shawn rider dot com

These are the bookmarks I created on February 27th, 2008:

• Welcome to Pixish! - Buy and sell images — post assignments and leverage the community to crowdsource your image needs.
• OhmyNews International - This is an international citizen journalism site that has grown from a Korean-only version.

These are the bookmarks I created on February 19th, 2008:

• » Microsoft Giving Away Free Developer Software To Students » InsideMicrosoft-part of the Blog News Channel - This is a great deal for college students, if only for the XNA Creators’ Club membership and Expression Studio, two things I’d LOVE to get for FREE! The list of free software includes pretty much all the major MS dev tools — over $2K of software.
• Gamerscore Blog - Gamerscore blog is one I check regularly and never noticed that I didn’t have a link for it before…
• Newspond - Wow, three new Digg clones in one night! Newspond uses an auto-aggregator (like Techmeme) to gather stories from the Web and presents them based on tags / topics in different categories.
• Mozilla Messaging - Thunderbird should be getting a shot in the arm from Mozilla Messaging, a re-dedicated wing of the Mozilla Foundation that will give specific attention to email, calendars, and various messaging needs. Death to Outlook / Exchange! Viva la revolucion!
• Morphic - Morphic is the evolution of Squeak / Smalltalk. It is being used within Lively Kernel.
• Sun Labs Lively Kernel - Just read a really interesting article about Lively Kernel that made me want to check it out. I am intrigued to say the least.
• Mixx - News, photo, and video sharing - YADC - Yet Another Digg Clone. Mixx has been getting some good press (via other Digg clones especially! haha), so I figured I should check it out.
• Techmeme - Another one for the ‘occasional’ folder…

These are the bookmarks I created between February 10th, 2008 and February 11th, 2008:

• NPR: ‘Second Life’ Players Face Real Financial Losses - Ack! A Second Life recession! Or worse?
• The Eco-Media Player, from Trevor Baylis Brands plc - The Eco Media Player is a wind-up media player. 1 min of winding gives 40 min of listening. Plus it plays vids, charges your cell phone and has a flashlight. Amazing!
• Mighty Seek - Web Application Security Podcast and Blog » PodPress - This is a pretty robust plugin for podcasting with Wordpress. I have been browsing for a friend who is thinking of starting her own podcast…
• Spread OpenID » OpenID Guide for End Users - This guide shows how to add OpenID handler tags to your website, so you can use your domain as your Open ID login (you still need to use an Open ID provider). So now all I have to remember is my domain name to login to Open ID enabled sites.
• DataPortability.org - Share and remix data using open standards - Continuing my research on OpenID, I realized I had no bookmark to this site.
• alertle - Alertle is a AJAX-y little news aggregator. It has a pretty cool interface and comes loaded with tons of feeds. The autoplay of stories is kind of cool if you like to just watch news flow past…
• tiinker :: My history - tiinker is a digg-like site that uses your personal feedback to texturize submitted articles for your personal tastes. It’s an interesting example of personalization through AI editorial assistance and user feedback. It’s like a Pandora for news, I guess.
• Brightness illusions to lottolab.org: understanding the ecological basis of complex systems - These are totally trippy optical illusions having to do with brightness and color.

News Channel 8 is an ABC affiliate in the DC Metro area. They are pretty much either showing reruns of better shows, the traffic report, or really terrible local news coverage. The best thing about the morning show is that Dave Willingham, the traffic guy, seems totally drunk every day. And the weather guy (Ron Riley) kind of looks like John Boland, the SVP of Content at PBS.

So it’s no surprise that News Channel 8 really screwed up their recent story on a Greenbelt, MD trend: ZOMG! Some kids posted RAPZ on TEH INTARWEBS! And the raps are DIRTY!

Aside from the fact that it’s not news that teenagers like dirty rap, the broadcast version of this story is complete hysteria. One woman interviewed says, “Now that you show me this, I’m shaking. My girl is in 10th grade — this is so close to her.” Seriously? Of all the bad things that could happen to one’s daughter in this crazy world, close proximity to rap music is probably not the worst. The rhymes are dirty, homophobic, misogynistic, and occasionally racist, which fits with most of the landscape of contemporary pop culture. It’s just amplified in the hip-hop realm a bit, but it’s no different than the content of the tracks I was secretly listening to when I was in junior high school.

But the straw that broke this camel’s back is the blatant lack of research that went into the story, and this is exposed in the last paragraph of the Web version, the closing lines of the broadcast version. The Web version reads:

The school system says the fight club consists of one clip which keeps getting recycled. It says it reprimanded the students in the video, yet the system admits it is hard to rein in anything once it takes off on the internet. Right now, there’s no way of knowing whether the rants have turned into any physical acts of violence.

The broadcast version also reported that students have claimed to see new episodes of the “Fight Club” videos posted each week. A quick Google will turn up results on YouTube for “Fight Klub” — a series produced by MTV2 that features rap battles between up and coming rappers. Amazing! In fact, after 20 minutes of searching, I cannot find the Roosevelt High School Fight Club videos at all — but I have found dozens of other “Fight Club” videos.

The first tier of the videos one finds are clips from the movie “Fight Club.” These are multitudinous and varied, creepy in themselves. The next tier is ACTUAL fight club footage: People making amateur fighting clubs. If done in a dojo, this is not really even considered weird. And finally there are many, many videos of all sorts of folks battle rapping and calling it “fight club.”

None of these things are mentioned: the fact that this is in no way an isolated incident, that the students are mimicking a television show, and that there is precedent encouraging students to release aggression through verbal expression rather than physical violence (such as dance and poetry groups). This is a series of serious omissions and forces us to confront the unreliability of our local new sources.

Source: Fight Club Rants Run Rabid Online|NewsChannel 8