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Geez. I called Loeb’s Delicatessen “Lloyd’s Delicatessen” in a previous post. Inexcusable, but I’ve corrected the error.

Adams Morgan is the place to go in Washington, D.C. for its stunning profusion of ethnic restaurants in close proximity. Those looking for African (especially Ethiopian) food are especially in luck. Two good sources for listings are The Washington Post’s entertainment guide and DCNet’s Adams Morgan restaurants page. The Post has links to its own reviews of the restaurants listed, and puts an “our pick” icon next to the ones it finds especially tasty. DCNet offers a much simpler list organized by cuisine type, with one-sentence descriptions and hours of operation in some cases.

Leaving tomorrow for a business trip in Washington, D.C.

Get to meet Ari Fleischer. That’s exciting, but even more so is eating breakfast and lunch at Loeb’s Delicatessen (which, despite being a favorite of both George Stephanopoulos and William Safire, seems to enjoy no links to itself anywhere on the Web). The address is 832 15th St. NW and the telephone number is (202) 371-1150. You’ll see me there noshing on an authentic New York bagel (plain, with a slab of plain cream cheese) for breakfast and a Walter’s Favorite: hot pastrami, Muenster cheese, Russian dressing and cole slaw on pumpernickel bread. I can feel my arteries hardening already, and it feels good.

CIO Magazine: Weblogs as Customer-Service Tools

Macromedia, the San Francisco-based developer of Flash and Shockwave software, has been using blogs to share information with its customers since last May. At that time, the company had just released three new software products directly to the Internet, and it wanted to get feedback as quickly as possible in case there were bugs or other problems. The company decided to put a set of blogs on its site, each administered by a single community manager who could communicate directly with customers, answer their questions and direct them to other Web content that might interest them. “Within the space of a couple days we had hundreds of thousands of posts,” says Tom Hale, Macromedia’s vice president in charge of developer relations. Not only do the blogs help Macromedia quickly troubleshoot its products and respond to customers’ concerns, they have spawned little communities where serious users can share advice.

Unlike questions sent via an online feedback form, the blogs enable the company to amass feedback, post information and patches to the site, and reach their user community very quickly. The blogs have also become a valuable marketing tool. The exchanges that occur between the community managers and visitors provide useful content in a personal rather than PR-ish tone and present Macromedia as a trusted information provider to its user community. While it might not feel like a marketing tool, the opt-in nature of the technology makes it an appealing way to establish and maintain low-pressure, high-value relationships with customers.

FUTURIST: Credibility of Weblogs as News Sources

Readers may find blogs more credible than traditional media because blogs have no corporate interest to serve. They aren’t censored by advertisers or constrained by editorial policies, and they are therefore a more democratic publishing medium. In the interest of “moving democratic media to the masses,” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab launched Blogdex, a blog tracking and listing service whose very existence seems to validate blogs as a legitimate trend in journalism.

We have yet to see how the new generation of high-tech journalism will stack up to traditional journalism in terms of quality and objectivity; with new technologies come questions about standards and ethics, warns OJR executive editor Larry Pryor. The publication launched a new “Future of News” section to address these questions and more, keeping an observant eye and an open dialogue on journalism’s dynamic, bifurcating future.

ONLINE: Problems with Searching Blogs

Blogs consist of many postings, typically featured prominently in the center of the page. By organizing the postings in reverse chronological order, the most recent entry is displayed at the top. To keep the page manageable, older posts are shuttled off the front page and into an archive section. With some bloggers so active and prolific that they post dozens of entries per day, the posting that was indexed yesterday may now already be at the URL of the archive, even though the search engine still points to the front page. Even if it points to the correct URL, it may be difficult to quickly find exactly where on the page the section of interest is.

Also note that unlike traditional online news databases, the search engines and Daypop do not index each entry separately. Instead, the words on the page are indexed as they appear at the time the search engine visits the page. So be prepared for a bit of digging to get from the search engine link to the content you want. One way around this problem at Daypop is to choose to search the RSS headlines that do provide entry-level indexing; unfortunately, the RSS headlines are not as complete as the other kinds of searching.

(Emphasis added)

ONLINE: Daypop for Searching Blogs

Daypop is a specialty search engine that just crawls and indexes Weblogs and news sites. It does not try to get every blog out there. Instead it focuses on what it calls the best of the blogs and news sites. It does cover over 7,500 and refreshes its entire index once or more per day. The news sites include both English and non-English language
sources.

Daypop is a great search engine for getting news from beyond the traditional media. While it does not have sophisticated advanced search features, it does offer a few important options. Its search defaults to a Boolean AND and supports phrase searching with quotation marks. Use a to force a stop word search or the ­ to exclude terms. No full Boolean searching or OR searching is available.

Daypop has an advanced search page, but both the basic and advanced offer four content-type limits: the default news and blogs, just news, just blogs, or RSS headlines. The advanced search also has language limits, country limits, and the choice of how many results to display.

Daypop takes after Google in several ways. The search results use a keyword-in-context display, have a link to a cached copy of the page, and include the size of the page. The results are labeled with an N for the news sources and a W for Weblogs. The blog hits also have a link to “citations,” which then finds other blogs that link to the original hit.

The ability to browse sideways with the “citations” link to see which other blogs are providing commentary is one way to use Daypop to get more than a single blog’s viewpoint. Daypop also has a couple of special pages that use their own link analysis to identify top interests in the indexed blogging community. Their “Top 40″ page is a ranked list of links that are most frequently linked by bloggers in their daily section (not just anywhere on their Web pages). The page even offers graphic depictions of the rise and decline of each link’s popularity. A similar “Top News” page shows the most-linked-to news stories.

InfoToday: Rich Site Summaries (RSS) Explained

The whole idea of Rich Site Summaries (RSS) came from Netscape back in its glory days. But the capability of RSS has been combined and expanded with the rise of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to create the Internet’s version of a news wire.

RSS is a way of creating a broadcast version of a blog or news page. Anyone who has frequently updated content and is willing to let others republish it can create the RSS file. Typically called syndication, the RSS file is an XML formatted file that can be used at other sites or by other intermediary software such as news aggregators. The original incarnation was to use RSS to include several headlines on a personalized portal page. But an RSS feed can also be easily pulled into other functions, such as an aggregator.

Sites that offer an RSS file will often display a small icon with either RSS or, more commonly now, XML in a small box, usually orange. An RSS feed can just have headlines, or it can have headlines and summaries. Due to varying formats of the RSS file, publisher vagaries, and the capabilities of the specific news aggregator, summaries may or may not be displayed.

Nerd Persecution Explained

Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.

Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults don’t normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage kids do it?

Partly it’s because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I’ve read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it’s part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It’s much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

(Emphasis added)

Off-topic, but valuable.

Wonder what would happen to a nerd’s unpopularity index if he/she published a weblog?

BBC NEWS: Blogging goes mobile

The latest trend is moblogging - updating your blog with a mobile phone.

Programs like FoneBlog, Manywhere Moblogger and Wapblog allow bloggers to post details about their lives from anywhere, not just from a computer

There are an estimated 500,000 people who run blogs and analysts say a quarter of them may eventually update their sites on the go.

So how do you pronounce that — MOB-logging or MO-blogging?