Jay Fienberg zeros in on the key ideas Gary Lawrence Murphy (phew) was illustrating in Echos of RSS and I was implying in Value-Added RSS Feeds.  In "Value-add feeds are like microcontent (list and packages)", he had some memorable bits worth several long chewing sessions:

"what I think Don and Gary are commenting on, is the feed of microcontent streams itself being used like microcontent: that is, where the feed is itself easy to reuse, refactor and add value to it."

"I think information is really an art—that is how it is different than data."

"So, I think this whole microcontent thing, and what I see as a parallel with value-add feeds, among other things, is like developing motifs with information."

Yes, Jay.  We are not just travelling in the same general direction, we are on the same road.

Wow.  Checkout Washington Post's Eyes on the War Flash-based slideshow.  Amazing series of pictures from the Embedded Journalists.  This is what I was talking about when I talked about the magic of slideshows and LIFE magazine.  I enjoyed it more with sound turned off.

Phil Wolff's blog have many interesting posts about blog related stats.  Did you know there are 100,000 polish blogs of which 62% are by women?  How about those 12,000 Iranian blogs? 

Best find on my first visit today was the reference to great post by Maciej Ceglowski on measuring how high the language barriers are in BlogLand backed up with numbers provided by his crawlers.  Posts like that deserves wider distribution that what he got.  Pass it on.  To entice you, here is the lure:

"links tend not to cross language boundaries. If you look at all the outgoing links from English language blogs, only about 1.75% point to a non-English weblog. In the reverse direction, however, the figure is much higher. A full 7% of links from non-English-language weblogs point to an English site." – Maciej Ceglowski

If you want to be amused, read Wired's Being Invisible article that talks about how one might build an invisibility cloak.  It shows how engineers typically think.  Thankfully, experienced engineers learn to ask questions like "Why is invisibility needed?" and "How near invisibility is sufficient?"

I have learned that one needs to question the validity and nature of the problem being solved.  In the case of invisibility, one has to reach further because invisibility itself is a solution to other problems.  One also must take each word and examine it carefully, taking note of all the assumptions.

Taking invisibility for example, the word means not visible.  Not visible doesn't mean the object of invisiblity has to be there, just that the subject of invisibility is not able to see it.  If I am not there, I am invisible to you.

Slightly harder solution is to have my proxy there, something small enough or hidden deeply enough to avoid being seen.  Another approach is deception, playing with the subject's perception and expectations.  More direct and possibly violent solution is to destroy the subject's ability to see: If you can't see, I am invisible to you.

A thinker must often swim up the river of problems to its source like a salmon.

Ground is shaking in UserLand.  John Robb's abrupt departure and blog disappearance smells bad.  Dave is hinting at a bigger change that should be "net-net good news for Manila and Radio users and for the weblog community."  While going open source is a possibility, "We weren't ready to announce, John surprised us" seems to point to a buyout.  My list of suspects with recent news about AOL's entry into BlogLand are:

• Yahoo
• Adobe
• Symantec
• Macromedia

Intriguing drama unfolding…

Mr. Safe is having his 15 minutes of fame and people are posting what they think is the best picture for Mr. Safe.  Well, I couldn't find one I liked, so I thought I would post a picture from one of my favorite movies that is definitely the least likely to be that of Mr. Safe.

Good Mooooorning, Moscow!

Gary Lawrence Murphy reached a similar conclusion as I have: emergence of value-added RSS feeds.  Checkout the second half of his "Echos of RSS" post.

A TIME article reflecting my appreciation for good insults.  Woo, I forgot about the Churchill classic:

If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee. – Lady Astor

And if I were your husband I would drink it. – Churchill

And a good observation from the article:

"If the N word has become devalued by overuse, so has the currency of moral indignation."

A good insult make you think it over and then hopefully appreciate it with a good chuckle and respond in kind while remaining civil.  Unfortunately, today's insults are just repeats of common foul words or what we see on TV.

Art of insult delivery has gone down hill too.  Today, people think a loud torrent of verbal abuse like the one we often see Eminem or the loose half of two stars in buddy cop movies frequently do is what a good insult is.  Even the intellects think slipping sly messages between the line makes good insults.

A few months ago, my wife dug a hole and buried some roots of green onions.  Look what we have in our kitchen today: green onions!  We do that often when we have something that might grow.  Er, don't bury bamboos though.  You'll regret it.

This reminds me of a trick I wanted to try on my dog.  Unfortunately, she died two years ago.  She was a beautiful black Pekinese.  Now I just have two birds.  Since they might be bored, I perform five-minute shows in front of the birdcage everyday to keep them entertained.  So far they haven't booed me.  I might have the start of a second career here: Bird Entertainer.

Getting back to the trick, if you have a dog that likes to bury bones, try this trick.  When the dog is not around, unearth the bones and either replace it with something else or put more bones in there.  Heehee.  Your dog just might start a bone farm.

When I started this blog, I tried to come up with a cool name like other bloggers but couldn't think of any.  Today, it dropped on me out of the blue: Daily Habit.  Being a newage narcissist, I left my name in there.  Let's have a round of applause for the new name:

Don Park's Daily Habit

Woohoo!  Aiyaiya!

FYI, the font used to display the title is Georgia…I think.  I am not a font fanatic.