USA Today has RSS Feeds for Classifieds

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Just read on MicroPersuasion that USA Today has RSS feeds for classifieds.  When I checked out the RSS page I thought of a few things:

  1. The RSS page does a great job of explaining to the average reader what RSS is all about.  It is also well organized by topic so readers don’t have to search for the feeds they are interested in.
  2. I wonder how many people sign up for advertising feeds?  My first instinct is that no one would volunteer to be inundated with more ads, but when you stop and think about it, it’s not advertising that bugs us so much as it is inappropriate advertising.
    I’m interested in seeing ads for products or services that I want to use.  Selling sporting goods?  I want to hear about it.  Feminine hygiene, i.e. "Got that not so fresh feeling"?  Forget about it.
  3. How are they selling the feeds?  Are they bundled with regular ad sales, or are they sold separately?  Can they measure results?  If so, how?

If this works I think it’s going to have a huge impact on the publishing industry, just as search advertising has had a huge impact over the last couple of years.  Should be interesting.

Any Prominent Bloggers in Winston-Salem?

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I’m putting together a list of Winston-Salem bloggers.  I’ve spent a couple of hours searching various local blogrolls, regional blog indexes, Google, you name it.  I now have a whopping list of four and they are all personal-ish blogs.  (I do like them and have posted them on the left column.)

Unfortunately I can’t find a single Winston-Salem public figure with a blog.  Where are the journalists, politicians or gadflies?  Our friends to the east in Greensboro are chock-full of public figure bloggers.  Here’s a few just off the top of my head:

John Robinson (Editor, News & Record)
Tom Phillips (Greensboro City Councilman)
Ed Cone (Columnist for the News & Record)
David Hoggard  (I think he falls into all three of the aforementioned categories)

Greensboro also has an experimental blog-aggregator-cum-alternative-daily-news-source, Greensboro101, that is positioning itself as a kind of Peoples Choice for local news.

All of which leads me to two questions:

1. Are there any Winston-Salem public figures with a blog? (Actually can anyone point me to any good Winston-Salem blogs?)

2. Did all of Greensboro’s public figures come to blogs because there was already a vibrant blogging community in place, or were they a catalyst for the development of Greensboro’s blogging community?  I know it’s kind of a chicken-egg question, but I’m curious.

***Update***
After another Feedster search I’ve found quite a few personal blogs, mostly by students at Wake Forest.  Not adding them to the list and have now determined that I’m going to have to come up with a totally arbitrary vetting process for the list.  Still no public figures.

I’m a ZBOA

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Well I’m 38 and serving my first term in any form of government since HS student council in 1984 (21 years!).

I was sworn in tonight as the newest member of the Lewisville (NC) Zoning Board of Adjustment.  Business was light (someone needed a special permit to put a detached garage on their property), but the swearing in process and the chance to be involved felt really good.

Before I left they handed me a big binder containing the "Unified Development Ordinances", which I’m supposed to learn. 

So I’m 38 and I have my first real homework since 1984…and I volunteered for this!

The Present Future Circa 1998

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I just read this very good piece by Peggy Noonan that I picked up from Rex Hammock’s blog. 

The article is divided into three segments. The first two sections compare our modern lives with the lives of our parents, and focuses on the irony that all of our time saving devices have led to a serious lack of free time.  The third, and last section, predicts that we in America are ripe for a big change.  She points out that to much of the world the US is the Great Satan and consequently we have a huge target on our chest.  She predicts that those people will target our greatest city to try and puncture our aura of supposed invincibility.  She thinks that it will most likely be New York, but maybe Washington.  Oh, and she wrote this in 1998.

In the end she looks at how such an event might change us.  In many ways she was right, especially immediately after 9/11.  She says:

We must take the time to do some things. We must press government
officials to face the big, terrible thing. They know it could happen
tomorrow; they just haven’t focused on it because there’s no Armageddon
constituency. We should press for more from our foreign intelligence
and our defense systems, and press local, state, and federal leaders to
become more serious about civil defense and emergency management.

The other thing we must do is the most important…

I once talked to a man who had a friend who’d done something that took
his breath away. She was single, middle-aged and middle class, and
wanted to find a child to love. She searched the orphanages of South
America and took the child who was in the most trouble, sick and
emotionally unwell. She took the little girl home and loved her hard,
and in time the little girl grew and became strong, became in fact the
kind of person who could and did help others…

“These are the things that stay God’s hand,” he told me. I didn’t know
what that meant. He explained: These are the things that keep God from
letting us kill us all.

So be good. Do good. Stay his hand. And pray. When the Virgin Mary
makes her visitations—she’s never made so many in all of recorded
history as she has in this century—she says: Pray! Pray unceasingly!

My fear is that now we are once again forgetting to pray.

Courting Influence

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Just found this website, www.courtinginfluence.net, that features a database of federal judges and nominees with links to their financial disclosure statements and copies of their Senate questionnaires.

The site is run by the Center for Investigative Journalism, which has a decidedly liberal feel to it, but the documents speak for themselves.

This is reason number 8,000,001 I’ll probably never run for public office.  Who needs the scrutiny of their every move?

DNA Doodle

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CrickdnadoodleTo the left you will see the original doodle done by Francis Crick when he theorized the shape of DNA. Crick, who was one of the two people who discovered DNA, died last year and now the US National Library of Medicine and the Wellcome Trust are digitizing over 11,000 pages of his work.  You can freely view and download any of his collection here.

To me this is the greatest part of the Internet.  If you had told me when I was in college that I could sit in my living room and easily search through millions of pages of information while sitting on my couch I would have said that you were crazy.

A Family Explodes

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This is a very personal post.  Frankly, I’m only writing this because I think it will be therapeutic.  I’m doing it here rather than in a private journal, because for some reason this is the only place I can, or do write.  I don’t have a journal, and I never have had one.  It is what it is.

I have a cousin who is getting a divorce.  Last I checked this kind of thing happens to about 50% of married couples in the U.S., so this doesn’t qualify as big news.  Still, to me it is very painful to be in the front row watching it happen.

You see I experienced divorce as a kid, back when it was very uncommon to have a single mom.  I’m pretty sure I was the only one in my 5th grade class to have divorced parents.  Of course by 10th grade (1982) I was far from alone.

Funny thing is, the prevalence of divorce doesn’t diminish its impact on the individual or the family.  I still grapple with my parents’ divorce today.  I’m 38.  They’ve been divorced for 30 years.  I can’t imagine them married.  It sticks with me because I still have questions:

  • How could my Dad move away (about a 3 hour drive) and see me and my brother on weekends initially about once a month and eventually alot less?  This question was almost rhetorical until I had my own kids, then it became unimaginable.
  • Would I still be a Mormon if my parents stayed together?  As it happens I’ve been a utility infielder when it comes to religion, having tried out every Protestant branch until I eventually converted to Catholicism.  And let’s just say that the church’s treatment of my parents when they were going through the divorce made me question the true meaning of Christianity at a very early age.
  • How did my Mom do it?  How did she shepherd two boys through their teenage years, then through college and eventually into independent, happy adulthoods?
  • Would I be happy now if they had stayed married "for the kids", or would I be a maladjusted heroin addict living on the streets of DC?
  • Would I have worked so hard with my wife five years ago to save our marriage if my parents hadn’t gotten a divorce?

That last is the million dollar question.  Five years ago Celeste (my wife) and I were at the nadir of our marriage.  We had lost all respect for each other, had lost sight of the traits that we’d so admired in each other and talked only when it involved household business or the kids.  It got so bad that we talked to lawyers and I found an affordable apartment.  I was a week away from moving out.

But then Celeste asked the real million dollar questions (she is definitely the smart one in this house).  She asked, "Have we really TRIED to fix this?  Have we really tried everything we can to save our marriage?" The answer was a resounding "no."

I’m a typical guy.  The idea of asking anyone for help makes me want to puke.  For years Celeste had asked me to participate in marriage support groups at our church.  For years I said that kind of stuff was for New Age crystal-gazers.  Now we were looking at marriage counseling and I was ready to run for the hills.

My motivation came when I looked at our kids.  At the time they were six, five and three.  If I left, even with joint custody, I thought I’d be doing the one thing I swore I’d never do.  I would rather gaze at a thousand crystals, wear Birkenstocks and attend seances before I putting myself in the position of being a part-time Dad.  I didn’t want to be to my kids who my Dad was to me.  Whatever we did, I wanted to have no reason to say "We shoulda.."

Marriage counseling it would be.

And I give myself credit for going.  It was a big step for me.  The rest of the credit goes to Celeste, to a wonderful counselor and to a very supportive family.  Through their efforts I was able to recognize my own flaws and try to fix them; to rediscover all of Celeste’s fantastic traits and to recognize how insignificant her own flaws were in the grand scheme of things.  Basically we fell back in love.

Watching my cousin and his wife struggle through this I can’t help but think of my own experiences.  My opinion is that they haven’t tried everything yet, and I don’t think they will.  I’ve shared my story with my cousin, but I don’t think it matters.  He’s moved out.  They’re looking for lawyers and talking about how to work out the property distribution.  It isn’t too late, but it’s close.

And yes there are kids involved;  they aren’t biologically his, but he is the only father they’ve ever really known.  I’m pretty certain his wife is keeping the kids top of mind, but I’m not so sure about him.  If he were to distance himself, that would be the biggest tragedy, for him and for them.

My instinct is to feel disappointment that he hasn’t tried everything.  His wife wants to try counseling, either individually or as a couple.  He’ll have none of it.  Knowing that he and I are cut from a similar cloth I understand his aversion to therapy, but I pity his lack of courage.

That is until I remember my own cowardice.  It’s been at least seven years since I realized how deeply my Dad’s leaving affected me.  For all that time I’ve wanted to ask him "Why?" and "How?", but I’ve never had the balls. 

For my cousin’s sake and mine I hope we both grow some soon.

Tobacco Case Also About Freedom of Speech?

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I just read this article, How to Silence a Racket: The Justice Department’s tobacco lawsuit threatens freedom of speech , in Reason about how the recent DC circuit court’s decision against the government in its racketeering case against the tobacco companies was also about freedom of speech.

As you can imagine the decision was big news here in Winston-Salem, home of Reynolds America the purveyor of such brands as Winston, Salem, Kool and Camel cigarettes.  Still, I never saw anything that looked beyond the decision’s immediate impact on the tobacco companies.

The author, Jacob Sullum, explains it best here:

The "racketeering acts" listed
by the Justice Department consist largely of advertisements, press
releases, and televised statements, which it considers instances
of mail or wire fraud. The fraudulent aspect of this speech is often
obscure. One "racketeering act," for instance, involved placing a
magazine ad that "depicted
Joe Camel wearing sunglasses, a tee shirt, and blue jeans, with a pack
of cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve and a lit cigarette hanging from
his mouth, and casually
leaning against a convertible automobile."

Even the messages closer to the heart of the Justice Department’s
case are not clear-cut examples of fraud. When the cigarette
manufacturers criticized early
studies linking smoking to lung cancer, for example, were they
deliberately misleading the public, or were they doing what any company
does when its product is
impugned—i.e., pointing out weaknesses in the evidence against it?

The question is of more than historical interest. Given the logic of
the Justice Department’s case, oil companies that question global
warming projections,
automakers that defend the safety of their SUVs, fast food chains that
say they’re not responsible for increases in obesity, pharmaceutical
companies that criticize
research indicating possible side effects from their drugs, and any
other business that stands up for itself in the face of attack could be
the target of a future RICO
lawsuit.

How to Torment Your Neighbors

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Here’s a Reuter’s story that I picked up through the first blog that I ever came across years ago, Fark.com.

Honey, Remember to Turn on the Rooster Booster…

BERLIN (Reuters) – Before leaving on vacation, a German couple set up a
loudspeaker and timer with the sound of a crowing cock to blast their
neighbors every morning.

After complaints, police in the northern town of Itzehoe obtained a
warrant to enter the house and discovered the gear with the speakers
aimed at the neighbors and rigged to a timer.

"The apparatus switched on between 2 and 4 o’clock in the
morning and produced a cock crowing at an enormous volume. This would
last for 20 minutes with breaks in between," police said.

Police confiscated the gear and charged the vacationers, who
are still away, with bodily harm and disturbing the peace. The
neighbors had no history of antagonism.

I have to say that the headline writers at Reuters are a bit more mature than me.  I would have been too tempted to resist this obvious alternative, "Honey, remember to set the cock clock…"

I’m Officially Old

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So I’m reading this piece on Gawker and it describes how some of the troops in Iraq flashed their "Shocker" foam fingers during the network’s obligatory "thanks to the troops" Super Bowl coverage.

I knew from the context of the article that the "Shocker" thing was one of those "If the adults only knew what this means" situations, but the real shocker was that I actually qualified as one of the adults. Now I’ll give myself credit; I was able to surmise what the "Shocker" probably represented, but I did have to read the article to make sure.

Depressing.