Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Censorship?
I read this article and suspect the real issue is that every now and then Blogger's mechanics just don't work very well. I've been snagged myself, though not in a long while, thank goodness. The annoyance about them is that there are so many users that sometimes they really can't handle it - and their customer service is awful as far as responding to questions or cries for help. Also it's owned by Google now and there are always concerns when something is used by outspoken individuals but run by people in a large company with goals that may be rubbed the wrong way by the aforementioned users. Given the huge number of users, however, my guess is that many more would have been disabled if it had really been intentional, but I may be wrong.

Main and awesome point for me staying is that Blogger is free (!) and provides those of us who want one, a place to learn tons by messing around with html and web design, without any ifs ands or buts.

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Permalink | 0 comment(s) | posted by jau at 9:21 AM

Thursday, June 19, 2008
Geese, ganders and you must be kidding
The AP has let lose a pebble of an edict that is causing huge ripples of frustration and anger all over the internet. They have decided to charge for quotations of more than 1 word, believe it or not. Hot Air posted about it here and Michele Malkin wrote about it here and Patterico wrote about it here, noting especially the enormous irony of the fact that the AP quoted from blogs when they announced their new policy. Apparently the AP goose thinks itself so sacrosanct that it cannot bear the idea of any ganders using their words other than they themselves. In the age of wikis and other shared information, this will surely not hold up under any legal testing, as Laura points out. Laura also points out that "the AP quoted 154 words of a Patterico post on [a well-known] controversy . . . [while at the same time] going after a blogger who used far fewer [than 154] words from an AP article than the AP lifted from Patterico's. . . . ." This is ludicrous. First people are arrested for cheering loudly during a graduation ceremony, and now this. The world is going mad again. Quick, someone put the axis back in place.

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Permalink | 1 comment(s) | posted by jau at 3:40 PM

Thursday, June 14, 2007
Answers
Cool new gadget from answers.com - an "answer this" button. It's over there on the left, under the recent comments list. The deal is that you double-click any word (literally: any word) on this page and get a definition plus synonyms and usage, so it's an information gadget more than a dictionary. Seriously, how cool is that?! Actually, answers.com has many features and I'll have to look into them and report on those I like.

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Permalink | 0 comment(s) | posted by jau at 10:19 AM