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February 22, 2006

Technorati launches bloggers' Favorites; Free mp3s: Neil Young; On being quoted by bin Laden; student blogger in Ecuador; radio station by zip code

New Technorati Feature: Favorites. Techorati, the search engine that scours the blogs, has launched a new feature to help us sift through the 28.4 million or so blogs out there now. Here's founder David Sifry's explanation:

It's really very simple. Just tell us who your favorite bloggers are and you'll get a custom page that lets you monitor, search, and share your Favorites!

Can't wait? Go give it a try! For the curious, read on for more details. ...

David asked three bloggers to kick the feature off. One of them, Linux Journal editor and Cluetrain co-author Doc Searls, named this blog as one of his 38 favorites. Doc, whom I've never met, is a constant source of encouragement, and I'm more than grateful for his appreciation.

Doc's has long been the first blog I read every morning. Even if I don't have a dog in some of the Alpha-blogger dustups he gets sucked into, his easy voice and tales of a constantly traveling man are easy to wake up with.

Free mp3s: Neil Young :: Perfect Echo Vol. I, '67-'71 at Aquarium Drunkard.

Infamously quoted: When Osama bin Laden quoted a paragraph from William Blum's book Rogue State, the media swarmed to Blum's door. He writes about the experience in Online Journal (The Anti-Empire Report: Things you need to know before the world ends):

Much of the media wanted me to say that I was repulsed by bin Laden's "endorsement." I did not say I was repulsed because I was not. After a couple of days of interviews I got my reply together and it usually went something like this: "There are two elements involved here: On the one hand, I totally despise any kind of religious fundamentalism and the societies spawned by such, like the Taliban in Afghanistan. On the other hand, I'm a member of a movement which has the very ambitious goal of slowing down, if not stopping, the American Empire, to keep it from continuing to go round the world doing things like bombings, invasions, overthrowing governments, and torture. To have any success, we need to reach the American people with our message. And to reach the American people we need to have access to the mass media. What has just happened has given me the opportunity to reach millions of people I would otherwise never reach. Why should I not be glad about that? How could I let such an opportunity go to waste?"

Celebrity -- modern civilization's highest cultural achievement -- is a peculiar phenomenon. It really isn't worth anything unless you do something with it.

Blum notes he's neither a Republican nor a Democrat. "...an entire alternative world exists above and beyond the Republicans and Democrats.," he writes.

Whether you agree with him or not, it's an interesting read, departing from the usual pat, polarized positions.

Another country heard from: Over at the new R.I. Students Abroad group blog, Jenna McCrory of North Kingstown got her first post out from Cuenca, Ecuador, and it's a good one. Here's a bit of it:

I chose Ecuador hoping to find a place where I felt completely culture-shocked, and out-of-whack. I wanted adventure, I wanted poverty, I wanted mountains, I wanted rainforest, I wanted indigenous people, I wanted to learn Spanish!

We're expecting yet another new blogger there later in the week, a Brown student in Rome. Stay tuned.

I coded the Movable Type software for this blog so that each blogger is a "category," with a photo appearing atop individual pages of entries as well as each entry, their photos and links to the individual pages showing in the main blog. I'm an English and American History major, not a programmer, but, to my amazement, my code worked.

Radio stations you should be able to hear: Enter your zip code and AM FM Zip Code Based Signal Strengths spits out a list of stations whose strength and location put them on the airwaves in your area.

I've never looked for WFAN sports radio 66 AM in New York, but it says here I should receive it.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:42 AM | Permalink