Thursday, April 28, 2005

Press Conference

A wink and a nod.

Where to find business blog feeds

Business Blog Feeds

When you search Google for "business blog feeds", at least today, you come up with zilch. Time to change that. Too much to learn to go racing everywhere for their feeds, when time is of the essence.
Therefore, I am cobbling together a page where those who often blog about business blogging are syndicated through the magic of java, rss, and so on.

There are plenty of good businesses with nothing to hide, and these should flock to blogging. For one thing, the ones that shy away are going to seem suspect before long. What is wrong with transparency, communicating, sharing, learning, educating, being educated, growing, evolving?

When companies and people share what they know, it has the potential of helping people who might not be helped otherwise, and it creates a situation where you want to keep learning, so as to have better and better things to impart. You grow and learn. Everybody grows and learns. People begin to trust you, and want to enter into a dialogue. The monologues of slow companies will grow tedious in the ears of those who, at best, sit on the phone for sometimes hours waiting for a machine to give them more hoops to jump through. As Harry Beckwith once noted, "Work is personal". But you couldn't tell it by the way some businesses behave today.

Blogs can help humanize a company. As a networking tool, it may well be unparalleled.

And if one considers the 19 or 20 critical subsystems necessary for life of a living system, blogging certainly supplies or enhances the Input Transducer, Internal Transducer, Channel and Net, Decoder, Associator, Memory, Encoder, Output transducer, even Decider, although it has little to do with Matter/Energy processes. But this is good, because a system is more likely to live the more it processes information over matter/energy. Dinosaurs are the converse. So are large, lumbering, deaf and dumb companies, organizations and prisons.

So I've created this page where you can learn about changing your company by seeing how others are changing theirs.

It's not my usual fare, but alas, I contain multitudes. :)

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Cooking makes us far less beastly

Charlotte Observer | 04/19/2005 | Kathleen Purvis

Cooked food delivers more nutrition in less time, freeing us to do all kinds of things, like hunt, plant and eventually invent the drive-through lane.

Juan Cole sticks it to Big Media (BM)

Mainstream Media and Bloggers

We are not you, so quit whining!

Happy Birthday!: Jim Beckwourth & The Hubble Telescope

Synchronicitously, serendipitously I picked up one of my books on Jim Beckwourth and began to read: "I was born April 26, 1798 in Fredericksburg, Virginia."

Granted, it would have been stranger if I had done that today, but alas it was yesterday. This fact doesn't change the fact of Jim remarkable life, which I summarized into next to nothing in the Wikipedia:

James Pierson Beckwourth (a.k.a. Jim Beckwourth, James P. Beckwith) was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1798 to Sir Jennings Beckwith and an African-American woman about whom little is known.
His father saw to it that his son would not suffer the vicissitudes of slavery, and thrice had him
manumitted at court.
Like his father, Jim enjoyed nature,
native Americans and adventure, and it was not long before he set out to explore the vast expanses of what would become that which kept the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans apart.
Places still bear his name.
Later in his life, Jim recounted his astonishing life to
Thomas D. Bonner, who set the book The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer, Scout, and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians to type. As notable as are the adventures, Jim's linguistic and stylistic prowess also impresses as being beyond the normal scope of reportage. The lessons of the book have currency, and much can be learned that might help us understand the role of alcohol in the US Government, how occupations effect the occupied, our historical relationship to diseases, wildlife, and the environment...among other things, including massacres and war.

and added his father's mini-bio today:

Sir Jennings Beckwith is perhaps best known for being the father of James P. (Jim) Beckwith (Beckwourth), or more commonly known and spelled as Jim Beckwourth, who, among other things, was a writer, raconteur, trapper, trader, explorer, mulatto and Indian Chief. Jennings Beckwith was the son of Sir Jonathan Beckwith, signer of the Virginia Stamp Act, and grandson of Sir Marmaduke Beckwith who documented nearly every aspect of life in that part of the Northern Neck of Virginia which produced such statesmen as Washington, Lee, Mason, Carter, Tayloe, Fauntleroy, Brockenbrough, and others whose influence on the early republic was felt far and wide.
As it was a fondness of Virginians, at the time of Sir Jennings Beckwith, to regard time with relative disregard, and consider it something that one "kills", so too did Jennings have such an attitude. One obituary even said that he had "insuperable objections to spending his time profitably". But because of this freedom, he was able to travel to, what was then, the Far West, and thus help expand America...which he did -- and took his family, some of whom were of African-American descent, through their mother.
It seems Jennings Beckwith may well have brought his family out west in order to shelter them from such a life, as on three seperate occasions he saw to it that his children were manumitted. And it is obvious, from the magnificent liguistic inventory of Jim Beckwourth that he had been taught the fine details of the language.
Jennings Beckwith died at Mount Airy, the beautiful palladian ancient home of the Col. John Tayloe family. Story is told that his spirit still visits the ancient mansion.


Happy birthday, Jim!


It is also the birthday of the most wondrous invention ever...the Hubble Telescope.

Again! May you have many more years!

The Commonly Confused Words Test

OKCupid! The Commonly Confused Words Test

English Genius
You scored 92% Beginner, 100% Intermediate, 100% Advanced, and 93% Expert!
You did so extremely well, even I can't find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don't. You have an extensive vocabulary, and you're not afraid to use it properly! Way to go!
Thank you so much for taking my test. I hope you enjoyed it!

For the complete Answer Key, visit my blog: http://shortredhead78.blogspot.com/.


Well, I got one question wrong. So shoot me!

Some old art, photos and sculptures by Anonymoses


Dave Beckwith Gallery

Monday, April 25, 2005

Journalism

The Raw Story | Secret Service records raise new questions about discredited conservative reporter
(via Dan Gillmor)

RSS Feeds at Charlotte.com

The Charlotte Observer now has a host of syndicable feeds for ye blognoscenti.

I have already stocked "My Yahoo" with a number of them.

Now all they have to do is allow commenting, and invite community bloggers into their fold. And podcast, of course.

Sunday, April 24, 2005

The Mood of the Newsroom

First Draft by Tim Porter

Tim Porter, who will be attending BlogNashville from California, as he puts it: "interviewed several hundred journalists - reporters, photographers, copy editors, executive editors, designers, graphic artists. I've been in newspaper newsrooms of more than 500 people and in newsrooms of less than 50. It has been an immersion course in the mood of the press - and much of it hasn't been pretty."

He goes on the surmise the following:


Here is the litany of shame that echoes in newsroom after newsroom:
We don't have the money.
We don't have the time.
We don't have the people.
We have lousy editors.
We have lousy reporters.
We can't communicate.
We don't talk.
We don't listen.


But he also shows some bright spots, such as Greensboro.

"There are plenty of ideas for change out there and some very smart people pushing them. "

An excellent read, with much else besides...

Going to BlogNashville

Are you going?

It has been a while since I looked at the list of folks already signed up to "please come to Nashville for the springtime", and so I am going blog my perusal of the additional folks I have yet to discover...

I peeked earlier and saw that the legendary Dana Blankenhorn is planning on attending, which spawned my excitement of yet other possibilities. I have read Dana's work since the mid-90s, and hope to get an opportunity to speak with him.

Now...whom else??

Weel, there is chris muir of daybydaycartoon.com who is coming up from Melbourne. Maybe he can bring my dear old friend, Ken Phillips, who lives right down the street in Palm Bay. He and I held each other's hand during the learning phases of the Internet, back in 94...when I decided to climb back in. An idea anyway. Carpooling is healthy.

Ross Myers from Greensboro! Awesome! Is Tara coming too? Hmm...
Minky Worden, from Human Rights Watch, and so many more. Too many to name really. Over 200. Maybe I'll just stay at home.

Naa.

Maybe YOU should come, instead! Can I git a witness!