hello makakas http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/lydon/comments?u=lydon&p=203&link=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.law.harvard.edu%2Flydon%2F2003%2F07%2F24%23a203

Your site is realy very interesting!

Your site is realy very interesting. http://www.bignews.com

I was frustrated by Dave’s answer to the “what is metadata, why is it important?” question, because he jumped right to RSS. He missed an opportunity to describe all the metadata in the world that we’re already familiar with, but don’t call “metadata”. In response, I wrote an essay about it:

http://www.nedbatchelder.com/blog/200309.html#e20030928T210943

I was just corresponding with Enoch Choi over at Medmusings about listening to the collected interviews. We both agreed that we loved the Real Live Preacher interview.

What occurred to me while I was commenting on Enoch’s post was just how much you have improved your grasp and confidence in the technical arena. Back when you and Mary were doing the Connection, I never really felt that your technology shows were among your best, because I thought you weren’t trusting your gut to stand up to the guest. If someone called in and claimed that Muslims bombed themselves in the marketplace, then you’d call them on it. But I found that a lot of the technical guests got away with grandstanding, misattribution, and lazy utopian blather (Okay, I admit it, I’m thinking of Richard Stallman, who forced every caller to call Linux GnuLinux, which is about as self-aggrandizing as Henry Ford making people call the Space Shuttle the FordShuttle because they both have combustion engines and come in only one color scheme).

This interview with Sifry is perfect proof of how far you’ve come both in understanding the technical issues and in developing your gut instinct on what kinds of questions to go after in the technical arena. It’s a big achievement to take in and be able to use such a large new area of foreign knowledge; let’s face it, most people just stick to what they started out knowing and are satisfied not to go further than that. It’s admirable to see anybody working at a field of knowledge they didn’t hail from and not giving up.

Like Sifry says, a blogger is more like a columnist than a journalist. I think that’s an important point: I’d be very reluctant to rely on blogs for my news. Opinion and buzz, yes. But not news reporting. I don’t pretend to believe that the conventional news media are objective and unbiased, but I do think that good editors and trained reporters are more likely to generate accurate reports than are bloggers. With the NY Times we at least know that there is a system and professional standards in place (which admittedly aren’t always adhered to) to present the facts as accurately as possible with a minimum of ideological spin. But bloggers have no such gatekeepers, and are free to report hearsay, or refract what they see through their ideological prisms, and call it news. And I’m not convinced that the average blog reader will be able to tell the difference.

Technorati is a wonderfull tool. The only sore point about it might the red color for links which makes it a bit of strain on the eyes.

Anyways, rock on david. Looking forward to more from you.

Thanks for a wonderful interview!