infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

Although it’s probably the hipsterest music site online, I do enjoy reading Pitchfork from time-to-time to catch up on what those whippersnappers are listening to. The site has long gone without any RSS feeds for either its news or its record reviews. I hoped that they would add feeds when they launched a redesign in early 2005, but apparently they’re too indie for metadata, leaving me months behind in my Arcade Fire news. Lately, I’ve been using an RSS feed that a reader created that scraped titles and permalinks from the news section, but today the feed included a post from that user’s blog informing me that Pitchfork has added what it regards as RSS feeds. Unfortunately, “they are not actually XML, but broken XHTML pages,” so they’re at least as dicey as the scraped feeds. (I’ve never coded content management servers, but, dang, outputting valid RSS or Atom can’t be that hard, can it?) Regardless, the underground feed is going down, so I’ll have to switch to the approved Pitchfork feeds.

Valid markup or not, Pitchfork’s feeds take an approach I find a little irritating, segregating different content into different feeds without offering a master feed. In total, there are six different feeds for news, record reviews, features, “best new music,” free downloads, and reviews of individual tracks. I mostly just want the news and record reviews, but I would settle for a master feed that includes all six. In particular, why are news and features in separate feeds? Features come out so infrequently that it seems ridiculous to subscribe to a separate feed. Anyway, congratulations Pitchfork, you’re bringing back 2001 like it never went away.

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Yesterday, I finally found the Wikipedia pages that list userboxes, so I edited my user profile page to include several userboxes. While very active editors often have extensive user pages that list their interests and editing philosophies, I barely edit the encyclopedia at all. If I make changes at all, I fix some copyediting problems. I registered an account primarily to watch articles and dig deep into the policy discussions for my research. Still, I felt a little lame having no user page.

I’ve never been a fan of blog badges — it seems like you should blog about your interests and causes rather than add a trail of little graphics, but I think that the userboxes are a nice way to cobble together an identity from pre-fab components. Inserting the userboxes give the appearance of having some investment in the page, at least compared to first sad effort at making a user page. Two of the userboxes I used, the boxes for vegetarian and public transport issues, fall under the category of beliefs and convictions, which apparently are threatened with deletion. The page says, “It should be noted that use of such userboxes is strongly discouraged at Wikipedia, and it is likely that very soon all these userboxes will be deleted or moved to userspace.” I haven’t had time to read the entire policy discussion around eliminating these boxes, but I don’t see how stating you’re a vegetarian or a transit enthusiast would prevent you from participating effectively. However, it does seem like an effort to discipline the user community into presenting identities that are ostensibly free of ideology or opinion. Userboxes provide an easy way to represent the human side of Wikipedia, users are folded into an anonymous mass, picking away at the encyclopedia.

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• FT.com - James Boyle: Constitutional circumvention
  The esteemed law professor sounds off on the hazards of the proposed WIPO broadcast treaty.
  (del.icio.us tags: scary globalization law copyright intellectualproperty)

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Time magazine TV critic James Poniewozik says “‘Rescue Me’s’ credits, anyway, are the best on TV, a flawless marriage of music, picture and idea.” Watching the FX drama last night, I had to agree. I actually enjoy watching this sequence, since it uses images as emblems for the themes of the show and the style of the sequence is quite different from the show itself. While much of the show uses a handheld style that passes for realism on TV these days, the credit sequence uses fast-cutting and compositing effects that give the footage a distressed look. It’s as if the credits depict the internal life of Denis Leary’s character, while the rest of the program shows his life from an outsider’s perspective.

Poniewozik says he watches “Rescue Me” on Tivo, yet he never skips over the credits. I don’t know that I would have that level of commitment to the credits, (I watch it as it’s played on cable.) but, “Lost” notwithstanding it really does seem like credits sequences are fertile ground for formal experimentation on TV.

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• New Scientist Technology - Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites
  “New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. “
  (tags: surveillance myspace yasns nsa privacy)
• Amanda Huginkiss: Congdon says beauty not key to her popularity
  Yeah right.
  (tags: TVontheWeb)

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• The real bias in Wikipedia: a response to David Shariatmadari by Robert McHenry
  The Encyclopaedia Britannica editor turned professional troll splits hairs over the Countering Systemic Bias Wikiproject.
  (del.icio.us tags: ethics globalization wikipedia)

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• SocialText/wikiCalc: More Interesting Than Google Spreadsheets
  Oh snap, UT should buy a license of this Wiki spreadsheet to make the lives of its suffering TAs easier.
  (tags: wiki spreadsheet useful)
• Record meteorite hit Norway - Aftenposten.no
  A meteorite strikes Norway with force comparable to the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima, and I learn of it through blogs, rather than TV news? Damn corporate media.. I guess they were too busy reporting on Natalee Holloway.
  (tags: disaster news journalism)
• MySpace exploration is marketer’s dream
  This Hollywood Reporter story discusses how studios are using MySpace to promote their pictures. I’m often a little surprised to see non-Fox productions promoted, but I suppose money swears for the folks at MySpace.
  (tags: myspace yasns film advertising business)
• Da Myspace Hustlerz - May 2006
  How-tos for “pimping out” your MySpace profile.
  (tags: myspace yasns design DIY)

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• dorkbot-austin
  Austin finally has a Dorkbot chapter. It’s first get-together is June 8th, which will have been yesterday by the time it hits this blog.
  (tags: austin geek dorkbot DIY hack)
• Unpacking My Library: The Perils of the Blogging Academic?
  Chris Anderson of NY IMC and Columbia University has a thoughtful post responding to Yale’s decision not to hire power-blogging professor Juan Cole after Zionist and right-wing pressure groups fought the departments’ decision to hire Cole.
  (tags: academic blog power politics)

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• Kurt Cobain’s Suicide Letter vs. Google AdSense
  Cory Arcangel has created a page with Kurt Cobain’s suicide note embedded with Google AdSense ads to see what the contextual algorithm will drop in the text. I had to whitelist AdSense in my Adblock extension for it to work.
  (tags: music punk google hack advertising art humor)

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UT-Austin paper The Daily Texan reports actor Robert De Niro has donated his collecton of movie ephemera to campus archive The Harry Ransom Center. Unlike the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate papers, which fetched $5 million from the archive, it seems like the Hi Mom! star may have simply given the artifacts away. The story gushes over the prospect of students checking out the prosthetic noses the actor used in Raging Bull or the notes on his shooting script for Greetings, a film I’m sure all of three Texan readers know. The HRC has quite an amazing collection of ephemera — like Jean-Paul Sartre’s journals or Edgar Allen Poe’s writing desk — that it’s a little disappointing to think that De Niro’s stuff would be a draw. Maybe some star-struck students will come to see the movie-related stuff, and have their interest in existentialism or photography piqued by one of the other exhibits.

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