Blogger: You're in the Army Now. The Army team that came up with a PC game as recruiting tool unveils a weblog with the same thing in mind. Critics say it lacks soul, not to mention blood and guts. By Noah Shachtman. [Wired News]
categories: metablog
1:04:11 PM 
say what []
I didn't know Jason Snell was doing something called teevee.org, but correspondent Charly Z assures me they do "snarky comentary about, well, TV." Shamelessly, I copped their title from their weblog announcement, in which they say:
Today TeeVee's Station Breaks take on a new form. Yes, we're sort of getting on the Weblog bandwagon. But this will be a different kind of Weblog, mostly because we're still working on the technology and trying to figure out how we're going to handle it logistically here at TeeVee HQ. Also, right now we're apparently limited to one post per day, making ours the most anemic Weblog in recent memory.It's actually a sideblog on their home page (down the left-hand side), so this is a case of integrating the blog form into an existing home page that has other content with different update rhythms.
categories: metablog
11:50:59 AM say what []
Political Parrhesia: The National Debt Marches Upward. Just passing this Political Parrhesia item along:The federal government's fiscal year ended on Monday, September 30. So, it is appropriate to take a look at how much the national debt rose in the past year. $100 billion? You wish. $200 billion? Sorry.
categories: x-syndicate
11:17:40 AM say what []
RadioExpress! and my back button (checking a quote), just ate my post... rewriting it now... {Here's a Radio wish! Could someone make a version of Radio Express that pops up in its own window, like every other bookmarklet on the planet?}...
Face it, naming your blog is the old band-name game writ large. There are so many more good band names than there are good bands. I could update that observation and maybe call it xian's law: "There are more good blog names than there are good blogs."
But names are important. I won't belabor that. The Maturin character in one of Patrick O'Brian's books says at one point that one of the oldest superstitions is "naming calls."
As a title, "Naked Emperor" (most recently seen tangling with pundiblogocrat N.Z. Bear) gets right to the point. It has the perfect tagline as well: Exposing the Obvious.
10:32:07 AM say what []
The implied architecture is impressive. The design seems to account for a broad range of content-management, community, calendar, and mail features on a common model. Some of it goes beyond what I'm interested in as a writer, but I did suddenly start imagining myself running all my sites with one single tool.
As someone who is still wrestling with httpd.conf and MT installation and RSS Monkey, the RSS parser feature in pMachine caught my eye. It doesn't come with the free version of the software, but the pro version is feature-complete and $45/noncommercial $125/commercial (very close to MT's "soft" price points). I'll report on this, amidst all my other jugglings.
I may have to try migrating a blog, because I don't think I can deal with starting any more just to explore software. The trickiest part is jumping from one interface to another, remembering "where did I put that?"
Final thought after touring pMachine's interface through screen shots: it appears to do just about everything I've ever been asked to spec out when gathering requirements for a custom CMS implementation. For $125, this could finally realign the CMS market along more rational lines.
10:04:02 AM say what []
