Workmanlike RSS feed for the Romenesko sidebar. Not pretty, but it gets the job done.

Update: This feed had stopped working properly after the Wotzwot RSS tool’s hiatus. I’ve updated it to scrape the page properly again.

Wotzwot = busted. Here is the new feed, courtesy of the awesome Feed43.

Have you seen the movie Crash yet? Phenomenal, and I’m very excited about the prospect of it being turned into a TV show.

Timely, too, considering you still read stories like this:

A group of white men set upon three black men on the streets of Howard Beach, Queens, early yesterday, beating one with a baseball bat and fracturing his skull, the police and prosecutors said.

The white men, who emerged from a black 2005 Cadillac Escalade before dawn, sent the black men fleeing into nearby swampland and through the streets of the largely white, insular neighborhood. …

Mr. Minucci, the accused, said that the three black men might have been looking at his jewelry earlier last week, and that he was responding to that when he came across them around 3 a.m. yesterday. For their part, two of the black men, according to police, admitted under questioning that they had been in the area with hopes of stealing a car.

Sad. Every which way.

I take it all back. Sorry, Mark Danner. David Foster Wallace clearly gave the best commencement speech this year at Kenyon College, filled with his trademark meta-metadiscursion, but much less pithy than his usual fare. It teeters at one point right on the edge of trite, but slams it all home marvelously, I think.

Hmm.

From JKottke, scientists posit that the reason we can’t remember our early youth is because we don’t have the language skills to encode events into memory.

Keepgoing.org takes a look at the story behind Suck, one of the first Web publishing phenoms, former stomping ground for the likes of Terry Colon, Nick Gillespie and Brian Doherty, Carl Steadman, Ana Marie Cox and Greg Beato. Along with Feed, Suck was once the darling of the cyberati.

“It may not fully be the equivalent of having served time in a Mexican prison where we were all raped and tortured and scarred for life,” says Gillespie, “but it is something like that.”

Heh. (Via.)

PS: Now that Michael Jackson is retreating from the limelight a little bit, I’m happy Tom Cruise has decided to step up to play the part of Insane Celebrity. It’s the role he was born for. Although it sucks that he killed Oprah.

Newly formed solar system contains Eye of Sauron … news at 11. (Via.)

Jeff begins with what he calls “an exercise in sizing knowledge.” Enter the query “real estate,” and you come up with over 100 million results on Yahoo! search, Google, and MSN search. But what if you were seeking a more contained, possibly more valuable font of information? Say, everything Jeff’s mother has learned in the last 26 years of selling real estate in Larchmont, NY.

That is knowledge that could be available on the Internet, Jeff says, but isn’t, because of the technological barriers and the disincentives (or nonincentives) that keep it from getting there. According to Jeff, that’s what Yahoo!’s here to fix.

The Yahoo! search vision, he says, is to “Enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge.”

• Find: Enable people to find what they are looking for
• Use: Search not for sake of searching, but to achieve a purpose
• Share: Sharing knowledge with people you connect with and connecting to people who you share knowledge with
• Expand: If we’re successful at doing all of the above, Jeff says, this one’s a freebie.

He points out that the first letters of each keyword in this mission statement spell FUSE, and helpfully defines the word.

He talks about finding a restaurant review on Yahoo! Local Search. Because both he and the writer of the review happened to be members of Yahoo! 360 (“happened” is probably a strong term here; he’s Vice President of Yahoo! Search and the other member also worked at Yahoo!), he was able to better evaluate her review.

Relating a moment of extraordinary serendipity at a speech he gave in eastern Asia, Jeff sounds mildly Scientological — This is the manifestation of the vision!

But then, we all have our L. Ron moments. Jeff leaves us with some helpful links:

• Yahoo! Search blog
• Yahoo! Next

Evan Williams, Mena Trott, Caterina Fake, Lili Cheng and Amy Jo Kim have gotten off to a rollicking discussion of our private selves, our public selves, and our cyber-selves. They’re extending Jonathan Schwarz’s talk on trust.

Trust structures on the Internet are complicated. Not just because it can be difficult to quantify who you trust to provide you information*, but also because it’s difficult to control who accesses your online persona. And even the implications of this are not so clear-cut. Amy Jo Kim mentions that when she blogs, she must accept having no idea which strangers are reading it or how they’ll use the information. Evan Williams points out that for some, the concern isn’t strangers, but acquaintances or coworkers. Caterina Fake paraphrases a David Weinberger anecdote — in the world around us, strangers mean danger; on the Internet, they mean connection.

So how do we create trust networks that can serve these diverse approaches? I didn’t hear any direct answers from the panel, but it’s a big question, so I forgive.

Interesting question from Amy Jo Kim: The kids who are blogging today, taking photos every day, writing their lives in public, what expectations are they creating for the future?

* I love my mother very much, but two of the last three e-mails she sent were quickly debunked in a trip to Snopes.com. Sorry, mom, you don’t get to filter my news.

supernova2005