onfocus

I'm a little late linking to the party, but check out this great essay explaining how weblogs are like punk: Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Wonderchicken. [via Blogroots]

From a walk earlier tonight...

IEEE article on Web Services: The Web Within the Web. You may even spot a quote from me in there.

Everyone else is doing it, why can't I? Here's a map of the states I've visited. Looks like I need to get to the East and South to bring my percentage up. And then there's Idaho. You can create your own at World66. Here are some other people with maps. meme ahoy!

I went to a meeting of the Corvallis chapter of the Software Association of Oregon tonight. A couple of people who owned a local company called Green Pasture Software (cached copy—site now redirects) spoke about selling the company to IBM. They told some great fish-out-of-water stories about small town software guys negotiating with big blue, and had some general business advice. Overall it was great to meet some people and hear a bit of what's going on with tech in Corvallis.

Matt and I brought SXSWblog out of its slumber for its fourth year in action. I still have some tweaking to do, but most of the pages are now working with Matt's new design. If you're going to South by Southwest Interactive (or thinking about it) stop by to discuss sxsw, ask questions, read notes, or see some photos from last year. If you have a weblog, feel free to send a trackback the site when you post about SXSW. (Or you could set up a SXSW category in MT and have your blog ping SXSWblog automatically.) Yep, geeky fun in Austin is only a month and a half away!

Over at Blogroots, the trackbacks (blogpopuli) and local posts (blognews) are now combined into one stream of information. We don't believe crossing the streams will result in total protonic reversal.

I use the Merriam-Webster online dictionary just about every day. (Thanks largely to a m-w context menu entry I whipped up for IE—and my bad spelling skillz.) Anyway, the site has undergone a nice facelift, and they have some nifty tools you can download that I haven't noticed before.

Last night I went to a gathering at the library in Corvallis celebrating the success of a community-wide effort to adopt-a-minefield in Afghanistan. Several churches and community groups worked together to raise $28,000 for clearing landmines. There were two speakers that gave emotional talks about their personal experience with these devices. One woman lost her son to a landmine—he was clearing them in Iraq. Now she's trying to raise money to clear landmines in his name.

I found out today that around the same time just down the street at Oregon State University, Portland photographer Joel Preston Smith was talking about his photographic work in Iraq: Images of Iraq haunt photographer. You can see a gallery of his photos at his Picture Iraq gallery.

Who is watching the watchers? Well, the Columbia Journalism Review has a weblog that is covering the campaign coverage called The Campaign Desk.

I posted a thread at Blogroots about weblog-related predictions for 2004. Here's my prediction for 2004: A prominent blogger with a large audience will be sued for publishing libelous comments and loose. (Not for republishing libelous statements, but for original content that is not true and defamatory.)