I am a bit irritated by the newly aggressive ad placement by WordPress.com. I have no control over that and would prefer no ads whatsoever, but WordPress charges for that. I will probably explore other hosting options if I do revive the site.

In the interim, I am more likely to share longer-form content on Google+. Go to my Google profile and put me in one of your circles for that stuff. You can also subscribe to my occasional public updates on Facebook, though I reserve friending for actual acquaintances.

Thanks for visiting.

I saw one at a friend’s house on a trip to Los Angeles last winter. This thing is amazing. Usually I’m content to take my espresso or coffee straight, but every once in a while I want some foam and froth.

I have managed to steam and froth milk with various steam-shooting attachments on espresso machines over the years, but it was usually a big mess, and the results were mixed.

And try as I might, I could never get soy milk to froth at all, which was sad for my wife, who doesn’t use dairy but likes a decaf cappucino every now and then.

So my family gave me one of these for my birthday last month.

It’s a revelation. It purrs quietly. It whisks up some hot (or cold) foam in a matter of seconds. It is easy to clean up. And it works fine with soy milk.

I’m drinking a fine soy cap right now, listening to a Pandora station on my new iToy and writing this post.

Mmm, creamy and foamy.

The iPad can’t do that!

But I have another problem. I’ve run out of coffee. And that takes me to this week’s selection — the last drop is going down the hatch.

Coffee Monserrate, Huila, Columbia

Roasted March 14 by Café Grumpy in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Purchased March 16 at Grumpy‘s Chelsea location, 224 W. 20th St., between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

Description “Hazelnut aroma, butterscotch sweetness, smooth body and ripe red apple brightness. Caturra & Typica. Washed, sun-dried. Producer: Grupo Asociativo Productores del Nuevo Milenio”

In the cup This is a perfectly fine but ultimately undistinguished coffee in my mind, but I’ll admit to being a little distracted this week. I’ve had it at home in the Jura and at work in the Aeropress (it is better than the previous selection for that). I’ve never been a big Hazelnut fan, associating it with the worst sort of break-room or gas-station coffee. This is nothing like that flavored stuff. It is just a hint. The butterscotch sweetness and smooth mouthfeel saves the whole thing. And of course, much of the time I have been drowning it in foam and milk, so I can’t really be trusted to give it a fair assessment. I do love the Aerocinno.

One note: A small amount of milk is enough to make foam for a few drinks, so it’s good to have company when you use it. I will have to experiment before I learn to draw little pictures in the cup the way pro baristas do.

So I just made this cappuccino and a decaf latte for my wife (using the Novo decaf — sure, we have plenty of that left). We’re listening to Pandora’s iPad app play a Phish song (“Contact”) while I blog this (on my MacBook Air — I don’t see the tablet working for my workflow even on this simple blog, which still requires simple picture uploads and easy typing, but I’ll discuss the iPad’s limitations in a future post).

I guess I’ll have to tear myself away from my new toy(s) and ride my bike to get some more beans today.

A Few Interesting Twitter Tools

There are hundreds of Twitter tools and sites out there, and perhaps as many blogs that will list them for you. But you really only need a few, and even some of these are just curiosities.

For searches, Twitter Search, Tweetgrid, Twitscoop, and Twitterfall are useful for finding trending topics:
http://search.twitter.com/
http://tweetgrid.com/
http://www.twitscoop.com/
http://twitterfall.com/

You can chart trends against each other (examples):
http//twist.flaptor.com

URL-shortening: Twitter and third-party applications will usually do this for you, but I recommend bit.ly in particular because it allows you to see how many people clicked on the link (just add a + after the shortened URL in your browser address bar). You can tweet from the bit.ly browser page if you set up an account. Another nice thing about bit.ly is the short URLs it produces. If you keep your tweets under 120 characters, it is easier for others to retweet you.
http://bit.ly.com

Here’s a list of Twitter account rankings and stats; you can also search by location:
http://twitterholic.com/

This tool tells you who you are following who isn’t following you, who is following you that you are not following, and mutual follows. Unlike some tools, you don’t have to give your Twitter password.
http://friendorfollow.com/

Once you have been on Twitter a while, give MrTweet a whirl & it will suggest people to follow in your network who have similar interests (follow and tweet a while before you try it):
http://mrtweet.net/

See the history of how your following is growing, or the growth of others:
http://twittercounter.com/

Look at a graph of how often you Twitter and when you tweet the most:
http://tweetstats.com/

This will tell you your “Twinfluence” — theoretical reach of your Twitter followers’ followers:
http://twinfluence.com/

This offers more statistics analyzing a user’s Twitter style:
http://www.twitteranalyzer.com/

And here’s another of the same flavor, the Twitalyzer:
http://www.twitalyzer.com/

Who is getting retweeted?
http://retweetist.com/

Track and see the links that are being twittered (also track by user):
http://twitturly.com

Follow @Twitter_tips on Twitter for daily links to posts about how to use Twitter and other news:
http://twitter.com/Twitter_Tips

For search purposes, Twitter does not save updates going back much longer than a month. If you want to save yours, here’s an archiving service (I don’t bother)
http://tweetake.com/

Confused by the terminology? Here is a Twitter glossary:
http://www.susanmernit.com/blog/2009/03/the-twitter-glossary-what-do.html

David Pogue, the NYT technology writer, swears by this site, Twitoaster, which shows threaded Twitter converations and statistics:
http://twitoaster.com/quick-guide/

Interesting People to Follow First

During the recent newsroom talks, I suggested some accounts that people could follow when they are just starting out. For journalists, Twitter tends to be boring if you’re not following people who are linking and thinking — “mindcasters.” Follow about 100 or so to get started. Don’t feel obligated to read every tweet. Don’t feel bad about unfollowing people if they are boring you or tweeting too much.

Our main feed, the home page headlines and breaking news alerts
http://twitter.com/nytimes

The CNN breaking news feed, which was started by a CNN fan (@imajes)
http://twitter.com/cnnbrk

Breaking News online, a news alert service:
http://twitter.com/BreakingNews

Nieman Journalism Lab’s curated journalism and new media links
http://twitter.com/NiemanLab

Digg 2000, all articles that get more than 2000 diggs
http://twitter.com/digg_2000

Long Reads — links to long form journalism
http://twitter.com/longreads

Matthew Ingram, communities editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail
http://twitter.com/mathewi

Colonel Tribune, imaginary figurehead of Chicago Tribune
http://twitter.com/coloneltribune

Twendly, Tweets about trending topics on Twitter
http://twitter.com/twendly

Kevin Sablan, blogger & web team person at Orange County Register
http://twitter.com/ksablan

Bill Romanos, lawyer, media fan, prolific linker
http://twitter.com/BILL_ROMANOS

Romenesko feed
http://twitter.com/romenesko

The very chatty Washington Post
http://twitter.com/washingtonpost

Howard Kurtz, the media critic
http://twitter.com/howardkurtz

Andrew Nystrom, social media editor at the LA Times
http://twitter.com/LATimesNystrom

LA Times official feed
http://twitter.com/LATimes

Foodimentary – daily food facts
http://twitter.com/Foodimentary

Peter Kafka, AllThingsD blogger for The Wall Street Journal
http://twitter.com/pkafka

Tim Siedell, aka Badbanana, a master of funny Twitter one-liners
http://twitter.com/badbanana

Steve Rubel, PR social media guy, Microtrends blog, linker
http://twitter.com/steverubel

Chris Krewson, executive editor online news, Philadelphia Inquirer
http://twitter.com/ckrewson

Jim MacMillan, pulitzer-winning journalist, professor, consultant, linker
http://twitter.com/JimMacMillan

Jay Rosen, NYU journalism professor and “mindcaster” on news
http://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu

Dave Winer, the father of RSS feeds, blogger and media critic
http://twitter.com/davewiner

Kathy Riordan of Florida, one of my favorite news-obsessives on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/katriord

Guy Kawasaki, tweeting/linking machine (with two ghost assistants)
http://twitter.com/guykawasaki

Pete Cashmore/Mashable — leading social media news blog
http://twitter.com/mashable

John A. Byrne, editor in chief of Business Week
http://twitter.com/JohnAByrne

Bill Keller, NYT
http://twitter.com/nytkeller

Also worth following: My NYT colleagues who joined the newsroom presentations, Jennifer 8. Lee, Jeremy Zilar, Brian Stelter and Jacob Harris, as well as the new social media editor, Jennifer Preston, Sewell Chan, bureau chief of City Room, and Tim O’Brien, editor of Sunday Business. The full list of Times people on Twitter is too long and growing too quickly to put here; please consult Muckrack or the accounts followed by Jennifer or @nytimes on Twitter.

There are many blogs that offer more lists of interesting people to follow. Here’s a recent example. Do not feel obligated to follow everyone back, and don’t feel bad if they don’t follow you back, especially if you are new.

Follower Networks

Muckrack (find more journalists)
Mr Tweet (find influential people in your network)

Third-Party Twitter Applications

The Twitter Web site is fine for most people who are starting out. It’s simple. But if you want to follow a lot of people, group different accounts, set up a variety of searches or manage multiple accounts (a personal account, a blog, etc.), then you might want to try a third-party application.

For a long time I used Tweetdeck, an Adobe Air app, and many people still swear by it. The NYT news technology department warned against Tweetdeck after it was found to cause performance and memory problems on some older newsroom computers. The software has since been upgraded, which may have fixed the issue.

Two other Air apps seem to work better (but they have different sets of features): Destroy Twitter and Seesmic Desktop.

Lately I have been testing the upgraded Peoplbrowser, an impressive Web browser-based dashboard with many bells and whistles (perhaps too many). Another full-featured browser-based app is Twitterfall, which is also useful for searching trending topics.

On my iPhone I use Twitterfon, but Tweetie is also quite good (and there is a desktop app as well).

Blackberry users might want to check out Twitterberry.

And, of course, Twitter itself has a mobile site for use with a cellphone Web browser.

Updated Aug. 30, 2009.

Updated March 13, 2011. Hello, and thanks for visiting my personal blog, which is mostly about coffee, with a little bit about social media and technology.

It is likely that you arrived at this welcome page by clicking the link on my Twitter profile. This post is my primitive method for tracking traffic from Twitter.

My name is Patrick LaForge. I have been an editor at The New York Times since 1997, after a dozen years as a reporter and editor at newspapers in upstate New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania. I started using Twitter in early 2007, when Sewell Chan and I created the City Room blog for The Times. In May 2009, I left City Room and the metro desk to become the editor in charge of the copy desks.

How I Use Twitter

I generally post updates about Web content I am reading, watching or thinking about, not what I had for lunch. I follow hundreds of people who use Twitter the same way — a collection of active linkers, journalists, bloggers, New Yorkers, Times staffers and readers.

You can see what Twitter looks like to me by viewing my Twitterstream list of the 800 or so accounts I follow and read every day. I find it hard to follow more people than that and read every tweet. If you are interested in a high-signal list that is mostly links and retweets, try my list “Linkers”, the people I rely on to recommend the latest, best content on Twitter and the Web.

I do not automatically return follows, but if you engage with me and provide interesting content, the odds are I will add you to my twitterstream.

And if you are not among the people I follow directly, but you seem nice enough (and not a spammer or commercial bot), I may add you to the few thousand accounts on The Mighty List, when I get a chance. (For some reason, Twitter allows me to go above the 500-account cap on these lists, and I’m not sure why — perhaps it’s a glitch, or perhaps it’s because I was a lists beta-tester or have a verified account.)

If you are relatively new to Twitter, you might be interested in this post, “Basic Twitter Links for Journalists.”

About The Times and Twitter

If you have a question about The Times, I will try to answer it, but you may be better off putting the question to the paper’s social media editor, Jennifer Preston, her new deputy, Liz Heron, or the public relations team, @NYTimesComm. You can find more Times staffers on Twitter by looking at the staff list at @nytimes on Twitter.

You may have heard that The Times has “banned” the word tweet in its pages. That is not true. We do discourage its overuse and encourage less colloquial language in serious contexts. If you want to read an accurate account, see this post on After Deadline, the style and grammar blog kept by our standards editor, Phil Corbett, or read my comments on Steve Buttry’s blog. There’s more here, too.

Other Places I Share Links

Only some of the links I share on Twitter come from The Times. If you want to see other links that I am reading, see my Google Reader profile. Sometimes I bookmark articles that are specifically about the future of journalism and media on my Delicious page. And lately I have been fooling around with a Tumblr page. My other Web homes, with varying levels of activity, are listed at the left.

If we are acquaintances or friends, find me on Facebook. Sorry, I don’t accept friend requests from people I don’t know.

How Do You Use Twitter?

Send me an email, or leave a comment here on the blog. I read them all.

For more of my thoughts on Twitter, blogging and social media, see these other posts. (I don’t blog much these days. If I do, it is usually about coffee.)

Or, you can just head back to Twitter. You’re probably missing something…

Origin: Cauca, Colombia

Roasted: March 31 by Intelligentsia

Purchased: April 5 at Café Grumpy, 224 W. 20th St., Manhattan, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

Description: “Almost candy-like in its sweetness, notes of licorice root and milk chocolate sustain the acidity as a finish of tart dried fruit and praline linger pleasantly.”

In the cup: For the last several days, this Colombian single-source bean has been loaded up in the Jura and ready to go. I’ve had it as an espresso and as a regular coffee, no milk. It’s hard to say which I prefer more. It seems sweeter as an espresso, though I’m not sure I agree with the “candy-like” description the bag, which is just as well. I’ve certainly tasted coffees with more of a hint of chocolate than this, and too much fruit aftertaste, but this goes down smoothly and pleasantly from start to finish.

This direct-trade and in-season coffee is a Bourbon grown at 1,900 meters or so above sea level and harvested last summer in the Cauca region of Colombia at Finca Santuario, a plantation operated by Camilo Merizalde, which I wrote about earlier. His beans seem to be a favorite of other coffee bloggers. Regrettably, the Intelligentsia blog post about Mr. Merizalde’s farm and methods, quoted in my earlier review of his Heliconias variety, seems to have vanished from the roaster’s blog. But you can find an updated version [also in pdf] (with pictures) with the Micay description:

This coffee marks the first time that we are offering two different botanic varietials from the same farm. This is a rare opportunity since it is not possible to separate most coffees in this way. Many farms are basically monocultures, with 80 percent or more of the crop coming from a single variety. On others with greater diversity, coffee varieties are usually not separated well enough in the field to allow for individual/selective harvesting. On smaller farms, even when varieties are well identified and separated, the volumes are just too tiny to be workable as individual lots.

So, one farm, two great coffees. I’ll keep an eye out for more from Finca Santuario. And Intelligentsia is fast converting me into a believer in its experts’ ability to find great coffees. My Ninth Street expedition this week yielded a couple of other beans from this roaster, a direct trade coffee from Brazil and Intelligentsia’s
“Alphabet City” espresso blend. More on them later this week.

So I wasn’t drinking as much coffee, and I still had quite a supply of the Ecuadorean beans from Whole Foods. About a week ago, though, I stopped by Cafe Grumpy with my daughter and was pleased to see some selections that were right up my alley. This is the first of the two.

Name: Chapadão de Ferro – Microlot 494

Origin: Patrocinio, Brasil

Roasted: March 31 by Ritual Coffee Roasters

Purchased: April 5 at Café Grumpy, 224 W. 20th St., Manhattan, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

Description: “Clean and sweet, with beautiful acidity and flavors of butterscotch, dutch cocoa, and dried fruits.”

In the cup: I was drinking this as an espresso most of the week, and had not been particularly impressed. But it was a lousy, busy week so I started fresh day with a regular cup, no milk. First I had to clean the Jura machine, which demands attention every 200 coffees or so. I dropped the white pill in the top and went through the rinsing procedure to get rid of coffee oil buildup. This may have affected the flavor of the espressos last week.

Here is the marketing pitch from RItual:

In the center of an extinct volcano in Patrocinio, Brasil, Ruvaldo Delarisse produces this natural, or sun-dried, coffee 1200 meters above sea level. The soil at Chapadão de Ferro is uniquely rich in iron, rendering the farm’s name (“Plateau of Iron”), as well as a flavor that is similarly unique to Cerrado, the eco-region. Ruvaldo sun-dries the coffee fruit off of the bean on concrete patios, which helps develop both body and sweetness in this coffee.

The Plateau of Iron, now that’s a phrase to conjure with. Its a good coffee. It’s not knocking my socks off. It’s typical coffee acidity is easy to take (is that the “beautiful” part?) and maybe there is indeed a hint of cocoa (that is what caught my attention on the Grumpy menu). Butterscotch? I wasn’t getting it. Dried fruits? Not really. I guess I remain something of a barbarian without a refined coffee palate. I found myself wishing I had instead picked up the single origin espresso from El Salvador — Finca la Ponderosa microlot roasted by Verve – that I had tried in the shop when I bought this. The barista pulled a shot that was funky, muddy and tasted like the side of a mountain, but I loved it. It was perfect for that moment, anyway. Still, this Brazilian is perfectly acceptable, better than most coffee you could get anywhere and better than many beans I have reviewed on the blog. I can’t wait to try the other coffee I bought and have kept sealed in deep cool storage — a Colombian bean roasted by Intelligentsia. Perhaps tomorrow.

Since October I’ve been experimenting here with some personal blogging. Why, you might ask, when I already blog at my job? Isn’t that a busman’s holiday? Perhaps. But I had plunked down money for this domain, and I had some ideas and obsessions to explore that didn’t fit in with my work. And I also wanted to conduct a few experiments.

When a blog is housed within a major news site, the metrics get hard to sort out. With some great content and breaking news, and a huge built-in audience, it is a simple matter to draw millions of views. (Palafo.com has drawn under 5,000 views in its entire existence, with who knows how many hundreds of those clicks attributable to family and friends.)

Blogging alone is a lot tougher, as some smaller news outlets and out of work journalists may be discovering the hard way. You have to rely on tools found in the wild — basic search, trackbacks, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Google Reader, LinkedIn, Digg, reminding friends at parties that you have a blog, etc.

As it turns out, the free host WordPress.com offers some pretty good measurement tools on the back end. They won’t let me use Google analytics — how irritating — but the stats they provide are interesting. (No measurement of time spent, unique users and repeat visitors, or other ways to judge engagement, alas,)

Take a look at the chart up top (click to enlarge it). It shows day to day traffic for the last few weeks. Basically, all you need to know is that the peaks are when I blogged. The valleys show up when I took a break. No content, no readers. Simple enough. Without posts, the traffic dives off a cliff. This is one reason big commercial sites (both mainstream and indie) often blog shotgun style, throwing as much content to the search engines and feed readers and social networks as they can, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Over time, you do get some repeat visitors, but the Web audience is pretty fickle. They come for the content, and they don’t care too much who you are.

The peaks and valleys are more obvious in this week to week chart (click to enlarge):

As you can probably guess from this chart, without looking around the blog, my posting dropped off in recent weeks, from about two or three times a week to once a week. Some work projects came to a head, and I found it more rewarding and easier to Twitter in 140 characters for a potentially large audience than research and write complicated posts requiring photos and so forth. So I never did the planned posts about the New York Comic Convention, the trip to the Spa Castle in Queens, and any number of food-oriented posts. (There’s something about blogs and food.)

It was particularly labor-intensive because I was mostly writing about podcasts, which required hours of listening to audio, music (ditto), blogging/social media/books (hours of reading and Web surfing) and single-source coffees that required comparison shopping around town.

Before that wore me down I did learn a few things about what drives traffic to a little blog like mine in a far corner of the Web. Let’s look at the all-time top posts (click to enlarge):

The all-time top post was my advice on a computer problem I encountered: how to get rid of annoying IM coho bots. More about that later.

The No. 2 spot is taken by a list post of my favorite blogs. Web readers love lists, and bloggers love to be put on lists. I had not quite realized the significance of automatic trackbacks, but a lot of blogs use them, so when you link to them, they link back to you. Bloggers themselves will pay you a visit to see what you are saying about them. It is still a thriving form of social media.

Then there was my bio. Not surprising. Just about everyone landing here probably looks at it once.

My list of iPhone apps, updated a few times, also proved surprisingly popular. I put it out at a time when people were having a lot of trouble figuring out which apps were worth using, and there were hundreds of new ones. Plenty of other bloggers had the same idea. It helps to be an early adopter. That list is probably getting a little stale now. I’ve lost interest in tracking down every single cool app, now that I’ve settled on the set I need.

The biggest overall topic is podcasting. There are many directories but few that approach the topic in a systematic fashion. My approach was entirely idiosyncratic, and I would have stopped if I hadn’t discovered a small but interested audience out there. Podcasters, even commercially successful ones, are rather unreliable about posting reliable show notes or blog posts about their content. And as much as I love the iTunes store, the podcasting area is a bit of a disorganized mess, perhaps because the content is mostly free. That leaves a search void.

My coffee blogging also proved “popular” in the aggregate, because it was aimed at obsessives who are served by a network of blogs and sites that have been going out of business in the economic downturn. While many coffee experts have tried to blog, their expertise tends to be in making great coffee, not writing or blogging. There’s definitely an opportunity out there for a good writer who loves coffee and knows more about it than I do.

Any blog post about Twitter is bound to be a hit, especially if you mention it on Twitter. I know, having clicked through to a bunch of them. (The Jan. 23 one about my rules for following on Twitter is the high starting peak in the chart at the top of this post.)

The only real surprises on this list were the N+1 post, about a slightly obscure literary magazine with Luddite pretensions, and the “thoughtprints” post, about a very obscure theater production. Neither had a particularly good Web presence, so these posts filled a void in search results, apparently.

On to the top referring sites. The results below (click to enlarge) taught me that I was better off depending on the curiosity of strangers than the kindness of my friends. The numbers don’t lie. Twitter, an open, public platform, wins hands-down, over Facebook, a mostly closed platform where only my friends see my stuff.

Now, something doesn’t quite add up here. These stats don’t match the larger views listed by the post. But that’s often the case with Web metrics. They are suspect.

During this period I had about the same number of Twitter followers as Facebook friends. I promoted links to my blog on both sites — probably a little more often on Facebook, thinking people who knew me would show more interest in my stuff. Facebook is a closed system, and only my friends can see my profile. Twitter is open and even shows up in search. But Twitter followers far outperformed Facebook friends on click-throughs. Perhaps they prefer to stay on Facebook, chat and look at each others’ pictures. Twitter users seem to be more actively seeking out content.

The biggest surprise may be that Mahalo referral, which keeps on giving. I posted an answer on Mahalo about how to get rid of the instant-message coho bots, with a link to my longer blog post about it. Not only did that answer drive a lot of traffic, but a link to my post has been posted on numerous other blogs. Happy to help.

The rest of the referrers are an assortment of individual WordPress tags, people clicking links in email, Google reader RSS shares, stumbleupon links, and so forth.

Now, what about search? It doesn’t seem to have driven a lot of traffic (click to enlarge):

Not surprisingly, many lazy people just type the name of the blog in the search panel rather than bookmarking the site. I do the same thing. The top searched term on Google has been “Yahoo” for many years. This is one reason I picked a short, unusual name for my blog that (I hope) is easy to remember. The other terms are assorted podcast, coffee and blog topics that I briefly mentioned, including the unusual phrase “janky vegetables” from the “Faire du Camping” episode of You Look Nice Today, which is not janky at all.

Most of the few incoming links were trackbacks from posts or blogs I mentioned, and stuff related to the instant-message coho problem.

Now, of course, it is a truism on the Internet that if you send people away with links, they will come back. Where did this blog send people?

Click to enlarge the chart. The greatest beneficiary here is my own Twitter profile, followed by my Facebook profile.

The other links are mostly blogs from my list, podcast sites from the reviews, and assorted links that have appeared in the feeds at the left of the blog. (WordPress makes it very easy to share links and feeds from Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Google Reader and so forth, without having to manually post anything here on the blog.)

The most interesting result had nothing to do with traffic here on the blog. I started posting a lot on Twitter in part to promote this blog, as well as share other links I found while looking for stuff to write about on the blog. Then people started following me there, I became part of a community, and I ended up with a bigger, more reliable audience there than here. Click on this Twittercounter chart, for the last three months:

That’s remarkable. I’ll be thinking about Twitter some more and eventually share thoughts here on the blog that require more than 140 characters. I could obviously use the traffic.

Update: After two blog posts, four hours and some promotion on Facebook and Twitter the chart was happily spiking again (at right). Most of the clicks came from Twitter, followed by Facebook, Google Reader and assorted tags here on WordPress blogs. Plus one click from Mahalo Answers to the IM coho post.

1. If you follow more people than are following you, that is a strike.
2. If you rarely or never post updates, that is a strike. Sneak.
3. If you post a tweet every 5 seconds, that is a strike. Get a life.
4. If you follow fewer than 20 people, that is a strike. C’mon. You’re not reading any of us?
5. If you follow more than 1,500 people, that is a strike. C’mon. You’re not reading all of us.
6. If you don’t follow me, that is a strike.
7. If you complain about people not following you back, that is a strike.
8. If you never reply to people, that is a strike.
9. If you only reply to people, that is a strike. Get a room.
10. If you auto-reply or send me a direct message when I follow you, I am not flattered, and that is a strike.
11. If you call yourself a social media guru, evangelist or consultant, that is a strike.
12. Linking and news tweets are great, if you are consistently among the first. If you are not, that is a strike.
13. Self-linking is great, unless it is all that you do, in which case it is a strike. (I don’t mind Twitterfeeds if they are clearly presented as that under a company brand.)
14. Retweeting is great, but if that is all you do, that is a strike. Especially if you retweet someone that everybody already follows. And by everybody I mean me.
15. Original quips are great, unless they are boring or offensive. I decide. Strike!
16. I don’t care what you are eating, drinking, watching, smoking, or what the weather is outside your window, or how your commute is going. OK, maybe once in a while. But it might be a strike.
17. If you don’t use a real picture of your face, that is a strike.
18. If you don’t tell me who you are or what you are about in your bio, that is a strike.
19. If we work together, or I already see your status updates on Facebook, I may not follow you because I already know what’s on your mind.
20. If you are pretending to be a famous person, or a fictional character, or a building, or someone’s pet, or an inanimate object, that is a strike, unless it is consistently funny.
21. If your tweets are all about Twitter and social media, or you compile lists about why you follow and don’t follow people, that is a strike.

If you are interesting enough, I can forgive any number of strikes and follow you anyway.
So what are you waiting for? Follow me @palafo.


Posted in Social Media Tagged: Blogs, followers, following, Mashable, Social Media, Twitter, Web 2.0 ]]> http://palafo.com/2009/01/23/my-rules-for-following-on-twitter/feed/ 5 palafo http://palafo.com/2009/01/19/podcast-zeitgeist-jan-19/ http://palafo.com/2009/01/19/podcast-zeitgeist-jan-19/#comments Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:17:10 +0000 Patrick LaForge http://palafo.com/?p=1976 ]]> Welcome to the Podcast Zeitgeist list: presented in apparently random order, at inconsistent intervals, its purpose obscure, its usefulness in doubt, its taste questionable, its methods and motives suspect. [See all lists.]
22. This Week in Tech 177: There’s a Little Shatner in All of Us and 178: Call of Doody. I’m catching up here with two episodes. A special guest on the first of these was Star Trek’s Geordi LaForge (Levar Burton). Burton held his own as a geek on a panel with Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak, Ryan Block, and Lisa Bettany. A lot of talk about TVs. (Block: “Plasma TVs are on the way out.”) Reviews of the “disappointing” MacWorld Expo and the Consumer Electronics Show. Whether the Palm Pre phone can save Palm (Dvorak: “They’re done.”) They end with the prospects for another Star Trek movie and a discussion of Geordi’s visor. The latest episode, recorded Sunday night, devotes 20 minutes to the news that Steve Jobs is taking a temporary leave from Apple for health reasons, with a focus on news coverage, from Ron Goldman of CNBC to this profanity-laden Gizmodo post. Dvorak predicts that Apple will go into decline in two years. This is followed bya discussion of the Downadup/Conficker worm that infected 9 million Windows computers in four days (download the security updates, people). Laporte is wiggy on this episode (“Conficker? I hardly knew her!”), perhaps because he and panelist Tom Merritt attended a concert the night before by the geek troubadour Jonathan Coulton and the improv duo Paul & Storm. (The “doody” in the podcast title refers to panelist Patrick Norton, who has to change his son’s diaper during the show and never returns.) The liquidation of Circuit City. A discussion of digital TV up-converters (Dvorak recommends a model.) Laporte recommends an audiobook: “Predictably Irrational.” United Kingdom porn filters are blocking Wikipedia and the Wayback Machine. Are Are Google layoffs and the killing of <a href="“>features like Jaiku and Dodgeball a sign of a market bottom? The episode ends with a clip of Coulton’s “Mandelbrot Set.” Running times: Both 1 hour 20 minutes, give or take a minute. Released: Jan. 11 and 18.
23. MacBreak Weekly 123: The Great London Fire The title is a metaphor from panelist Andy Ihnato. Laporte is also joined by Alex Lindsay. The three agree that MacWorld Expo turnout was low, and the show lacked drama. Could Apple’s decision to pull out of the convention anger fans and hurt the company? Can MacWorld survive? David Pogue will give next year’s keynote. Ihnatko on what organizer IDG should do: “They should treat this like the Great London Fire.It’s not the result that one would have wanted, but when you wipe the slate clean, you get to rebuild this city in the world that exists today… If you were to build a really big conference today, you wouldn’t do it like a 1985 trade show.” Focus on public areas and community. In another blow, CES is looking to have an Apple-centric area. The big announcement at MacWorld, it turns out, was the end of DRM at the iTunes store, but Leo points out a big drawback to the 30-cent upgrade offer: You have to upgrade ALL your songs, even the lame ones you don’t like anymore. Discussion of the iPhone and the Palm Pre. There’s agreement that no company will dominate the cellphone market. Politicians switching to Mac: the latest, Mike Huckabee. Hacking PC Netbooks to run Mac OS (in violation of the Mac user agreement, it should be noted). BoingBoing has a chart. Apple seems to be (cracking down, apparently irked by a how-to video on Wired Gadget Lab. Leo mentions that the MacWorld Expo swag bag for presenters included $1,800 worth of gifts. They end with some a robust list of weekly picks. Laporte suggests this external battery solution for iPhone. I’m happy with the APC universal, which doesn’t have be attached directly to the phone (it charges iPods and other devices too). Lindsay picks the rubber-covered Rugged LaCie portable hard drive, which I also use, for music. It’s versatile, carries a lot of data and takes a pounding. The panel also reviews some portable document scanners. And there is a zen moment from Lindsay, talking about how multiple users burn out Firewire ports: “Computers tend to like to have monogamous relationships. You have a lot of people using them, they tend to fall apart.” Running TIme: 1 hour, 10 minutes. Released: Jan. 13
24. “This Week in Media 122: Planned Viewerhood“ This week, an interesting discussion about how digital video recorders, video on the Web and similar technology are changing how we watch. Watching a series all at once. Watching sports after the game is over, with fake suspense. No more competing for specific time slots. The viewer chooses. This is all good, but I offer three numbers to consider, the totals in my iTunes podcast subscriptions window: 463 items, 15.8 days, 19.32 gigabytes. That’s not counting the regular shows stacked up on the TiVo, and the movies in my Netflix queue. Giving me control over content might mean I never get around to actually consuming it. Another topic: Should online video have closed-captioning for the hearing impaired? Speculation that Apple pulling out of MacWorld was the result of a Steve Jobs tantrum. More MacWorld/CES stuff. I feel like I’m hearing the same conversations over and over on these tech podcasts. May have to cut back. Running time: 58:47 minutes. Released: Jan. 13.

25. The Dinner Party Download, Episode 14 I’m glad these guys are back. The concept: Win your next dinner party. The Icebreaker is another animals-in-a-bar joke. Small talk: President-elect Obama’s old car is on eBay, a Chrysler. Burger King PR stunt: Drop 10 Facebook friends, get a free burger. A Sundance-nominated history lesson with booze. Dr. James Bedford is super-cool. He was the first person to be frozen after death. The cocktail is “Death on the Rocks”: Champagne, absinthe and ice cubs of fresh blood orange juice. The interview is Lamont Mozier, the Motown songwriter; don’t ask him which was his favorite song. The food segment is about Kogi Korean barbecue tacos. It is sold off a truck that broadcasts its location on its blog and on Twitter. Outro song is A.C. Newman’s “There Are Maybe 10 or 12…” A big sound, but interesting. Running time: 15:49 minutes. Released: Jan. 16.
26. Christian Comedy Podcast: January Week One With more than 160,00 subscribers, the host Mike Williams says, this is the most-listened-to Christian comedy podcast on iTunes. He starts with a squeaky-voiced imitation of that annoying YouTube kid FredThen we hear a few jokes from the “Stephen Wright of Christian comedy,” Pastor Tim Jones, with his “weird mental mind.” For example: “Remember, if you’re standing next to Dracula in a group photo and you try to give him bunny ears, when the film develops it will just look like you’re giving the peace sign… I asked her if she was a model and she smiled, thinking it was because of her beauty. But it was actually because she smelled like plastic and glue.” I kind of like that one. There’s a comedy song about a fiancee with a bad attitude from the new CD by the duo Bean and Bailey: “Who peed in your cheerios? Only heaven knows… Who got your panties in such a wad?” Ahem. You can fast-forward through the hunting bow ads in the middle. Robert G. Lee, a comedy writer for the kid show “Veggie Tales.” tells jokes about rasising kids. For example: “If the Apostle Paul had had teenagers, Christianity would have been nipped in the bud! ‘We’re going to Corinth again? …Everywhere you go, you’re beaten, you’re robbed, you’re stoned. Do you have any idea embarrassing that is? Why don’t you just write these people?’ ‘That’s not a bad idea, young lady.’” Running time: 17:59 minutes. Released: Jan. 4.
27. Geek Loves Nerd: Teaching Gratefulness James is the geek. Jenn is the nerd. They’re married. Their podcast took a holiday hiatus, but now it’s back. He also does the Nobody’s Listening Podcast, billed as “a clean comedy podcast.” He has grown a beard. She thinks it is attractive but the beard sticks in her face when they kiss. They did nine minutes on the beard. Then I started skipping ahead. There was a lengthy discussion about their 11-month-old, their second. I had to bail, and never did hear how to teach a child gratefulness, an important topic. These seem like very nice people. I am not interested in listening to them on a regular basis. This is, no doubt, my own character flaw. Running time: 53:35 minutes. Released: Jan. 9.
28. Uhh Yeah Dude, Episode 149 This is not a clean comedy podcast. This is the pee in the Cheerios. It grows increasingly impossible to summarize what Jonathan Larroquette and Seth Romatelli are up to here. There are the usual offbeat topics — lame celebrities at liveautographs.com (Hulk Hogan, Danica Patrick), that Amish heater infomercial, the drunk woman who called 911 on herself, some tots in trouble, an F.B.I. warning about cybergeddon, and a promising ABC hidden-camera show that outs racists, a belated appreciation for George Carlin and disgust with Adam Sandler. But the highlights are the personal rants and anecdotes: Seth about his experiences waiting in a line for a $14 juice, and several items from Jonathan: women who go out with jerks, a true story of martial arts justice from his school days, and a weird encounter in a guitar store. The promised “Uhh Yeah Dude” Web site is not yet online. Length: 1 hour, 11 minutes. Released: Jan. 13, 2009.
29. Smodcast: Smod Bless Us Everyone (70), Way of the Master (71), Hello Dere! (72). So, now that their movie has tanked, the director Kevin Smith and producer Scott Mosier are suddenly back with several episodes of this explicit humor podcast. In the first one they riff on Christmas and how people have trouble remembering their movies. “Making moves only seen in Belize.” In “Way of the Master,” they discuss the sexual possibilities and risks of staying abroad in youth hostels. The title refers to Kirk Cameron’s Christian evangelical Web site, “The Way of the Master,” which has a test of how good a person you are. Kevin and Scott take the test, and the discussion gets mighty dark. They also brainstorm a science fiction, the “slaptrack,” in which everyone has the godlike power — once — to banish another person from this reality. And it’s pretty weird. For the most recent, third episode, Mosier is traveling in Vietnam, so Smith is joined by another pal, and they spend a lot of time ragging on a third friend who isn’t there and talking about breasts. As always, I enjoy the background soundtrack that is added post-production. I skipped two earlier episodes that were basically the DVD discussion tracks for the film, which I haven’t seen yet. Running times: 52 minutes to 1 hour, 5 minutes; released Dec. 24, Jan. 9 and Jan. 16.
30. The Futile Podcast: “It Worked in Cuffs,” “It Became Cobra,” “It was an Academy Award winning training montage” I’m catching up on this action-movie discussion podcast. First up, “The Spirit.” I’ve been a longtime collector of Will Eisner and his art, and I’ve been a Spirit fan since I was a kid reading the Warren reprints in the 70s. I’ve been looking ahead to this movie with dread and anticipation. Now I may just wait for the video. It doesn’t sound like the film did a good job capturing Eisner’s gloomy comedic world, or perhaps that world just doesn’t translate to the screen. The podcasters compare it to the Tim Burton “Batman,” “House of Games,” and “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” A bad trip. “This movie was just strange.” Tonal inconsistency and acting problems. There’s consensus that the movie failed to pull off breaking of the fourth wall, which they say “worked in ‘Kuffs.” (I’m pretty sure Eisner invented that technique in comics back in the 40s, but it was a technique he used sparingly.) The futile podcasters digress into a long discussion of sex roles, which was entertaining. The next, short episode is billed as a review of “Beverly Hills Cop,” but is mostly a discussion of comedians with a quick recap of Eddie Murphy’s career. The third of these podcasts is about Scorsese’s “Color of Money,” which I probably can’t bear to watch again because of Tom Cruise, though this discussion reminded me it wasn’t bad. And it made me want to watch “The Hustler” again. Running times: 31 minutes, 11 minutes and 33 minutes. Released: Jan. 4, 8 and 11.
31. The 40-Year-Old Boy: Episode 43. I dropped into this podcast cold, and perhaps earlier episodes wehre better. The Chicago comedian Mike Schmidt (now in L.A.) talks about … stuff .. while his producer laughs in the background. (She’s like a laugh track. I started to suspect she was a recording.) His Web site explains: “While friends his age are taking care of their kids, it’s all Mike can do just to take care of himself. Come listen to the stream-of-consciousness ramblings of a modern day Peter Pan: awkward, angry…basically, the kind of guy who would punch you in the face for referring to him as a ‘modern day Peter Pan.’” In this episode, Schmidt says he used to weigh “500 pounds” and he got stomach surgery to fix it. He describes some medical particulars in excruciating detail then he tells how he got around the limitations of his surgically altered stomach and gained the weight back. The outro song, “Don’t Give Up,” by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, lays it on thick and underscores how sad this story is. Great song, though. Running time: 1 hour, 17 minutes. Released: Jan. 14.

Posted in Podcast Zeitgeist Tagged: 40-Year-Old Boy, Alex Lindsay, Andy Ihnatko, Apple, Blogs, Christian Comedy Podcast, computers, Dinner Party Download, Facebook, Futile Podcast, Geek Loves Nerd, iPhone Apps, iPhones, iPods, Jonathan Larroquette, Lamont Mozier, Leo Laporte, MacBreak, macs, MacWorld, Mike Schmidt, movies, netbooks, Podcast Zeitgeist, podcasts, Seth Romatelli, technology, This Week in Tech, Twitter, Uhh Yeah Dude, Weekly ]]> http://palafo.com/2009/01/19/podcast-zeitgeist-jan-19/feed/ 6 palafo http://palafo.com/2008/12/26/podcast-zeitgeist-dec-26/ http://palafo.com/2008/12/26/podcast-zeitgeist-dec-26/#comments Fri, 26 Dec 2008 05:13:36 +0000 Patrick LaForge http://palafo.com/?p=1627 ]]> The mix this week is more culture than tech. Most of the podcasts I sample were off for the holidays, or they had recorded episodes in advance, so I went a little farther afield. [See all lists.]
• The Dinner Party Download, Episode 12 “The show that helps you win your next dinner party.” A breezy podcast from Brendan Newnam and Rico Gagliano of 89.33 KPC public radio in Los Angeles. It starts with an icebreaker joke: “A penguin walks into a bar…” On to small talk, based on news tips from American Public Media reporters: How big of a wallet would you need to carry all the cash from the Madoff scheme? This big. Then it’s on to a history lesson and related cocktail. The lesson: Why General Grant was bad for the Jews. The drink: an ounce of bourbon, an ounce of apple brandy, sugar or honey topped with hot water, a mix of North and South. An interview with David Fincher, director of “Benjamin Button.” A food segment about mozzarella, including mozzarella restaurants and bars like Obikà in New York. A 30-second music clip (Low’s “Just Like Christmas,”). Time to party. Get the cheat sheet. Fun concept. Length: 13:51 minutes. Released: Dec. 19.
• “Books on the Nightstand #20: Sci-Fi for the Rest of Us” Do you read the book, or the e-book? Like the hosts, I do both. They’re using Sony Readers, and I use a Kindle, but the advantage of e-books for travel is clear in either case. In fact, I plan to be reading my Kindle for a couple of hours today on a flight out west. (I don’t care for extended reading on my iPhone, though there are several e-book apps.) I used to strain my back lugging books on trips so I wouldn’t be caught without something. Another segment focused on science fiction picks for people who don’t like SF, including “Stranger in a Strange Land,” by Robert A. Heinlein. I grok the choice, though it’s not for everyone and I don’t think the pitch here — “fish out of water story” — does it justice. Other picks in the podcast included “The Sparrow” by Mary Doria Russell, “Life Class” by Pat Barker, and “Firmin” by Sam Savage. As podcasts, and book discussions, go, this did not strike me as particularly deep or compelling, but I may give it another chance later. Length: 18:18. Released: Dec. 17.
• Coffeegeek Podcast 64: Carl Sara Rocks This podcast is infrequently updated but my quest for the perfect espresso shot seemed to require more research, so I grabbed the most recent episode, from August. Intro/outro is Sinatra singing the jaunty “Coffee Song.” The host, Mark Prince, founder of the excellent Coffeegeek.com, started by apologizing for a two-month delay pledged to get on a weekly schedule. Didn’t happen. Oh, well. (The other day, I sent an e-mail asking what was up, but did not get a reply yet.) This episode is notable for Prince’s grievance, discussed at length, about a “backlash to the pursuit of culinary coffee” that he sees in the mainstream media. He blames the bad economy. He says the U.S. coffee market breaks down this way: 80 percent of the people are “the untouchables… They are satisfied with Folgers and the junk around the office.” He wants to reach the other 20 percent, including 1 to 2 percent who are culinary coffee experts, 6 to 8 percent who understand and love it but “they’re not quite convinced the effort is worth it”; and 10 percent who may have had a cup or two and are open to it but they think it means Starbucks. “They don’t know what culinary coffee is yet. They know it exists.” He goes on a digression about iced espresso (the gist: to avoid a sour taste, brew the espresso into a cold cup, not directly into the ice). Back to the backlash. He blames a Burger King mentality in the U.S. “In a lot of cases the customer is always right,” he explains. “But when it comes to the delivery of a culinary product, and you have a reputation you want to protect as a business for delivering a culinary product, I’m sorry, there are certain lines that a customer can’t cross, and they can’t ask you to do things in a certain way if you believe it is detrimental to the quality of the beverage. And I do blame Burger King for that for their ‘have it your way’ campaign.” Of course, he says, “commodity or utility coffee” at Starbucks or McDonald’s is O.K. in a pinch, but don’t drink the stuff in the hotel room. At 38:15 minutes, a list of “awesome” coffee beans, followed by a recorded interview with Carl Sara, a New Zealand coffee champion, which takes up the rest of the podcast. Then Sinatra takes us out. Length: 1 hour, 27 minutes. Released: Aug. 9, 2008.
• Stuff You Should Know This is a great find from the How Stuff Works folks, with a place on the iTunes “Best Podcasts of 2008″ list. The hosts Josh and Chuck take apart a topic scientifically in about 17 minutes per show. On this one, we learn that flirting is a form of language important to our survival as a species, with a discussion of the ambiguous protean gestures preferred by women in flirting. I also listened to the previous two episodes about the safest parts of your body to take a bullet (answer: hands or feet), and eco-friendly ways to get rid of a body. All were entertaining and informative. Length: 17:29 minutes. Released: Dec. 23.
• New York Review of Books Podcast Compared to some of the stuff I have reviewed, this is laid-back, ruminative stuff from the bastion of New York liberal intellectualism. First I listened to this 17-minute interview with the veteran Washington correspondent Elizabeth Drew about the Obama transition, cabinet picks and other issues, based on her N.Y.R.B. article “The Truth About the Election.” My takeaway is that she thinks Obama was different from other Democratic candidates in that he had been working on his message, plan and staffing long before the election itself, making his transition rather smooth. We’ll see. The more recent 50-minute podcast is a recording of the 2008 Robert B. Silvers lecture by the novelist Zadie Smith, delivered at the New York Public Library on Dec. 5. Silvers is the editor of the review and delivers introductory remarks. It was framed as a lecture about lecturing. The description: “Drawing on literary and historical examples from Elizabeth I to Eliza Doolittle to Barack Obama, Zadie Smith explores race, writing, and what it means when we speak in different ways to different people.” There’s a lot more Obama than this description suggests, and a bit more about mixed race and the duality of language. She has a take on Obama — “the man from Dream City” — that is far more poetic than Drew’s nuts-and-bolts assessment. In that respect, the two podcast episodes complement one another neatly. Length: 17:27 minutes and 59:05 minutes. Released: Dec. 15 and 19.
• The Futile Podcast: M.A.D. Men The action movie podcast. This episode was billed as a discussion of “preachy movies that are remakes of movies that were preachy about avoiding nuclear annihilation, or what was known … as M.A.D., or mutually assured destruction.” But it’s mostly about the recent remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” with Keanu Reeves and the guy from “Mad Men.” Overall review: “This movie sucks, but it doesn’t.” Beware of spoilers, if that matters to you. In the case of htis movie, maybe not. A couple of days after I listened to this, another podcast dropped, about the original “Lethal Weapon,” but I haven’t listened to that yet. Length: 23:15 minutes. Released: Dec. 20.
• Uhh Yeah Dude, Episode 146 Great episode. Topics include 50 Cent’s fight with Floyd Mayweather, cameras hidden in the baby Jesus, cellphones for the dead, the new Burger King fragrance, adult video awards, the Michael Phelps video game, and Z-mailing, similar to sleep-eating, in which people send inappropriate e-mail while asleep. Jonathan: “Can’t we just get back to sleep-dreaming?” Seth: “I was listening to U.Y.D. and the two hosts of the show have trained themselves to sleep-dream, where they fall asleep, they create almost movies in their head, I guess is how they would describe it. Literally, they’ll think about people in their lives, not in their lives, who have been in their lives, in situations where they’ll be in a house, but it’s not really their house, it’s their childhood home. They call it sleep-dreaming.” Hey, that’s happened to me. I dreamed podcasters were watching me in my sleep. Length: 1 hour, 7 Minutes. Released: Dec. 22.
• This Week in Tech 174: 10-Ferret Night Leo Laporte dispenses with tech for another appearance (recorded earlier this month) by John Hodgman, who is still on his book tour. Leo interviewed Hodgman the week of Nov. 2. This time they are joined by his friend Jonathan Coulton, a Brooklyn singer-songwriter beloved by nerds and geeks. There’s no point in summarizing the discussion, which is entertaining and well worth a listen if you are a fan of their work, as I am. A few topics: Hodgman’s career as a literary agent, the throwing of shoes at the president, the availability of Crystal Head Vodka, quahogs, and two things Laporte learned from his father: “Rummies have no wind, so you can outrun them. And never catch the eye of a hobo.” There’s more, plus Coulton music. Length: 1 hour, 20 minutes. Released: Dec. 21.

Posted in Podcast Zeitgeist Tagged: Benjamin Button, Bernard Madoff, Blogs, Books, Books on the Nightstand, Brazil, cheese, Coffee!, Coffeegeek, David Fincher, Dinner Party Download, drinks, e-books, Eating, espresso, Frank Sinatra, grok, John Hodgman, Jonathan Coulton, Jonathan Larroquette, Keanu Reeves, Kindle, Leo Laporte, Mad Men, movies, mozzarella, Obika, parmesan, Podcast Zeitgeist, podcasts, protean gestures, Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction, Seth Romatelli, The Coffee Song, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Uhh Yeah Dude ]]> http://palafo.com/2008/12/26/podcast-zeitgeist-dec-26/feed/ 4 palafo http://palafo.com/2008/12/20/15-blogs-on-my-current-reading-list/ http://palafo.com/2008/12/20/15-blogs-on-my-current-reading-list/#comments Sat, 20 Dec 2008 22:15:26 +0000 Patrick LaForge http://palafo.com/?p=1396 ]]> I subscribe to the feeds of hundreds of blogs through Google Reader (see shared links to some of them at left), but the list of blogs I actually enjoy reading is short. I’m always looking for additions to that list, and here are some strong contenders, in alphabetical order:
• Cognitive Daily The “daily” part seems to be a misnomer, but the topics are always fun and interesting. How many tabs do you have open on your browser? Caffeine, memory and the brain. Is it sexist to think men are angrier than women? Another blog from the same site is The Frontal Cortex, also in the same vein and infrequently updated; the author was featured in last Sunday’s NYT Magazine.
• Consumerist This is was one of the best blogs in the Gawker Media empire (sold to Consumer Reports on 12/30). And it’s only gotten better since the start of the Great Depression II, despite some staff cuts. Frugal tips from America’s cheapest family. Customer call center horror stories. Crowd-sourcing rumors like the Wal-Mart iPhone. Abuses by the credit-card industry. How to write complaint letters to consumer-abusing corporations.
• The Daily Beast Tina Brown‘s ripoff of The Huffington Post is better-written, better-designed, better edited and more provocative than the original. Brown attracts big-name talent, and there’s a coherent editing philosophy (unlike the endless stream of often-predictable blah-blah at HuffPo — 250+ items on Friday alone! More than 60 already today! I need an assistant to read it). The Beast is attractive and well-organized with some cute ideas. Too bad it launched on the eve of the Great Depression II. Just don’t try to turn it into a magazine. I’ve canceled most of mine.
• Dlisted and Last Night’s Party My friend Louis, who is in the financial industry, recommended these. They seem to be for people who think Gawker and TMZ are too high-brow.
• David Byrne Journal The personal observations of the former Talking Heads frontman. Updated at an erratic pace, and hard to pin down. Sometimes he posts about riding his bike around New York (I see him all the time). Sometimes he writes about about music and touring. Sometimes about art. Then there’s this post about the newspaper business. David Byrne is the only cool celebrity. His secret? He remains a genuine human being.
• Fail Blog The Web cliché comes alive. Bad math. Fail! More bad math. Fail! Video of an exploding VCR. Fail! Trying to look cool with naked guy behind you. Fail! Bad parking job. Fail! Etc.
• kung fu grippe The personal Web log of Merlin Mann a k a @hotdogsladies on Twitter, frequent MacBreak Weekly podcast guest, and the mad genius behind the You Look Nice Today podcast. The title is a G.I. Joe reference, I’m pretty sure. Quotes and videos mostly. He is also behind the brilliant 5ives list blog, which has not been updated since August, but is funny as hell. And, of course, 43 Folders, get organized, blah blah blah.
• Mashable Incredible amounts of practical information about apps, tech, social media, the Web, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, the iPhone, and the like. Sometimes too promotional but always enjoyable. Many many lists: 5 Reasons to Install Google Desktop Today, Twitter Lawsuits: 4 Reasons Your Tweets Might Be Trouble, The Year in Tweets: The 10 Most Memorable Twitter Moments of 2008, Career Toolbox: 100 Places to Find Jobs, and the 24 Most Underrated Web Sites of 2008.
• The Official Google Blog. Because you have to know what they’re thinking about over there.
• Pinakothek A blog about pictures by the writer Luc Sante a k a The All Seeing Eye Jr. Updated irregularly, but each post is a polished gem, like “The Poetry of Ellery Queen” and “Debraining.” Then there is this wonderful paragraph.
• Portfolio’s Mixed Media I don’t read Portfolio the magazine. Is it still published? But I like its media blog. It’s smart. It’s sassy. It’s a good guide to reports of the media meltdown, real and rumored. And possibly doomed. (Just a rumor!) Enjoy it while you can.
• ScienceDaily Science is fun. And sometimes a little weird. Pain hurts more if the person hurting you means it. First U.S. patient gets face transplant. Whispering bats are shrieking 100 times louder than previously thought. Thanks, science!
• Scobleizer Oh, Robert Scoble. So egocentric, so insane. Look at Scoble! Look at Scoble! But I do love his blog. And his multiple Twitter accounts. And his Friendfeed. Powerful critiques of blog comments. Deep thoughts about Twitter. And Friendfeed. And Facebook. And so forth. Fall into the Scoble vortex.
• This Recording I’m not entirely sure what it is, or what it is trying to do, but I came across this while writing this post about N+1, and I like it. And in the end, that is all I ask from a blog. Recent posts: an appreciation of John Lindsay, working as a medical test subject, an essay on tattoos by somebody who does not care for them much (me neither — nothing personal!), and something by Emily Gould.

Have a suggestion for a blog to follow? Add it in the comments. Thanks.


Posted in Blogging Tagged: 43 Folders, Blogs, bookmarks, Consumerist, David Byrne, Delicious, dlisted, Facebook, Fail Blog, feeds, Flickr, Friendfeed, G.I. Joe, Gawker, Kung Fu Grippe, Last Night's Party, Luc Sante, MacBreak Weekly, Merlin Mann, Perez Hilton, podcasts, The Daily Beast, Tina Brown, TMZ, Twitter, Web browsers, You Look Nice Today ]]> http://palafo.com/2008/12/20/15-blogs-on-my-current-reading-list/feed/ 1 palafo http://palafo.com/2008/12/16/what-my-smart-playlists-showed-me-3/ http://palafo.com/2008/12/16/what-my-smart-playlists-showed-me-3/#comments Wed, 17 Dec 2008 03:08:32 +0000 Patrick LaForge http://palafo.com/?p=1394 ]]> Name of iTunes Playlist: The Older Faves

Rules: Rating is greater than *** (3 stars). Last played is in the last 12 months. Last played is not in the last 6 months. Date added is in the last 24 months. Play count is greater than 5 times. Skip count is zero. [See all lists.]

Top 10 From the List

1. “Sirena” by Calexico on “Convict Pool” Playcount: 8.

2. “Summersong” by The Decemberists on “The Crane Wife.” Playcount: 8.

3. “Story of an Artist” performed by M. Ward on “The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered.” Playcount: 8.

4. “Yawny At the Apocalypse” by Andrew Bird on “Armchair Apocrypha.” Playcount: 7.

5. “Modern Age” by Eric Hutchinson on “…Before I Sold Out.” Playcount: 7.

6. “Carballo” by The Essex Green on “Everything Is Green.” Playcount: 7.

7. “Leisure Suite” by Feist on “Let It Die.” Playcount: 7.



8. “The Angels Hung Around” by Rilo Kiley on “Under the Blacklight.” Playcount: 7.

9. “My Body Is a Cage” by Arcade Fire on “Neon Bible.” Playcount: 6.

10. “Click Click Click Click” by Bishop Allen on “The Broken String.” Playcount: 6.

Annotation

The purpose of this list is to identify newish songs that were in heavy rotation on my musical devices about six to eight months ago, but which I no longer play — songs that I might want to reconsider. I was still in the heart of a Calexico phase, apparently, but it’s a different album than has popped up on other lists. This track has a lilting country Grateful Dead-like feel, with a haunting chorus of women singing in Spanish near the end, followed by the inevitable end in the Greek myth of the sirens:

To save this sad, tragic soul
Sorrow’s worse than the tide’s pull
Sinking deeper, gasping for love
Till desire navigates you
Into the arms of sirena…
Caught in the rip tide, smashed on the reef
Joining the mass of bones underneath

Follow that up with The Decemberists, and phrases like “..slip into a watery grave,” and I have to wonder what’s up with the morbid nautical theme. “…swallowed by a wave.” I was thinking about heading to the beach last spring. Whatever the words, both of these songs sound beautiful. A lot of Decemberist tunes are too otherworldly for repeated listening, but this is one of the exceptions, with some interesting instruments in the background. No idea what they are, but I like them.

I went through a serious M. Ward phase in 2006, bleeding into 2007. I bought everything I could find. No. 3 was a cover tune off a Daniel Johnston tribute album. Back in 1997 or 1998, I saw the schizophrenic Johnston perform live twice in Manhattan in separate clubs. For the second show, about 10 of us were in a circle around him about two feet away. He was obviously a painfully disturbed man. It was hard to watch, and while he writes beautiful songs, I have a hard time listening to him. Ward teases the beauty out of Johnston’s song and his pain in this cover, the best on the album of covers. I recommend the 2005 documentary on Johnston, who, despite the title of this tribute, is still alive. And I also recommend you buy anything M. Ward does.

The Andrew Bird track is an instrumental off his followup to 2005′s “The Mysterious Production of Eggs,” and I am surprised to see it here. It’s a great song, though, haunting and mysterious.

I don’t know much about Eric Hutchinson. I think I downloaded his album on impulse one night on iTunes. There were songs I liked more than this one, but there’s no arguing with the list. The track is live and ends with some chatter at the audience that grows old with repeated listens. His lyrics are a little political and funny:

How did we every get by before data was sent?
I can’t believe I got around without electrical cars

The Essex Green, a Brooklyn-based neo-psychedelic pop band, has a sweet sound, and I like a lot of their songs, including this one. I would recommend the album “Cannibal Sea” over this one, but they’re all great.

Feist, of course, had a breakout moment when her song “1 2 3 4″ was featured in iPod ads in 2007. I had a few of her songs from somewhere before that, and I downloaded more after that. I like this earlier album from 2005 more than her breakout, and while I thought liked other songs on it, like “Mushaboom,” I guess there’s no arguing with the playlist.

I bought a bunch of Rilo Kiley albums in 2006 and 2007, and bought “Under the Blacklight” hoping it would be as good, but I’m not sure it was. Still, this was a pretty good song. Watch the video. Jenny Lewis is definitely the talented half of the duo, though her first solo effort struck me as a wee too precious.

Arcade Fire is another band that I started listening to a few years ago in my Canadian music phase, having no idea what they were about or who followed them. They had a breakout moment with “Neon Bible,” which is indeed an awesome album. If you asked me to name a favorite track, I would say “No Cars Go,” but the list thinks I like the far more emo “My Body Is a Cage.” So be it. My body is a cage that keeps me dancing with the one I love? Untrue, but moving. I still remember what that used to feel like, to be so out of place:

I’m living in an age
That calls darkness light
Though my language is dead
Still the shapes fill my head

I’m living in an age
Whose name I don’t know
Though the fear keeps me moving
Still my heart beats so slow

Oh, young Arcade Fire fans, your pain will never again be this sweet. But the old people might prefer “Funeral” (2004).

Bishop Allen first came to my attention in the so-called mumblecore films of Andrew Bujalski, “Funny Ha Ha” and “Mutual Appreciation.”

Rent them now. Watch them. I’ll wait. Then read the latest N+1. Harvard was cool for 20 minutes around the turn of the decade, so what? It’s already over.

I saw “Mutual Appreciation” with my friends Teresa and Brett in a small theater in the Village. Bujalski was there and answered questions from the audience about the kind of film stock he used and how he got non-actors (including his Harvard pals like Justin Rice, the lead singer of Bishop Allen).

Fast forward to August 2007. Teresa, Brett and I were on our way to a show featuring a number of bands including Bishop Allen, which was touring to promote “The Broken String.” We had spent the afternoon at a barbecue. My boss called me about a fire at the the former Deutsche Bank Building downtown. Brett and Teresa went on to the show, as I stepped out of the cab in Times Square and walked to work and worked on live-blog coverage of the fire, which killed two firefighters.

By 11 p.m., we had put the first print edition to bed and there was nothing more to say on the blog. I hopped into a cab and reached the club just as Bishop Allen was taking the stage at midnight. It was a good show. I flipped a switch in my head and felt nothing about the sad story I had just been covered, because that is what I have learned to do.

The rest of the list after #10 is dominated by Bishop Allen tracks from the monthly EPs they were putting out in 2007, songs from Radiohead’s “In Rainbows,” (I paid $5 to download it) and more from the Decemberists and Feist albums, a snapshot of a year that now seems distant, another era.

The only anomaly lower on the list is R.E.M.’s 1987 hit “The End of the World as We Know It,” which I listened to several times as I turned it into a ringtone on my then-new iPhone. It is the song that plays as my wake-up alarm. It is the song that plays when the newsroom calls. The choice is sardonic. This was only one day in my career that felt like the world ending, and nobody called. I just went.


Posted in Smart Playlists Tagged: Andrew Bird, Andrew Bujalski, Arcade Fire, Bishop Allen, Blogs, Calexico, City Room, Daniel Johnston, Decemberists, Eric Hutchinson, Feist, fires, Funny Ha Ha, Harvard, In Rainbows, iPhones, iPods, iTunes, journalism, M. Ward, music, Mutual Appreciation, Neon Bible, R.E.M., Raidohead, Rilo Kiley, ringtones, The Essex Green, YouTube ]]> http://palafo.com/2008/12/16/what-my-smart-playlists-showed-me-3/feed/ 0 palafo http://palafo.com/2008/11/20/jeff-jarvis-asks-what-would-google-do/ http://palafo.com/2008/11/20/jeff-jarvis-asks-what-would-google-do/#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2008 01:30:30 +0000 Patrick LaForge http://palafo.wordpress.com/?p=593 ]]> I recently skimmed a galley proof of “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis. The book, available from HarperCollins in January, is structured as a series of rules or aphorisms about how Google does business, with some anecdotes from Jarvis about things he has observed in his groundbreaking work as a blogger and media consultant.

The book reads like an expanded version of a PowerPoint presentation on the conventional wisdom of Web 2.0. Transparency. Learning from your customers. Simplicity in design. Always being in beta. The importance of links and search engine optimization. The information wants to be free business model. The let-it-all-hang-out-in-public lifestyle of Twitter and Facebook and blogs. (Jarvis gave an overview of his thesis in the Guardian on Monday.)

None of this will sound new to anyone paying attention to the Web in 2008. But for those who feel like the digital world is quickly leaving them behind, or who regard the new trends and tools with bafflement, Jarvis’s book will be a good tutorial, even if some of the lines sound like Tom Peters-style excellence-speak (“Your worst customer is your best friend”), or call to mind burning Vietnamese villages (“we have to kill books to save them”).

Jarvis offers a lot of Google-style advice for traditional media and other businesses facing a paradigm shift. His point in the section on books is that authors and publishers should turn their works into living texts online, as he promises to do with W.W.G.D. on his blog Buzzmachine. Smart plan. Books in this genre have a short shelf life, often measured in months not years.


Posted in Paper & Ink, Social Media Tagged: Blogs, Books, computers, data, Facebook, Google, Jeff Jarvis, macs, SEO, technology, Twitter, Web 2.0 ]]> http://palafo.com/2008/11/20/jeff-jarvis-asks-what-would-google-do/feed/ 0 palafo img_0440 http://palafo.com/2008/11/10/blogs-i-actually-enjoy-reading/ http://palafo.com/2008/11/10/blogs-i-actually-enjoy-reading/#comments Tue, 11 Nov 2008 04:43:30 +0000 Patrick LaForge http://palafo.wordpress.com/?p=484 ]]> I read blogs for my job. I used to read them for fun. There was a certain satisfaction circa 2002 in answering the question, “where did you hear that?” with the name of a blog the other person had never heard of, which by now is a blog that person is sick of reading. Of course, now dogs have blogs. Dogs. Have blogs. This is deplorable. One good thing about the old Internet was that we didn’t know they were dogs. And we thought they were fascinating.

Good blogs have a few things in common. They are the often the product of an obsession, or a collection of obsessions. They are reported. And, yes — well-curated links count as reporting. Good blogs are surprising. They are fresh. They break news. They are visually interesting. They make us laugh. They make us email our friends. They are sometimes deep. They update frequently. In other words, they are nothing like the lame personal blog you are reading.

The true test is whether you return. Here are 10 blogs that get my repeat business. That means their feeds are in my top folder in Google Reader, and I scroll through the headlines every day, even if I don’t read every post. They are not, generally, mean-spirited or political or full of opinion.


• BoingBoing I used to read BoingBoing when it was a print zine. By many measures, this group blog is consistently ranked at the top. Mark Fraunfelder, Corey Doctorow and Xeni Jardin, among other writers here, are some of the clearest thinkers about the Web and digital media. Obsessions include gadgets, steampunk, comics, copyright, robots, still and moving images, games, puzzles, madness, art. Chances are, if you come across something fresh and wild online, if it didn’t originate on BoingBoing, it will be posted there within the next 10 minutes. If I could read just one blog, this is the one.
• Cool Tools One new tool recommendation a day. I have bought utensils, eco-friendly shoes, toys and gadgets recommended here. The blog was started by Kevin Kelly, former editor of the Whole Earth Review, Wired and the subject of one of the most interesting interviews ever to be broadcast on “This American Life,” in 1995. Go listen to it.
• kottke.org Jason Kottke has been serving up fine hypertext products at his blog about the liberal arts since March 1998. He has his finger on the pulse of the Internet. Chances are, if you are about to blog it, Kottke has already blogged it. He has a nose for online innovation, curiosities, important trends and goofball concepts.
• Metafliter A community site started by Matt Haughey when blogs were still called weblogs. It is still going strong. It’s hard to define what makes a good FPP, and I haven’t tried in ages, but skip the newsfilter; the real action is in the comments, which are witty, intelligent and only sometimes brutal. And if you have a question about anything — anything — Ask Metafilter, and get multiple answers, in a feature badly copied by Yahoo, Google and others.
• Fimoculous Rex Sorgatz reads the Web so I don’t have to, then he links to the best stuff. Short, to the point, prolific, on hot topics. He makes it look easy, but — it isn’t.
• Streetsblog If you don’t ride a bike or walk on sidewalks in New York City, you may not want to read this blog, but I do and I do, so I do.
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog There must be 10,000 Apple and Mac news/rumor blogs, and I’ve read them all, but in the end you only need one, and this is the one I picked, because it taught me how to jailbreak my iPhone.
• Ephemeral New York “Chronicling an ever-changing city through fading and forgotten artifacts.” I don’t know how she finds this stuff, but it’s all cool.
• Dvorak Uncensored Weird crime. Bizarre health claims. Why read it in tomorrow’s Post or Daily News when you can read it at John C. Dvorak’s WTF-news site first?

O.K., that’s only 9. There are several tied for 10th place. I’ll save them for another post.


Posted in Blogging Tagged: Apple, Blogos, Blogs, cycling, Google Reader, Jason Kottke, John C. Dvorak, Kevin Kelly, macs, Matt Haughey, NYC, Tools, wtf ]]> http://palafo.com/2008/11/10/blogs-i-actually-enjoy-reading/feed/ 1 palafo http://palafo.com/2008/11/05/my-old-man-a-blogger-before-the-web/ http://palafo.com/2008/11/05/my-old-man-a-blogger-before-the-web/#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 02:55:34 +0000 Patrick LaForge http://palafo.wordpress.com/?p=149 ]]>


Eddie and Kay, circa 1950, Nick's in Greenwich Village

When the news of the day seems particularly big, I wonder what my parents would think about it all. They’re dead, and gone with them are all the stories and family lore that I only half-listened to when I was younger. Rattling around in my head are half-remembered snippets of conversations about their childhoods in the Great Depression, long-ago presidents and wars, those scary Beatles with their rock and roll, pulp fiction and radio dramas. They lived through World War II, the atom bomb, the invention of television, Vietnam, hippies, Watergate, pet rocks, disco and the bad old 70′s, the Cold War, the Iranian hostage crisis, recessions and more.

They never saw my journalism career leap beyond the small-town stage. They never met their granddaughter. Then again, they haven’t had to live through the worry of my blood-clot scares nor their other son’s repeated deployments to wartime Iraq and Afghanistan.

I wish they had kept journals, or blogged, so I could show what they wrote to my daughter. But they didn’t keep diaries, and there were no blogs then, and I can only make out every other word in my mother’s cursive script in letters that she wrote. She had me late in life, and she died in 1986, when I was 24, just starting out. Leukemia, after she beat colon cancer.

My father, Ed, or Eddie, depending on who was talking, lived about 11 years longer than my mother, Kay, a surprise to him, considering his fondness for booze, cigarettes and red meat, and her abstention from most vices. He was a man of the old school, reserved when it came to affection, but often loud, angry, not always kind to her, or any of us. Before he retired, he worked as a bureaucrat for the national security state, and the cold war defined his adult life, as the war in the Pacific had defined his youth. He flew to then-exotic places like California and Florida when jet travel was still in its golden age, returning with stories of the Magic Castle, the Playboy Club, and beaches in January. He was a wit, sometimes the life of the party, always ready with a joke, the center of attention. My brother and I were his TV channel changers, his butlers. “Get your old man a beer out of the fridge.” Indeed.

My old man kicked the bucket from lung cancer complications in 1997, and my uncle was the executor of his estate.

Long after the paperwork was done, my uncle mailed me a package of documents — Army records from my father’s Philippines tour, various vital documents, security clearance forms for the job with the Defense Department, a weathered brown wallet with a Playboy Club card, a stopped watch. And there was a spiral notebook, too, of some jottings, from mid-1986, not long after Ma died, leaving him rattling around alone in that big old house up in the frozen wastes in that rural air force town that he thought would be a great place for us to grow up (it was) and maybe even stick around (boring and in decline, so we didn’t). They had lived for several years in the vicinity of New York City, but I know little about those years, apart from left-over photos (like the $1.25 souvenir shot above from Nick’s in Greenwich Village, a jazz joint) and stories of living in Shanks Village, an outpost of former barracks turned into housing for veterans in Rockland County.

Ed was never a good investor, lost his shirt in mutual funds once, but stuck with the old standbys of passbook savings, mortgages, pensions, certificates of deposit, a federal pension. In the end he ran up a lot of credit card debt, and nursing home expenses, and my uncle sold off the house to pay off the bills. But creditors can’t touch life insurance, and it isn’t taxed, and that nest egg got me seriously started as an investor.

He wanted to be a writer once, so maybe I got that bug from him. He used to write wonderful jeremiads against banks and utility companies and, after he retired, politicians and the like. When he was young, he wrote some short stories. One was about a World War II veteran who was suffering from what today we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome. The guy blew his head off at the end, sort of an obvious ending, and Salinger did the same thing better, but his prose was just fine.

After he quit the fiction game for a salaryman’s life of paperwork, my old man spent the rest of his life reading impossible stacks of books and magazines (Gourmet, Playboy, Esquire), with the TV on most of the time, from the moment he walked in the door until he went to bed. His other hobbies were outdoor activities without a lot of talking — golf, fly-fishing and ice-fishing, hunting with bow, rifle and shotgun. If there was a gutted deer hanging in the garage in the fall, it was a good year.

He was the one who told me to learn about computers, there’s money in it, and he logged me onto the Arpanet back in the 1970′s with a terminal from work. It didn’t have a screen — it had a roll of paper. It connected through couplers that you screwed onto the telephone handset. The only people on the pre-Internet were military types and academics, sharing research and occasionally furtively playing text-based games and chatting. I caught the bug then. Networking. Talking. BBS’s and Usenet newsgroups, eventually the Web when it was just a handful of sites. People looked at me funny when I talked about how it was going to change the world. Yeah, right.

But then came the 90s, and the Web explosion, and I put my money in tech before it was a bubble. And when I got out, it was partly dumb luck and partly the old man’s voice telling me this was a little crazy, slow down, they’ll skin you if they can. He knew about hardship. When he was growing up in the Great Depression, his parents shipped some of the kids off to an aunt because there wasn’t enough food for all of them at home.

When I want to remember his voice, I read the few words he ever bothered to set down in his later life, mailed to me in that envelope from my uncle, painstakingly printed by hand, a blog before there were such things:

4-28-86

+Four weeks yesterday (27 April 86). Still seems unreal. Mass cards/ letters are trickling after the initial flood.

+My feelings are more in check except when answering a letter or note from a close friend. Better than letting it build up destructively, I guess. Still having trouble concentrating on the job, or the so-called important things (ie. income tax, bills, refinancing the house.)

+Worked in the garden yesterday for a while — too hot. Planted some broccoli. Nabbed the boy next door to cut the grass — explained the do’s and don’ts. Trying to civilize this barbarian was probably one of my better ideas — he won’t kill the golden goose. Maybe!

+My favorite fishing rod and reel (the ultra lite) has disappeared — no idea where to! Must replace!

+Got to get things sorted out.

12 May 86

+I never said this was a diary. It’s a way of me communicating with myself, I guess. Mr. Y— of C— and Sons and I have struck a bargain of sorts. The head stone should be ready in about 6 weeks ($875). That, plus the funeral, took about $5,000, which is what I had figured. Another 20 years, it will be triple!

+I planted some Impatiens on the plot on Mother’s day — she always loved them — it would be nice if someone could do it every year.

+I scared the shit out of E—- the other night, I suppose. I told her and B– if it wasn’t for you guys, the obvious solution to my grief, at first, was the obvious one. I think I meant it but when you’re in deep distress, what the hell do you really know. I still cry every day! Oh God, how I miss her.

13 July 86

+All it takes sometimes is a little thing; a song that reminds me or a phrase in an old movie (e.g. “Chapter 2” when James Caan says “How dare she die — I’d never do that to her”). Jesus!

It ends there. I am impressed by the economy of language. He had a need to say something, write it down, and he did for a while. Then he moved on.

But he kept on living, for years, in that old house, giving up fishing and hunting eventually, slowly losing his lungs to emphysema, driving down to his favorite Italian restaurant with an oxygen tank on a little wheeled cart, breaking his hips a couple of times, calling me with me updates on the upstate weather (136 inches of snow!). When I showed him the early Web, he was impressed, but he waved off my offers of a computer. By then, it was too complicated to learn something new. He spent most of his spare time gardening and running VCRs in every room to tape all his shows. He would have loved TiVo.

My parents’ relatively early deaths, their setbacks, their stories of growing up when everyone was poor, the 1970s with their cultural chaos — all these experiences have made me skeptical of progress, not quite believing the balance in my 401K or that the good jobs would last, that my health would hold out, that anything awaits any of us at the end of the line besides a shrinking circle of pain. It’s the kind of outlook that leads my father, a proud atheist married to a daily church-going woman, to let a priest mumble by his deathbed, I suppose.

It was a few years ago that I got this stuff in the mail. My daughter was young, and I was inspired to write down some thoughts on my laptop:

I spent part of this night sitting up with a toddler who had been throwing up periodically for hours. She will never know her grandparents, though she has her grandfather’s eyebrows, as do I, and a little of her grandmother’s smile.

After she finally fell asleep, I sat for a while on my little bench in the darkness, listening to her breath, listening to mine, then to hers, then to mine, hers, mine, inhale, exhale, our mortal bodies sharing certain pieces of code, strands of DNA, mixed up and handed down through the generations, destined one day for cold stillness.

But not yet.


Posted in Blogging, New York, Paper & Ink Tagged: Blogs, cancer, children, computers, death, fathers, generations, Internet, parenting, smoking, technology, Web ]]> http://palafo.com/2008/11/05/my-old-man-a-blogger-before-the-web/feed/ 9 palafo img_0298 http://palafo.com/2008/10/22/hodgman-infestation-is-noted/ http://palafo.com/2008/10/22/hodgman-infestation-is-noted/#comments Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:00:04 +0000 Patrick LaForge http://palafo.wordpress.com/?p=222 ]]> It’s a great week for John Hodgman fans. Hodgman — you know, “The Daily Show” expert, the guy who plays the PC in Mac ads. He is suddenly everywhere: back on Jon Stewart’s show last night, talking to “Rachel Maddow” on Monday night, guest blogging on BoingBoing, Twittering about the presidential race, showing up in some new Mac/PC ads out, making appearances in New York, various blogs and podcasts. It’s all about promoting his new book, “More Information Than You Require,” officially released Tuesday.

By the way, if we are heading for another Great Depression, we’re going to need more than 700 hobo names.


Posted in Paper & Ink Tagged: Blogs, Books, computers, experts, hobos, John Hodgman, Jon Stewart, NYC, Podcast Zeitgeist, Rachel Maddow, The Daily Show, Twitter ]]> http://palafo.com/2008/10/22/hodgman-infestation-is-noted/feed/ 5 palafo john-hodgman http://palafo.com/2008/10/01/about-the-name-palafo/ http://palafo.com/2008/10/01/about-the-name-palafo/#comments Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:05:48 +0000 Patrick LaForge http://palafo.wordpress.com/?p=3 ]]> Updated March 12, 2011.
Hello, my name is Patrick LaForge.

@Palafo is a purely personal and non-commercial blog, a public notebook about a few of my obsessions — the Web, technology and computers; media of all types (books, podcasts, blogs, Twitter and social media, and music); and my quest for the perfect cup of coffee.

I am no relation to this guy nor am I the president and CEO of the Edmonton Oilers hockey team.

By some happy accident, I am an editor at a local newspaper in New York, where I am currently the editor in charge of news presentation, which is a fancy yet imperfect way of describing the copy desks and aspects of Web production.

I was also the founding editor and one of the creators of the paper’s blog about New York, City Room. The blog you are reading is not affiliated with those enterprises in any way, and I am responsible for its content, which follows my employer’s ethics policy.

This blog is updated erratically. I spend more time posting on Twitter; you can follow me there: @palafo.

Thanks for reading.

About the Column on the Left

When I started this blog, I was a heavy user of Google Reader, to keep track of hundreds of blogs, and there are few that I keep in a top folder. That folder is the main source of links that I share through my Google Reader page and the associated feed in the left column of this blog. I don’t use Reader as much anymore; now Twitter curates the Web for me.

Also in that column is a feed for my Delicious bookmarks, which I used for interesting articles and other items, mostly about the future of media. But I haven’t been using Delicious much, either.

All of those links, along with my Twitter comments, Facebook status updates and posts on this blog all flow onto my Friendfeed page. I rarely go there anymore. Does anyone? Let me know.

I am also experimenting with posting pictures at Posterous and sharing stuff on my Tumblr. Still figuring that all out.

You can also follow my article recommendations on Timespeople at NYTimes.com, although I don’t use it that much anymore. I usually post straight to Twitter. Are you sensing a trend here?

Friends and acquaintances on Facebook are welcome to contact me there.

I use LinkedIn for professional contacts, but rarely check in there.

Last but not least, you can use the link on the left to send me a direct e-mail. I try to respond to all e-mail and blog comments.

The left column also includes information about this blog’s tags, most recent posts, most-clicked links, recently popular posts and whatever other streaming Widgets the folks at WordPress make available.

About the Name Palafo

When I started working at the paper in 1997, the newsroom was using a publishing system known as Atex for text editing. Usernames were six characters long. The naming convention at the time was to take the first two letters of the staffer’s given name and the first four letters of the surname.

Not every Atex username had a mellifluous combination of consonants and vowels, but mine — Palafo — did. On a whim, I used it as a username on various sites in the early years of the Web and as an email address with a succession of Internet service providers. The vaguely Italian-sounding but non-existent name was usually available, while my actual name was already being snapped up by my French-Canadian-Irish doppelgangers.

The Atex naming convention used by The Times was abandoned (along with Atex), but a few of us still use the naming convention in e-mail addresses.

I have been a computer nerd and geek since a time before there was a Web, and I was a bit of an early Web pioneer, but this is the first time I’ve used this particular name for a Web site or blog.

Here’s hoping I don’t besmirch it in the permanent Google record for all time.

Regarding the pronunciation: Some people have been known to say PAL-ah-foe, but I prefer to stress the syllable that is also the first syllable of my surname: Pah-LAH-foh.

I live in the center of New York City with my wife and daughter. It is a Mac household. I do not own a car. We are cat people.


Posted in Blogging, Coffee!, iPhone Apps, Moving Images, New York, Paper & Ink, Podcast Zeitgeist, Smart Playlists Tagged: Atex, Blogs, City Room, Edmonton Oilers, names, NYT, palafo, Patrick LaForge ]]> http://palafo.com/2008/10/01/about-the-name-palafo/feed/ 0 palafo