Rough Drafts

I’ve got not one, but two articles in the April issue of PC World.

The Bork edition of the Opera Web browser behaves differently on one Web site: MSN. When you visit that site, the browser translates it into the language of the Muppet Show’s Swedish Chef.

I finally figured out how to override those nasty, tiny, fixed-point size fonts in Internet Explorer.

Clay Shirky observes that the popularity of weblogs follows a power law: A few popular blogs get the most links and the most traffic; most blogs get very little of either. Jason Kottke makes the same argument, with better graphics. Dave Winer, typically, misreads Shirky’s essay (probably because it

Posting an unedited transcript, as I just did [https://dylan.tweney.com/2003/0128doctorow.html], is a disconcerting experience. It feels a little like taking off my journalistic clothes in public. But there’s a deeper reason why I don’t usually post transcripts like this.

Cory Doctorow fans and others might be interested in the full, unedited transcript of my interview with Cory Doctorow [https://dylan.tweney.com/2003/0128doctorow.html]. The edited version of this interview [https://dylan.tweney.com/weblog/000348.html] was published on 1/23/2003 by SFGate.

Washington Post book columnist Michael Dirda indulges a fantasy that afflicts nearly every book lover at some time or another — the desire to run a literary magazine [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A977-2003Jan16.html].

RLG is trying to take some of the library world’s background technology and bring it to the fore with a new Web application (still in development) dubbed RedLightGreen. If it works, it could do for the library stacks what Google did for the Web.

My interview with Cory Doctorow [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/01/23/cdoctorow.DTL] for SFGate.com has just been published. Take a look!

Science fiction writer, EFF evangelist, BoingBoing blogger, and former dot-commie Cory Doctorow has just published his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Sci fi writer David Brin looks at J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings [http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2002/12/17/tolkien_brin/index.html?x]through the lens of Romanticism vs. the Enlightenment, nostalgia vs. optimism. And Jakob Nielsen looks at computer tech through the lens of Harry Potter.

I’m a jaded tech journalist. It’s not often that a new Internet service can actually make me excited. But last week I discovered one that had me grinning all afternoon.