Jay Rosen asked himself some questions (over a year ago) about an idea he’s trying to spread about the American journalistic style:

In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.”

The initial idea is good, but the fleshing-out is worth sticking around for.

(via Chairman Gruber)

This brief article is ostensibly about Google and Microsoft, but it’s a cogent attack on the inefficiencies of any sufficiently complacent bureaucracy.

How did Microsoft manage to acquire a relatively hip and happening company like Danger and turn it into a complete flop of a product launch with the Kin? To oversimplify: by having all the money the world. When your development decisions affect your ability to meet payroll quite directly, you see them in a very different light than when they affect nothing more than perhaps your next annual review or your status in the latest internecine company struggle. The economic discipline of the marketplace is lost for those afflicted with cash cow disease. A CEO can embark on a cellphone project for little better reason than that some obnoxious guy in a black turtleneck is doing well with his own cellphone.

(via DF)

Inspired by this post from John Gruber, I searched for the title of one of Carl Sagan’s books and came up with multiple amazing things.

My two favorites are from different parts of the text. One from palebluefilms — which uses the same audio as most videos this search yields — is about our significance, the one from thelostproductionsUS — that Gruber highlighted — is about our potential.

I now know who to blame whenever I feel bad about using “they” as a singular pronoun.

Anne Fisher (1719-78) was not only a woman of letters but also a prosperous entrepreneur. She ran a school for young ladies and operated a printing business and a newspaper in Newcastle with her husband, Thomas Slack. In short, she was the last person you would expect to suggest that he should apply to both sexes. But apparently she couldn’t get her mind around the idea of using they as a singular.

And along with promising that soon the dark days of the plural-only “they” will pass into memory, the piece mention a pronoun I’d heard in lore, and begun to consider apocryphal: thon.

Now if only we could settle on a second-person plural more accurate than “you”…

(via Daring Fireball)

You’ve probably seen some of these photos elsewhere. Others are doubtless Photoshopped or just staged for amusement. But it doesn’t stop this site from being worth a little of your time.

(via DF)

I enjoyed this trip to the end of a life.

(via DF)

I’ve always had mixed feeling about Thomas Friedman. While I applaud many of his goals, I often find his style (and moustache) off-putting. But I do had to say that Matt Taibbi ripping into him certainly has it’s moments:

Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol.

(seen many places, noticed on DF)

You can read it as either a sign that NBC is desperate, or that they’re the boldest network in adapting to a changing media climate, but report are that they’re going to give the last hour of weekday primetime (10 on the coasts, 9 in the middle) to Jay Leno.

(via DF)

Some people of some repute — Chris Bowers, David Cay Johnston, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur — think that there’s really no need for Hank Paulson’s $700 billion dollar proposal (or anything like it). I don’t know nearly enough to have anything intelligent to say, but i thought I’d note it.

(via @gruber)

UPDATE (20 minutes later): Also:

• An open letter from economists doubtful of Paulson’s plan.
• Felix Salmon and Ryan Avent answer David Cay Johnston (linked above). (via Yglesias)
• A chart to put the massive size of the proposal in historical context. (via Kevin Drum)

I noticed two interesting things on Google today, so I thought I’d share.

• Google has a new favicon. They’ve switched from the big G to the little one. I like it. (via DF)
• Maps on searches for country names and cities. Now when I want to know where Zambia is, I no longer have click through to Wikipedia to know.

It’s phishing, but only for big fish only.

Thousands of high-ranking executives across the country have been receiving e-mail messages this week that appear to be official subpoenas from the United States District Court in San Diego. Each message includes the executive’s name, company and phone number, and commands the recipient to appear before a grand jury in a civil case.

A link embedded in the message purports to offer a copy of the entire subpoena. But a recipient who tries to view the document unwittingly downloads and installs software that secretly records keystrokes and sends the data to a remote computer over the Internet. This lets the criminals capture passwords and other personal or corporate information.

(via Daring Fireball)

They just passed Wal-Mart.

(via Daring Fireball)

Andy Baio has some good words on the topic of the FAIL meme (typified by The FAIL Blog).

A few years ago, I wrote an entry about knee-jerk contrarians on the Internet: those delightful people who find fault in anything and everything, dismissing months or years of work with a few words.

This is nothing new. It’s as old as communication itself. I’m sure that the moment man discovered fire, there was some guy nearby saying, “Too smoky. Can burn you. Lame.”

(via Daring Fireball)

I know there’ve been a lot of times when I thought this would be useful, and now it exists. A site to tell you if the problem with a certain website is on your end or their’s.

(via Daring Fireball)

Props to John Gruber for finding this. I’ll leave the explanation to him:

Quite a web site for one of the most successful companies in the world. View source to fully enjoy the Adobe PageMill HTML 2.0 love. It’s funny, but I’m not holding it up to mockery. Given Warren Buffet’s homespun keep-it-simple philosophy, somehow this site, ridiculous as it is, seems appropriate.

Portfolio has a pretty neat showcase of the five dollar bill through history, including the newest iteration. They also have some of those compulsary notes about its security features.

(via Daring Fireball)

A perfectly good question. And the answer is: I don’t know.

But I do know that Link Banana is my just-born link blog. I also know that the name was chosen because I have a penchant for odd and off-the-wall names for otherwise serious thing. Probably the clearest — though certainly not only — example of this is that my longer-form blog which is called “Frozen Toothpaste.”

And as that name came like a random shot of lightning at sometime in the past (I don’t remember the moment or day), this one did too. Though I would say that this time I was holding the longest metal rod I could get my hands on. If I had to guess I would say the name came while I made banana bread on this first day of 2008. And it’s coming saved my from naming this “Worth a Link” — an accurate but boring title for this link blog.

I should probably explain what I mean by “link blog,” as the term has little pedigree or precedent. To me, a link blog is not unlike a “tumblelog,” but it is less varied in look and content. The chief content of a “link blog” is, well, the links. Hence, they’re in the title of each “entry.” Probably the purest example of what aesthetic and content you’ll see here is a look at Daring Fireball’s Linked List, though the content will be rather different than that. After all, we’ll be playing with my preferences and sensitivities, not John Gruber’s.

In any case, because Link Banana is a nascent and untraditional blog, some things don’t work quite right yet. This site’s RSS feed is still formatted like the WordPress default, which mean you’ll have to click through to follow any link I proffer. So too is the archive and commenting system not quite as I’d like. And the look will probably be see revision sometime soon.

But if you can accept all those flaws (and I hope you will) please enjoy the content that will soon be on offer from Link Banana. And I wish you a beautiful 2008.