be real,” my mind told me.

My friend slowed her car down, and I tried to get out. She said sternly, “Wait!” and then “OK, now you can get out.” She parked her car and turned on the hazard lights. She started to wave the cars behind her away from the scene.

I leaped out of the car and could not believe what I saw and heard. I walked past an SUV parked on the side of the road and noticed another car parked in front of it. I think it was a white BMW. I never saw the driver inside. After I noted the body’s odd position again, I saw a man in blue scrubs. He had dark brown hair and wore glasses. He was on his cell phone, intensely describing the body to someone, “Male, about 30 years old…yes, I think he is seizing.” The top of the man’s head was facing me. As I walked around to face him, the breath was knocked out of me. His head was swollen to 2-3 times its normal size. His eyes were swollen shut. The top-right corner of his forehead near the temple was a matted clump of blood-soaked hair. There was a huge dent in the forehead, where his skull was smashed. “A person’s brain should not be outside of their head,” I told myself. His arm was turned away from him, and he did seem to be having some kind of seizure. He was moaning, gasping mightily, and sputtering with each breath; his chest rose and fell heavily, and eruptions of blood and phlegm shot straight up like a geyser.

I wanted so badly to clear his mouth and turn his head to the side. I reached my arms out toward him. “Don’t touch him! He might have a spinal injury!” the man barked.

I mumbled something about his ability to breathe.

“See those bubbles? That means he’s breathing,” he snapped.

“Mean,” I thought. I forgave him instantly.

He explained to the 911 dispatcher, “I am a fourth-year medical student.” He shot a glance at me, as if to see that I heard.

I grabbed the man’s left hand instead. He had thick fingers, and his skin was rough. “It’s going to be all right,” I said soothingly. I glanced at the dark, wet hole in his head and pushed my doubt aside. “Help is on the way.”

Then something clicked. I let go of the man’s hand for a few moments, and I picked up his bicycle from the opposite lane. The thick metal handlebars were crumpled, and I couldn’t wheel it. I had to pick it up. I noticed that it was black and did not have lights on it. I dumped it on the side of the road. Then I saw his backpack. It was heavy, black, and quite far from where the bike and body were. In fact, all three items made a large triangle. I understood why his head was so damaged. The car must have hit the front of the bike and sent the man and his backpack flying. He landed on his head where a helmet should have been; he should have had a cracked helmet and not a cracked skull. I tried to ignore these disturbing thoughts as I moved intently. I had to shoo away another intrusive thought: “This is Stanford! This shouldn’t be happening at Stanford!” I flung the backpack near the mangled bike.

Then the medical student had orders. “There should be a box of rubber gloves in the back seat of my car. Get them.”

“Lucky, someone who carries around medical gloves in his car,” I thought. I retrieved the purple gloves and concentrated on the task. There was only room for one thought in my head at a time. “Get the gloves,” I recited to myself as a mantra. I returned to the scene with the box in hand. We both put them on.

A blond woman yelled to us, “Do you need help? Should I call 911?”

“Someone already called 911,” I yelled back.

“Should I help direct traffic?” I finally noticed the cacophony of honks and yelling from the cars stopped behind us.

“Yes!” I responded, and then I turned back to the body on the ground. I spoke to him once more, “The ambulance is coming. Everything is going to be all right. They are going to help you. Don’t worry.”

At that point, the medical student thrust his cell phone at me. “Here, take this!” he said. I held the man’s hand in mine as I spoke to a dispatcher on the phone.

“Where are you?” she asked.

I said, “About halfway between the Oval and El Camino.”

“Is anyone there yet?” she asked.

I told her that no one was on the scene yet except for us. She told me help would be there soon. Moments passed like hours, and then I heard the sweetest sound in the world: sirens. I told her, and she said, “OK, hang up and flag them down. They are not exactly sure of your location. Good luck.”

I hung up the phone and looked for the flashing lights. “Do you hear those sirens?” I told the man. “The ambulance is coming, and they will help you! Hold on!” Then I stood up and waved my arms at the sound and flurry emanating from police cars in different directions. The police immediately blocked traffic from both ways with their cars, and they were filled with questions. The medical student answered them curtly. I was holding the man’s hand tightly. He was struggling harder than ever to breathe.

Moments later, we heard the ambulance pull up. “The ambulance is here!” I screamed at the man. You could almost see the relief wash over the small group then, as if we were done with our leg of the race and were passing the baton to a teammate. But this relief affected the man on the ground differently. At the exact moment that I announced the ambulance’s arrival, the man stopped breathing.

The medical student and a policeman reached out for his wrists. “Does he have a pulse?” someone asked. Instinctively, I started screaming a stream of questions at the man’s face, “HEY! What is your NAME? How OLD are you? WHAT IS YOUR NAME? HEY!!! WHAT IS YOUR NAME?!!!”

The man suddenly took in a huge breath and exhaled with a giant splutter. We all sighed with relief. Then the paramedics approached with their equipment. We all took a step back to give them room. The paramedics moved with a kind of relaxed calm. They put a cervical collar on him, turned his head to the side, and put a suction tube in his mouth. It was attached to a little vacuum. Someone put a long board next to him, a sort of gurney. Then, inexplicably, they started cutting off his clothes with a large pair of scissors. He lay in his underwear, but his limbs weren’t strangely positioned anymore.

I became aware of the medical student’s cell phone in my hand. I forced myself to walk to his SUV and place his cell phone in the cup holder. “I put your phone in your car,” I told him. He looked in my eyes and thanked me. We really saw each other for the first time.

As I wandered to the side of the road, I noticed a thick puddle of blood from the man’s head that stretched several feet beside him. I placed the man’s black backpack near the paramedics and told them it was his. They accepted it. Then, my friend X was standing next to me. We both stared at the blood. Then, a policeman asked if we saw what happened. The medical student said, “I saw it happen. I am a witness.”

Then the cop turned to us and said, “You can go now.”

I was completely torn. On one hand, the man was a vision of horror — human roadkill twitching on the asphalt. On the other hand, he was a human being: a son, a student, and maybe a husband or father. I wanted to be sure he would survive, but I couldn’t bear to ask if he would be OK. In fact, because of the smooth calm of the paramedics, I was worried that there wasn’t much they could do and that they knew something I didn’t about the possibility of his survival. So my friend and I walked back to her car, and she drove us away in the opposite direction of the man. I had to let go of my concern as abruptly as I had been moved by it. I felt shock, sadness, and anger. I was angry that the driver of the car hadn’t even stepped out to see if the man was OK. My friend explained to me that the driver was probably in shock and facing the prospect of being responsible for someone’s death. The anger subsided. Then, I noticed his blood on my hands. I started to panic. My friend gave me some baby wipes, and I cleaned off the blood. I was left with a queasy feeling in my stomach, which lasted for a week, and a wish for hope and strength among all the strangers.

Afterward, my friend and I searched the web for weeks. We even sent a detailed e-mail to the campus police. We never got a response. I searched for information about the survival rate of bicyclists who do not wear helmets, the chances of recovering from brain injury, and news stories of accidents. At first, I thought no news was good news because the newspapers would be all over a story that involved death. But then I talked to several people, and a friend whose opinion I respect simply shook his head and hugged me when I told him about the experience. I knew he didn’t think the man had survived. So I started to think about the possibility that the man did not survive. Then, two weeks later, my friend X e-mailed a news link to me. The Stanford web site had a story about a visiting researcher from China who had been hit by a car while bicycling. X’s e-mail was titled, “This is our guy!” And it was him! His name was Yichao Wang. I thought he was half black and half white, but he was Chinese! He came from the same town that my friend X’s mom was from. The story had a link to a photo of him in a coma and a request for donations to cover his medical care. I was excited to discover that he had survived the accident. I donated to his recovery fund through the Chinese Mutual Aid Society. However, the day that I donated, he died.

Now, I think about his wife and parents who must miss him terribly. They are probably in shock. He was 25 years old, married for three years, and on a promising path as a research scientist. Now, he is gone.

I feel sad, but I also feel angry. Stanford Hospital has charged one million dollars for the brain surgery that kept him alive but in a coma from which he never woke. It seems like it was an unnecessary surgery. Certainly, asking two retired Chinese parents who just lost their son to pay one million dollars seems ridiculous and cruel.

I wish that Yichao wore a helmet that day, had blinking head and tail lights on his bike, wore bright clothes with reflective stripes, or left his lab during daylight hours. I wish the driver had been more aware and careful. You have to be a defensive driver at all times in this area. I wish Stanford had a no-car zone around the campus and shuttled people in. I wish that this man was living, loving, and discovering. I wish he died after his parents and not before. But, again, he is gone.

He will not have died in vain if we learn this lesson: YOUR HELMET IS PART OF YOUR BIKE. IF YOU RIDE A BIKE, ALWAYS WEAR YOUR HELMET.
delicious word cloud
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 23 Feb 2010 | 11:31pm GMT

wordle.net not only lets you generate tag clouds out of any chunk of text (which can be great for doing things like figuring out which keywords a politician emphasizes the most in a speech), it can also scan your delicious bookmarks to give you a weighted view of the kinds of things you keep track of. Kind of a zeitgeist snapshot of the inside of your head. It appears that I bookmark work-related/tech stuff almost exclusively. I do have a lot of non-tech bookmarks in delicious as well, but they’re drowned out in the frequency ranking by webdev stuff.
Meet The Flintstones
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 23 Feb 2010 | 9:19am GMT

"Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, and more than half disagree with the theory that humans developed from earlier species of animals, according to the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll."
Manifesto: On Poker Chips, Paperback Book Publishing and Health Care Reform
→ Literary Kicks | 23 Feb 2010 | 12:32am GMT

MANIFESTO: On Poker Chips, Book Publishing and Health Care Reform

Unless you're color-blind like me (yes, I'm color-blind, and yes, that probably does explain the color scheme here on Literary Kicks), you probably see two different color chips in the photo above.

read more
Sundry Images, Feb 2010
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 22 Feb 2010 | 1:59am GMT

Just returned from the most amazing rain walk with Miles. Two full hours in the drizzle, revisiting haunts and trails we’ve enjoyed since he was three. Came to grab some of the images from the day and realized I hadn’t downloaded images from the iPhone for a very long time. Here’s a sundry collection of fun stuff from the past six months. Visit the Flickr Set to see these with captions.

Flickr Set
Reviewing the Review: February 21 2010
→ Literary Kicks | 21 Feb 2010 | 6:40pm GMT

Apparently the reputations of our acclaimed magazines have recently sunk to the depths of ignobility. William Vollmann, reviewing Ted Conover's The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today in the current New York Times Book Review, complains that Conover "occasionally seasons his prose with the flavor of a National Geographic article".

read more
Well, when you put it like that....
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 21 Feb 2010 | 6:18pm GMT
Miles’ Umbrella Ad
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 16 Feb 2010 | 1:37am GMT

Miles had the idea to make his own TV commercial. This is what he came up with.

Miles’ Umbrella Ad from Scot Hacker on Vimeo.
Moon Jelly (or UFO)
→ Zeigen | 15 Feb 2010 | 10:36pm GMT
Buzz vs. FriendFeed: 14 features I miss in Buzz
→ Zeigen | 11 Feb 2010 | 3:34pm GMT

My feed in Google Buzz

If you use Gmail, you’re likely aware of Google’s new social networking service, Google Buzz, which launched this week.

It’s only the the third day of Buzz’s public existence, and I only received access yesterday, so my experience is very preliminary.

In contrast, I’ve been using FriendFeed since January of 2008, so with two years’ experience under my belt, FriendFeed feels very familiar to me, and naturally my bias is towards what I know.

As I wrap my head around Buzz, I want to like it and have it succeed, but there are quite a few aspects of the service I can’t help but find lacking. Here are the features that FriendFeed has that I miss the most in Buzz:
1. Pause. Both FriendFeed and Buzz present a feed that updates in real-time. With FriendFeed, the play button (or q key) pauses/unpauses updates. With Buzz (on a browser, not on mobile), items I’m reading suddenly getting scrolled away and I can’t figure out how to stop that.
2. Custom lists of users. With FriendFeed, I can create my own lists (“Co-workers” and “Relatives” and “Favorites”) and automatically filter their updates. That way, posts from my relatives and close personal friends don’t get lost in the noise. With Buzz, either I’m going to have not follow so many people or figure out some other strategy for not losing updates that are important to me. Most likely I’m going to have to unfollow a lot of people who followed me.
3. “My discussions.” In FriendFeed, there’s an easy link for me to keep track of items I’ve liked or commented on. With Buzz, some of the items I’ve liked or participated in appear in my regular inbox, but not consistently and not in a simple list.
4. Smart collapsing of long posts and comments. FriendFeed’s layout for keeping items compact until I click “more” or “more comments” is ingenious. Buzz wastes a lot of screen real estate by comparison. Especially on the mobile version.
5. Smart, flexible hiding, including hiding by service. FriendFeed allows very smart ways to hide updates I’m not interested in. For example, I never care about anyone’s Foursquare updates. In FriendFeed I can hide an entire service, or many types of updates from a particular noisy user. Buzz offers no such automatic filters yet.
6. Hiding duplicates. Buzz seems to have some bugs right now where an individual post by a user is displayed twice (or even more) in my feed in two separate places. It could be the user posted the item twice by accident. But also several people could post the same item (a news item, for example). FriendFeed automatically collapses duplicate items into a single line (“1 related entry from so-and-so”). Buzz desperately needs this.
7. Bookmarklet for easy sharing. The FriendFeed bookmarklet is ingenious and easy to use, a button that appears on your browser’s toolbar that lets you easily share web content, including excerpts and images. Buzz lets you share a URL but doesn’t (yet?) intelligently create an excerpt of the page. (See screenshot.)
8. Reposting to other services, such as Twitter. The absence of this one is flabbergasting to me. FriendFeed lets you bring in services and also “exports” your posts to other services, including Facebook (via an application) and Twitter. Buzz is a one-way street right now: It can bring in your items from multiple connections, but once inside Buzz, there it stays. It can’t become your Facebook status or a tweet.
9. Groups and “Imaginary Friends.” Not everyone will join FriendFeed, so you can create a placeholder account on them that brings in their public content into the FriendFeed interface. Similarly, not everyone will join Buzz, so it’d be nice to be able to get someone’s chat content into the same UI. But that feature doesn’t seem to be available. On FriendFeed you can use this to create a “group” or “room” built from whatever content you like, such as the USGS earthquake feed or the Amazon MP3 deal of the day Twitter account.
10. Plethora of supported services. Buzz currently seems to support somewhere around a dozen “connections” that can create items in buzz whenever you use the service: GChat status, Facebook updates, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FriendFeed, Picasa, blog content, Google Reader, and probably others. But FriendFeed supports 58 services, including Amazon wishlists, Reddit and lots more.
  Screenshot of my feed in FriendFeed
11. Customized profile page. Not a deal-breaker, but users today expect their profile page to have some customization. Maybe not to the extent that MySpace allows, but both Twitter and FriendFeed let you pick your background image and color scheme. Buzz relies on your Google Profile, which doesn’t allow you to customize the layout or color scheme or background at all. (Buzz inherits your Gmail theme, so you can control how things look on your screen, but that doesn’t display for anyone else. Thus everyone’s feed looks the same.)
12. Posting of text and photos simultaneously via e-mail. From my mobile phone I can take a picture, and e-mail it to share@friendfeed.com. The subject line of the e-mail becomes the subject of the posted item. Up to three pictures can be posted. Any text in the body of the e-mail become included with the item, as the first comment in FriendFeed. Buzz allows you to send a picture to buzz@gmail.com, but any text outside of the subject is ignored.
13. Friend of a friend discovery. In FriendFeed, if I follow my friend Georgia, and she “likes” an item from her friend Lani, then I automatically see that item from Lani and can then choose to follow Lani as well. In this manner you can expand your social network and meet new people with shared interests. With Buzz, I don’t have any option to see items that Georgia liked, unless I already follow the person who posted the item. (Note that FriendFeed is flexible and lets you hide friend-of-friend updates if you prefer.)
14. Flexible notification channels. Depending on my preferences, I can have FriendFeed notify me in several ways whenever a particular person posts, or if an item I posted gets comments. I can get an IM, a desktop popup via a standalone application, or an e-mail, either in real-time or at the end of the day.
So what does Buzz do better? Its mobile version is location-aware, and there’s a very interesting implementation with Google maps for following local updates. I was able to see someone post about a special offer at a restaurant near where I pick up my kids from their preschool, for example. Location awareness could be a tremendous change to how I interact with social media. Buzz also makes it very easy to e-mail an item to someone. Notification of new followers is handled real-time on screen, and it’s very easy to reciprocate. (FriendFeed notifies you of new followers via e-mail, so following back is less real-time and a tiny bit more of an effort.) Buzz has better keyboard controls than FriendFeed’s keyboard controls, having inherited the excellent Gmail keyboard implementation. I’m sure there’s more. But I can’t think of anything else yet.

In any consumer space, first-mover advantage is of course critical, because it builds mindshare and market share quickly via the head-start on the competition. But the competition gets a huge advantage also, because they don’t have to create the market, they don’t have to educate users on the category, and they can copy-and-paste the feature set while offering refinements and new features.

But if the competition only copies SOME of what the original offers, they can only succeed either by excellent marketing, an improved implementation on the core feature set, or because of a built-in audience from the brand name or related product. Google has copied some of what FriendFeed offered two years ago. But they really copied only a small subset, and as far as I can see even the core functionality of Buzz needs a lot of work: Counters are buggy, the layout is ugly and hard to follow, and the integration with Gmail feels intrusive and clumsy.

But it’s from Google, and by bolting it onto Gmail (which I use heavily and find to be the best web-based e-mail solution in existence), Buzz has instantly catapulted into a dominant position in the social media space, because they can make all 150 million Gmail users aware of it and even force them to try it.
Mundus Journalism and More
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 10 Feb 2010 | 8:59am GMT

A ton of excellent new sites maintained by journalists and artists have been added to the Birdhouse Hosting roster over the past couple of months, including:

angelajbass.com
Angela highlights issues related to women, girls and people of color in the Bay Area and abroad, and groups that have been historically misrepresented by the media.

annavictoriabloom.com
Bloom began working in journalism as a newspaper reporter in Park City, Utah, covering everything from the Sundance Film Festival to skiing to town hall politics.

exactcenter.net
As a science teacher, I have the special privelage of getting to know my students and enjoy every one of them for what they teach me as well as what I might teach them. The values of their parents and the raw culture of our society greet me each day as plain as the eye can see when I walk into every class.

good4uproductions.com/raisetheroof
Raise The Roof is a free iPhone app with one simple goal in mind: to get you to dance with your iPhone and have a little fun. The app gives meaning to that infamous dance move “raise the roof.”

greentuliphandmade.com
Green Tulip designs for textiles, T-shirts and the Web are truly handcrafted one by one. The look of each design is original because each design is made from scratch. Green Tulip designs are made from materials that feel good in the hands: paper, scissors, glue. Each design is defiantly non-digital to ensure a handcrafted feel even online.

kimbennett.net
Kim Bennett is an artist and writer based in the San Francisco Bay area.

mundusjournalism.com
An international consortium of universities and media outlets work closely together to run the Mundus Journalism programme.

noahbuhayar.com
I am currently a candidate for a master’s in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Before graduate school, my background was mostly in print journalism. Now, I am focusing more on producing multimedia features for the Web, particularly on business topics.

sethrf.com
“My undergraduate thesis, which began with a summer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was on connections between the Unique Games Conjecture and semidefinite programming-based approximation algorithms.”

All sites also listed at the ever-growing list of Birdhouse Hosting Sites.
“I’m helping”
→ Zeigen | 5 Feb 2010 | 6:55pm GMT

Kimi made banana bread last night. Sophie helped.
All MLK's speeches in a nice easy to use location.
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 4 Feb 2010 | 5:55pm GMT
All Martin Luther King's speeches are online in a nice streamable format thanks to a labor of love by genesayssitdown
Bath formula
→ Zeigen | 4 Feb 2010 | 3:43am GMT

E_gib = E_gob > E_p10kH

The Energy to get a kid into the bath is equal to get a kid out of the bath, which is greater than the Energy to power 10,000 homes.
Roeder: guilty, murder 1st degree.
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 30 Jan 2010 | 7:50pm GMT

"The jury deliberated for just 37 minutes before finding Scott Roeder, 51, of Kansas City, Mo., guilty of premeditated, first-degree murder in the May 31 shooting death.

[...]

Roeder faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years. ".

That's for murdering someone in cold blood in church after stalking and harassing the victim for 20 years. He's lucky there aren't terrorism charges tacked onto it.
How To Report The News
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 30 Jan 2010 | 4:58pm GMT
(sign the..) Manifesto of Liberation of Women in Iran
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 29 Jan 2010 | 3:52pm GMT

Manifesto of Liberation of Women in Iran
Six more miles....
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 28 Jan 2010 | 2:58pm GMT

Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn, one of the country’s most celebrated historians, died of a heart attack Wednesday in Santa Monica, California. He was 87.

His classic work, A People’s History of the United States, changed the way we look at history in America. First published a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and continues to sell more copies each successive year.
After serving as a shipyard worker and then an Air Force bombardier in World War II, Zinn went on to become a lifelong dissident and peace activist. He went to college under the GI Bill, received his PhD from Columbia. He was active in the civil rights movement and many of the struggles for social justice over the past half-century. He taught at Spelman College, the historically black college for women in Atlanta, was fired for insubordination for standing up for the women. He is now Professor Emeritus at Boston University and was recently honored by Spelman.
Zinn has received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award, and the Lannan Literary Award. He is the author of many books, including the People’s History Series; a seven-volume series on the Radical ’60s; several collections of essays on art, war, politics and history; and the plays Emma and Marx in Soho.
In December, The People Speak a documentary based on the live performances of A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States premiered on the History Channel.
Over the years, Howard Zinn has been a frequent guest on Democracy Now! A collection of his appearances is listed below.
- Howard Zinn (1922 - 2010): A Tribute to the Legendary Historian with Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein and Anthony Arnove
  We pay tribute to the late historian, writer and activist Howard Zinn who died suddenly on Wednesday of a heart attack at the age of 87. Howard Zinn’s classic work A People’s History of the United States changed the way we look at history in America. It has sold over a million copies and was recently made into a television special called “The People Speak.” We remember Howard Zinn in his won words and we speak with those who knew him best: Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein and Anthony Arnove.
- HOWARD ZINN: "Holy Wars"
  Howard Zinn is an American historian, social critic, and activist. He is best known as author of the best-seller A People’s History of the United States. He spoke at Boston University on November 11, on the subject of American “Holy Wars.”
- 150 Years Ago Today: Abolitionist John Brown Raided Arsenal at Harpers Ferry in Attempt to Start Slave Insurrection in South
  Commemorations are being held in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland today to mark the 150th anniversary of abolitionist John Brown’s raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. We end today’s show with a reading of John Brown’s address to the court in Virginia that ordered his hanging. Actor Harris Yulin read his words as part of a larger reading of Howard Zinn’s classic work, A People’s History of the United States. Yulin was followed by James Earl Jones reading Frederick Douglass. [includes rush transcript]
- Vietnam War Architect Robert McNamara Dies at 93: A Look at His Legacy with Howard Zinn, Marilyn Young & Jonathan Schell
  Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara has died at the age of ninety-three. McNamara was one of the key architects of the Vietnam War, which killed at least three million Vietnamese, around one million Cambodians and Laotians, and 58,000 American soldiers. We take a look at McNamara’s legacy with two preeminent historians: Howard Zinn and Marilyn Young. We also speak with Jonathan Schell, who covered Vietnam as a reporter in 1967 and met with McNamara in a secret Pentagon meeting. [includes rush transcript]
- Howard Zinn: "I Wish Obama Would Listen to MLK"
  Legendary historian Howard Zinn joins us to talk about war, torture and the teaching of history. Zinn says Obama had Obama heeded the lessons of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he wouldn’t be escalating US attacks abroad and increasing the size of the US military budget. We also play excerpts of the forthcoming documentary, The People Speak, featuring dramatic readings based on Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States. [includes rush transcript]
- Howard Zinn on "War and Social Justice"
  Howard Zinn is one of this country’s most celebrated historians. His classic work A People’s History of the United States changed the way we look at history in America. First published a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and is a phenomenon in the world of publishing—selling more copies each successive year. After serving as a bombardier in World War II, Howard Zinn went on to become a lifelong dissident and peace activist. He was active in the civil rights movement and many of the struggles for social justice over the past forty years. He taught at Spelman College, the historically black college for women, and was fired for insubordination for standing up for the students. He was recently invited back to give the commencement address. Howard Zinn has written numerous books and is professor emeritus at Boston University. He recently spoke at Binghamton University a few days after the 2008 presidential election. His speech was called “War and Social Justice.” [includes rush transcript]
- July 4th Special: Readings From Howard Zinn’s “Voices of a People’s History of the United States”
  On July 4th, we feature a Democracy Now special–a dramatic reading of legendary historian Howard Zinn’s classic work, “A People’s History of the United States.” First published more than a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and is a phenomenon in the world of publishing–selling more copies each successive year. Howard Zinn gathered with a group of actors, writers and editors for a public reading of the book at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The cast included Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny Glover and many others.
- Howard Zinn's "Rebel Voices" Opens in New York
  The new play “Rebel Voices” is based on the book, “Voices of a People’s History of the United States,” by historian Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove." It features dramatic readings of speeches, letters, poems, songs and petitions of people like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, as well as contemporary voices such as Iraq war resister Camilo Mejía. [includes rush transcript]
- Readings From Howard Zinn's "Voices of a People's History of the United States"
  Today we spend the hour with readings from a Voices of a People’s History of the United States edited by historian Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. It is the companion volume to Zinn’s legendary People’s History of the United States—which has sold over a million copies.
  We will hear dramatic readings of speeches, letters, poems, songs, petitions, and manifestos. These are the voices of people throughout U.S. history who struggled against slavery, racism, and war, against oppression and exploitation, and who articulated a vision for a better world.
  Performances include Danny Glover as Frederick Douglass, Marisa Tomei as Cindy Sheehan, Floyd Red Crow Westerman as Tecumseh and Chief Joseph, Sandra Oh as Emma Goldman and Yuri Kochiyama, and Viggo Mortensen as Bartolomeo de Las Casas and Mark Twain.
- Howard Zinn Urges U.S. Soldiers to Heed Thoreau's Advice and "Resist Authority"
  In Part II of our conversation with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, we speak with the two leading dissidents about U.S. wars from Iraq to Vietnam, resistance and academia. Zinn speaks about the importance of Henry David Thoreau and his relevance today. Zinn says soldiers should “read Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience or take its advice to heart, realize that the government is not holy, but what’s holy is human life and human freedom and the right for people to resist authority.” [includes rush transcript]
- In Rare Joint Interview, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn on Iraq, Vietnam, Activism and History
  In a Democracy Now! special from Boston, two of the city’s leading dissidents, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, sit down for a rare joint interview. Noam Chomsky began teaching linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge over 50 years ago. He is the author of dozens of books on linguistics and U.S. foreign policy. Howard Zinn is one of the country’s most widely read historians. His classic work “A People’s History of the United States” has sold over 1.5 million copies and it has altered how many teach the nation’s history. Chomsky and Zinn discuss Vietnam, activism, history, Israel-Palestine, and Iraq, which Chomsky calls “one of the worst catastrophes in military and political history.” [includes rush transcript]
- Howard Zinn on The Uses of History and the War on Terrorism
  Howard Zinn is one of this country’s most celebrated historians. His classic work “A People’s History of the United States” changed the way we look at history in America. First published a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and is a phenomenon in the world of publishing–selling more copies each successive year. [includes rush transcript]
- Howard Zinn on The Uses of History and the War on Terrorism
  Howard Zinn is one of this country’s most celebrated historians. His classic work “A People’s History of the United States” changed the way we look at history in America. First published a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and is a phenomenon in the world of publishing–selling more copies each successive year. [includes rush transcript]
- Readings From Howard Zinn's "Voices of a People's History of the United States"
  Today we spend the hour with readings from a Voices of a People’s History of the United States edited by historian Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. It is the companion volume to Zinn’s legendary People’s History of the United States—which has sold over a million copies.
  We will hear dramatic readings of speeches, letters, poems, songs, petitions, and manifestos. These are the voices of people throughout U.S. history who struggled against slavery, racism, and war, against oppression and exploitation, and who articulated a vision for a better world.
  Performances include Danny Glover as Frederick Douglass, Marisa Tomei as Cindy Sheehan, Floyd Red Crow Westerman as Tecumseh and Chief Joseph, Sandra Oh as Emma Goldman and Yuri Kochiyama, and Viggo Mortensen as Bartolomeo de Las Casas and Mark Twain.
- Readings From Howard Zinn's "Voices of a People's History of the United States"
  Today we spend the hour with readings from a Voices of a People’s History of the United States edited by historian Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. It is the companion volume to Zinn’s legendary People’s History of the United States—which has sold over a million copies.
  We will hear dramatic readings of speeches, letters, poems, songs, petitions, and manifestos. These are the voices of people throughout U.S. history who struggled against slavery, racism, and war, against oppression and exploitation, and who articulated a vision for a better world.
  Speakers include Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Sandra Oh, and Viggo Mortensen.
- A People's History of the United States: Dramatic Reading of Howard Zinn's Classic Work
  This weekend is a national holiday commemorating July 4th when American colonies declared their independence from England in 1776. While many in the US hang flags, attend parades and watch fireworks, Independence Day is not a cause of celebration for everyone.
  For Native Americans it is a bitter reminder of colonialism, which brought disease, genocide and the destruction of their culture and way of life.
  For African Americans Independence Day did not extend to them. While white colonists were declaring their freedom from the crown, that liberation was not shared with millions of Africans who were captured, beaten, separated from their families and forced into slavery thousands of miles from home.
  Today we’ll hear excerpts of Howard Zinn’s classic work: A People’s History of the United States. It was first published 24 years ago. The millionth copy of the book was recently sold.
  To celebrate this feat, the great historian gathered with a group of actors, writers and editors for a public reading of the book at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The cast included Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny Glover and James Earl Jones.
- Howard Zinn: "To Be Neutral, To Be Passive In A Situation Is To Collaborate With Whatever Is Going On"
  We speak with legendary historian Howard Zinn, author of one of the most popular books on American History, “A People’s History of the United States.” In his youth, Zinn was a bombardier in World War II and participated in the Napalm bombing in France. He went on to dedicate his life to opposing wars of all kind. He was an active fighter in Civil Rights Movement and served as an advisor to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. In the late 1960s, he traveled to Vietnam with Father Dan Berrigan during intensive US attacks and negotiated the release of US POWs. In fact, Howard Zinn was a part of most struggles for social justice in this country during his lifetime. He joins us in our firehouse studio. [includes rush transcript]
- Historian Howard Zinn: "Bush Represents Everything That Martin Luther King Opposed"
  We speak with Howard Zinn, renowned historian and author of “A People’s History of the United States.” Zinn says: “People all over the world are mourning the ascension of Bush to his second term as president… that’s something to feel encouraged about, even as all this pomp and circumstance of the inauguration goes on.” [includes rush transcript]
- Howard Zinn On the Election: Candidates Not Addressing "Fundamental Issues of American Policy in the World"
  Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, joins as George W Bush and John Kerry wrap up their third and final debate of the campaign. We speak with the legendary historian about the election, U.S. foreign policy, Ralph Nader’s candidacy, the importance of citizen involvement before and after elections, and much more. [includes rush transcript]
- A People's History of the United States: Dramatic Reading of Howard Zinn's Classic Work
  This weekend is a national holiday commemorating July 4th when American colonies declared their independence from England in 1776. While many in the US hang flags, attend parades and watch fireworks, Independence Day is not a cause of celebration for everyone.
  For Native Americans it is a bitter reminder of colonialism, which brought disease, genocide and the destruction of their culture and way of life.
  For African Americans Independence Day did not extend to them. While white colonists were declaring their freedom from the crown, that liberation was not shared with millions of Africans who were captured, beaten, separated from their families and forced into slavery thousands of miles from home.
  Today we’ll hear excerpts of Howard Zinn’s classic work: A People’s History of the United States. It was first published 24 years ago. The millionth copy of the book was recently sold.
  To celebrate this feat, the great historian gathered with a group of actors, writers and editors for a public reading of the book at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The cast included Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny Glover and James Earl Jones.
- People's Historian Howard Zinn on Occupied Iraq, the Role of Resistance Movements, Government Lies and the Media
  On this Indigenous Peoples Day, we hear from historian Howard Zinn who wrote extensively about Columbus’ so-called discovery of the Americas. Today Zinn examines the occupation of Iraq, the role of the media in the build-up to war and the historical role of dissent in the United States.
- Labor Day Special Pt. 1: People's Historian Howard Zinn on Occupied Iraq, the Role of Resistance Movements, Government Lies and the Media.
  Howard Zinn, author of the People’s History of the United States, reviews the history of the abolitionists and the Vietnam War to encourage a new generation of resistance against the Iraq occupation and the war at home.
- Independence Day Special: A Dramatic Reading of Howard Zinn's <i>A People's History of the United States</i> with James Earl Jones, Alfre Woodard, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny Glover, Harris Yulin and others
  Today is a national holiday commemorating July 4th when American colonies declared their independence from England in 1776. While many in the US hang flags, attend parades and watch fireworks, Independence Day is not a cause of celebration for everyone.
  For Native Americans it is a bitter reminder of colonialism, which brought disease, genocide and the destruction of their culture and way of life.
  For African Americans Independence Day did not extend to them. While white colonists were declaring their freedom from the crown, that liberation was not shared with millions of Africans who were captured, beaten, separated from their families and forced into slavery thousands of miles from home.
  Today we will go back more than 150 years to hear one of the most powerful voices of the abolition movement–Frederick Douglas.
  Born a slave in Maryland in 1818, Douglas escaped from slavery in the 1830s and became a leader in the growing abolition campaign through lectures and his anti-slavery newspaper The Northstar. He would become a major civil right leader in the Unites States.
  Douglas gave his Independence Day oration in 1852.
  Today we’ll hear excerpts of that speech as part of a dramatic reading of Howard Zinn’s classic work: A People’s History of the United States.
  The great historian gathered with actors and writers several months ago at the 92nd Street Y in New York.
  The cast included Alfre Woodard, Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Kurt Vonnegut, James Earl Jones and others.
- Howard Zinn and Arundhati Roy: A Conversation Between Two Leading Social Critics
  “One of the reasons for the acceptance of the war by so many Americans…is that the American population has had concealed from it the human consequences of what we’ve been doing.”
- A People's History of the United States Pt. III
- Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny Glover, James Earl Jones and Others Read From Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States": Hour One of Two-Hour Special Commemorating the Millionth Copy
  It has become a classic work of history. It is used in countless schools across the country, it has inspired a generation of historians and students and it has reshaped how many people view this country’s history.
- "The Most Important Message I Want to Convey Is That You Don't Depend On the Authorities, the People in Power to Solve Problems:" Howard Zinn Talks About Bombs, Terrorism, the Anti-War Movement and th
  We’ve been hearing authors and actors and fans of Professor Howard Zinn, celebrating Zinn’s tremendous achievement: he has sold one million copies of his revolutionary book, ‘A People’s History of the United States.’
- A People's History of the United States, 1,000,000 Copies and Counting: Alice Walker, Danny Glover, Kurt Vonnegut, Marisa Tomei and Others Celebrate Howard Zinn's Classic
  The majority of Americans have been taught a red, white and blue history of this country.
- Renowned Historian Howard Zinn On the History of Government and Media Lies in Time of War
  We go now to historian Howard Zinn. Howard Zinn is a historian and professor emeritus of political science at Boston University. He is the author of fourteen books, including ‘A People’s History of the United States,’ and ‘You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.’
- Over 600 Gather for the Funeral of Legendary Anti-War Activist Philip Berrigan in Baltimore: We Hear From Historian Howard Zinn and Brendan Walsh, Who Co-Founded Viva House, a Catholic Worker House in
  It may have been the largest gathering of ex cons in the country. Over 600 people packed into the St. Peter Claver Catholic Church in Baltimore on Monday. It would have made the legendary anti-war and anti-nuclear activist Philip Berrigan proud. It was at his funeral.
- Howard Zinn On the History of the US Government and CIA 'Changing Regimes' Around the World
  We turn now to an excerpt of a speech historian Howard Zinn gave earlier this month at Brown University. Howard Zinn is the author of
- Saying "No" to War: From Boston to Washington, D.C. to Madison, Wisconsin, We Hear From Howard Zinn, Medea Benjamin and Others
  According to CNN, over 200,000 people protested US plans to invade Iraq at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC on Saturday.
- The People's Historian: Howard Zinn
  He overturned the sacred myth of Christopher Columbus as a courageous hero. He unmasked military leaders like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt as racists, war-lovers, imperialists, and Indian-killers. He revealed our most liberal presidents–Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy–as more concerned with political power and national might than the rights of non-white people. And he exposed the cold war as a competition fueled by thirst for empire and domination.
- "Where Are We Heading: Terrorism, Global Security, and the Peace Movement": During a Time Ofseemingly Endless War, We'll Hear From Radical Historian Howard Zinn
  The United States ambassador for war crimes said yesterday that the Geneva Conventions are outdated and need to be rewritten to deal with the threat of international terrorism.
- Historian and Activist Howard Zinn Speaks On the US War Against Afghanistan, US Wars Gone By, and the Prospects for a Humane US Foreign Policy
  U.S. jets pounded Taliban positions this morning near front lines outside the Afghan capital and a key northern city. The attack came as Sec. of State Gen. Colin Powell, said he wanted to see the Afghan capital captured within the next few weeks before the onset of winter.
- Howard Zinn, Continued
  1:06:47.1
- Manning Marable, Howard Zinn and Grace Paley Speak Out Against the Bush Administration'smarch to War
  In the midst of the rising tide of Congressional and Bush Administration calls for a harsh military response to theattacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there is a remarkable, hawkish unity in the views being expressedin the mainstream media.
- The Electoral College and Election 2000: A Historical Perspective from Howard Zinn
  It’s been 132 years since the Florida Legislature got this involved in presidential politics, but some things never change. The GOP majority wanted to send a Republican to the White House then, and it does now. [includes rush transcript]
- American History Review of the 20th Century: Manning Marable and Howard Zinn
  Today we are taking a look at the people, events and social movements of the century. We are joined by two activist scholars who will shed some light on this subject.
- A People's History of the United States
  What are the political implications of cyberspace? What role is the United States playing in Russia’s current crises? After its rise and fall, is the labor movement on the rise once again? What are the origins of corporate power? Who will control the past–and the future?
- Historian Howard Zinn Discusses Mergers</B>
  Last week’s announcement of the proposed merger of two oil giants Exxon and Mobil would create not only the largest oil company in the world, but also the world’s single largest corporation. This merger would also reunite two of the seven companies that made up the Standard Oil monopoly of John D. Rockefeller, a monopoly that was broken up in 1911 in what was perhaps the most famous anti-trust action in U.S. history.
- Historian Zinn Addresses Nation's Censored Reports
  No other historian has attacked the distortions and myths about the history of the United States as forcefully as Howard Zinn. His book
- Zinn
  Perhaps no other radical historian has reached so many hearts and minds as Howard Zinn. His book
- PEOPLE'S HISTORY
  Howard Zinn is arguably one of the most important historians in the United States today. But that’s not because he’s followed the traditional route to influence and political power of historians before him.
- Howard Zinn on Indiginous People's Day
  The leader of the movement to look at history from the perspective of people of color and the powerless in our society, is Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States 1492 to the Present. In honor of Indigenous People’s day, we now bring you an excerpt of a speech by Howard Zinn.
‘Twas the Night Before iSlate
→ Zeigen | 27 Jan 2010 | 6:59am GMT

'Twas the night before iSlate, when all through the land Every techie was jonesing a bit out of hand; The stock market was hung on the announcement to be, In hopes that Steve Jobs would soon let them all see. The faithful were tapping upon their iPods While mock-ups of AMOLEDs appeared on their blogs; And Terry McGraw (he's the McGraw-Hill head) Let slip a few things that he should not have said. Then suddenly on twitter there arose such a chatter, I pulled out my MacBook to check out the blather. And I sifted through web sites all loaded with flash And read many nutters using #ipad as hash. The loons who loved gadgets were gabbing again Giving the lustre of newness to concepts mundane, When what to my iGoggling eyes should appear But a plausible leak from a tunneling peer. With its burnished titanium shiny and new I knew in a moment this jpeg was true. More features than Kindle or Android they came And we googled and journaled and guessed at its name; "It's iBook, no-- Canvas, no-- Tablet or eSlate! Or iPad! Or iGuide! Or maybe it's iWait." To the top of the trends! To my facebook wall! Now post away! Post away! Post away all! As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky, So onto my wish-list this gadget did flew With a cart full of accessories and free shipping too. And then it was Wednesday morning at last I'd canceled my meetings and closed all my tasks. As I fired up Safari and loaded the sites, I logged out of my IMs and ate my last bites. And onto the stage strided Steve Jobs He was dressed in a turtleneck like the flash mobs. The Apple Store and iTunes were down to deliver And Steve looked like he could use a new liver. His iPad -- how it glistened, its curves were so sexy! Its apps were all written in code that was hexy! Its cute little screen was so packed up with pixels, And its underlying OS allowed many C-shells; The form factor was sleek and just right for reading, And with its touch-based UI no keyboard was needing. It used up broadband and a little more 3G, And no buttons at all, just multi-touch easy. It was silver and sleek, a right sexy device And I had lust when I saw it in spite of the price; A wink of Steve's eye and twist of his head, Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread; He spoke a few words, then went straight to his demo, And filled all the screens with a 3-D memo, And showing us the features we all had expected, Including which apps were not yet rejected, We sprang to attention as his team came to the stages, And an exec from B-N showed us how to turn pages. And I heard Steve exclaim before he said one more thing, "Many iPads on sale, for just $899."
It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 26 Jan 2010 | 7:14pm GMT
Wow.

If you did not murder someone to start a war, then you don't need to cover it up....

(via pope_guilty)

Update: apparently, its all for the good of the family, and doctors can see the report.
How the West was Wan
→ Zeigen | 23 Jan 2010 | 11:28pm GMT

I saw Daybreakers last night, a movie that cleverly explores an alternate 2019 America in which vampires have taken over the world. (Why should zombies always be the ones to eliminate humanity? Why do vampires constantly have to hide in the shadows and keep their numbers limited? The concept of a world populated almost entirely by vampires was also explored in Kim Newman’s “Anno Dracula” series of books.)

While Daybreakers comes off feeling a little low-budget and B-movie in parts, and there are a few plot holes that don’t withstand scrutiny, it’s thoughtful, stylish, gory, engaging, and well-acted (possibly excepting Willem DaFoe, whose character, named Elvis, vamps [hah!] his southern accent a bit too too much).

Star Ethan Hawke’s character has the first name of “Edward.” The movie was made originally in 2007, long before the current Twilight craze, so it wasn’t an intentional reference. But it’s very unfortunate and distracting, even when some characters refer to him as Ed.

I woke up this morning with a $50 million dollar idea that I’m giving away here, because I couldn’t live with myself if I did this. Here’s what you do:
1. Hook up with a nutritionist and come up with a vitamin cocktail formulated specifically to make up for chronic Vitamin D deficiency.
2. Frappé it, add sugar water and a whole ton of caffeine, and add your (fictional) secret ingredient, “tauro-hemine,” which you say is synthesized from cow blood.
3. Bite your tongue and a bullet and license Twilight. See if you can get away with only 20% of the gross.
4. Slap Edward’s brooding mug on an ankh-shaped can.
5. Call it “Twilight Red Thirst” and set up your distribution channel for every goth club and vintage clothing store in the land.
6. Sure you’re splitting your gross with Charlaine Harris, but after a couple of promotional campaigns and with a catchy slogan, soon you’ll be laughing all the way to the blood bank.
Using Facebook Insights and MySpace Dashboards to monitor community web analytics
→ Extra! Extra! | 21 Jan 2010 | 8:49pm GMT

One of the strongest Project Managers that I have ever worked with, Nick Giordano, is also the lead guitarist for the band Monsters are not Myths. Yesterday, Nick walked me through some of the analytics that he monitors on his band’s fans base (groupie analytics?) on both Facebook and MySpace.

Facebook Insights has come a long way in the last 12 months. After creating a page and gaining fans, administrators can see a large variety of reports. Most of the reports focus on two main areas (1) How successful a page is at creating interaction within a community and (2) How successful Facebook advertisements are at getting Facebook users to act (convert). The most impressive piece of data that you can find is your Post Quality. This variable measures engagement by tracking each of your posts (text, video, photos, etc) and how many of your fans comment, like, or write on your wall. While the report does not necessarily tell you which demographics in your fan base react more than others, it gives you an excellent idea of how strong your content is. This would be an awesome feature for any site. While Facebook puts a little too much emphasis on their simple demographics data (literally just age and gender), the export feature and the graphs on data such as media consumption give administrators an excellent understanding of their ability to create an interactive community. Facebook Insights would be more useful if they offered the ability to integrate with offsite analytics applications such as SiteCatalyst, Webtrends, or Google Analytics to show downstream analytics – one can only dream. With some work, an analyst could start to track trends between the applications – for instance, when Facebook Post Quality goes up, Facebook traffic to our site (and conversion) increases.

While the MySpace Dashboards are not as user friendly, the data offered is still very impressive. The dashboards provide similar demographics to Facebook with age, gender, and location being the primary tracking variables. MySpace gives a little more insight into interactions by showing posts, comments, views, and kudos over days, weeks, and totals (Facebook focuses on the last 7 days). What impresses me the most about the MySpace dashboards is their unique variables suited for the goals of the administrator. For example, Nick’s band uses the MySpace music player to let fans play the band’s songs and their dashboard shows how popular different songs are on MySpace. It measures the song popularity by plays, dedications, iLikes and trending data. For Monsters are not Myths, “Old Soul” tops their MySpace charts.

Most importantly, Nick can log into the bands Google Analytics account and see how traffic from Facebook and MySpace to their band’s main webpage (http://www.monstersarenotmyths.com/) interacts with the site. For instance, he can see if visitors to the site that came from MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter were more likely to be repeat visitors, viewed more content, and/or signed up for newsletters and events. To isolate traffic from URLs posted on a fan page versus random users posting URL’s on a social networking site, be sure to append tracking variables to the URLs you post. For instance, if Nick was to post his tour dates the URL might look like this - http://www.monstersarenotmyths.com/v2/music_shows.html?source=facebook. If you are using a URL shortener such as ow.ly, tr.im, or bit.ly, be sure to append the URL variables before you shorten them.

http://www.Facebook.com/pages/Monsters-are-not-Myths/6306011877

http://www.myspace.com/monstersarenotmyths
The Positive Side of Negativity
→ Extra! Extra! | 19 Jan 2010 | 6:30pm GMT

I am feeling a little philosophical this morning and thinking about some of the behaviors of web analysts.

It’s funny how most web analysts present the positive side of analytics. They may produce reports which illustrate that 9.8% of the visitors converted to quality leads, that 749 users signed up for the newsletter, and that 56% of the customers came back for a second purchase. The traffic reports often start with the keyphrases that get the best click-through-ratios and the best conversion rates. Web analysts seem to be always looking on the bright side of the data. The analysts are also often complaining that their web teams are not acting on the data they report.

I wonder if the analysts focused their reports on the 90.2% of the visitors who didn’t convert, the 6,567 users who didn’t sign up for the newsletter, and the 44% of the visitors who never came back – would the web teams be more likely to act on the data? It might help site owners to make more objective decisions if all reporting tools showed both sides of the story. For instance, traffic reports might show the 98 visitors that came from organic search results as well as the 7,528 visitors that searched for our phrases but decided not to click on our link.
Africa Bike Drive
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 17 Jan 2010 | 3:34am GMT

For the last 12 years, I’ve been riding this 1996 Gary Fisher Kaitai – a bike I bought from my editor during the BeOS Bible project. We’ve been through thick and thin together: A lot of rain and mud, a bunch of repairs, and countless daily commutes from El Cerrito to UC Berkeley and back. But despite the fact that my body and this bike are virtually united, I’ve been hankering lately for a new ride — something actually fitted for my body.

But every time I get on that bike, I feel guilty for even contemplating giving it up. There’s nothing wrong with it. I have a relationship with this bike. Just a few days ago, finally decided to keep riding it until it wore out.

Today, riding a few miles along the Bay Trail with friends and family, coming down off one of the amateur wheelies I like to pop from time to time, I heard a loud cracking sound. Suddenly, the handlebars didn’t turn the front wheel anymore. Uh oh. Got it home and opened up the top tube to find the handlebar stem badly cracked. Took off to find a replacement stem at local bike shops.

It was then I was reminded why standards matter and proprietary variants suck. For a couple of years, Gary Fisher had experimented with a non-standard stem size of 1 1/4″, rather than the typical 1 1/8″ or 1 1/2″. One shop after another gave me the same bad news: “I’ve never seen a stem that size.” “Good luck finding a replacement.” “I doubt even the Gary Fisher company themselves have them in stock.”

Was beginning to contemplate an internet hunt, when the sales manager told me about Mike’s Bikes Africa Bike Drive, which takes tired old Bay Area bikes and sends them to Namibia, where mechanics piece them back together and give them to Africans in need of reliable, inexpensive, eco-friendly transportation.

A remote village in Namibia is the location of our new Sister Shop, a place where there is little access to telephones, much less bicycles. Erasmus and Ludwig are our point-men on the ground along with Peace Corps Volunteer Kami. They are thrilled to have an opportunity to bring a better life to their community through the power of the bicycle, which is our philosophy exactly. With your help and generosity, it’s going to be a beautiful partnership.

Tax-wise, it worked out pretty well. We estimated that the tax savings would approach what I would have made by selling the bike on craigslist — after going through the twin hassles of fixing the stem and finding a buyer. Decided then and there to let the old Kaitai go. In a few weeks, it’ll hopefully have a new home with a person in Namibia who needs it more than I do.

And, of course, this was exactly the sign I’d been waiting for that it’s finally time to go bike hunting. The Renovo Panda makes my heart skip a beat, but eyes and ears are wide open to other options. Got a favorite commuter bike to recommend?

Unloading the shipment from last year’s Africa Bike Drive.
Web Analytics for Twitter
→ Extra! Extra! | 6 Jan 2010 | 11:41pm GMT

While the buzz around micro-blogging is all about what is new and cool, marketing groups should realize that a successful Twitter imitative takes a significant amount of work and though you can’t thoroughly track your Twitter activities with your traditional web analytics suite, you should be tracking trends in your Twitter community. Many tweeters out there are simply posting 140 characters about the main course of each meal and/or retweeting every article they see online (or on other tweets). Extraneous banter may create an active feed but it will not create a loyal fan base or ROI.

A successful Twitter community takes continuous thought about what your followers want to read. If your content is good, the analytics should prove it. The following is a list of some variable that you can track on your Twitter initiative:
1. Traffic to your site: Track the amount of traffic to your site from Twitter (i.e. ow.ly,is.gd,bit.ly) as well as from Twitter aggregators (i.e. LinkedIn, Facebook). Be sure that when you post articles to Twitter you’re embedding URL parameters to help track how much traffic is coming directly from Twitter. This report will help you determine ROI for your Twitter initiative. Typically the best ROI for a Twitter campaign is cost effective traffic that converts.
2. Traffic from your site: Track how much traffic you are sending to Twitter and how much of it is coming back. This is often surprising to site owners how much a link to Twitter can influence abandonment.
3. Followers / New Sign Ups: Keep a count of how many new followers you tweets are getting on a daily or weekly basis. Remember that followers are not always reading your tweets! A follower is not necessarily an impression. One common mistake is to assume that your followers are reading your every word – remember that approximately 60% of Twitters don’t come back to the site after their first month.
4. Tweets: In order to make sure your content is fresh, record the number of tweets you produce daily/weekly. This may come in handy if you need to correlate it with the growth of your community. If you content is good, you may find that your community grows proportionately with your tweets.
5. Replys, Retweets, Lists: How many replys or retweets are your post getting? This is best indicator that your posts are getting read and appreciated. Dive deeper and determine if it is a small group of followers that are retweeting often or a broad group that is retweeting when they see fit.
6. Competitors: Many of the Twitter tracking tools out there allow you to track the variables above on your tweets as well as your competitors. While I don’t typically see a lot of value in watching the competition, this may give you a good indicator of how well you are interacting with your community (or how well you should).
Determining ROI in Twitter can be difficult. The most challenging step is determining the costs in creating a successful Twitter initiative. Use of the website is free, the followers (if your copy is good) are free. Typically the largest cost is the time put into producing relevant tweets. As you plan and implement the Twitter campaign, keep track of your time and associate a fair value for all time spent (Cost = time spent * value of time). The return on your investments comes from the traffic you derive from Twitter that converts on your site.

Below are some great tools for simplifying you data gathering on your Twitter campaigns.
1. Great for tracking article promotions – twiterurly
2. Great for tracking community development – twittercounter or twitteranalyzer
3. Learning about your community – tweeps and twitter.grader.com
4. Hashtag tracking – whatthehashtag
Little kids review iPhone apps: Doodle Buddy
→ Zeigen | 6 Jan 2010 | 2:33am GMT

When you’re taking two little kids on a plane for 2 hours, after you’ve read them four books, worked with the Play-Doh, let them annoy nearby passengers by standing up and playing peek-a-boo, spent a few minutes talking with the flight attendant about available drinks and the lack of lids for cups before settling on half a cup of apple juice each, watched one kid spill said half a cup of said apple juice all over themself, cleaned up said spill, read them another three books, exhausted the questions related to oxygen masks and other pictograms in the safety card, and then checked your watch to find that there’s still another hour in the flight, what do you do to pass the time and keep your kids occupied?

You pull out your iPhone and start having them play around with different apps, of course. If you’re exceptionally fortunate, you may even be prepared in advance by having an iPhone for each of them. (Both iPhones in Airplane mode, of course.)

There are a range of apps my kids like, including apps related to bubbles and apps related to noise making, but their favorites (that is, the most distracting) are the different sketch apps that let them draw.

Today, we’ll be reviewing one free sketch app, Doodle Buddy, which as far as my kids are concerned is the best thing about daddy’s phone. (That opinion will probably last another week. When it changes, I’ll post another app review.)

I could talk about Doodle Buddy’s ability to let two users collaborate on drawings (which I’ve never tried), or how it has basic sketching options (in 24 colors, with variable width, plus a smudge tool and eraser), multi-level undo, lets you take a photo or use an existing photo for a background, and has several other background choices, and — its key feature — has 24 stamps (smileys, a couple of animals, and some basic symbols) that make sounds when you put them on your drawing. I could mention it lacks basic shape drawing — no circles or lines or squares. I could talk about all that. But let’s instead let my kids review this app.

Sophie (age 2): “Doodle buddy! Doodle buddy! Doodle buddy!”

I take a photo of her as the background, have her draw over it in various colors, then have her use the eraser tool to reveal her picture.

Sophie: “There’s Sophie! There’s my NOSE!”

With the multi-level undo, you can undo the erasing, letting her play peek-a-boo with her picture again. For a two-year-old, repetition is the soul of amusement.

Sophie: “There’s Sophie!”

Me: “Sophie, do you like Doodle Buddy? Is it good?”

Sophie: “Um. Yes. Um. It’s good. Doodle Buddy. Doodle Buddy!”

Me: “What’s your favorite feature?”

Sophie: (quietly doodles)

My son Sammy, age 4, has a more sophisticated review.

Sammy: “Well, it’s a game that you play with drawing. It has yellow. And there’s blue. And more colors. So that’s pretty good. It has snow and fire. And a basketball. It does NOT have dinosaurs.”

He was reluctant to make more observations because he was busy drawing something that looked just as good to me as your average Jackson Pollack masterpiece.

Demerits that I could see: The shake-to-clear feature is sometimes a misfeature, and can’t be switched off, and you can’t undo it. As a free app it has some ads, which is fine, but if you touch them it will naturally take you out of the app. So the kids will do that from time to time, and then you’ll need to close the Safari window and go back to the app. The app should be smart enough to know if it’s in Airplane mode and that the ads won’t work.

All in all this app is worth about 20 minutes of blissful silence per child on an airplane ride, so its worth is approximately $25. At the price of free, it’s a total steal.

Doodle Buddy, by Pinger, Inc. App Store Link
Also available with a holiday theme for $0.99
Resolved: To never write another check
→ Zeigen | 3 Jan 2010 | 12:17am GMT

I will never write another check again.

Any company or service provider who needs to be paid anything regularly can be set up for automatic billing through my bank or through their billing system. My bank will write the check for me, if need be — whether it’s for my gardener or the daycare my kids go to or what-have-you.

Anyone else who needs money can take cash or paypal or a bank transfer.

Checks had a good run (2100 years or so, if this article is to be believed), but I will no longer be a part of perpetuating this dead end of financial technology.

Why? My handwriting sucks. I hate having to wait for them to clear. I hate having to manually classify them in financial programs. I don’t want to have to carry around a checkbook. And who wants to pay other people?

I will still accept them. Begrudgingly. For now.
We ate up there
→ Zeigen | 2 Jan 2010 | 6:36am GMT

There’s a maxim my dad told me when I was a kid, after dragging us into some tourist trap of a restaurant by some beach somewhere: “The better the view, the worse the food.”

There’s another rule of thumb engineers talk about also: “Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.” (Meaning you can’t have everything — there’s always a compromise that has to be made with either the schedule, the budget, or the quality.)

Well, the Sky City restaurant rotates at the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, where we ate this evening. It seems to defy both rules: The view is truly magnificent yet the food was good too. I had the clam chowder followed by Dungeness crab mac and cheese, and it was sublime. The other entrees chosen by our group (my wife and my sister-in-law, plus my two kids) all seemed delicious as well, if not especially gourmet. Kimi’s crab cakes were perfect, and Tomi’s French toast with espresso creme was wonderful.

As for that second maxim: The food was good, but it wasn’t fast or cheap. The speed didn’t bother us — more time to enjoy the view. We were planning on riding up to the top of the needle regardless, and since no restaurants were open nearby on New Year’s Day, it seemed prudent to eat there.

The maxim I will pass onto my kids is this: “The better the view, the more you’ll pay for it.”

Great treat to start the new year, though! Happy New Year, Zeigen.com readers. (Both of you.)
A Thing You Can’t Do Anymore
→ The Fever Of Phineas | 1 Dec 2009 | 9:03pm GMT

Here’s a thing you can’t do any more. Given a printed form, you used to be able to feed it into your typewriter and type the form data. You can’t do that any more. Today, if your doctor’s office hands you a printed form to fill out, you have no choice but to fill it out by hand. Arguably, you shouldn’t have to do this any more. This data entry could be done electronically. But nevertheless, printed forms are still around. Presumably some clerk or intern at the office now has to take your handwritten form and enter it into the computer. It would obviously be easier on them if they could actually read the data. In the case of my handwriting, they’d be lucky to get half of it right.

So really, I think it’s fair to say, this is a capability we’ve actually degraded as the result of new technology. I’m not talking about sentimental loss. I’m saying a bit of functionality that used to be a little better has actually gotten a little worse.
Web Analytics influencing Wireframes and Information Architecture
→ Extra! Extra! | 3 Nov 2009 | 3:38pm GMT

A lot of focus is put on using web analytics data to make incremental improvements in site performance. But as audiences, brands, products, and technologies change – sometimes a site needs a complete redesign. When it’s time for a complete site overhaul, it’s important to dive deep into the web analytics for the site early in the process.

Data and insight derived from web analytics should be a key driving force in the creation of wireframes, information architecture, and usability testing. The following is a partial list of bits of data that help User Experience experts make informed decisions, when creating the layout for a new site that will more effectively achieve the intended goals:
- Navigation Preferences: By categorizing your navigation types into groups such as drop-down menus, primary navigation, content navigation, quick-links, content links, text links, graphic/button links, flash/media links, etc you can start to see how visitors prefer to navigate across the site. This becomes more exciting when you are able to compare these numbers with the navigation preferences of other sites.
- Visitor Tasks: Content popularity and/or click-paths are essentially the visitor showing you what tasks they are performing successfully (conversion) or unsuccessfully (abandonment).
- Vocabulary / Nomenclature / Taxonomy: The visitors are telling you how they describe and categorize their needs in 3 important ways. First, the choice of words and phrases they use on public search engines such as Google. Second, their choice of words and phrases on your site search engine (i.e. Endeca). Thirdly, they are exposing what words make them click within the navigation and content in the site (as well as what words they don’t click on).
- User Research: Often overlooked is the data that tells us what company the visitor is at when navigating the site as well as demographic information such as if they are using an expensive ISP or a more practical one. Their technical aptitude can be loosely derived from their connection speed, browser, operating system, and plug-in preferences. The language, region, country, state, and county of your visitors also helps in defining web marketing strategies.
- Conformity / Variance: Analyzing the deviation in variables such as visitation (frequency / latency), click-through-ratios, and search trends shows degrees of loyalty and dependencies within your visitors during a sales cycle/product research.
Generating a report of these variables and more helps the entire team review and evolve site layouts more intelligently. Often in projects we find that if the wireframes and information architecture are data-driven, the revision of designs becomes an informed process rather than one of personal preferences.

Prioritizing Marketing Budgets - When Conversion is Not an option for analysis.
→ Extra! Extra! | 21 Sep 2009 | 5:37pm GMT

Many of our clients ask us how to justify larger web marketing budgets to their executives. One of the obvious places to start is an ROI analysis or a cost/benefit analysis. If there is no straight forward conversion event (i.e. Lead Generation or eCommerce), it can be difficult to measure how effective web marketing is. In some cases, web budgets need to be analyzed as a cost of doing business.

Marketing budgets are often divided up into channels/segments such as events, print, mail, television, radio, etc. The sales team, often operating on a separate budget, actually spends budget on some channels with the same goals as marketing - such as inside sales.

When analyzing how the marketing budgets should grow (or shrink) an organization should analyze how the different channels stack up against each other for common variables.

For example, as a touch-point (impression), ask your team to quantify how often each channel serves as a touch-point for potential and current customers.

Average Touch-Points (Impressions) / Month
	Potential Customers	Current Customers	Total
Events	4,700	9,400	14,100
Website	28,750	19,950	48,700
* Print Adv	4,825	4,825	9,650
Email	22,490	25,785	48,275
Mailers	5,750	4,980	10,730
Inside Sales	4,250	2,370	6,620
**TOTAL	70,765	67,310	138,075
* Because there is no data on users, this is split evenly
** There are likely a high degree of redundant users

Another example would be to put a cost to each impression. Take the total budget per channel and divide it by the number of touch-points (impressions).

Average Touch-Points (Impressions) / Month
	Budget	Touch-Points	CPI
Events	$29,890	14,100	$2.12
Website	$28,590	48,700	$0.59
Print Adv	$37,450	9,650	$3.88
Email	$56,475	48,275	$1.17
Mailers	$49,750	10,730	$4.64
Inside Sales	$27,250	6,620	$4.12
TOTAL	$229,405	138,075	$2.75

From these numbers, as a channel for interaction with potential and current customers, the website and email are the most cost effective. Adding conversion rates to this table may paint a different picture. Analyzing budgets in this fashion shows that online channels are more cost effective at interacting with potential and current customers.

Martinis
→ The Fever Of Phineas | 30 Aug 2009 | 4:47pm GMT

Martinis last night.

Why martinis? Could it be Mad Men fever? Actually, it was because of Julie and Julia. They were drinking Martinis in just about every scene. So after the movie, Julie and I (the real Julie) went to CostPlus to obtain the paraphrenelia. Then we went to Safeway to obtain the hooch. Then we came home. I looked up the recipe for Martinis. It’s not too hard, as it turns out. Couple cubes of ice, a bunch of dry gin, a splish of dry vermouth, and shake. I was unable to achieve the full on sexy shake, but nevertheless. Soon we were drinking home-shaken, dry Martinis.

They were OK. I prefer beer.

The only other time I ever drank a Martini? Saudi Arabia, 1989. Things were just peachy in the Gulf before the Gulf War, let me tell you. I was teaching English to Saudi naval cadets. Saudi is as dry a country as they come, hoochwise, as everybody knows. But at the Dharan airbase the U.S. military maintains a tiny bit of sovereignty, sort of a diplomatic briefcase but bigger. And inside that briefcase, you can drink. If you can get in. We got in. To the Officer’s club. So we’re in this semi-swanky space, drinking real drinks (not the homemade beer we drank back in our teacher’s quarters). Everyone was having Martinis, so what the heck, sure, I’d have a Martini. So guess who else was there having Martinis? Norm Schwartzkopf. The US had recently invaded Panama, so my buddy James, who was bold about this sort of thing, talking to generals about classified military operations and such, engaged Mr. Schwartzkopf about it. Norm, I’ll call him Norm from now on since it’s easier to spell, Norm’s a pretty intense character. Especially armed with a Martini. Norm and James went at it a bit, not arguing, but Norm obviously proud and conscious of his power to impress, inhibited by the classified aspects of the story, James trying to get him to spill. Since none of you know James, unless you do, go ahead and picture James Woods, circa Salvador. All politics aside, if you’re going to have a Gulf War, I guess Norm was the guy you’d want to be your general. And if you want someone to needle him about it, James was your man.

Anyhoo, that’s my Martini story. I hope not to have very many more like it.
Not Homer, Not Marge
→ The Fever Of Phineas | 16 Aug 2009 | 6:25pm GMT

You’ll have to take my word for it, but I drew these cartoon characters before I ever saw the Simpsons.

Not Homer, Not Marge

The Simpsons first appeared on the Tracy Ullman Show in 1987, which I definitely did see. But I drew and conceived of these characters in college prior to that, more like 84/85/86. Can’t prove it, but it’s true.
Data Driven Globalization: Using Pilots to Determine Priorities for Localization.
→ Extra! Extra! | 12 Aug 2009 | 8:41pm GMT

Marketers love the opportunity that the web offers to promote a product or service to a global audience. But when the costs of translating/localizing content, integrating a Web Content Management that supports localization, implementing localized SEO/PPC initiatives, and maintaining sites in multiple languages get added up – the value of localized sites gets questioned. Companies which have products and services that can be marketed to a global audience often let their websites follow their sales teams into new regions. That is, the sales teams start to sell a product into a specific region and when the sales team is able to show a fertile market, the marketing team localizes a web presence to support the sales reps.

But what if the product/service is marketable to a global audience and the company cannot afford to send a sales team to every major country/region where demand may reside? How does a marketer decide which regions to make investments for global growth? Knowing that some regions are more expensive to localize for and some regions are more competitive than others when it comes to SEO/PPC initiatives, how does a marketer weigh the cost against the opportunity?

The answer should be simple:
1. Use global keyphrase research tools to see if customers in various regions are searching for your product or service on the web. It’s typically OK to make the assumption that if there are surfers using relevant keyphrases to find your services, that customers are out there.
2. For the regions that have online audiences for your product, pilot as many micro-sites (2-5 pages) as possible with small campaigns for driving traffic and see which sites demonstrate growth. Translating a few pages and posting them as static pages is significantly less costly than fully building and deploying integrated/localized web sites.
3. While the pilots are running, monitor site analytics to see if your micro-sites are attracting the traffic you expect and if the sites are able to convert traffic at acceptable conversion rates (i.e. Lead Generation).
The pilots will cost significantly less than full-blown web sites and will allow you determine which regions have more opportunity for growth giving your team a prioritized list of regions to localize into. Remember that these sites will require maintenance overtime as you are budgeting a pilot and full blown localized sites.
Hetch Hetchy thoughts
→ The Fever Of Phineas | 11 Aug 2009 | 12:56am GMT

One slightly negative thing about my Lyell Canyon hike: One person that I had spammed to ask for support for my “Restore Hetch Hetchy” pledge hike decided to reply to that by being a dick. A dick is not someone who declines to support, or even who disagrees with the goal. A dick in this case is someone who decides to pick a fight with me about it, imply that I’m uninformed (but he of course knows everything), that I am trying to “destroy” the water supply, that my position is “crapola”, etc. I mean it was totally unnecessarily aggressive and insulting. Compounded by the fact that it’s a “family” person (not my family, but an in-law) so he created this new awkwardness. He ends his email with “Please do not bother me with this crapola again” yet sent me a second email along the lines of “and another thing…” So I spent a good deal of time on my hike last week mentally arguing with this guy. That was both negative but had its value. I guess if I’m going to do an activist thing (doing this pledge hike) I need to be prepared for challenges and questions. So working it out in my head helped me clarify my position with regard to Hetch.

His basic objection was that Hetch Hetchy reservoir is a major (but not the only) source of water for the city of San Francisco and if the dam (which is in dire need of earthquake proofing upgrades) were to be destroyed by an earthquake, it would be catastrophic, disrupting the water supply at a time of drought, etc.

Well of course. The objective of restoring Hetch Hetchy is NOT about “destroying” anything, or allowing the dam to deteriorate. It is about revisiting the problem. The problem the turn of the century engineers and policitcians were trying to solve was: “How can we provide water for the current and fast growing population?” They solved that problem with the dam. But we in the 21st century are trying to solve a new problem: “How can we provide water for the current population, allowing for a reasonable degree of growth, in a sustainable manner with low impact on fragile eco-systems?” That problem was not at all solved by damming Hetch Hetchy, nor would it be solved by damming Yosemite valley, or all the valleys of the high sierras. We are trying to solve a new problem with new values and new technology. We need not be beholden to bad decisions made a hundred years ago by engineers and politicians long dead. The fact that the reservoir is currently in use is merely a variable in the equation, not a reason to accept the status quo.

So to be clear, my position is that it is possible and desirable to restore Hetch Hetchy valley while not disrupting the water supply to the users downstream. That is also the position of the Restore Hetch Hetchy organization which I am attempting to raise money for. No one anywhere is lobbying to stick it to the city of San Francisco. No one favors allowing the dam to deteriorate.

The only reasonable questions that can be argued over are:
1. Can it be done, from an engineering perspective?
2. How much will it cost, really?
3. Is it worth it?
To question 1, I believe the answer is of course. If we can dam water upstream, we can also move water to a downstream reservoir. No question about it really.

To question 2 — well there’s a lot of numbers to argue over I suppose. But when you factor in real, meaningful water conservation efforts, the cost of upgrading the current dam, and other number crunching one could do, I believe a realistic number could be arrived at (FAQ says $1-3 billion).

To question 3, well, this is a value judgment. My feeling is that reasonable, sustainable growth is better than uncontrolled growth, that low impact environmental solutions are better than high impact ones. I believe the valley is a precious and very special resource that was destroyed by short sighted minds and is worth restoring. I can’t argue with a person who does not share those values.

But please be assured, the goal to restore Hetch Hetchy is a proposal to embark on a civil engineering project that solves 21st century problems with 21st century values and solutions, NOT an attempt to protect a spotted owl at the expense of jobs. If anything, a large civil engineering project like this could be viewed as a very timely stimulus which would create jobs.

So whenever my dick in-law tries to engage me again, I’ll be ready for him.

If you share my concerns about this cause, or if you merely want to stick it to the dicks of this world consider donating to my pledge drive.
Lylle Canyon Hike
→ The Fever Of Phineas | 11 Aug 2009 | 12:16am GMT

We’re back at sea level — the air is so thick and balmy compared with 10000 ft! Terry and I hiked 10 miles into Lyell Canyon (basically to the end of the meadowy part halfway up the switchbacks to Donohue Pass). So it was basically about 25mile hike in total, including a day hike on day 2.

This was a pretty easy hike — mostly flat (although we gained 1000′ feet from Tuolumne Meadows to the pass area). It was unseasonably cool — we were warned about a snow storm. It definitely was freezing overnight and did snow lightly, but no accumulation in our area. This was a pretty spontaneously planned hike. Terry just happened to be in town and I snagged some days off. Most of his gear is at my house, but he was a little under-equipped for cold weather.

Anyway, we lit out early Wednesday morning, arrived to get our permits at the ranger station around 9, and after gathering some last minute supplies (warm clothes for Terry and some lunch) we were finally on the trail around 1:30. We hiked in about 6 miles to a point beyond Ireland Creek where we had never been before. It’s always fun to explore virgin terrirory. We found a really excellent site — flat, soft earth, plety of trees for our hammocks (Terry’s tent is a hammock dealy. I have a simple hammock for resting during the day but my tent is a single person tent on the ground.) Close to the Lyell Fork for water, a pretty little falls. Previous campers left some little presents for us — a copy of the novel All Tomorrow’s Parties to use as kindling, some sunblock and a handkerchief.

There seemed to be tons of pack trains on this trail — this is a segment of the John Muir Trail and most hikers are going much farther than we did. Lots of groups were hikers plus horses plus mules. We also saw one Llama train! That was cool. Two hikers leading around four or five llamas. They did not carry as much load as the mules did but they were really beautiful and exotic.

On day two, Thursday morning, it was snowing. We had some hot coffee and Ramen noodles for breakfast, then head down the trail for a day hike. We passed more pack trains and chatted with hikers. One British dude we met was 6 days into a 4 week hike of the full JMT — which culminates with a hike up to the summit of Mt. Whitney. He’s out there now, presumably, so do raise a pint for him. He bid us “Cheerio!” which struck us as archaic, although I greeted him with a “Howdy” so…

We hiked up the switchbacks at the end of the meadow — it really isn’t Yosemite unless you do switchbacks, according to Terry anyway. Got more views of the pass and the meadows we had just come from. But it was a little too cold to linger too long. We hiked back down to camp, lit a nice fire and mixed ourselves some High Sierra Margaritas: water + instant lemonade + tequila + snow.

Friday morning we lingered at the site. The sun threatened to emerge but basically it was still cloudy and windy and cool for the hike out. We drove to Oakdale for our traditional Mountain Mike’s post hike pizza and it was a wrap.

In terms of wildlife, we saw: mama deers with their fawns, a garter snake (first non-poisonous snake we’ve seen in Yose), horses, mules, llamas. No bears, so our success rate for this area dropped from %100 to %66.666. But that’s OK, especially since we saw something rarer. It was either an American Marten or a Fisher. We had stopped on our hike out at Rafferty Creek by a bridge. Right as I was ditching my pack, I saw across the stream an animal that scurried across the rock and stoop and looked at me. I said to Terry, “That’s a huge marmot!” Then the creature slinked away and as it did so I noticed it had a more elongated shape than a marmot. It had similar coloring — a brownish coat with a light colored chest. But the behavior was not at all marmot like — a marmot would have come right up to us to steal our food. Also I have never seen a marmot at this elevation (around 8800′) — they usually appear higher than that and in more rocky terrain. This was woodland. The elongated shape and size were the main giveaways. I came home and wikipediaed the thing and basically narrowed it down to Marten ro Fisher. It looked more like a marten but the size was more like the fisher. So cool, I saw my first new mammal, and a hunter as opposed to a scavenger.

That was a real highlight. Also the lack of mosquitoes or bugs due to the cold weather. Virgin territory, new animals, no skeeters, and snow added up to a really pleasant, highly successful hike. Also cool is that this canyon is a fork of the Tuolumne River, so I essentially hiked all the way to the very headwaters of the source of the water that is eventually captured in the Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Next month when I do my “Restore Hetch Hetchy” hike, I’ll connect up by hiking from Tuolumne Meadows down to the reservoir. So that means I’ll have walked the length of the watershed.
My Life in Photography
→ Life Less Literary | 22 Jul 2009 | 10:03pm GMT

A while ago, Theo Simpson interviewed me about my photography, for a project he was doing. I just stumbled upon the interview, while cleaning up my hard disk, so here it is:

How did you first begin interest in photography?

In childhood – my dad gave me a Kodak Brownie when I was 4 and we developed & printed the photos together.

Have you had any formal training in photography?

I took a photography O-Level when I was 17 in 1986, and did a week’s photojournalism course in 2006, but am mostly self-taught.

What kind of photographer would you say you are?

Always hard to categorise, but I think the term “documentary photographer” more-or-less covers it.

Is there any particular photography you prefer?

Photographs of people, photographs at night… but to be honest most types of photography interests me.

How did you start working commercially?

I was approached by the Mail on Sunday to buy a photo I had taken. Most of my commercial work has been through approaches from others, but this is because I don’t make most of my living from photography and still often feel uncomfortable about promoting myself as a photographer.

Did you start working alone?

Yes, I always work alone.

What steps did you make to set up a company/business? Or did you test the waters so the speak first?

See above – I haven’t gone very far in this direction. I already have a company, specialising mainly in website development, so have used this to manage the commercial side of my photography, but I’ve never formalised my commercial work.

What are the pressures you have found working commercially?

There is a great pressure to perform and get everything right, although this mostly comes from myself. Also I suppose keeping the business side of things organised: keeping notes of expenses, insurance, tax etc.

What kind of portfolio do you have?

I have a self-produced book, as well as a website which is very out-of-date and not very representative of my work. I also have a large, rather chaotic but regularly updated Flickr account.

How do you get people to see it?

Various ways – I give out copies of my book to people who may be commissioning photography. But mostly I tag my photos extensively on Flickr and ensure that my website has good, descriptive and relevant text, plus plenty of links, so that search engines will rank it highly.

Has your website been a part of your commercial success?

Yes, my own website and my Flickr portfolio have probably been the main source of business for me – although I don’t think this would be sustainable if photography were my main business.

How much competition is there?

There is a lot of competition, although a lot of it is not great quality.

What do you do to advertise yourself?

I have done some online advertising, e.g. using Google Adwords and Bidvertiser, but mostly I just use Search Engine Optimisation techniques to make my photographs easy to find online.

What makes your work stand out from other people?

I like to think I have a fairly well developed personal style – this is not necessarily something I’ve planned, rather something I can’t help. I don’t like covering the same ground that people have already covered, so I am always looking for different approaches to a project, and I think this helps my work to stand out.

Do you advertise?

See above – I have done a small amount of advertising in the past, but don’t at the moment.

How much creative input are you allowed when working for certain clients?

I’ve usually been allowed a fairly good degree of creative freedom. I’ve come to realise that my photography doesn’t always fit easily within rigid guidelines, so I would be unlikely to accept any future commissions without a great degree of creative freedom.

How much free time do you have for yourself to work on other photography projects?

Not a great deal, but I squeeze in whatever I can.

What advice would you give to someone starting working commercially?

I’m not sure that I’m best placed, but I would say try to stay true to yourself while always pushing yourself in new directions. Don’t write anything off out of hand – learning can come from the most unexpected directions.

How do you maintain your client base?

I don’t really have one

What equipment do you use?

Camera bodies: Canon EOS 40D and 20D.
Lenses: 16-35mm f/2.8
24mm f/1.4
50mm f/1.4
70-200mm f/2.8 IS
Flash: Canon 480 EXII
Tripod: Manfrotto

What computer software do you use?

Mainly Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Also occasionally Adobe Photoshop.

How do you back your work up?

External hard disk.

How do most clients want the work presenting to them?

Initially by web gallery. Then prints, photobooks or high-res files.

How are you equipped for that?

I use Lightroom to produce quick web galleries, and produce other formats as required.

How is your client base spread?

Most of my clients have been in Sheffield, with a few in London.

How far do you travel to get work?

Usually not far, but will travel all over the country for the right job. Furthest so far has been to Glasgow.

In a situation where you might feel technically challenged, what steps do you take to make sure the job is carried out properly, for example in unusual lighting conditions?

Experiment with conditions, check details of photos (and download to computer if possible), take as many photographs as possible, using different settings/lighting.

What do you do if you make a mistake?

Keep going and try to learn from it!

What photographers have influenced your current work?

So many… but particularly Garry Winogrand, Brian Griffin, Terry O’Neill.

Is Sheffield a good place to set-up a business?

Hmm… not sure!

Do you maintain copyright on all your work?

Yes.

Do you arrange royalties and rights before you do a job?

Generally.

Do you ever work for free?

Yes, depending on the client and the job.

What are the most important aspects to working commercially?

I am lucky in that I don’t need to make most of my money from photography, so for me the most important aspects are the opportunity to learn & to take interesting photos.

How do you take yourself forward?

In fits and starts, but usually through intense bouts of taking photos & contemplating photos.

What are your plans for the future

Watch this space!
Desert Island Disco
→ Life Less Literary | 22 Jul 2009 | 12:45am GMT

A few weeks ago, Cherry Red Promotions very kindly asked me to play my Desert Island Discs at their monthly Desert Island Disco at The Shakespeare in Sheffield. Here are the tracks I picked, in the order in which I played ‘em. Lizzie also produced a little booklet, handed out on the night, and the following descriptions appeared in it:

1: The Lake of Puppies - Largelife
I got married to this song! “To have and to hold, the stuff in my hands, and if my hands are small, all that I hold must be even smaller…. Be it a large or a small world, nothing is larger than life.”

2: Cardiacs – Manhoo
Cardiacs are the one constant in my life: I could have filled this entire list with their songs. Manhoo is perfect pop, something the Beatles would have written if they’d still been on-form in the mid-90s. I like to think of it as the final word on all the Blur/Oasis nonsense going on at the time.

3: Material – Disappearing
As a student bass player, I had four heroes: first Lemmy, then JJ Burnel, Chris Squire, and finally Bill Laswell. Laswell introduced me to a world of music I had no idea existed (after 20 consecutive listens to Last Exit’s Noise of Trouble, I suddenly “got” free noise). He made me realise I didn’t need heroes any more. This is one of his funkiest tracks, which also introduced me to the sax of Henry Threadgill and guitar of Sonny Sharrock, both of whom also deserve to be on my desert island.

4: The Fuzztones – 1-2-5
Makes me feel like a teenager again.

5: Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society - When We Return
A beautiful, mysterious beginning and ending, joined by the most insane-yet-somehow-logical magical manic middle mess. The world’s greatest drummer keeps time while Vernon Reid rocks his fucking socks off. If I could just keep one of the eight, it would be this.

6: Claude Debussy - Claire de Lune
It feels like these five minutes describe an entire lifetime: from the first tentative movements of a baby, through increasing confidence and experience, to a noble, wise and peaceful death. When you bury me, please do it to this piano piece.

7: Caspar Brötzmann Massaker - Tribe
…and when I come back as a zombie, I’d like to hear this pumping out at a few hundred decibels. Immense! Terrifying! German!

8: Ooberman - Blossoms Falling (accoustic version)
Sunday morning lie-ins. True love. Warm, fuzzy perfection. Love you Gill!

Book:Viriconium Nights by M John Harrison
Reading this, during a lost-weekend in Amsterdam, changed my life. Made me realise stories don’t need endings, fantasies aren’t real, and some people waste a lifetime trying to get to the other side of the looking-glass. I think I grew up that weekend. This book contains nothing but language and imagery; but I could lose myself forever in it.

Luxury: an oojamaflip
One thing I’m forever searching for, so I probably ought to have one handy on my desert island.

Of course, eight records is never enough. I brought a few extra, in the hope that there’d be some spare time at the end, and indeed there was - I managed to slip a while side of the Cramps’ Off The Bone in. But what really limited me was not being able to play many very long tracks. Here’s a couple which have just as much right to be included as the other eight:

9: Henry Threadgill’s Very Very Circus - Hope A Hope A
One of the most sublime orchestrations ever created - who else but Henry Threadgill would replace the bass with two tubas, and back up battling electric guitars with a trombone and a french horn. I saw this live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with my friend Ed: probably the best gig I’ve ever been to.

10: Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring
When I was around 19, I decided to “get into” classical music. So I picked a CD at random from my Dad’s collection. Boy, was I surprised. It knocked me off my feet, punkier than the punkiest punk I’d ever heard. It was The Rite of Spring, performed by the New York Philharmonic (still the most violent version of this music I’ve ever heard - and I’ve heard many). However, for my desert island I think I’d pick Fazil Say’s four-handed piano version: surprisingly, just as rich and dischordant as the orchestral version, at times more so.

Finally, one of the other desert islanders picked a Blur track for his list, and explained that he’d listened almost exclusively to classical music until Blur awakened him to the possibilities of popular music. I hadn’t though about this beforehand, but Blur did something very similar for me: from around 1990 to 1995, I listened only to jazz, improvised music and other forms of avant-garde noiseism. I considered myself above crass pop songs. Then by chance I saw a Blur video, Sunday Sunday, on a late night TV show, and I was surprised by the intelligence and beauty of it. From then on, I never looked down on pop music, and my tasted expanded to include a bit of everything. So I really owe a place in this list to Blur, and of all their tracks I think the one I’d pick is the oh-so-beautiful Tender.

Postscript: I’m loving the SEO Smart Links Wordpress plugin, if only because its automatically-generated links remind me of stuff I wrote ages ago and have forgotten. Case in point: Check out the “Henry Threadgill” and “When We Return” links above.
Treacle Song, Radio 3
→ Life Less Literary | 1 Jul 2009 | 12:06am GMT

Her voice, singing,
Baked in a land of brown, black and purple.
Light, milk coffee clouds;
Dark, cook chocolate shadows;
Sparkle Stabs of Sugared Violet.

Ohne Zucker Bitte.
Kein Kandis.
Live at Fetico Gallery, Chicago 2001: Mixed Beats
→ CraqueCast | 15 Jun 2009 | 10:00pm GMT
Part 3 of 3: A gallery show in Chicago where I was accompanied by dancers being painted with flourescent paint and performing under blacklight with similarly coloured plexiglass panes hung from the ceiling.
Live at Fetico Gallery, Chicago 2001: Dubnbud (Live Extended Version)
→ CraqueCast | 15 Jun 2009 | 9:00pm GMT
Part 2 of 3: A gallery show in Chicago where I was accompanied by dancers being painted with flourescent paint and performing under blacklight with similarly coloured plexiglass panes hung from the ceiling.
Live at Fetico Gallery, Chicago 2001: Opening Improvisation
→ CraqueCast | 15 Jun 2009 | 8:00pm GMT
Part 1 of 3: A gallery show in Chicago where I was accompanied by dancers being painted with flourescent paint and performing under blacklight with similarly coloured plexiglass panes hung from the ceiling.
Books that Changed My Life
→ Life Less Literary | 31 May 2009 | 11:36am GMT

A meme’s been doing the rounds on Facebook. Instructions are as follows:

Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

I did that… but then wanted to offer more explanation of why these books are so special to me, and why you should probably read them as well. And so, I spent far too long writing up 16 potted book-reviews (After posting the original 15, I remembered one other which absolutely had to be on the list). Here they are (in no particular order), complete with links to Amazon via my associate account, so that you can buy them and earn me a few coppers if you like the sound of any of the books here (if anyone knows of a good alternative to Amazon for a very low-volume affiliate account, please let me know).
1. Viriconium Nights, M John Harrison. I read this aged 17. At the time, I read only fantasy/sci-fi (which I thought this was). It is, in fact, anti-fantasy: all of its short stories seem to finish unresolved; no quest is ever completed satisfactorily. Suddenly I understood: this is what life is like; there is no beginning, middle and happy end. Despite this, the writing is so beautiful, the choice of words so unconventional and vivid, the stories can be enjoyed for those reasons alone. Reading this book taught me that sometimes it’s all about the journey, not the goal. I realised the fallacy of fantasy, and have never really bothered with it since. This one book completely changed my reading habits.
2. Pastoralia, George Saunders. Probably the funniest, but also the saddest book I’ve ever read. Again short stories, they are a perfect exaggerated satire of life in the corporatised early 21st century (just as Gogol nails the early 19th century and Kafka the 20th). Saunders started, and has continued, in the same vein, but this his 2nd book is the peak of his originality & brilliance.
3. All Quiet on the Orient Express, Magnus Mills. Like Pastoralia, warped sad, funny, chilling satire, and also a 2nd book which I prefer to the (more critically acclaimed) 1st, or subsequent ones. A young man camps in the Lake District, and takes on some farm work to subsidise a planned motorbike trip to the Orient. The atmosphere is very similar to League of Gentlemen. But nothing happens. Ever (except for one shocking, terrifying incident). But it "doesn’t happen" in such a way that makes this book the most compelling of page-turners. Surely, any moment now, something will happen! I read this for a book club once, and one of the other members said "how could anyone identify with this book? The hero is so spineless, nobody could be like that in real life." I identify 100% with the hero, I could be just that spineless, and I can appreciate that a story this unlikely could all too easily just happen. (I should also add that the original, Ladybird-style cover for this book is gorgeous. Sadly they’ve reprinted it in something generic and instantly forgettable).
4. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Angela Carter. Angela Carter writes like an angel on acid, and nowhere is her writing more trippy than in this book. It’s a story of a young man from a ministry in an unspecified city in an era which seems to hover unobtrusively somewhere between medieval times and the 21st century. The city is under siege from Doctor Hoffman and his hallucination engine, so that nothing is ever what it appears to be. Carter can use language like absolutely no-one else I’ve ever come across. I’ve never experienced synesthesia except while reading her books. She can put one word unobtrusively alongside another in such a way that you can actually smell what she’s talking about, even though that smell is contaned in neither of the two words. Nearly 20 years after I read this book, I can stll remember its exact taste (and still don’t understand why it’s persistently out-of-print).
5. Geek Love, Katherine Dunn. Again (like Carter) there is a smell, feel, taste which I associate with this novel. Without meaning to sound sexist, it sems that female authors often have a more sensory way of writing than men (although Harrison sometimes comes close). The story of an American family of circus freaks, deliberately and lovingly mutilated during gestation through a variety of bizarre and sickening practices. It’s an extremely beautiful, extremely moving study of the bonds and dependencies which arise within a group who are alone within society.
6. Gödel, Escher, Bach - an eternal golden braid, Douglas Hofstadter. This was on my 3rd year psychology BSc reading list, for a course in Cognitive Ethology taught by Dr. Susan Blackmore. The book (and the course) changed my life completely: showed me all kinds of metaphors for how human consciousness may operate, and banished the need for any kind of "magic spark" from explanations of consciousness.
7. The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins. Part of the same Susan Blackmore-led module as Gödel, Escher, Bach, this book did the same for my understanding evolution.
8. Songlines, Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin’s brand of half travel-writing half musing and philosophising is, in my experience, quite unique and quite magical. This is the story of his trip to Aboriginal communities around Australia, but it is also the story of the human race. He builds up a theory, that humans are natural nomads who draw their energy and inspiration from the rhythms of walking, and who have lost much of their spirit by being coralled into permanent residencies. It’s very convincingly argued, and another example of a book which changed my opinion of what it is to be human.
9. The Engineer of Human Souls, Josef Skvorecky. I read this during my first two weeks apart from Gill - she was in Egypt while I was buried under a duvet in a squat in Leytonstone. It still conjures up memory of the magic of our young love mixed with the melancholia of separation. The story follows hero Danny (a not-even-thinly disguised version of Skvorecky) during two periods in his life. He is an aging Czech literature professor in a University in Canada, lusting after his young students, but his mind wanders back to his forced-employment and ultimately meaningless sabotage in the Messerschmidt factory in WWII rural Czechoslovakia, lusting after his tuberculosis-stricken co-worker. The novel is divided up according to the authors Danny is teaching at the time - Poe, Hawthorne, Twain. It’s incredibly complex, and I’m sure there is much here which I don’t quite "get", but its melancholy synthesis of youthful uncertainty/optimism and aged wisdom/cynicism really, really buries its way deep inside my heart.
10. The Photographer’s Eye, John Szarkowski. Szarkowski is my favourite writer on photography (though I’ve long meant to read Geoff Dyer, who is by all accounts a genius on the topic. Sontag and Barthes I’ve struggled with but not yet engaged with). Although this is mainly a (very good) photobook, with an all-encompassing survey of photography at the time of the accompanying exhibition (1964), what most insprires me is the accompany essay and the way the book is structured: split into 5 aspects the photographer must tackle (even if subconsciously) when making a photograph: the thing itself, the detail, the frame, time, and vantage point. His explanation of these 5 is so clear and succint that even a child could read it and instantly become a master of photographic critique. It also articulates (again quite perfectly) what it is that makes photography different from other art forms (it’s all in the frame - quite literally).
11. Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut. Extremely clever, extremely moving, extremely thought-provoking. An example of the kind of sci-fi which I still find quite acceptible, post-Viriconium. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. While captured during World War II, Billy is abducted by aliens who live simultaneously in all times, and he begins to see reality as they do, jumping from one point in his life to another, via old age, the death of his wife, the marriage of his daughter, a WWII bombing raid in reverse where aeroplanes mercifully suck fire & destruction out of a German city, to the finale in a fire-bombed slaughterhouse in Dreseden. One of the most powerful anti-war (but not anti-glacier) books ever, and a constant reminder that every single death is important, yet unavoidable. So it goes.
12. Exquisite Corpse, Robert Irwin. Robert Irwin is one of the most intelligent, yet one of the most easily readable, authors I know of. This is a fictionalised autobiography of an English surrealist painter, which tells the history of the surrealist movement from the 30s to the 60s. Again, I find myself drawn to the WWII period, where surrealism was unnecessary with "a white horse galloping around inside a burning meat market… a girl in a blue dress emerging with her skipping rope from clouds of black smoke and skipping calmly by… facades of buildings curving and distending like the sets of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari… staircases which led nowhere, baths suspended apparently in mid-air, brick waterfalls flowing out of doorways and objects jumbled incongruously together". The novel also has one of the most audacious twists of any novel I have ever read, truly worthy of a surrealist. Read more of my thoughts on Exquisite Corpse here.
13. The Good Soldier Švejk, Jaroslav Hašek. I was made aware of this (and also the excellent War with the Newts by Karel Čapek) through frequent references in the work of Josef Skvorecky. I usually struggle with books more than about 50 years old, but this one proved to me that during the First World War there was at least one author who shared a sense of humour with the writers of The Young Ones, Blackadder and The Office. Side-splittingly funny (but sadly uncompleted due to the author’s death), Švejk is the archetypal "little man", who subversively stands up to, and is much cleverer than, those in authority. By obeying their orders to the letter, he brings chaos everywhere he serves. I’m told by various friends that this is one of the absolute classics of Eastern European literature; also that the English language does not contain the range and nuance of swear words required to accurately translate the book.
14. The Tin Drum, Günter Grass. The Tin Drum. An epic novel on the making of modern Germany. Again, it stays with me particularly because of the imagery and unusual incidents: Oskar’s violent birth, the worn-out drums, his father’s fall into the cellar, and (especially) the horse’s head with the eels. I also have a DVD the excellent Oscar-winning film of this (which only covers about the first half of the novel), plus a copy of the book in its original German (Die Blechtrommel, if I remember correctly), which I dream of one-of-these-days reading even though so far I’ve not managed to struggle very far into page two.
15. À Rebours (usually Against Nature in English), Joris-Karl Huysmans. I read this on the recommendation of my friend Caroline Simpson, and am very glad I did. The story of Des Esseintes, a fin de siècle decadent aristrocrat who, having experienced all of life’s supposed pleasures and indulgences, tires of it all and has himself bricked up inside a house (with only a small hatch through which his servants deliver his meals). Like the Magnus Mills book, this sounds like it could be a tedious read, but its limitations are part of what make it quite magical: the attention to detail is as breath-taking as an intricately jewel-encrusted tortoise. The writing is quite dense, and this book taught me that reading is also an activity which can benefit from a "slow movement" approach: I lingered over and savoured every single word, and got a huge reward from doing so.
16. Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban. A post apocalyptic parable written entirely in not-quite-English (I know some people find this kind of thing very hard to read, but I find that if you let the sounds of the morphemes wash over you then within a couple of chapters it all makes sense). I’m told that every single word in the book has at least two meanings (prime among them: Addom, the biblical first man whose splitting caused the nuclear event which created the current state of this Kentish archipelago). Biblical and scientific double-meanings abound, parliament is a ritual carnival carried out by Punch-and-Judy men, and tradition and survival determine everything in this harsh future environment. Absolutely unique, absolutely genius, and once read never, ever forgotten.
I could have added at least another 15 kids books to this - especially the Uncle & Agaton Sax books. And When Little Bear met Great Bear (or was it the other way around), which I’m sure I didn’t dream up, but I have never managed to find listed in any online catalogue or in any of the booksellers in Hay-on-Wye. Anyway, I hope that you enjoy these reviews and that you’re inspired to read some of the books as a result.
Simple process for homepage optimization.
→ Extra! Extra! | 27 May 2009 | 8:07am GMT

During the initial phase of an engagement and during the post launch optimization, we’re always looking for simple methods for improving a sites ability to hit specific goals. Below is a fairly simple process for bringing your users closer to what they are looking for and hopefully gaining a couple conversion points in the process.
1. Start by estimating the value of a conversion event on the website. Let’s use lead generation as our primary goal. If we have an average web lead / converted customer ratio of 4% and our average value of a web customer is $7,500, then the average value of a web lead can be estimated (roughly) at $300.00.
2. Next, in your analytics tool associate the value ($300) with the conversion event (Lead Generation). Most Analytics tools will help you do this if you can associate a dollar value with your conversion event. For our demonstration, we will assume that there is a Thank You (and next steps) page after each lead form. Users that reach the Thank You page are worth an average value of $300. The way to do this in each analytics tool is a little different. For example, if you are using Google Analytics this would be the $Index value.
3. For the next step, log in to your analytics tool and decipher which content is most highly valued to your converted users. Again, this will be different depending on which analytics tool you use. Sticking with our Google Analytics example, go the Reverse Path report see which pages are viewed before conversion events and go to the Top Content report to see the value of those pages.
4. Now you know which content your web leads are looking for and which content is most influential to them!! ! Update the link structure on your homepage by adding prominent links to the most valued content and eliminating links to the least valued (or least visited content).
2 Notes

* First: Be sure to measure your average conversion of the event (lead generation) both before and after the homepage has been optimized.

** Second: Use common sense when optimizing links on the homepage. Some links require context before you put them in front of a user. For example, just because terms and conditions on a home loan application are highly valued and highly visited by customers that convert, doesn’t mean that it is the first page a visitors wants to see on your homepage. Customers looking for home loans may need to see rates first in order to put the terms into context.

If you have questions about how to implement this process, please contact us at 650-212-3900 or info@extractable.com
Fake it
→ The Fever Of Phineas | 25 May 2009 | 3:58pm GMT
Idea for Travel Food Show
→ The Fever Of Phineas | 16 May 2009 | 7:47pm GMT

The best Margarita in Alberta?

The best sushi in Florence?

The best Mexican food in Shanghai?

The best bacon burger in Calcutta?

Best canolli in Rio?

Best falafel in Bangkok?

Take that concept, add one obnoxious anti-social snob and you’ve got yourself a show!
Integrating Google Analytics with Content Management
→ Extra! Extra! | 15 May 2009 | 4:56pm GMT

Over the years we have written several applications that integrate with Google components through open APIs. We’ve used Google maps to show office locations, Google CSE for internal search engines, and even Google Charts to show graphs. Last month, my favorite Google API was launched.

Google Analytics announced an API to their popular analytics service.

The first implementation we are working on ties Google Analytics into a content management system that we are deploying for a client. For many organizations, the CMS is used daily to make updates to the site while the analytics are viewed less frequently. This gives all CMS users the ability to analyze the page(s) they are working.

CMS users will have the ability to know valuable information about the content they are editing, such as:
1. how people get to the page they are working on (entrance, visitors, pageviews)
2. and how many leave after viewing it (bounce, abandonment)
3. are people reading this page (time on page)
4. if the copy they are spending so much time on only gets viewed by 1% of the site audience
Content owners / marketers that are aware of this data will improve overall site performance by being aware of how specific pages impact site goals.

I’m excited about our first implementation of this new, simple channel for getting analytics data in the hands of the web team.

For more information, check out the Google Analytics Developer Docs.
Overheard on the plaza in Santa Fe
→ The Fever Of Phineas | 17 Apr 2009 | 2:06pm GMT

Down the old Santa Fe trail sits La Fonda Hotel.

Old lady: “Oh, look, it’s Jane Fonda’s hotel.”

Old man: “Hanoi Jane? I’m not going in there.”
GIA - World’s Authority on Diamonds, Colored Stones & Pearls
→ Extra! Extra! | 10 Apr 2009 | 11:25pm GMT

The Gemological Institute of America (GIA), the world’s foremost authority on diamonds, colored stones, and pearls recently worked with Extractable to launch their new website www.GIA.edu. The new website was designed with a coherent navigational structure that promotes critical user paths.

The site design and information architecture should increase student applications and stone submissions while driving repeat visitors as they have a more positive online experience with the GIA brand.

If you need a stone evaluated, are interested in a jewelry career, need to buy a ring or learn more about a stone make sure to visit GIA online or visit them in Carlsbad.
Music Re-org
→ The Fever Of Phineas | 31 Mar 2009 | 3:40am GMT

I’m re-organizing my music a little bit. I dropped my “Cowboy of Hope” blog and plan to just drop my tunes here as “Pages”. For now the “Music” tab above gives the playlist with everything. I’ll create a dedicated page for each song with liner notes eventually. Here’s the starter page, for my new song “Mr. Universe“. Again, I’ll add liner notes soon.
Link Building Campaigns
→ Extra! Extra! | 27 Mar 2009 | 6:49pm GMT

One of the most important factors search engines use to rank your website for keyword phrases is analyzing the number of websites and how popular (or important) the websites that are linking to you are (note: I’ll refer to these type of links as “backward links” although other SEO professionals might call them inward links, insite links, etc). Google even patented a link analysis algorithm called Page Rank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) which helps Google determine the ranking of your website on keyword phrases.

Hence, link building should be an integral (and ongoing effort) in any search engine optimization (SEO) program. Where should you look to increase the number and quality of backward links to your website?
- Find industry related blogs; and blog!
- Find and participate in industry related websites and forums.
- Submit your website to free search engine directories like DMOZ.org.
- Build relationships with similar website owners and prove value in having them add a link to your website.
To elaborate on the last point a little more; in Google’s search engine find related websites by using the following search syntax “related:www.yourwebsitehere.com” and identify any websites that might benefit from adding a link to your website. Don’t email or call the website owner blindly. You will need to build a relationship and prove value to the other website owner that creating a link to your website is in their best interests.

Show value! For example, if your websites focuses on listing all the Happy Hour events in the city of San Francisco consider contacting websites like MustSeeSanFranisco.com or SFTravel.com. Who on vacation in San Francisco doesn’t want to have a drink at a local Happy Hour event?

Lastly, don’t forget to “optimize” the hyperlink by including the primary keyword phrase in the actual link. Example: Instead of adding the following text to another website you are getting a link from, “Visit http://www.yourwebsitehere.com/ to see some social events including happy hours in the city” write “Visit our partner to find great happy hours events in San Francisco”

The direct benefits of getting backward links is A) your website will receive more site traffic from visitors clicking through on that backward link and B) search engines will give your website more “weight” when determining where your website should appear on related keyword searches.
Sue Schofield
→ Life Less Literary | 24 Mar 2009 | 7:23am GMT

To celebrate Ada Lovelace day, and the importance of women in technology, I’d like to introduce you to Sue Schofield. Sue is a journalist and author who was writing about hooking computers up to telephone lines when I was still in short trousers. You could, perhaps, call her the mother of the UK Internet (in fact, I just did).

In 1994 she wrote “The UK Internet Book”. And, yes, it was: The UK Internet book. Until then, all our Internet advice had come from Americans who had a rather different Internet infrastructure from the UK (and no need for BT-approved modems). In those days, we had very few ISPs (in fact, there was only one real UK ISP - the fledgeling Demon Internet - although other “online service providers” such as CompuServe offered small windows onto the Internet). Sue’s book was exhaustive, informative (although the section on gopher was wasted on me) and, unlike the books coming out of the USA, it had a wry English sense of humour.

It also came with a voucher offering a month’s free membership of Demon Internet. So I abandoned my CompuServe training wheels and set off into the world of ftp, nntp, smtp, archie and, yes, gopher. Without Sue Schofield, it would have taken me another year or two to get to grips with the Internet. And so she bears some responsibility for the fact that, in 1995, I started working for one of the UK’s fledgeling web agencies, starting a thrilling and eventful career which has led up to my current work on the iPlayer.

By 2002, when I’d all but forgotten the name Sue Schofield, my friend Phil Franks introduced me to “the girl who left those wacky entries on my guestbook about me being Elton John’s dad”. The name on the email headers looked familiar and… it can’t be… it was! I found myself bantering with the very same Sue Schofield who had hooked me up at 14,000 baud all those years earlier. And thus started a three-way email conversation which lasted several years. (In real life and in private emails, Sue’s peculiar brand of gonzo-tech-journalism is even wittier and more beautiful than in print).

So here’s to Sue, tech journalist extraordinaire, 30 years in the industry and still going strong. It’s highly appropriate that she’s writing for The Guardian today, on the subject of women in technology.

While we’re on the subject of women in technology, I’d like to extend the high-fives to two of my colleagues at the BBC who have made, and continue to make, huge contributions to the iPlayer project: Gemma Garmeson and Marina Kalkanis.
Hans Aarsman
→ Life Less Literary | 23 Mar 2009 | 9:13pm GMT

A few weeks ago I went to the Photographers’ Gallery for a lecture by the Dutch photographer Hans Aarsman. I’d never heard of Aarsman before, but the description piqued my interest, particularly the line "if, and how, artistic ambitions, aesthetics and useful photography can coincide". I’m so glad I went! Aarsman described his journey through photography, and I found strong echoes with my own feelings and development as a photographer.

He started by talking about his early influences which, like so many aspiring photographers, came mainly from Magnum images. He showed some of his own photos from this period, I guess around the late 60s. He explained how, like the best Magnum photos and indeed all of photojournalism, they relied on conflict. Even a charming photo of girls and boys was mainly interesting because of the contrast between the girls and the boys.

And so, after a few years, he grew tired of this type of photography. He discovered the work of Garry Winogrand and described it as "an alien’s view of the world". He explored a similar aesthetic, using unexpected angles on otherwise-uninteresting subjects to provoke fresh ways of seeing. But this style was too unfettered for him. He imposed limits on it by buying a large view camera, which needed a tripod and a good deal of preparation. He drove around the Netherlands in a van, photographing chunks of the modern landscape, and finding ways to obscure the dreadful clarity and sharpness produced by a large format camera. But eventually, once again, he tired of this. He started to see echoes of centuries-old landscape painting in some of his compositions, at the same time as "art photography" was elevating faux-painterliness as its highest virtue (something I’ve written about before in relation to Tom Hunter). He realised that there was no way of taking a photo without his many years of visual training imposing themselves on the resultant image.

Disheartened, he gave up photography. For many years he didn’t own a camera.

This changed when he had to move into a smaller apartment, not long after his mother died. He had to get rid of many belongings, including little dolls which his mother had made for him while she was in terminal decline. He couldn’t justify keeping them, but felt that by throwing them away, he would be betraying his mother’s memory. So he bought a small point-and-shoot camera, and photographed every single thing he got rid of.

This led to a realisation: many things are important to us only because of the memories they evoke. And a photograph is a storage space for memories. Suddenly, getting rid of things became easy. He went even further with the declutter, rejoicing in the ease with which he could simplify his possessions. He even used this approach on potential new purchases: photographing things in the shop so he would never have to buy them (he showed us a photograph of a locked-down Powerbook in a shop, then pointed at the laptop which he was using to give the presentation: "I managed to delay buying this computer for 12 months because of this photograph").

Suddenly he became interested in photographs again. But not art photographs: rather, everyday photographs, photographs with a practical use. He would collect pictures of meat from the promotional supermarket leaflets which came through his door. He began to trawl EBay for interesting pictures, eventually settling on photographs of ashtrays (of which, he says, there are 8,000 new ones per week on EBay). He realised that many photographs have a backstory, and for him this is the most interesting aspect. Over three weeks, he realised (by comparing backdrops and wallpaper) that three of his ashtray photos came from the same person; he began to wonder why this person was selling different hotel ashtrays, and why one per week rather than all in one go.

He started a blog, analysing photographs, and through this he was offered a monthly column in a Dutch Newspaper doing the same thing. He ended the talk by giving a detailed analysis of a photograph of Iranian uranium enrichment, which he analysed for the newspaper. The photograph was originally printed alongside an article stating that Iranians were ramping up their nuclear capability, but by careful analysis of this photograph and others from the same source he was able to demonstrate that this was not the real story. What was actually happening was the Iranians were trying to demonstrate to the West that they were ramping up their nuclear capability. Numerous clues pointed to this conclusion, from the huge number of men needed to wheel a one-man trolley, to the dozen-or-so photographers in the background of what seemed ostensibly to be a hastily-snatched photo smuggled secretively out of the country, to the (meticulously researched) conclusion that one of the men in the photograph had dashed out of the toilet in time to be included into the picture.

Aarsman’s final slide was a quote from Garry Winogrand which he said now defines his relationship to photography. However, unlike virtually every other Winogrand quote I’ve ever read, this one didn’t quite ring true for me. Or at least, I think, it was badly worded. The quote, if I remember rightly, was "beauty is a fact explicitly described". But for me (and I think, if he’s honest about it, for Hans Aarsman), it’s not the explicit description which makes a photograph beautiful. It’s the information which leaks between the gaps; the backstory; the space left for the imagination; the painstaking detective work. Those are the things which, for me, bring a photograph to life and make it dance in the mind.
Film Peeve
→ The Fever Of Phineas | 14 Mar 2009 | 5:49pm GMT

Here’s a new one:

Character is in a situation that triggers a memory. Now we go with that character into the memory for a while, a minute, two 30 seconds, whatever, but it’s long enough to shift context and follow a sub-narrative. Then we return to the original context, the present, with character’s face absorbed in the memory. Another character then has to jog the first character’s attention. “Joe? Joe” Where were you?” And the first character then has to come back, pretend it’s nothing and resume the first nbarrative thread.

That whole jogging of the first character’s attention is completely unnecessary. It’s stupid to pretend that just because we in the audience experienced a time shift with the second thread that the characters in the first context also experienced it. The whole thing could have taken place in a split second for them. I don’t mind the actual context shift itself, I just hate the way they transition back. It’s so rote, total cliche, and they do it in the finest of dramas and films. Just skip it completely.
I’m Qyper of the week!
→ Life Less Literary | 22 Jan 2009 | 5:56pm GMT

A while ago, I signed up to review site Qype, but it was only last week that I really started using it. So it was a really nice surprise when today I got their weekly email newsletter (which, I have to admit, I normally kinda ignore) and saw that I’d been made Qyper of the week.

Here’s what they had to say about me:

Northern lad Dansumption likes the finer things in life: good beer, good food and the odd bit of culture.

According to the man himself, Dan has "eaten in most of the restaurants in and around Sheffield city centre", which means he knows where local MP’s choose to "entertain world leaders", where you’ll pay premium prices for a supermarket-bought faux-baguette, and where to head for if you have an absinthe craving.

And if you’re after a bit of steel city art (and you don’t mind maneuvering around some dustbins to get to it) then Dan’ can point you in the right direction.

I’ll be posting more reviews to Qype soon.
ITV gave me my BBC Micro
→ Life Less Literary | 21 Jan 2009 | 6:57am GMT

Last night, I was reminiscing with a BBC colleague about the UK micro-computer boom of the early 80s, and it struck me: like many programmers of my age, I cut my programming teeth on the BBC Micro (and also the ZX81). But unlike many, I got my BBC from the ITV.

BBC Micro

In about 1982 (and for most of his working life), my Dad worked at Thames TV, and was a member of the computer club there. Dad and his fellow club-members foresaw the increasing importance of computers in the workplace, and petitioned the management to provide subsidised computers for their staff to take home and learn on (I remember being kept regularly updated on the progress of these negotiations, excited at the prospect of swapping my rather worn 16k Sinclair computer for a spiffy new 32k BBC Model B). Eventually the management were persuaded, and Thames staff were offered a free three-year loan of a BBC Micro.

I played games on it, of course, many of them (I still remember the first night after we got it: Pacman was so burnt into my visual cortex that he continued to chase around my brain all night). But I also wrote games: typing in code from magazines and inventing small programs of my own. I even, along with my schoolfriend David Swaddle, set up a software company DSoft (which took its name from our shared initials). That never went very far (although bunking off school to hawk vapourware to all the local computer shops was kind of fun), but it was a start to something.

At around the age of 16, I started to lose interest in computers. There were too many other things in life to grab my attention. But when I came to write my university dissertation five years later, my dad had just got a new PC, so I laid claim to the old BBC (which had been sold on to us by Thames for a nominal amount once the three-year loan was up) and used it for essays and revision notes.

It took a few more years to rediscover programming: in fact, I was working for Olivetti, writing letters to debtors, when one day I looked at the computer I was typing on and thought “hey, I used to program these things when I was a kid. It was a lot more fun than this, and I bet I could get paid more money for doing it”. I went back to college to study C & C++, and never looked back.

So eventually I’ve pitched up working at the BBC, and I guess (like many in BBC “Future Media & Technology”) you could say it was the BBC Micro which got me here. But, unlike many, it was an ITV company which had the foresight to give me that micro, and plant a seed which continues to bear fruit. I can’t imagine many companies being quite so forward-thinking nowadays, especially as in the intervening years all companies, private and public, have been “rationalised” to the extent where such costs are impossible to justify to shareholders/tax-payers. And I think that’s a very sad thing.
2008: Life
→ Life Less Literary | 19 Jan 2009 | 1:17am GMT

In part one of my “2008 and thereabouts” retrospective, I talked about what I’d been up to work-wise. Now I’m going to focus on my personal and family life. I find this side of things a little harder to talk about, and recall, if only because for most of the year, I spent five days per week at work (usually in London, away from my family) and the other two days recuperating. But here goes…

Of my immediate family, Rowan (now thirteen) completed her first year of secondary school, and Lola (a few weeks shy of eight) entered juniors. For Rowan the summer holidays of 2007, between primary and secondary, were some sort of chrysalis phase. Within a few weeks of starting King Edward’s she was a different person: not only in character, taste and habits (a new taste for fashion and music, a stand-offish muteness towards her parents and, for a short while, a boyfriend), but also physically: she seemed to grow about six inches in her first year (or should that be Y7 – I still can’t quite get to grips with our new American-style system) and very soon developed from a big girl into a young woman. Watching her become rapidly more independent has been wonderful, though sometimes painful. At times she can be incredibly argumentative and hurtful – like most teenagers I guess – but on those odd occasions when she lets me into her confidence, or tries unsuccessfully to hide her excitement about something, it melts my heart. I’m also immensely proud of the fact that she writes and draws keenly, and is showing real talent in both areas (she just won a Waterstone’s writing “supernatural love story” competition with a lengthy and very original tale of a girl who falls in love with a boy nobody else can see, only to find out that he’s a ghost).

Lola hasn’t yet reached that troublesome age (although she can be troublesome in her own, usually much cuter, way). She is every inch the daddy’s girl, eager to please; but as she gets older she is becoming cleverer at using this to her advantage, turning on the cuteness tap when she knows it will get her what she wants. She excels at school (like her big sister before her), and seems to have an incredible quality for peace-brokering, whether this be bringing calm to a rowdy classroom or helping two friends to resolve a dispute. Teachers and other parents love her because she can (usually) be relied upon to be sensible and helpful, although I worry that as she gets older the sensible part may slip. She has also recently started piano lessons, and is learning incredibly quickly. Every week when I’m at home, she shows me her piano practice, and I have a go two, which is wonderful as it means I’m also getting to learn to play, and to read music.

Gill too has been finding more outlets for her creative side. For a while she was working at a vintage clothes shop in Sheffield, but at the same time she was discovering eBay, buying and selling at first old nighties but increasingly a range of weird and wonderful items, retro and new, including dresses, handbags, purses, badges and jewellery. You can often find her abusing my eBay account. Recently, she has started to customise and combine items, so she may sew a 60s cloth doll’s face onto a 40s handbag, or make a brooch out of some tiny dollies attached to circles of Victorian lace. I bought her O’Reilly’s Fashioning Technology book for Christmas, so hopefully we’ll soon have antique accessories combined with flashing LEDs and intelligent textiles.

The two of us have continued fostering with FCA, although obviously with me out of town most of the time, 99% of the work and responsibility has fallen on Gill. We are currently without a placement (and taking a bit of a break from it all – although we do have Gill’s cousin’s daughter Zoe staying with us, and her boyfriend Tyler, which is at times not too different from a foster placement). But for most of 2007 and 2008 we fostered two of our longest placements: N___, a Somali girl who was with us from the age of 15 to 17, and A___, an English boy who lived here from 16 to 17. With kids that age, for the most part you just let them get on with it. The biggest problem is getting them home on time: we have to set them curfews and, under strict foster agency/social services instructions, have to phone the police and report them missing if they’re not back by midnight. As you can imagine, this results in phone calls to missing persons on average about 3 times per week. Then we have to wait for the police to turn up, which they’re duty-bound to do, and which usually happens around 3am. Couple that with the odd petty crime and misdemeanour that kids in care tend to get themselves into, and we soon became pretty familiar with most of the local force (in fact, we were already fairly well known to them after we had a panic button installed when a previous placement, a young Muslim girl, heard that her family were threatening to burn her alive after hearing rumours that she’s been seen out with men).

Which kinda brings me on to the subject of challenging situations. We’ve had a few: alongside the panic button incident, having most of our electrical goods stolen (a Powerbook laptop, several digital cameras, a mobile phone, iPod…) was one of the more minor incidents. Other stuff, I wouldn’t ever want to go into on this blog, but it makes you thankful for who you are and the fact that you come from a stable, supportive background. While appalled at some of the things human beings do to one another, and saddened at the things people do to children, I’ve felt myself growing as a person as a result of my ability to deal with some of these crises, and support Gill as she deals with them. But it doesn’t half make it difficult reading the newspapers, which make me alternately despair all over again at some peoples’ cruelty, and despair even more at the cluelessness of some newspapers’ leader and comment-writers, wittering on in the most judgemental terms on subjects they truly know nothing about.

And me? Where have I been throughout all of this? Well, as I mentioned I’ve mainly been at work, travelling backwards and forwards to London. And my personal development hasn’t been solely related to fostering incidents: freelancing has taught me lessons which would have passed me by had I stayed closeted-up in my office. Most of all, I’ve learned to embrace the new, to constantly experiment and re-invent. Part of the problem with my previous long stretch at home was that I was never exposed to new influences, and so I became more and more stuck in the same groove, the same way of doing things. I don’t think that will ever happen to me again: I now know that, in order to stay alive, stay fresh, I need to seek out adventure and learning wherever I can find it.

The only downside of this year of discovery has been that my photography career, which was really starting to blossom over 2007, has had to take a back seat. Although I’ve done some half-dozen weddings this year, and early in the year I was hired to cover some amazing events like the Creative Sheffield launch and the Vivienne Westwood exhibition VIP party, I haven’t had the time I’d like to edit photos, or to push my career forwards. Towards the end of the year, I’ve photographed a few private views in London galleries, but my rate of photography has gone right down, and as a result I’ve got a bit rusty (photography, like sport, is something you need to practice almost daily in order to stay on top of your game).

I did manage to produce a wonderful little Working Nights photobook in June this year but my (slightly unexpected) BBC iPlayer career swept me off my feet so fast that, to date, I’ve only managed to hawk it round a few shops, and haven’t found time to send it out to all of the magazines, galleries and, indeed, friends who I had intended. My New Year’s resolution for 2009: get some books in the post!
Friday nights at the Washington
→ Life Less Literary | 18 Jan 2009 | 12:22pm GMT

Since working full-time in London, I get precious little time to spend out-and-about in Sheffield. As you may know, for the last few years I’ve been a regular fixture on Sheffield’s social scene, out with my camera documenting the night-life. I really miss this, and I miss Sheffield’s wonderful people.

Thank goodness for Friday nights, and London-Sheffield trains which arrive at the perfect time, around 10.30pm. And thank goodness for The Washington, around halfway between the station and my house, and usually throbbing on a Friday night, especially when there’s a good DJ night like the Record Hop, Plan B, El Jackster or Banksy’s Fragrant Garden. Here’s a few photos from last Friday night at the Record Hop.
Metaphors
→ AlienFlower Blog | 18 Sep 2008 | 3:13pm GMT
Subject: Metaphors
To: aliflo, alienflower.org

Hello,

I require some help regarding the definitions of descriptive, organic and structural metaphors. What definitions I have found are very vague and do not give me enough data with which to differentiate between the different definitions.

Any help that you could give me would be most welcome.

Thanks,

Chris Hamilton

---

Dear Chris,

Thank you for sending your question. My first thought is for us to search for poetry dictionaries that clearly define these terms. In my search this morning on the internet, I have not found anything yet. I will keep searching for dictionary definitions and share any new information.

Let's start with organic metaphor (vs dead metaphor?). I found Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.'s web page on Organic Metaphor:

http://www.ajdrake.com/e491_fall_04/materials/guides/gd_rom_organic_metaphor.htm

He begins his text by quoting The Portable Coleridge (Samuel Taylor Coleridge):

"Coleridge says that "the spirit of poetry" must "circumscribe itself by rules"; it must "embody [itself] in order to reveal itself.""

Does organic metaphor "embody" the poem?

---

Tim Love's article (link shared below) asks,
(in reference to descriptive metaphor?):

"Are they metaphors of animals, or nature, or politics?? Maybe the image that is used is of importance in the reader's understanding of the stories."

---

Structural metaphor is defined on the Summer Institute of Linguistics web site:

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAStructuralMetaphor.htm

"A structural metaphor is a conventional metaphor in which one concept is understood and expressed in terms of another structured, sharply defined concept."

Example: "I demolished his argument."

---

I am curious to know what definitions you have you found so far, even though they are vague. Will you share them with us please? And also what definitions might any other AlienFlower reader have to share with us?

---

Metaphor in poetry enlivens, paints a better visual image with words, adds depth and breathes life, and brings beauty and understanding that might otherwise be lost to the reader. I found a metaphor essay written by British Teacher Tim Love on Tim's Web site:

http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/workshops/metaphor.html

---

The University of Oregon is home to the Metaphor Center:

http://philosophy.uoregon.edu/metaphor/metaphor.htm

---

And I found a web site article that discusses "Making Sense of Metaphor" as it relates to the American legal discourse and system. There is discussion of cultural uses of language and metaphor. Here is one of the reviews quotes of the article:

"In 'Making Sense of Metaphors', Professor Bernard Hibbitts mines the richest possible vein of understanding, one that leads directly to the heart of the transformations affecting not just contemporary legal discourse but also the nature and structure of our entire legal system. Words and language are not a mere assemblage of clichés or conceptual archetypes: they serve as an organ of collective perception. And metaphor is the matrix of all verbal activity. The media of the last century and a half have rendered written codes obsolete: the electronic word is oral and kinesthetic and invested with a paradoxical permanence far more stable than that which writing can confer. In this provocative analysis of the medium, Professor Hibbitts uncovers the patterns of change that inform present events and will continue to do so for generations to come."

Eric McLuhan
Co-author (with Marshall McLuhan), The Laws of Media; co-editor (with Frank Zingrone), The Essential McLuhan

"A truly astonishing article...surely one of the most significant of contributions to the relative role of the senses in social life."

John Urry
Professor of Sociology
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Author, The Tourist Gaze
http://www.law.pitt.edu/hibbitts/meta_int.htm

---

Here is the general definition of metaphor for those who like dictionary definitions:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=metaphor

---

metaphor

n.

1. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in “a sea of troubles” or “All the world's a stage” (Shakespeare).
2. One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol: “Hollywood has always been an irresistible, prefabricated metaphor for the crass, the materialistic, the shallow, and the craven” (Neal Gabler).

[Middle English methaphor, from Old French metaphore, from Latin metaphora, from Greek, transference, metaphor, from metapherein, to transfer : meta-, meta- + pherein, to carry; see bher-1 in Indo-European Roots.]

n : a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity
Craque DJ set: The Commonwealth Lounge, Fullerton, CA
→ CraqueCast | 22 May 2008 | 8:00pm GMT
Wednesday night I played a closing set for the private CD release party of jazz quartet Stop Time, led by John Harrington of Delta Nove fame. Styles ranged from jazzy to semi-dark electronica, but mostly it was some good smooth loungey big beat, broken beat and house. Enjoy!
Amalgamation: Live at Smartbar, Chicago, 2002
→ CraqueCast | 9 Jan 2008 | 8:00pm GMT
A set I did at SmartBar (beneath Metro) in March of 2002. I'm playing many looping devices driven by live sampled sound from miscellaneous objects and guitar, and a laptop for softsynth control and vocal samples.
Craque + Viv + Carol : Uir
→ CraqueCast | 11 Oct 2007 | 6:00am GMT
Matt Davis (voice, sampled objects and electronics), Carol Genetti (voice) and Viv Corringham (voice) : Part 2 of a free improvisation at The Nervous Center Festival of Electronic Music, Chicago 2002
Craque + Viv + Carol : Evo
→ CraqueCast | 11 Oct 2007 | 6:00am GMT
Matt Davis (voice, sampled objects and electronics), Carol Genetti (voice) and Viv Corringham (voice) : Part 3 of a free improvisation at The Nervous Center Festival of Electronic Music, Chicago 2002
Craque + Viv + Carol : Ava
→ CraqueCast | 11 Oct 2007 | 6:00am GMT
Matt Davis (voice, sampled objects and electronics), Carol Genetti (voice) and Viv Corringham (voice) : Part 1 of a free improvisation at The Nervous Center Festival of Electronic Music, Chicago 2002
Phonography 1, 2006-2007
→ CraqueCast | 10 May 2007 | 6:00am GMT
Five unedited recordings from the past year as juicy slices of concrete life: a charcoal grill, a santa ana windstorm, a juice blender, more fire in the grill, and the departure of a locomotive.
Improv at Myopic Books, Chicago, 03/19/2001
→ CraqueCast | 19 Apr 2007 | 6:00am GMT
Free improvisation with turntable and electronics in Chicago a few years back.
Social software provides buffer for shy people
→ xian's running monolog | 15 Aug 2006 | 2:25pm GMT

I think 12 frogs is onto something here with Why social software is good for introverts.
[The Power of Many]
Blogging and identity panel proposal for SXSW
→ xian's running monolog | 14 Aug 2006 | 2:05pm GMT

Hugh Forrest, the indomitable lead organizer of South by Southwest Interactive has announced a public process for voting on and vetting panel ideas for next year’s conference. Apparently it will take several rounds, with the first round narrowing down the 173 panel proposals.

The voting is open to anyone, but the votes of past attendees of SXSW are weighted more strongly and those of past presenters are given even further weight.

Here’s part of Hugh’s announcement:

I wanted to alert you that the online interface for panel proposals for the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival is now live. This page allows users to give us their feedback on which of the many outstanding panel proposals they feel are most appropriate for next year’s event.

…

Complete directions for the voting process are listed on the site. Deadline for voting is September 8.

I’ve got two panel proposals in the running, the first of which is more directly related to the mission of this blog:

Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online

No privacy? Spy on yourself and commodify your attention stream! Countless representations of ourselves flood the net with information daily. What is happening to our models of attention? trust? reputation? Rate my new fighting style unstoppable and I’ll trade you this artifact I forged in Worlds of Warcraft… Expect a lively debate from noted experts on attention and identity and skeptics who think most of the sentences above are content-free.

(filed under blogging and education / sociological)

and

You’re It! Tagging is so over! It’s the People, Stupid!

Resolved: the tagging meme has overstayed its welcome. No, tags aren’t going away but they are not a user-experience panacea. Are we folksonomic yet? Some ideas about the next frontier in malleable, emergent information architectures and classification schemes. Plus, how to apply the lessons of the global social internet to more niche oriented web application development projects. Tag pioneers, theorists, and skeptics beat a dead horse.

(filed under social networks and user generated / open source)

Vote for my panels and eight others! (occasional RFB contributor Liza Sabater has three great proposals up, including one on net.art and another on blog "sheroes" and Jon Lebkowsky, my partner in hosting the blog conference on the Well has a couple more worthy of a vote). I also recommend Prentiss Riddle's panel idea bout teaching children to program with Lego Mindstorms.
[Radio Free Blogistan]
Speaking of 'Connecticut for Lieberman'
→ xian's running monolog | 11 Aug 2006 | 1:17am GMT

Looks like his team forgot to register the domain: The Connecticut for Lieberman Party
[Edgewise]
Another tactical blunder by Lieberman
→ xian's running monolog | 10 Aug 2006 | 6:13am GMT

Even if you grant that Lieberman should run in the general election as an independent (and I do not), shouldn’t he at least have taken a page from Jed Bartlett and Howard Dean and called his party-of-one “Lieberman for Connecticut” instead of the self-centered sounding “Connecticut for Lieberman”?
[Edgewise]
Jason Scott on 'the great failure of Wikipedia'
→ xian's running monolog | 8 Aug 2006 | 10:51pm GMT

I was looking at the Haddock blogs aggregator and in their links gutter I came across a transcript of a presentation given at Notacon 3 (whatever that is) in April of this year by Jason Scott. You can listen to the audio if you prefer.

I tend to like the Wikipedia idea, warts and all, but this talk is a pretty compelling look at its flaws. Here are a few choice excerpts that jumped out at me:

What Wikipedia has taught us now, is that in a vacuum of politics, politics will be created. There is no vacuum of politics. People who are encountering this space where they can not lord over others for technicalities and gain power for themselves will then proceed to invoke technicalities, take power from other people. They just do this. This is what human beings do.

and

One of the big fallacies that people currently have is “well, even if people undo your work, at least you can see it.” It’s not true. People will go to the history of an article that’s disputed, and they will find that that history’s actually been utterly and completely purged from Wikipedia. The history is gone.

and, also

Wikipedia tends to be, at this point, the first hit for most proper and non-proper nouns. Putting in anything gives you the Wikipedia entry. In fact, if you have Trillian, Trillian has an automatic setting so that any word you have in there that matches on Wikipedia ends up as an underlined word. You click on it, and it tells you what the answer is. To someone who’s using instant messaging, they don’t know where this entry came from when they clicked on it, they also tend to be out of date because they index it across the Trillian … and so on. So as a result, you can’t say just go in and change it, because it’s actually using older and older indexes. That’s what I mean by the concern I have, the worry that I have, when I make these big points.
[The Power of Many]
OpenID info evening (for developers)
→ xian's running monolog | 7 Aug 2006 | 8:36pm GMT

Kaliya “Identity Woman” Hamlin writes:
Webwide distributed SSO is finally happening… Learn more from the core guys behind this emerging standard for user-centric digital identity. August 10th 6-9 in Berkeley at 2029 University, Upstairs. RSVP to me kaliya (at) Mac (dot) com and please pass this along to those who might be interested… OpenID is the emerging standard for web wide distributed single sign-on. It works with OpenID enabled URLs and i-names. The goal of the evening is not to geek out on identity but to connect with developers working on applications that require users to log in. Find out more about what it is… how it works… how you can install it. The incentives to learn are high with the $5000 bounty for having OpenID in Open Source projects. Presenting and answering Questions:
- David Recordon formerly of Live Journal/Six Appart now of Verisign will be presenting a bit about the origins of OpenID but most importantly how it works… and how you install it.
- Andy Dale from ooTao will talk a bit about i-names and how they work with OpenID2 and looking forward to what comes next after authentication - profile sharing. ooTao is also data sharing, are running ibroker services.
- Scott Keveton from Jan Rain a development shop in Portland that has been ond of the leading instigators of OpenID. He just posted a walk through on his blog.
- Mary Hodder CEO of Dabble will talk about the work happening around the development of itags.
If you know a developer - pass the word along.
Perhaps the vision of a universal single sign-on on the Web isn’t just a utopian pipedream after all?
[The Power of Many]
zorca interviews xian
→ xian's running monolog | 7 Aug 2006 | 5:27am GMT

Suzanne Stefanac is writing a book on blogging called Dispatches from Blogistan (catchy title, eh?) for Peachpit / New Riders. Naturally, she’s been blogging the whole process and posting snippets of work in progress and the texts of interviews she’s conducted for the book.

I know Suzanne from The Well, where I host the blog conference and where I’m known as <xian> and she’s known as <zorca>. A while back she interviewed me via email and she recently published the results on her book’s blog: Dispatches From Blogistan - interview with christian crumlish.

In the interview we talk about blogging (of course) as well as social media, RSS, wikis, politics, media, authority, trust, online presence, the long tail, and other stuff I hope you’ll find interesting. I know I had fun doing it.
[Radio Free Blogistan]
Is ANWR as ugly as they say?
→ xian's running monolog | 1 Aug 2006 | 3:02am GMT

Jim Goldstein was up in Alaska in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge recently and brought back these photographs.

He says, “A conservative friend asked me, ‘Is ANWR as really as ugly as they say it is? This alarmed me a great deal after having one of the best photo trips I’ve taken to date. The beauty of ANWR is almost unparalleled.”
[wake up!]
'Tamper' Chapter Four
→ xian's running monolog | 17 Jul 2006 | 5:20am GMT

1978 - Psychoanalysis

by Bill Ectric

“You should stop blaming your parents for your quarrel with reality,” said Dr. Carnes, casually. He leaned back nimbly in his chair, hands behind his head, framed diplomas on the paneled wall behind him. I almost thought he was going to prop his feet up on the desk in front of him. My psychiatrist wasn’t much older than me - maybe thirty.

“I’m not blaming my parents,” I said to the shrink. “I’m just telling you what happened.”

“Well, go on, then. You say your mother gave you paregoric?”

I studied the pastel Aztec pattern in the arm of my comfortably stuffed easy chair. Nice texture.

“You know what paregoric is, right?” I asked, still looking down.

“They stopped making paregoric in the late fifties,” Dr. Carnes answered correctly. “It was a medicine made from camphor and alcohol with a small amount of morphine. They gave it to children for cough medicine.”

“Very good,” I said, looking at him. “Well, my mother says she used to rub it on my gums when my teeth were coming in. When I was a baby. I have this memory of lying in my crib in my bedroom. There were these cartoon pictures on my wall. Eight pictures – two on each wall. They were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. You know, Happy, Sleepy, Doc…”

“Yes, I’m familiar with the dwarves,” said the shrink, a bit impatiently, I thought. “But you were very young. You actually remember this?”

Ignoring his question, I continued, “So I’m lying there, and I look at the picture of Grumpy, and he seems to be frowning at me. It was scary. His eyebrows moved up and down and he blinked. Then I looked at Happy, and his red grin got wide and crazy and his nose started stretching and bending sideways. His big eyes were crossed and his tongue stuck out! It scared me so I looked away and closed my eyes. Then I could see stars glittering, and a big, bright golden crescent moon. In slow motion, a cow floated up into the black, starry sky and sailed over the moon!”

“Were you traumatized?” said the doctor, stifling a laugh.

“I think so. But I felt so good I didn’t care."

“But, Bill,” the shrink frowned. Relying momentarily on his neck muscles to support his head, he used both hands to brush back his hair in a motion that ended with his hands clasped again behind his head. “You were too young to even know what paregoric was. How…”

“No, listen,” I said. “Years later, my mother found those pictures of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when she was cleaning out the attic. She said, ‘Do you remember these?’ and I said, ‘Yeah’ and then she told me how, when I was a baby, teething, I would cry and cry, because teething hurts, so she said she rubbed paregoric on my gums. After that, she said, I stopped crying and just looked up at those pictures until I fell asleep.”

“Did you use any other drugs when you were a kid?” asked Dr. Carnes.

“I had bad hay fever.”

“Allergic to pollen?” the shrink clarified unnecessarily.

“Yeah,” I said. “It made my eyes itch I sneezed a lot. I had to take antihistamine for years. Sometimes the antihistamine allowed me to dream these amazing Technicolor dreams if I took it at night.”

“I’ve dreamed in color,” said the shrink. “Some people say we only dream in black and white, but I’ve dreamed in color.”

Whoop-de-doo, I thought. Big deal. I never doubted people dreamed in color.

“Sometimes,” I continued, “When the pollen was extra bad, I had to stay indoors. While other guys were playing baseball, I was inside drawing pictures and writing stories. Our kitchen had a linoleum floor with all kinds of squiggly designs in it, and if I stared at those squiggles I saw faces and other things.”

“People do the same thing looking up at clouds,” said the doctor.

“I’ve seen big shapes in the clouds,” I said. “But there is something more … intimate, when faces emerge from the floor tiles. I also saw them, sometimes, in the towels hanging in the bathroom. In the little threads.”

“Is that why you are so interested in Richard Shaver’s art?” asked Dr. Carnes.

Very astute.

I should explain who Richard Shaver was. Primarily a writer of science fiction, he also created some unusual art. He split rocks open and saw patterns in the grain, then used paint and ink to enhance the images so that other people could see them. He called these "rock books" and said that an ancient civilization had created them.

Shaver was, by all accounts, a strange man. You can read about him on the Internet, but I’ll give you a little background.

A man named Hugo Gernsback created the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. Amazing Stories is the magazine that Forrest J. Ackerman famously says, “jumped into his hands” when he was a boy and inspired him to become a literary agent and later the editor of Famous Monsters magazine.

Around 1940, Richard Shaver sent a story to the magazine about a race of evil mutants, called Dero, who lived in underground caverns and sometimes captured humans to torture and eat. According to Shaver, aliens from another planet had abandoned these subterranean creatures on Earth, back in ancient times, and centuries of inbreeding underground had made them insane and sadistic. Shaver also claimed that the Dero were using some kind of energy beam to send disturbing voices into his own mind. He called this mental harassment "tamper." The story was all the more remarkable because Richard Shaver claimed that it was entirely true!

It was never clear whether Ray Palmer, the magazine’s editor, believed that Richard Shaver was serious or not, but Amazing Stories continued publishing Shaver stories because it increased their sales and thousands of letters poured in. Some of the letter writers claimed that they, too, heard strange voices in their heads. This annoyed the more serious science fictions fans, who looked upon the "Shaver Mystery" as a ridiculous hoax.

Years later, in an interview, Palmer admitted that Shaver, like me, had spent some time in a mental institution
[Telegraph]
Democratizing the art market
→ xian's running monolog | 17 Jul 2006 | 5:11am GMT

David Hinojosa has got a project called Stock Artist that offers a simulation (for now) of a rationalize the art market.

I’m not sure I fully understand the concept, but this appears to be the nut of it:

The central nucleus of Stockartist is the “transformed art piece’s concept.” This concept consists in dividing the value of one work, or a group of them into little pieces called “stock-art.” The stock-arts have two characteristics: they represent one part of the value of the “transformed art piece” and they are themselves art works. In other words, the stock-arts are at the same time art works and an instrument of investment that besides of representing their own value, they represent other’s. The stock-arts share some common physical characteristics as: maximum weight, maximum size, security codes, etc, and they contain unique characteristics imposed by their creator.
[The Power of Many]
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→ Mediajunkie | 23 Feb 2006 | 6:08pm GMT

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→ Mediajunkie | 23 Feb 2006 | 6:05pm GMT

A reminder to our hosted bloggers: I occasionally post tips about our blog content management system at Above the Fold.

And author clients, we have a new author/agent agreement available. If you’ve signed up under the older agreement you can continue to be represented under those terms or you can “upgrade” to the new agreement. It’s up to you.
Response Poems
→ AlienFlower Blog | 13 Aug 2005 | 4:38am GMT

Weathervane Sketch
by David Kaneda

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maggie and milly and molly and may
by E. E. Cummings
http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15406

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Writing Response Poems
by Thom Williams

*e.e.cummings is so great. I remember distinctly how I felt when I read it the very first time. I was sort of copping an attitude about its childlike ethos. Then, it slammed into me. He deployed a universal theme, a vast theme-the idea that we are alone, yet tied-in to everything. Each thing that the girls found opened their world and made them come back to themselves. I am healed by the simple things: water, a starfish, the otherorldliness of a crab. I have gone to the sea so many times for peace. In the churning of the sea beneath the jetty, I feel the power of life, and I am part of it, too. The sea reminds me of the power I have to make or break my own way. The true genius of the poem to me is the way it leaves you with an idea you already had but you forgot. A good poem sort of wakes you up to something like a recovered memory, a good one.

When I think about writing a response piece to a poem, I make sure to give myself maximim freedom. My intention is not to analyze the poem; this is not schoolwork. I look at the poem and I let myself find a connection without rules. Pick anything; but pick something that pushes your buttons. I might write about the time I got stung by a jellyfish; how I lifted my arm from the sea and saw the tentacles wrapped around it, how I handled the situation, how it scared me.

I might write about the idea that we are alone and are not alone. Sometimes I think life is like a shipwreck where we are washed up on the shore of existence. We have each other and survival. The constellations stretch over head; they turn by the hour. The sea shows me how to survive. It tells me to be blue and keep many things below the surface. The sea shows me that danger is nearer than I thought, but so is beauty.

Let your response seek its own level, like water. Poetry can be like a river that has been flowing always. It is only for the poet to dip into the flow. Let the current of inspiration push you along a bit. Perhaps imagination is just about to come in on the tide. Perhaps in one more moment some healing or some hope might wash up at our feet. Let your response find you. You'll recognize yourself quite soon.
Testing out the new banner
→ Mediajunkie | 28 Jul 2005 | 5:48pm GMT

Not animated yet, and probably messes up the motto, but I'm tired of Times New Roman.
Why we were down last week.
→ Mediajunkie | 28 Jun 2005 | 6:02pm GMT

We were hacked by script kiddies. They didn't accomplish anything but they did trash the web server. We're back up now and we've tightened security measures. I won't go into details because why draw the vandals a map?
The essence of publishing
→ Mediajunkie | 28 Jun 2005 | 2:20pm GMT

Patrick Nielsen Hayden from Making Light points us to an article he's quoted in from the Book Standard:

The Book Standard, an up-and-coming online trade magazine about the book industry, does a reasonable job of covering experiments in the online distribution of free-and-unfettered novel e-texts as a means of building an audience, including ventures from entities as diverse as Cory Doctorow and Baen Books. Among those quoted are Cory, Jim Baen, Charles Stross, Tim O'Reilly, and me. I'm particularly glad they used this bit of summing-up:

"Publishing is not about just making a paper copy of a book," says Hayden. "The essential enterprise of publishing is finding texts that audiences want to read and signaling to those audiences that, hey, this is something neat," he says. "Those skill sets are going to be just as valuable with new forms of publishing."

Not as well-put as I might have managed if I hadn't been blathering over a long-distance phone line, but it's a point I find myself making a lot, and I'm glad to see it passed along.
Avoid getting unpaid
→ Mediajunkie | 26 Jun 2005 | 10:07pm GMT

Some fresh book-deal advice from Matt Wagner, my old agent at Waterside (after Bill Gladstone and before Danielle Jatlow and Margot Maley), warns about how, if presented with a book deal, you should do all you can to avoid agreeing to a cross-collateralization clause: The Varieties of Co-Accounting.
→ Mediajunkie | 23 Jun 2005 | 12:33am GMT

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Art Department
→ Mediajunkie | 22 Jun 2005 | 10:52pm GMT

Media Junkie's New York Office Art Department has officially opened
with veteran image maker Xourmas at it's helm!
Book site shaping up
→ Mediajunkie | 11 May 2005 | 12:11am GMT

After a hurried site launch to coincide with the author's book tour, Marie Myung-Ok Lee's site for her novel Somebody's Daughter received some long overdue attention today and is now much more nearly ship shape. Please drop by and let us know if anything isn't as it should be.
East Bay for Democracy
→ Mediajunkie | 12 Apr 2005 | 8:59pm GMT

We've relaunched the East Bay for Democracy site using CivicSpace, thanks to expert assistance from Scott Chacon.

We're still fleshing out some of the content areas, but the site is no longer in the staging area and is ready for signup by locals.
Let Me Sing Longer
→ AlienFlower Blog | 5 Mar 2005 | 3:01pm GMT
Writing a Cinquain

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A cinquain (sing-KANE) is a short, unrhymed poem. This style was named and created by Adelaide Crapsy (1878-1914) in the early 1900's. Her poems were not published until after she died.

Its form consists of 22 syllables:

First Line: a one word title (two syllables)
Second Line: a two word phrase that describes the title or you can just use two words (four syllables)
Third Line: a three word phrase that describes an action relating to the title or just actions words (six syllables)
Forth Line: a four word phrase that describes a feeling relating to the topic or just feeling words (eight syllables)
Fifth Line: one word that refers back to the title (two syllables)

The title, due to the shortness of the poem, takes on a greater weight because it is one sixth of the poem.

--

Niagara, Seen on a Night in November
by Adelaide Crapsy

How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.

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Moon Shadows
by Adelaide Crapsy

Still as
On windless nights
The moon-cast shadows are,
So still will be my heart when I
Am dead.

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Amaze
by Adelaide Crapsy

I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.

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Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about reading her poetry and to honor her memory.

Adelaide Crapsey
by Carl Sandburg

Among the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,
I read your heart in a book.

And your mouth of blue pansy—I know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.

And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her naked knees, and her head held there listening to the sea, the great naked sea shouldering a load of salt.

And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea:
Mother of God, I’m so little a thing,
Let me sing longer,
Only a little longer.

And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers hauling new shapes on the beach sand.
Inside the Rhyme Machine
→ AlienFlower Blog | 2 Mar 2005 | 2:40am GMT
A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem usually in iambic pentameter with a carefully patterned rhyme scheme. The shortness and strict rhyme scheme create a musical effect. This is a good form to practice because it focuses and challenges much of the poet's technical and artistic skills.

There are two main types of sonnets: the Italian (Petrarchan) and the English (Shakespearean).

The Italian sonnet has a first division (octave) of eight lines rhyming abbaabba and the second division (sestet), consisting of six lines rhyming cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce. The octave presents the narrative, states the proposition, or raises a question; the sestet brings the narrative home by making an abstract comment, applying the proposition, or solving the problem.

The English (Shakespearean) sonnet has four divisions: three quatrains (each with a rhyme-scheme of its own) and a rhymed couplet. The typical rhyme-scheme for the English sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg. The couplet at the end is usually a commentary on the foregoing, an epigrammatic close.

Here is a Web site with a long listing of sonnet poets and their poems:

http://www.sonnets.org/alpha.htm

After reading through the poems at sonnets.org for awhile, you might find it easier to write your own.

Here is one Italian sonnet I found there written by Katharine Lee Bates:

To a Crow

Come hither, taunted bird, and I will stroke
Thy ruffled plumage with a verse, O triste
And sombre minstrel at our Twelfth Night feast,
A music masquerading in thy croak.
How often, when the wild March mornings broke,
Have I descried thee, like a demon priest,
Heaping hoarse curses on the riotous East
From the bare branches of some tossing oak!
Yet ever welcome is thy wizard flight,
--Most welcome now, when Earth lies imaging
The sleep of death beneath a winding-sheet
Of frozen snow intolerably white,
A pallid waste crossed by the sudden, fleet,
Beautiful shadow of thy sable wing.

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