The Republic of T.

Two of the bloggers I read regularly have posted about browser related problems. One was returning to Firefox, after Chrome started crashing too often (a problem I’ve also had recently). Perhaps too soon. The other was musing about whether the end is nigh for Firefox.

 

Mozilla’s open source Firefox browser essentially saved the Internet by breaking the hegemony of Internet Explorer. But over the past 18 months, I’d say it’s become noticeably obsolete. Safari and IE have both upped their game, Google’s Chrome which I use is an outstanding product, and in the fast-growing mobile space it’s not at all clear where Firefox can play. And the future outlook for Firefox is quite bleak. Over eighty percent of their 2010 revenue came from a deal with Google, in which Google paid them to make Google the default search option on the browser. But that deal expires this year, and since Google is pushing a competing product in this space it seems unlikely to be a lucrative source of revenue in the future. It’s at least conceivable that Microsoft would step in to generate traffic for its Bing search engine, but here too it’s hard to see why they wouldn’t just stick with pushing the latest version of Internet Explorer.

Meanwhile, as the chart indicates, Chrome is catching up with Firefox.

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I write like
P. G. Wodehouse

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Apparently, according to this website.

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As a former Sunday School teacher, I’ve often looked at the antics of today’s religious conservatives as they wave the Bible around and pound others over the head with it and wondered: Have they actually read that thing? Because I couldn’t see how they could reconcile their politics if they had.

Well, apparently, they read it and didn’t like everything they read. So, they’ve decided to change it, rather than change themselves.

It’s a day most progressives never thought they’d see, but here it is: according to a group of conservatives, the Bible has become too liberal. And, naturally, this same group has taken it upon themselves to edit it.

The Conservative Bible Project, a new wiki-style website brought to our attention by HuffPost, Andrew Sullivan and Beliefnet, aims to bring the Bible back to what they see as its conservative roots.

Though the site itself is currently not working for us, conservative writer Ron Dreher at Beliefnet notes that they’ve come up with ten guidelines to which a “fully conservative translation” of the Bible should adhere. They are as follows:

It gets better.

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Sometimes people respond to posts, and I wonder if they’ve bothered to read the post they’re responding to. Case in point, this comment on the previous post about the Obama administration’s response to the ridiculous misinformation spreading about health care reform.

So from your article, you agree that Obama’s effort to spy on citizens is bad, as Bush’s effort was.

Why don’t you call Obama out for his actions ?

Aren’t they both in the wrong

Where to begin?

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There’s a trend I’ve noticed in the past year or so, which is related to one I wrote about almost two years ago, when bloggers asked both parties to make presidential debate video available on the web.

Well, I don’t’ know if it can make you a “star.” But it’s getting easier, and a lot more fun, to create, remix, and experiment with video online. And with a presidential election gearing up, bloggers are asking both parties to make debate video accessible and editable on the web. The “remix” potential here is, to put it mildly, huge.

I don’t have a lot experience with video, but in the past month I’ve used video on my blog a few times, in a few different ways, and saw a leap in my traffic when people discovered my videos and linked to them. Not bad for a guy who doesn’t know much about video, which means if I can do it anyone can. You just have to know what to use.

…I’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to online video. There are lots more sites and resources out there, like Yahoo Video, DropShots, Metacafe, Motionbox, Revver, Dailymotio, Grouper, blip.tv, iFilm, Photobucket (with a new remix feature) and Ourmedia, just to name a few. With all the video resources out there, the amount of video available on the web, and little creativity, The possibilities are almost endless.

Well, I did say “almost endless.” Good thing, too. Because, well, things changed.

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This pretty much fits my mood right now.

A few of these are my own creations (made with a new toy I’ve found).

Given the slowdown in my blogging in the past year — and the accompanying slide down “the long tail” — I don’t look to be included in many “top blog” lists or “can’t miss” blog lists. I’ve stopped checking. So, I couldn’t have been more surprised when a neighbor clued me in that this blog was recently included on just such a list.

I’ve never an anonymous as a blogger. (I figured, I’d either be found out or give myself away eventually.) But I’m not exactly “out” in our neighborhood as a blogger. Unless it comes up in conversation, I don’t usually bring it up. Besides, anyone who Google’s my name will figure it out pretty quickly.

This weekend, one of our neighbors babysat while we had a night out at a fundraiser for Parker’s school. When we returned, she asked me, “Do you write a blog, by any chance?”

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I’ve wanted to write something about the murder of Larry King for a while now. But it’s been more than a year since his murder, and I haven’t written anything substantive yet. I started a couple of blog posts, and even began working on an entry for the LGBT Hate Crimes Project (despite my usual aversion to writing about things I know have been thoroughly covered elsewhere).

But every time I started, as some point I found myself backing away from the story the way I might back away from a fire or someone wielding a weapon. Something in me instinctively knew that immersing myself in Larry’s story, as I usually do when I’m researching a hate crime story, would be painful, and would probably bring back memories I’d long tried to forget as much as possible.

As the anniversary of his murder approached last year, I wanted to have something ready to post about his story. Again, some of it felt too painful, and I had to stop and focus on something else. So often, in fact, that the anniversary of Larry’s death came and went before I finished anything. B

ut in the course of writing I discovered what it was that was that made thinking and writing about Larry’s murder so painful. (more…)

OK. I value my autonomy (what’s left of it) way too much to do something like this. But the idea of someone else being in charge is tempting at times.

Chen Xiao had pretty much given up making her own decisions and so decided to throw open her life to the whims of China’s hundreds of millions of Internet users, known in China as netizens.

“It’s your right to arrange Chen Xiao’s life, and it’s my obligation to serve you,” read her online shop.

Since December, Chen has been allowing others to decide what she will do each day, because, for the most part, last year was awful, she said. Her hometown was hit by blizzards, her country rocked by a devastating earthquake, friends divorced and her clothing shop went bankrupt.

“Every time I had a plan for what I wanted my life to be like, nothing would come of it. It was very disappointing. I figured if other people came up with things for me to do, I might stumble upon something new and better,” she told CNN.

C’mon, who hasn’t thought about it?

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And gay dad bloggers will get around to that after we finish changing diapers.

The Washington Post has an article about gay bloggers that’s worth reading.

Only the blogosphere, perhaps, has room for Pam Spaulding — a black lesbian who lives in North Carolina, the only state in the South that has not banned same-sex marriage.

“California, Arizona and Florida all passed marriage amendments in November,” says Spaulding, 44, an IT manager by day and a round-the-clock blogger. “All eyes are on North Carolina now.” A few days ago, after reports that groups such as NC4Marriage and Christian Action League are organizing a rally in Raleigh to support “traditional marriage,” Spaulding wrote on her blog, Pam’s House Blend: “As predicted, the professional anti-gay forces plan to descend on NC.” What she doesn’t write is that, so long as she’s blogging, what happens in North Carolina won’t stay in the Tar Heel State.

Pam’s House Blend is an influential voice in the gay political blogosphere, must-reads that include the Bilerico Project, Towleroad and AMERICAblog, each attracting a few hundred to a few thousand hits a day. Just as the liberal Net-roots and the conservative “rightroots” movements have affected traditional party structures, the still relatively small gay political presence online is rebooting the gay rights movement in a decentralized, spontaneous, bottom-up way. It’s spreading news via blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Online, a story about two 16-year-old girls in a Lutheran private school in California being expelled for “conducting themselves in a manner consistent with being lesbians” — as the school’s lawyer describes it — goes viral. And hits nerves.

I didn’t even know the article was in the works, but that’s OK. I don’t read my email often enough to get news like that in time to do anything about it. Besides, it loooks like the writer was interested in the bigger names, and my blogging stature has been in decline for the past year, and at this rate I may disappear from the universe altogether.

(Whether that can be turned around remains to be seen, and will likely depend on getting a few extra hours added to the day.)

But at least a couple of the blogs I write for (occasionally) — Pam’s and Bilerico – are featured.

No, Wikipedia is not really dead, but it might as well be, with the news that Wikipedia editors may approve all changes.

Wikipedia faces a revolt among thousands of its contributors over proposals to change the way the online encyclopedia is run.

Until now, Wikipedia has allowed anybody to make instant changes to almost all of its 2.7m entries, with only a handful of entries protected from being altered.

But under proposals put forward by the website’s co-founder Jimmy Wales, many future changes to the site would need to be approved by a group of editors before going live.

Wales argues the scheme will bring greater accuracy, particularly in articles referring to living people. But the possibility has caused a furore among Wikipedia users, since many see it as a fundamental change to the egalitarian nature of the site.

A user poll on the website suggests 60% are in favour of trials, which could take place within the next few weeks. But some think the split could ultimately threaten the future of the site.

I suppose it’s the next phase in Wikipedia’s development, though it’s not that much of a change.

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Yes. Once upon a time.

I took this survey via Lifehacker.

CNET reports that Wikipedia has received $890,000 in funding specifically aimed at creating an easier to use interface for readers with a low level of tech knowledge. Wikipedia’s goal is “to identify the most common barriers to entry for first-time writers, and then work to systematically reduce or eliminate them.” It’s an excellent idea, considering the obvious fact that there are presumably countless potential contributors with a lot of knowledge but a low level of tech skill. Still, since most of our readers are a tech-savvy bunch, it got us wondering:

Have you ever edited Wikipedia?

Well yes. But I soon stopped.

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Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s murder. I didn’t get chance to blog about it (or much else) yesterday.

Ten years ago yesterday, I was in a hotel in Albuquerque, NM — helping to facilitate an HIV/AIDS prevention and education training for a Latina organization — when heard about Matthew Shepard. I was brushing my teeth while listening to the morning news on television. (I still watched TV news back then.) At some point during the report about Shepard, I came out of the bathroom and sat down on the bed. I may have still had my toothbrush in my mouth. I know I was only half dressed, and had to hurry to finish dressing and get downstairs for the training.

It was an hour before I could speak to anyone, and even then I could only manage to tell them what I’d seen on the news. I kept running back up to my room to catch the news during breaks. At some point my update was that Matthew had died. Later, I flew back to D.C., and the first thing I did was to go to a huge rally at the Capitol, where I met up with some of my friends who were also trying to get their brains around what happened.

The response to Shepard’s death was huge. But, like Cathy wrote, a lot has happened since then. A lot of people have been targets and victims of hate crimes.

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Wow. I’m a little overwhelmed by the response to the Meltdown 2008 timeline. It’s gotten more than 22,000 views since I created it. I hope that means people find it interesting and/or informative. Anyway, it means a little added pressure to keep it updated. So here’s the latest.

Every once in a while, I get an idea that turns out to be bigger than I thought was. Such is the case with the Meltdown 2008 timeline I debuted in the previous post.

That timeline is still developing. (Which means I’m still adding to it.) But before I could start the process of putting it together, I had to figure out a way to do it. That lead to even more time researching online timeline-building tools. I didn’t know they existed before, let alone that there were so many. But now that I’ve settled on which to use for this project, I wanted to share what I learned from my research about what else is out there.

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I spent some time this weekend researching different web-based tools for creating timelines, after getting an idea for a project I might want to propose at work, when I came across this. I remember when I was in college, and 1989 was winding down, my friends and I were all kind of struck by the fact that the first decade we could remember from it start was coming to an end. I’m sure we all said we felt “old.” at the time.

So, children of the 80s, how much of this stuff do you remember? Anything left out that you’d want to add.

At this point I think “old” is relative, but when a decade of your life becomes nostalgia fodder…well, that’s something.

I’m officially blaming it on gas prices, which probably isn’t too far off the mark. Metro ridership in D.C. is way up, and recently hit a new record.

Metro says it counted 854,638 riders on Friday, beating the old record by 4,000 passenger trips. Officials attribute the spike to a Washington Nationals baseball game, a Women of Faith Conference at the Verizon Center and tourists visiting the city.

So far, 20 of Metrorail’s top 25 highest ridership days in its 32-year history have been recorded this year. Many of the busiest days are generated by baseball games or big events like the Cherry Blossom Festival or the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

No wonder I can’t find a seat on the Metro. I used to let packed trains go by, because I could be almost certain that I would get a seat on the next train. That means I’d be able to take out the laptop and use that little bit of quiet time between work and home to catch up on some of the stuff I’ve been wanting to read.

But the trains are all crowded now, and by the time the third packed train goes by, I have to get on or get home late. So, what’s a guy to do?

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I going to try and spend some time today working on a couple of things I’ve wanted to write, but haven’t found time for lately. So, since I’m not sure how much actually blogging will be going on here today, it seems like a good time to post a round-up of some of the more interesting blog posts and news items I’ve seen in the past week or so. (And earlier, since I’m perpetually behind on my blog reading these days.)

I ‘ve often been told that being gay is all in my head. Well, it’s true. Actually, it’s in my brain. Thus, I think like a girl.

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This reminds me of my days as co-director of the LGBT student group in college. Once a semester, we’d spend at least one meeting sitting in a circle, telling our coming our stories when new members showed up. We stopped after we realize we could go around the room and tell each others’ stories.

How gay am I? How gay are you? Well, it’s anybody’s guess. But there’s a questionnaire that, while it won’t provide an answer, seems like an interesting diversion on an afternoon when I’m running on about two hour of sleep. I found it at Put ‘Em All On an Island, who got it from HiStoriesOfSex, who got it from wonder boy, who got it from addaboy, and after that I lost the thread.

Still, I’m too brain dead to think of anything serious to blog about. So, I’m joining the daisy chain. Check the questions after the jump, and feel free to chime in.

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Well, maybe not, but I’m betting that some of his so-called followers are hating Google Ads right about now. If they’re paying attention. My boss showed me this site. Actually, it was more like I heard him laughing and wondered over to see what was so funny.

Well, it was pretty damn funny.

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