Just another nerd.
So Dave Winer offers up a demo of what he’s looking to do by using the Google API to search through the data at Scripting.Com. But, again, why rely on a third party to accomplish this?
Want to see every time I’ve mentioned Dave Winer on this weblog?
<http://brian.carnell.com/index?body=winer>
Or how about every time I’ve mentioned Seth?
<http://brian.carnell.com/index?body=seth+dillingham>
And, as Seth points out, you see the results in the weblog. Excellent!
CNN reporter John Zarella seems to have out-and-out faked a demonstration of an automatic weapon as well as made a gross error/lie about the “assault” gun ban. And yet, no heads are rolling at CNN. Why?
First, Zarella made an error that gun control advocates encourage but that anyone doing reporting on the “assault” weapons ban should know not to make (or else find a different line of work). Zarella featured automatic and semiautomatic weapons in a report on the ban, and claimed that the ban outlawed automatic weapons. In fact, it did no such thing. All the ban did was make it illegal to sell semiautomatic rifles that feature certain external attachments such as flash suppressors, large magazines, etc. (the actual law sets out a complicated test to determine whether or not a given gun is legal or not and I won’t go into that here).
Second, Zarella featured a police officer oing a live demonstration of firing a weapon on semiautomatic and a weapon on automatic fire at a brick. Here’s how The Washington Times describes (emphasis added),
In the first of the two segments that aired Thursday, a Broward County detective fired the AK-47 in semiautomatic mode, and the camera showed bullets hitting a cinder-block target. The detective then fired a legal semiautomatic weapon, and CNN showed a cinder-block target with no apparent damage. On Friday, CNN admitted that the detective had not been firing at the cinder block.
Given the problems we’ve seen with credibility problems at major national newspapers, I don’t see where Zarella avoids the chopping block for deceiving viewers.
Source:
CNN rapped over gun segment. Robert Stacy McCain, The Washington Times, May 19, 2003.
One of the things that really makes Conversant ideal from my point-of-view is that the system’s developers are often one step ahead of me feature-wise. What I mean by this is that inevitably a new feature will be introduced and I’ll be reading the docs and thinking to myself “why would anyone need that?” And then a few weeks later I’m usually thinking to myself “How did I ever live without this?”
Such is the case with the resource macro. Now using resources in Conversant is pretty straighforward. A resource is essentially a placeholder. For example, I’ve set up a macro called Afghanistan. If I surround the word Afghanistan with pipes, like this: |Afghanistan|, then the system will automatically create a link that I’ve set up so that the final result looks like this Afghanistan. Setting up new resources is real easy and much of the system I use to manage and categorize posts relies upon resources.
Back in April, Macrobyte added a macro to handle resources, and to be honest I couldn’t figure out why the heck anyone would want such a thing, since resources are so straightforward to use.
What the macro does, however, is let you add a bit of complexity when you need it. For example, one of the obvious limitations with the Afghanistan example is that I always have to use the word Afghanistan. What if I’d like to use that link but use different text. Suppose I wanted to say, “Al-Qaeda’s former stomping grounds” and link “stomping grounds” to the Afghanistan page? Now I either have to find a way to work the word Afghanistan in there or I have to go and find out what the URL is and manually insert it in “a href” tags. Ugh.
The linkResource macro takes care of this. Now all I have to do is post “Al-Qaeda’s former ” which will result in this: Al-Qaeda’s former stomping ground.
Excellent. I use a program called ActiveWords so that when I type “resource” and hit F8 it automatically inserts the basic template for the linkResource macro into any textfield I’m editing, so this has turned out to be an excellent solution to a problem I run into quite a bit.
Maybe I’m missing something, but Dave Winer’s ongoing talk about some new app. idea he’s come up with using the Google API really has me scratching my head. Dave said earlier today,
Now that said, I doubt if it has been done before because it combines two things that are relatively new — weblogs and the Google API. It uses the fact that URLs in a weblog have structure. They’re not without meaning. And the Google API returns, among other information, a set of URLs. Sites like Scripting News, with an archive going back to 1997, will have new utility.
Anyway, if this is as popular as I think it’s going to be, I’ll have to ask Google to up the limit on my key, or maybe give them the code to run on their server.
Sounded somewhat interesting, if cryptic, but then he followed up with this post,
An example of a bit of knowledge that’s now easy for me to get: Dave Sifry first appeared on Scripting News on 6/23/02. His second appearance was on 12/10/02.
Maybe I’m just spoiled by the weblogging tool I use, but why in the world would you want to do a Google API call to sort through data that is all local? Why in the world would you want to use a tool that makes it difficult to find out when you first wrote about a given individual? (For example, this URL will quickly lead you to the first time I blogged something about Winer).
I guess I can understand people running blogs for little or no charge who are using free hosting at Blogspot or wherever finding such a tool useful, but otherwise I just don’t understand why you’d need to go outside your blogging application to obtain such rudimentary views of your data.
Winer seems to be saying in a roundabout way that the software he’s using won’t do X, so rather than requests that ability or code it himself, he’ll pass along the problem to Google and use their system to accomplish what he’s looking for. Somehow I don’t think they’ll be jumping at the opportunity.