Knowledge Is Power

Blogging

AOl is now including weblogging tools with it's version 9, and changing the term - blog to 'AOL Journal' to make it easier for the easily confused AOL user. Not only will this cause an explosion of weblogs, but it will also cause a rash of clueless mainstream articles like this BBC item: A blog for everyone.

Wired interview with Rafat Ali, a journalist who's making money online writing about making money online. In the article he mentions pMachine, a blog publishing tool I haven't heard of yet.

In local blog news, etherfarm is coming to Chicago for a short stint. While visiting that link, see the mandible section of the very pretty site. Normally I'd link such recipe pages on my food blog, but items like Roast Pork Tenderloins with Pomegranate and Orange, Pumpkin Tiramisu and Cappuccino Créme Brulèe, bring up feelings of inadequacy and jealously.

Also in local blog stuff, if you missed the Gaper's Block party, you missed further prove that this city has some very talented, creative people. I'll post a few pictures later. Those of you who'd like to see the back of my head (complete with stylish ducktail) can see it here, courtesy of hanlonvision.

POSTSCRIPT: My pictures of this event were pretty bad, but since I've been spurred on by the Wiz, I'll post these two, one of the Wiz himself, talking to the Skillet, and another of Naz, doing stand-up.

Some more random links

A look at Liberian President Charles Taylor "Who is Taylor, the latest bad guy to draw American ire? A review of a decade of newspaper and magazine articles, books, reports by human-rights organizations and think-tank studies shows him to be everything from a pingpong devotee and connoisseur of old Motown tunes, to a lay Baptist preacher and avowed capitalist fond of dressing all in white, to a remorseless war criminal who used drugged 10-year-old boys to do his murderous bidding." via Breaching the Web

And in other African despot news - former Ugandan leader Idi Amin - whose 1971 to 1979 regime was one of the bloodiest in African history - is reported to be in a coma.

Perhaps as a response to 'freedom toast', the French The Culture Ministry has announced a ban on the use of "e-mail" in all government ministries, documents, publications or websites, replacing the word with "courriel".

Measuring an intellect as limitless as the universe A Review of Isaac Newton, by James Gleick. "Although he invented the calculus and figured out gravity and light, laying the foundations of mathematical physics so firmly that, as physicist Hermann Bondi put it, they "entered the marrow of what we know without knowing how we know it," these attainments consumed but a fraction of Newton's time. " The review is by another well-known science writer - Timothy Ferris.

The Zoo

I went to the Lincoln Park Zoo the other day and took some pictures.

Random Links

Some random things.

Looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction?

The HTML Your Mother Never Told You About "These pages will look best if you come over to my office and look at them on my monitor."

Wigley and Associates Weblog A good blog on business blogging.

A Tooth in Time, the history of the Iguanodon tooth that was the first fossil ever to be identified as from a dinosaur.

MicroAngela Some beautiful colorized electron microscope images. via dublog

Catching up

I usually do slow down around here doing the summer, but it has been pretty darn stagnant at KIPlog lately. Rather than try to recap everything I've missed in the last month, I'm just going to skip ahead and pretend there was a terrible archive accident. Here's a big list of stuff.

First some very valuable knowledge: Drink Specials at Chicago bars Found about a month ago at Gapers' Block, simply the finest source for Chicago news on the planet.

Work-related reading material:

The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams by Jesse James Garrett
Dynamic Websites ... on a CD
The Seven Virtues Of The Interaction Designer
Ten Quotable Moments: Challenges and Responses for UI Designers
Experience Curve blog. How does Experience Design (ED) or User Experience (UX) contribute to an organizations competitive advantage. Features and functionality are no longer the lingua franca of competition."

There's always a few excellent Chicago blogs to be discovered out here:
BigOldGeek-a-Vision
Guide for Good "Resources for Making a Real Difference... giving, volunteering,working, living, traveling, advocating, learning, and more"
Dumpstervegan
palochi
Cryptic Elliptic
A Prairie Web Companion
cogicophony