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They can’t be serious can they?

Dear New Yorker, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post and others**,

Please stop using the term “web log” to refer to a chronologically-ordered frequently-updated website. The correct term is “weblog”. Furthermore, “blog” is not short for “web log”, it is short for “weblog”.

[...]The original spelling of the term is “WebLog” as seen on Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom WebLog page from December 1997. It was never “web log”. In subsequent correspondence (like this Usenet post from June 1998), Barger himself referred to his site as a “weblog” and sites like his as “weblogs”.

Read on here.

I was a big fan of The Office but I wasn’t impressed with the Ricky Gervais Show. Now I’m even more disappointed.

I can understand why Gervais would want to make money off of the show. But imagine if you had to pay to read Boing Boing or to watch Rocketboom. Blogging, podcasting and vlogging are new media forms that thrive when content is free. And Rocketboom and Boing Boing have managed to make a profit without charging readers or viewers. Advertising has proven to be the key.

Pay-per-download seems like a very old fashioned way of using new media. In the past couple of months I’ve seen the Ricky Gervais Show discussed all over the Web, especially on US weblogs like this one. By putting up a paywall Gervais is cutting off a swathe of listeners, many of them from the valuable US audience that he could have cashed in on further down the road.

As it is, current commentary on the pay decision ranges from this (from a polite American):

You can thank these three English blokes for spoiling what was until now a podcast-world free of capitalism…Speaking as a fan of the first twelve free episodes that just concluded, this, quite frankly, blows.

To this (from a Brit in New York):

What a wanker.

One of the great achievements trumpeted about Gervais’ show has been his entry into the Guinness Book of Records for the most downloaded podcast. (Not the greatest of feats for such an infant media form.) It’s safe to say that those download figures are about to take a steep nosedive. It will be interesting to see how many listeners he loses.

***

Harry’s Place serves up more Galloway entertainment. Interviewed in the Algerian El Khabar newspaper, he had this to say about the cartoon row:

Personally, I condemn these barbaric and evil acts. Today, the objective of the Western states is to control the oil of the Muslims whatever the price. In fact, the cartoons published in Denmark did not surprise me because the Western states have been waging fierce attacks against Islam for years. These began by humiliation, insults and then occupation. Today they reached the point of ridiculing the prophet. This incident is worse than the 11 September attacks in the US and the 7/7 incidents in London. Therefore, today it is the right of Muslims to express their anger and to defend their right and faith.

It’s the night before and the restaurant’s crammed with emergency personnel. A foursome walks in and demands to sit the back section. I tell them we’re having a medical crisis and the section’s closed. They don’t care and start arguing with me.

“You’re gonna sit us in the back right?” one of men says. “You’re gonna sit us in the back like we want right?”

“Do you see the paramedics working over there?” I say incredulously.

“Well, we want that table when it clears out,” the man huffs.

Read on here.

You can check out my story here. But why bother doing that when you can check out her excellent weblog here.

After nearly five years in a steady, meaningful relationship, I recently found myself thrust back into the singles scene. As a Jew in New York City, it was my religious duty to blow the dust off my suspended JDate account and start meeting women again.

As a cartoonist, I figure I should use humor as my weapon of choice in capturing the attention of prospective dates. For some reason, this approach is not working. Below is an excerpt from my latest blog entry, “Into the Void“:

My sorrowfully ineffective method has been to start with a humorous reference to their profile, to show I was actually paying attention. For your enjoyment, I’ve compiled a select list of actual clips from letters I’ve sent to other JDate members. Invariably, I get no response.

Tell me, would you write back?

To the psychologist:
Can I book an hour of couch time?

To the entrepreneur who quit law school and her job on Wall St. to start a cookie company:
Subject: I did it all for the cookie
Message: Wall Street, law school, now cookies. You’re in it for the DOUGH!

To the “Vice President with Looks”
I typically only date Presidents but I would be willing to lower the bar and make an exception here.

To the girl who, well … I can understand why she didn’t write back:
If we went on a date I think I could overcome the fact that you bear an uncanny resemblance to my sister.

You can read the rest here.

My copy of 2005: Blogged arrived yesterday. If you aren’t already aware it’s a kind of Best of British for the past year, compiled by Tim Worstall. (There’s even a post by a certain EiNY.) I’ve had a quick flick through and it contains some writing that goes a long way towards supporting Tim’s idea that someone should really be syndicating blogs to the print media. For a review by Rafael Behr in the Observer, see here.

And if you think 2005: Blogged may make a nice stocking filler then don’t forget about Blog, the book I worked on over the past year. Obviously, I’m biased (I contributed about one-third of the interviews in the book) but I have to say that many of the ideas and insights from bloggers and blogging experts are still being discussed today and will be discussed for years to come. Plus, if you buy a copy my editors will make money which will finance them to pay me for future book projects For a review by Hugh Hewitt in the New York Post see here.

Links for today:
How blogging can help the regional UK press (via journalism.co.uk)

But the basic premise of the article that introduced the New Orleans helicopter sniper to a global audience was dead wrong, just like so many other widely disseminated Katrina nightmares. No 7-year-old rape victim with a slit throat was ever found, even though the atrocity was reported in scores of newspapers. The Convention Center freezer was not stacked with 30 or 40 dead bodies, nor was the Superdome a live-in morgue. (An estimated 10 people died inside the two buildings combined, and only one was slain, according to the best data from National Guard officials at press time.)

Reason: They Shoot Helicopters, Don’t They?: How journalists spread rumors during Katrina by Matt Welch

Links for today:
My OJR story being discussed in Germany (via Martin Stabe)
Ricky Gervais to podcast
The left-wing Neocons (via Clive Davis)

The city viewed from the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, Central Park, yesterday at about 4.30pm. (Connie and Yoav, I take it back! It’s not such a bad name…)

Some exciting new WordPress theme links for today (via Blogging Pro):

The purpose of theme (besides putting out something that’s different from the herd) is to promote the use of social networking within WordPress…Other neat features include an advanced layout, support for multiple plugins, the ability for registered users to add tags, livesearch, ajax commenting and an archives page with support for extended live archives. Squibble.

No CSS or graphical showcase here, the theme focuses on the content you are writing. A close attention has been given to internal navigation, internal linking, article promotion and search engine optimization, so that both readers and the Googlebot can easily find everthing they are looking for. Several features of this theme are concerning Adsense. When most (all ?) themes today come ad free and are a blogger’s hell to nicely implement ads in a layout that was not designed for it, Problogger Clean comes with built-in ads, with optimized colors and positions. Problogger Clean.

Enable your visitors to recreate their reading experience by customizing your website live with the power of AJAX in the back. Many new built-in plugins with interesting functions included, like “sticky notes”, “global bookmarks” and “off site content aggregation”, to name a few. One of the most innovative functions is the possibility to load your presets on every BP powered website. Bloxpress.

Despite Clive Davis’ assertion that the French riots have not been “the blogosphere’s finest hour,” he is doing a great job of pulling together mainstream media and blog reports while sounding a cautious note to the hysterical voices in the blogosphere (especially on this side of the Atlantic) who are putting too much emphasis on Islam and having far too good a time laughing at France’s misery.

Meanwhile, Opinionistas, who I wrote about in the New York Times at the weekend, has published one of her best posts in a long time, a remarkable achievement considering the quality of her blog. I see also that she has had quite a response to the piece.

And Scott Burgess, at the Daily Ablution, invigorated after raising almost £3,000 in his first fund-raising drive, lays into the Indy for its reporting of claims that US forces ‘used chemical weapons’ during assault on city of Fallujah with a post highlighting the unacknowledged biases of the story’s sources yesterday and a second post throwing further doubt on the story’s vailidity today. (PS I notice the Indy put the phrase ‘used chemical weapons’ in quote marks. A bit of a giveaway?)