Kids these days

My little sister just notified the world that Lauren and I are going to be godparents for her first-born child, who is due in March.

Via myspace. No phone call, no email - a myspace bulletin was how we found out. It was question #38 on some silly survey for pregnant mothers-to-be that she filled out.

So, to get back at her for letting xXsxyAngelXx find out about it before us, I'm now blogging about it. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mary!

I sincerely hope that the MySpace/Facebook/Friendster revolution doesn't ever completely replace organic human social interaction, but it certainly looks more and more like that's exactly what's going to happen, eh?

Karl Rove retires, just like Jay-Z

I don't quite understand the reaction I'm witnessing to the news that Karl Rove is "retiring" from his post as White House political adviser. That he's leaving the White House over a year before his boss's term in office is up should be no reason for excitement. Review a few basic nuggets of common sense with me:

1. Karl Rove's political career is not over. He's a relatively young person, and he orchestrated two elections for a group that has enjoyed notorious longevity despite their governing policies. Plus, remember that the public has a very short memory span, as evidenced by how many former Nixon administration officials have been a part of this White House. He will be back, and he'll probably be back with a few new filthy tricks added to his repertoire. The question, then, is when? He says he won't join any of the 2008 campaigns (and they probably can't really afford to have him since every GOP candidate has tried their best to distance themselves from Bush), but who knows how much stock we can put into that statement.

2. White House policies won't suddenly improve. Even if W. and Company packed their bags and left tomorrow, the damage they've done to the Constitution and to the Office of the President will be lasting. Because Karl Rove isn't around doesn't mean that we can begin to pick up the pieces from this Administration yet; it just makes this Administration that much less effective in peddling their messages and policies to their base. Plus, they've still got this Dick Cheney guy working for them...

Karl Rove has been a destructive force in American politics and government. Believing that his career is over at the end of the month is akin to believing that Jay-Z was really done rapping after 2003's The Black Album. We know we haven't seen the last of him, so therefore there's nothing to really get excited about as Rove returns to Texas to watch and wait.

Confirmation: Stu Bykofsky is, indeed, a whore

Shut the fuck up, Stu, you whore!

MY HYPOTHESIS last week that another 9/11 attack would unite America was wrong, judging by e-mail and voice-mail responses. When I stopped reading at 1,000 (lots more unread) roughly 65 percent disagreed with me, many violently and obscenely.

Published early Thursday, the column received moderate response until it was posted on Web sites from right (Drudge) to left (CrooksandLiars). Then my world exploded and I became the flavor of the day.

Interview requests rained in from radio (local, national and Canadian) and TV (Fox News, CNN Headline News.) I accepted as many as I could.

(emphasis mine)

The column is basically a very long-winded pat-on-the-back for having successfully stirred up so many reader responses. Stu then digs to the very bottom of the mail bag and shares only the dumbest, most insane, most off-topic conspiracy theories to make himself look better and smarter than his readers by comparison.

Stu Bykofsky must be an attention whore

In case you haven't seen this yet, yesterday Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky wrote this:

America's fabric is pulling apart like a cheap sweater.

What would sew us back together?

Another 9/11 attack.

The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago's Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda.

Is there any doubt they are planning to hit us again?

America's collective response: "Go fuck yourself, Stu!"

Reactions:
Philly Will Do
Atrios
Crooks & Liars
Digg
Kiko's House

I just can't imagine a scenario in which both Stu and his editors at the Daily News thought this topic might be appropriate. The premise is so aggressively stupid that I can only come up with one reason for it, and that's that Stu Bykofsky must be an attention whore. The headline for the story might as well have read "I'm an asshole that wants innocent Americans to die! Digg this!"

I'm continually amazed by people that write and say stuff like this, seemingly without a single thought as to what people's reactions might be. They just throw it out there, consequences be damned.

Right now: Brett Myers Entrance Music at the "Zo Zone"

In an ironic twist that must have Todd Zolecki shaking his head, this post from his Phillies baseball blog on Philly.com has garnered more attention in the comments section than any other post he's made about, well, baseball. This is not to speak ill of Zolecki's coverage of the Phightin's, which is top-notch. However, it must be kind of aggravating to see blogs like Beerleaguer and We Should Be GM's (two Open All Night faves) get all the reader love while Todd, the actual, honest-to-goodness beat writer for the hometown rag, gets none.

The reason for the attention today? He's soliciting suggestions for entrance music for Phillies closer Brett Myers to come charging in to. KC and the Sunshine band apparently doesn't do the trick for Myers (although you might not have been able to tell after the way he pitched last night).

Myers has used both White Zombie's "Children of the Grave" and The Outlaws' "(Ghost) Rider in the Sky" as his intro music this season. But neither has really stuck and Myers has thought about what else he could use. That situation came to a head during last night's 6-4 victory over the Florida Marlins at Citizens Bank Park, where neither White Zombie or The Outlaws were played before he struck out the side to earn his eighth save.

No, Myers got KC & the Sunshine Band's "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty" instead.

"It (ticked) me off," Myers said.

"They need to do a poll in the paper to tell people to pick my dang song," he added.

So what are you waiting for?

What should the Phillies play for Myers as he leaves the bullpen?

I've already suggested Muse - Knights of Cydonia and White Stripes - Seven Nation Army to balance it out between all the chuckleheads asking for Bon Jovi and that "Let the bodies hit the floor" song. Go there and help out if you can. Also, let's start soliciting more baseball topics that are music-related for Zolecki to post about. Maybe if he does this every day, he can establish his own group of dedicated commenters.

For reference, here's this link. Is there anything that Wikipedia doesn't document?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_baseball_entrance_music

I have these ideas...

Every once in a while, I get these wacky brainstorms for an idea that JUST MIGHT WORK, but nowadays it's rare that one actually comes to fruition. One of my brainstorming missions over the past year since I left Webreseller was to come up with some solid ideas for how to make some dough to cover the fees that would keep my server online. One way to accomplish this has been to politely beg for a periodic stipend from some of the folks that keep their sites on my server, but I know that another untapped resource waiting in the wings is site ads -- and the only thing keeping me from swimming in that vault full of gold coins (Scrooge McDuck style) is the utter lack of user traffic coming to the sites I currently maintain.

Don't get me wrong, here. I know that I am capable of generating a steady stream of loyal readers: the proof of this is one of my first sites that was cofounded by myself and one Dany Sloan to congregate fans of the indie rock band Ted Leo & the Pharmacists. TimorousMe.org now has well over 1,000 registered users, and it gets around 3,000 visitors a month. That's not a huge pull, but it's significant when compared to the short amount of time spent actually publishing content and maintaining the site. But, because Ted has got his morals and I've got mine, I won't ever put ads up to try to profit from his work. Still, there are some things of value that I can pilfer from this site, which will be four years old next month: the knowledge that I am able to attract a significant number of users when armed with a broad enough topic of interest, and that I can successfully put those users to work sharing content with one another.

It's 2007, baby: user-generated content is where it's at. You need only look at the success of sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Digg to see that phenomenon. Obviously, I'm not a MIT programmer geek cooking up the next Google in my dorm room, but I know I can use some of the existing tools out there to cook up something of substantial interest and carve out my niche without working 14 hour days to keep site visitors placated. The following are some of those brainstorms I've had on the stove for the past few months: I'm posting them in the hopes that having them out in the open will somehow force me to take action.

Dub-Cee 2.0: The "Pulse" - Some of you may remember this ill-fated project we started shortly after Timorous Me, at www.dubcee.org. Aimed at West Chester students, the purpose was to fill the site with writers that lived in the borough and cared about their community, and to boost interest and participation in our other media organizations (the Quad, WCUR, and WCU-TV). Dub-Cee was supposed to have been the zenith of that whole collective, but it fell flat on it's face when I started asking people to contribute to the blog on top of whatever else they had going on at the time. It petered out after the mayor's race and that was that.

Turns out I was going about it all wrong. As we've seen, West Chester people are blogging - they just didn't want to write more for an online magazine that was getting them no additional attention. Granted, my enthusiasm for the project wasn't all there, either - so that didn't help. However, knowing what I know now, I'd go back and use the magic of tools like Yahoo! Pipes and Feedburner to cobble together a site that essentially updates itself. Similar in design to the Hype Machine, all that needs to be done is to find and enlist a legion of local bloggers that are already going at it, categorize their content, and bring in that content live via an RSS feed. That, combined with daily headlines from sites like the Daily Local, Philly.com, the Quad, WCUR, etc. would keep news coming in at a steady clip. Combine that with some forums and maybe a classified section, and here's a site that changes every minute according to what's going on in West Chester - hence, it's got its finger on "the pulse" of the borough. This kind of thing becomes a "one size fits all" solution, depending on where you live. If you're in a town with enough of a blogging presence (Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, or maybe Millville?) then maybe YOU could be the proud owner of a "town-pulse" site.

Then and Now: Re-create an old snapshot - The inspiration for this came a little at a time as I worked on a few different projects - most notably, a 2004 video to help the Chester High School Class of 1954 celebrate their 50th reunion. For that short film, I was armed with a stack of old postcards and a digital camera, with a mission to try and recreate some of the scenes in modern-day Chester, PA for a side-by-side comparison. Obviously, the results were not pretty as Chester is a city in decay, but it gave me a taste for urban exploration. If you've ever been to West Chester Scoop Ice Cream on Darlington Street, you'll see by the photos of old and new West Chester up on the wall that I'm not the only one with this fascination with before vs. after.

Only recently did I find the tool that would help to accomplish this; I had previously planned on it being a coffee table book or something similar. Certainly an interactive site that allows users to search and contribute is much more engaging in this situation than a static medium like print. Using software like Google Maps API and MediaWiki (I actually had found a script that worked like Flickrvision, but I can't find it now to save my life...) users would be encouraged to post old photos and then position themselves and their cameras to recreate the scene for the 21st century. Wow, I didn't know there used to be a farm where that Bath & Body Works is now! An existing example of this can be found at phillyhistory.org, albeit without the "now" part. Is that Vince Papale I see jogging down underneath the El?

End Transmission: The "go-to" forum for college media moguls - This is another one of those ideas that's had it's roots in several places. Going way back to 2002, Dany introduced me to one of his friends in Iowa or Utah or some shit that had a blog and a message board dedicated to his misadventures and what I'm guessing had to have been KUOI. (Quick google search reveals that his name was Ben High, from Moscow, Idaho, and he's still online! I thought he quit blogging a while ago.) Anyway, the point here was that Ben graciously sacrificed his bandwidth to allow strangers to discuss college radio on his forums. When they went down, it occurred to me that there was no obvious alternative for college radio geeks to talk about low-power FM, student volunteers, or the Postal Service.

It later occurred to me that college newspaper, yearbook, and television staffers had a similar issue. These are folks that spend a lot of time in front of computers and procrastinating - I see it as a perfect opportunity to congregate them in one spot for a discussion of all things "college media".

This is one idea I've already acted upon, albeit with my traditional half-assed approach. The concept and spirit for a college media forum went hand-in-hand with the symposium / concert we put on in 2004 called End Transmission, so I sought to borrow from that and update it for 2007 when I bought www.endtransmission.org. However, I haven't gotten around to actually putting the forums together, designing the artwork, or even getting the word out about the place. And so it's just sitting there patiently, waiting for someone besides porn spammers to pay attention to it.

The common thread here for me has been to take topics that I care about (local stuff, nostalgia, and college radio, I guess) and find a way to bring other people together in a way only the Internet can. And then, of course, to post ads everywhere on those sites, profit without doing anything, and retire early.

Minnesota Bridge Collapse a Peak Into Every Commuter's Nightmares

Each time I am on a bridge, I pray that I am able to get over to the other side before it collapses (because every bridge eventually collapses, right? Just not always with people on it...). That fear, for me, is right up there with my fear of big needles. It's just not one I tend to have to wrestle with quite that often. I am a bit shell-shocked after witnessing this actually happen on a major roadway in a major American city.