I’m not a fan of Mitt Romney, but this is my candidate for simultaneously dumbest and most biased headline of the day:
Mike Huckabee Opts Not to Talk About Mitt Romney’s Mormon Faith
Over the last couple years I’ve written (I think) four letters to the editors of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News. Most recently I wrote one last week in response to this letter. Today they printed it. That makes three out of the four that have made it to publication. Woo hoo!
As an aside, I noticed that they recently started allowing people to post responses to the letters. An excellent idea since letters are so often edited for brevity.
For the last year or so there’s been a ton of articles about how MySpace, YouTube etc is creating a new generation of narcissistic exhibitionist teens who put it all out there and wait for the pedophiles to come knocking. On one hand, I agree that many teens may not know what they’re getting into and that parents need to pay attention and take reasonable steps to keep their kids safe. That said, I think the long-term impact of this phenomenon could be remarkable.
I’m hardly a teenager at 38, but in the last 10+ years I can trace practically all of the important developments in my life to exposing myself online. At a practical level, I really mean that I’ve met a lot of people (including my wife) simply by emailing them. Being exposed and relatively open online has also helped my business by helping me find customers, investors, partners etc.
My point? I’m probably in the top 10% of people in my age group in terms of leveraging online networking. The remaining 90% are too busy or set in their ways to take advantage of these new technologies (and understanding the etiquette that goes with them). When it comes to social networking, my generation is a bunch of old fogies with their VCR clocks doing this:
A much greater percentage of kids today intuitively understand this. Right now they’re doing sophomoric stuff on MySpace, but today’s teenagers will be looking for jobs in a few years, and in 10 years they’ll be the hiring managers. Of course they will take advantage of social networking tools like MySpace, Facebook etc and will look askance at anyone who doesn’t, just like I’m amazed when I occasionally meet someone who doesn’t have an email address.
(As an aside, while I was writing this post I got a phone call from someone in Belgium who has followed my company very closely online. It may or may not lead to a business opportunity down the road, but the fact that he knew who to call, even though I’m 7-8 time zones away in another country, is yet another example of this trend.)
Hat tip: The Social Networking Weblog
Today we (Enthusiast Group) made our first site live. It’s not a launch per se, more of an early beta version. (Does that word even mean anything any more?) We have several features still in the pipeline and there are doubtless many bugs still to be ironed out. As a matter of fact, I just found and fixed a couple between the last sentence and this one. 
So go check it out and let us know what you think: Mountain Biking at YourMTB.com
When a newspaper or other publication makes a mistake, they typically run a correction a day or two later in a section of the paper that no one ever reads. Usually it’s out of context: the reader probably no longer has the original story at hand, so they can’t re-evaluate what they read in light of the new facts.
So I was surprised and happy today to see that my alma mater’s campus newspaper is trying something new. They run the correction at the top of the story and republish the story via RSS. Here’s an example of a corrected story that showed up in my reader today. The correction is highlighted in bold between the byline and story proper, so it really stands out. It also is the only thing shown in the feed, which just displays excerpts. I hope this trend catches on.
The blogosphere has been abuzz of late about Google’s apparent caving in to the Chinese government’s request that they censor their search results. I’m of mixed feelings about this. Being radically moderate and having spent time in China, I think it’s silly to have a binary view of how things should be done there. (Though I’ve always thought Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” stance was a bit pompous and destined to fail.)
That said, I had a very visceral reaction when I came across the links below on a Slashdot thread.
Here’s a Google image search of “tianenman” as in Tianenman Square: http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen
Here’s that same search on Google’s Chinese site: http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen
Where did the tanks go?
Interesting that:
Beside the fact that he’s related to Churchill, there’s nothing noteworthy about his letter, at least not in the sense that it has any relationship to the Churchill affair. Isn’t it amazing how fame helps your cause? It even works on veteran journalists.