Bob Stepno’s Red Liner

   Just when I thought I’d fought off the temptation to look
at more software, Mark Bernstein has a new OS-X release of Tinderbox,
a hypertext program I bought a couple of years ago and never found time
to explore thoroughly. I liked its approach to handling “messy
information” through a variety of views — a graphical map, outlines,
linked folders and more. I thought I might use it to sort out fieldwork
notes, especially if I made major revisions to my dissertation or a
follow-up study.
   Now more people are using Tinderbox for weblogs, and some are doing things with content categories or, as another Bob puts it, “thematic content.”
   At the same time, I’ve been planning to add a taxonomy or category system to my own main Radio weblog
to make it more useful as an archive for class lecture notes… so I
guess I’ll be taking another look at Tinderbox, which also exports to
Radio.
  For now, I’m using this Harvard blog for notes related to our Thursday meeting topics (blogging tools, politics), and using my Radio blog for notes that I might mine and link to lectures or assignments in some future teaching job. But I’ve been very sloppy about it. For a while I was thinking the Harvard blog could consist of brief versions of entries from the other blog — a low-tech, but too-high-maintenance way of giving RSS subscribers a choice of how much content to see in their aggregators. I’d still like to offer that kind of choice, but there must be a better way…

Tinderbox and Categories …

A friend on an SPJ mailing list
writes, “Today, Dec. 15, is the 212th anniversary of the Bill
of Rights. I haven’t seen any signs of public celebrations (though
there certainly should be!) but the day will certainly be honored here
in my office. Are any of you doing anything special to mark this day?”

Inspired, I decided to celebrate Bill of Rights Day this way:

1. Go to http://WhiteHouse.gov
2. Search for “Bill of Rights Day”
3. Get a list that begins:

4. Click on first item and get this press release:

5. Repeat test.

6. Repeat word “Huh?”

7. Settle for earlier proclamations:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/12/20031212-6.html

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/12/20021209-10.html

I do see one celebration after a quick Web search… but it isn’t
making huge headlines amid the liberal-bashing. Still, the New Yorker
probably will cover it…

http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=14572&c=206

The president did mention the topic of “rights” at his press conference this  morning (I just skimmed the transcript):

At The Times
I thought I’d find a Bill of Rights theme or two at The New York
Times “Learning Network” for school teachers, but it is all Saddam
today… For a “historic front page” the
“On this day…” section uses the Battle of Verdun, followed
by the birth of J.Paul Getty and a Harper’s Weekly cartoon about press speculation on President Benjamin
Harrison’s cabinet. However, passage of the Bill of Rights heads a fascinating chronology under “On this date…”

Quite a day for various freedoms, actually!

Elsewhere, The Times education site did have a “bill of rights” related lesson plan online from 1999 and several specifically related to the First Amendment.

And here are few interesting Bill of Rights posts found by Google:

The document itself at the National Archives
http://www.archives.gov/national_archives_experience/bill_of_rights.html

and at the Library of Congress
http://memory.loc.gov/const/bor.html

The Bill of Rights Institute
http://www.billofrightsinstitute.org/

Bill of Rights Day Dotcom?
http://billofrightsday.com/

Loveland, Colorado, observes the day:
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1030004/posts

One national park…

http://www.nps.gov/sapa/pphtml/eventdetail5999.html

This site has a link that says it goes to  other Bill of Rights
blog entries, but also mentions some technical problems today:

http://expatsagainstbush.typepad.com/home/2003/11/bill_of_rights__1.html

Happy Bill of Rights Day …

Audience members at the Nieman
Foundation Narrative Journalism
Conference were invited to blog their reactions to last
weekend’s
three-day conference.

The Web crew from the Poynter Institute put together a category system
with pull-down menus that cross-reference the blog entries…
Not
as extensive as Scripting
News’ new
category system, but useful. For example, one entry about David
Halberstam’s talk is tagged to the “crime & law”
category, although it wasn’t
the major theme in his talk — but someone intrigued by his comments
could follow the link to discussions of other police-beat presentations
at the conference.

The post-conference
blogging hasn’t really taken off, but then this was
a conference for folks who (a) probably like to write
long
and (b) like to get paid for the stuff they write. New
top-level
blog entries require authorization from Poynter (either that or I
haven’t figured out how to create one), but the “comment” system is
open, for better or for worse.

Example: One of the top-level entries, about the closing talk by the
New Yorker’s
Susan Orlean, was a rambling jumble of description and metaphors that
seemed as inspired by Orlean’s looks
as her words. (Looks aren’t the point. Orlean herself once described a
guy as “sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing
all his front teeth… has the posture of al dente spaghetti
and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video
games.” [source])

Was her
commenter in awe, star-struck, flirting, being satirical, or
just playing with the
weblog system after having a few drinks at the Hyatt? I don’t know, but
I still think it was rude for someone to add a
one-liner that said “This
is a piece of crap.”

OK, it wasn’t exactly clear where the original comment was
going,
especially since Nieman and Poynter don’t post “official” summaries of
the original presentations. (They do sell audio tapes.)
However,
as another poster pointed out, also inspired by Ms. Orlean, “finding
your writerly voice involves a lot of
self-editing.” That’s not always the case in the
shoot-from-the hip world of blogs, which may be why I’m not a daily
blogger.

Narrative Journalism Conference Weblog …

A few weeks ago, a Thursday night blogger meeting was talking about
“scraping” news from Harvard websites so that their contents could be
read in RSS aggregators as well as Web browsers. I’ve just discovered
that O’Reilly publications has  a related chapter  online as
a sample from  a new book, Spidering Hacks.
If the book was mentioned that Thursday, I didn’t catch the title. In
any case, the extracted chapter may not have been  posted online
at that point. Somewhat technical  Thursday-nighters and online-news researchers may find it useful. Authors  Kevin Hemenway and Tara Calishain
devote several chapters to blogging and RSS feeds, and say the book is
for “developers, researchers, technical assistants, librarians, and
power users.”

Hack #24: Painless RSS with Template::Extract

Scraping Up RSS News …