Eric Zorn from the Tribune has started a weblog called Breaking News. I think it's cute that our little hometown paper is joining our well-established Chicago blogging community.
No, seriously, I think it's great, and it goes on the list to the left. I think in all the blogging vs. journalism arguments, the format itself is forgotten - is there a better way to stay informed about local news than with regularly updated, concisely written, link-ammended, reports from a professional journalist?
There is one thing I'll disagree with the Tribune on - in Eric's FAQ -
"Q. Why do you write "Web logs" instead of the more common and accepted "weblogs"
A. It's current Tribune style. I predict it will change in time. We ultimately took the space out of DuPage County, you know, so anything's possible. "
I got twelve of these emails yesterday. Normally I just blow these things off but I might as well make a public service announcement since getting 12 of them pisses me off.
An email says that eBay is changing their security servers and you need to re-enter your account info. A link on the email goes to a page on the IP address http://64.177.224.104/ (which if you try just the IP, redirects to the real eBay). The page the link lands on looks real, and includes many links to the real eBay, including an offer for an eBay credit card from FirstUSA.
The page states "The transmitted credit/debit card information is protected by the industry standard encrypted SSL connection." But lacks any secure socket layer or the "https" convention.
This scam is slick, so I doubt that the owner of the domain name listed is the perpetrator of this scam. The scam artists who steal credit cards usually use stolen credit cards to buy the domain names they need.
On a real eBay User Account Protection Page, the real domains are listed.
"Be cautious of emails that ask you to submit personal information such as your credit card number or your eBay password. Some members have reported attempts to gain access to their personal information through email solicitations that are made to appear as having come from eBay. These solicitations will often contain links to web pages that will request that you sign-in and submit information. At eBay, we identify these as 'spoofed' emails or websites. Remember, eBay employees will never ask you for your password.
If you receive or suspect you have received such an email, do not respond to it or click the links. Immediately send a copy of it to spam@ebay.com."
Some Weblog related links.
All over for blogs? It should be all over for 'technology analyst' Bill Thompson and whatever BBC editor let him ramble on like that. "The earliest bloggers have been at it for two years now..." Next month this blog will be 4 years old, and I'm certainly not one of the earliest ones.
There's an awful lot of fair and balanced blogs.
Some fascinating blogs can be found on this list of Blogs Around the World "I'm hoping to find reasonable, approximately-English-written sites in as many countries as possible."
Writing for the Web talks about metablogging. There is another genre not mentioned - the classic weblog, which of course is a log of things found on the Web.
The classic form may look like a rare thing these days, but there are plenty of them, they're just hidden amongst the throngs of journals.
This MSNBC article does a decent job of explaining how the Blackout happened
The NYC group blog Gothamist has some links and blackout photos, some are from this Newsday collection.
Metadata Mark II A good resource for what's new in metadata. If nothing else, it explains what the Dublin Core is, and what RDF stands for. "RDF stands for "Resource Description Framework," and like other metadata we've examined so far, it's just another way of describing resources on the Web. RDF, however, is an official initiative of the W3C, the same folks who wrote the specifications for HTML, XML, and CSS. (Nobody breeds prize-winning acronyms like the W3C.) "
Handwriting analysis trouble traits "The difference between an expert handwriting analyst and an amatuer is how well he or she can "stack" different strokes in the handwriting to establish a fuller "whole" personality profile. "
Le Monde diplomatique' maps In French, but still a great resource. From the Intro - "It would be wrong to think there are 'official' versions of the world's political divisions. Even the cartography departments of certain United Nations agencies are careful to state on their maps that they bear no responsibility for the depiction of borders, which are indicative only. To avoid offence, the World Bank recently 'advised' its cartographic department not to produce maps of the Indian sub-continent on which the Kashmir region figured too prominently. The varying national and international views of territory give the map-maker only too great a choice."
Weblog search engines "Phil Bradley looks at the developments occurring with weblogs and how you can go about searching on or for them".
Jonathan Delacour comes back to blogging to write an essay on Weblog Ethics. To edit, or not to edit. With a lively comment thread. This is a discussion I'm not getting involved in. I don't have time to form any meaningful opinions, so how can I have time to go back and edit them?
Chain Letters Anonymous "Please use one of the following methods to safely send your chain letter. We cannot guarantee that you will receive the benefits described in the letter (in fact we think it's a load of bunk), but at least you will not be the last link in a broken chain "
From this article - Google Dance Syndrome, part II "One thing not in the cards for future index changes are plans to pull blog content out of Google's regular search results. During my recent interview Google made a point of stressing blogs are staying." The Google Dance refers to the monthly shuffling of the Google index.
Gapers Block has a thread on free wifi spots in Chicago.
Some free tools from Geobytes including a geo-locator and a geo-location redirection script.
Designing with Web Standards Very nice presentation by the Mighty Zeldman.
Is Zip coming undone? "People who receive a file with .zip now won't know until they try to open it whether it's one of three types: a secure file accessible only through PKWare's software; a secure file accessible only through WinZip; or a standard Zip file that can be accessed by any compression utility."
Lockergnome's RSS Resource From the About RSS page - "We want to put information directly in front of the people who want to see it. Obviously, asking them to visit our site on a regular basis is not enough - which is why we started to push targeted content to them directly in the first place (after asking their permission). The key? The bridge? The solution? The Rosetta Stone of online data."
Semiotics: A Primer for Designers by Challis Hodge "Meaning is not contained in the world or in books, computers or audio-visual media. It is not simply transmitted, it is actively created, according to a complex interplay of systems and rules of which we are normally unaware."
PHP5: Coming Soon to a Webserver Near You "For some, PHP5 is the "holy grail" that will deliver essential features they've been struggling to survive without. For others, PHP5 is vaguely unsettling, as it appears to threaten the status quo with suggestions of its adoption of a Java-like programming discipline."
Creating a faceted classification scheme and nav with Movabletype
Some random links:
My prize for best Knitting Blog title goes to: A Loom with a View
MetaFilter Survival Guide written by Kevin, a veteran.
Uxblog has a good post explaining mobile matchmatchmaking technologies. The possiblities of this sort of stuff are endless when applied to other geo-data services. Though the privacy and security issues are a bit scary.
Wood That Works has some cool wooden kinetic sculpture aniimations.
Gallery of Data Visualization has some great links.
Someone mentioned my Chicago Blog list on the Chicago Bloggers Yahoo group, so I was forced to make some updates and corrections. I've added a few that really needed to be one my list. Soon I'll re-edit my other sidebar categories, and my topical blog list.
If you're coming from the St. Petersburg Times Food Blog article and looking for the Food Blog, it's here.
And don't miss the growing list of other food blogs that deserve mention.
Helvetica Vs. Arial Font fight! via lost
POSTSCRIPT: same subject - test your font knowledge with Arial or Helvetica?
CSS Zen Garden "A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS based design." via antenna
The Sad Story of PNG Gamma Correction" "PNG-supporting browsers. This reduces the usefulness of the otherwise excellent image format. If the image colors and the colors defined in a style sheet need to match, it is safer to use GIF or JPEG. "