DISQUS

It looks like several posts went missing. I came here a day or two ago to catch up on the contest goings-on and thought I had to flip back through three or four posts to get to it.

Late-night mud sliding party! We're going to head over to Mount Trashmore with a 'barrow filled with ice and drinks and slide down the hill repeatedly and drunkenly.

It sounds like it was an interesting evening. I have been thinking about local eating for a while, because of its increasing popularity and also because I was raised on market-bought foods mostly and continue to bias towards them in my adulthood.

Your description triggered an idle thought: I wonder how effective this tactic of playing to the elite is. To me convincing the elite to eat locally is almost trivial. Local eating often means small farms with high-quality food which tends towards the expensive (though certainly not always) and of course manual preparation which both are things that the middle class tends not to do.

The elite do it because they have the luxury of being able to pay extra for the quality, and the poor tend to eat locally because they don't have the luxury of paying for premade foods and imported foods, but the largest swath of food eaters (I think, and I am being completely speculative) don't bother with it. Finding the time and energy to take the 2.5 kids to the market on Saturday after working a full week and dealing with the crowds and irritation isn't for everyone (and probably isn't for most!) and unlike my situation many people can't buzz off and hit the market on one of the weekday days if they so choose, or muster up the cash to pay up-front for a CSA share.

I'm kind of torn on this. I think that the Kazakh players are probably way out of their league, but the reality is that they're participating in a tournament that features the very elite players. Playing down to them is disrespectful in its own way.

One possible solution to the astronomical disparity in goals is to build a cap into the rules and call the game when some difference in score is achieved (10 points or something) but at the same time there's always a chance (however slim) that the losing team can pull it together and to end the game before regulation time is up would be even more embarrassing.

The Kazakh players got their butts kicked, but they did so with aplomb and the Canadian players played straight-forward honest hockey. They didn't showboat, they didn't take a nap. They treated Kazakhstan like a legitimate threat which is the only fair way to face any opponent.

Hockey isn't Kazakhstan's sport, yet. But what we've seen through participation in tournies like this one is the building of the minor hockey system that is critical to playing the game at the top level. I don't know because I don't follow them, but I bet the Kazakh soccer or cricket teams would dominate their Canadian counterparts.

This is the first I've heard of the process, and I expect it to be nothing other than crap, but I also think that most highly budgeted and produced slasher films are crap too. It's kind of intrinsic to the genre. :-)

Anyway, it would be interesting to me to compare this post to early (and hell, even recent) commentary by journalists relating to blogging. 'Just leave it to the pros, you amateurs will only churn out crap.'

It is a contentious but common issue: Does more content mean more crap or do rising waters float more boats? I'm inclined to think both. Just as there's a ton of wasted disk space and bandwidth spent at YouTube, occasional gems shine through that couldn't if it wasn't cheap and easy to produce content. My stance is that the gems justify wading through the crap. I have no reason to desire your stance to be the same though, and I am always a fan of curmudgeonry.

One of the things that really bothered me about the show is that every deal that was made was for control of the company and in most cases for what strikes me as an insanely small amount of money for that amount of control.

I've bought 3 iPods and can't fathom any reason to buy the boombox thing, but Jason Fried at 37signals points out some interestingly similar comments about the iPod in a recent post (http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/original_ipo...).

I think it's really interesting that they're experimenting with audio hardware at the same time the Mac Mini takes another step closer to being a home entertainment device. I'd assumed they were just looking for the PVR/media server aspect, but maybe they're getting closer and closer to front-to-back Apple-delivered experience in the living room. I have no idea how legitimate the rumours of the Apple TV are, but an existing Cinema Display is already a better television screen than my creaky old CRT.

Sure not every one needs to be rolled out, but what's the harm in doing so?

I mean, don't get me wrong, I pretty much completely agree that this is an entirely yawn-worthy and mostly pointless application, but still, why not? It's not like the internet's going to run out of bits as a result.

I am speculating quite heavily, but I think Google's following a Release Early Release Often philosophy. The problem is that it doesn't quite mesh with their position as a major software company. We expect to see complete, reasonable products from major companies, but this (and the other examples you list) isn't one, really.

The page creator is nothing special but it's a really early stage product. They're letting people bang at it early in the life cycle to find out what people actually want, and then maybe it becomes something good. I don't know.

I think the products have to do with Google's 20% time. The engineers are working on something that maybe might one day be useful, and they're encouraged to do so, so they get some space at google.com to take it a little further. I think it's a good thing that this giant corporation is willing to open the doors to a very early stage product.

I don't quite understand how it fits together with Blog*Spot though. They already have a free web page hosting service, why are they building something different?

That's fair, Mathew. I do appreciate that the conversation is important, but if someone is broadcasting high quality signal I'm still going to read and enjoy it. I would argue (but I'll give it a rest after this ;-) that blogging is far more about having a voice, not a conversation.

Mathew, I have to disagree. A blog is a log on the web, just that. Nothing about that inherently suggests comments or conversation. "Old school" blog conversations happened without comments, the conversation happened by people referencing each other directly in posts.

That hasn't actually been practical for some number of years, but comments on most blogs also aren't really a single conversation. They're people contributing, and having their say, but there's no serious back and forth, it's as if someone shouts a topic into a room and everyone chips in. You hear and respond to what's near you or what overpowers local chatter, but whether or not your response is heard or considered is another thing entirely.

That being said, I think that it's important for modern bloggers who want to be heard and considered to offer a way for responses to get to them. Comments as we know them know are typically easiest, but I don't think everyone should need to be a moderator of their own forum.

I agree that it's unfortunate when someone goes effectively one-way, but whether or not that's a blog is another thing entirely.