Stephen’s Statements A little bit of everything from Stephen Duncan Jr, a Software Developer in Portland, Oregon

Looking through the stats for the Spurs team defense, you'll find they excel in almost every category. They're 1st in number of point allowed. 2nd in opposing team's field goal perecentage. 10th in opposing team's turnovers. However, the Spurs are 27th in opposing teams' 3pt. field goal percentage.

Focusing on the negative: the Left - from Ann Althouse.

hat I've noticed, over and over, is that the bloggers on the right link to you when they agree and ignore the disagreements, and the bloggers on the left link only for the things they disagree with, to denounce you with short posts saying you're evil/stupid/crazy, and don't even seem to notice all the times you've written posts that take their side. Why is this happening? I find it terribly, terribly sad.

While it would be easy to take this as an opportunity to bash liberals, I think there is a potential explanation. People frequently blog to spread the opinions they feel aren't being given a strong voice elsewhere. With a mainstream media that slants so far leftward, it's primarily extremist leftist nuts who have incentive to blog. Could that be why the reaction from leftist bloggers is so different?

Update: Josh Poulson writes a longer post going into detail on the mechanics of how the difference in perception of how much you're voice is heard might affect these kind of reactions.

Was that a great game or what? Finally, they looked like a team that could compete for a National Championship. Yes, I know that they were playing a depleted Texas team. But it's not about how easy things were, or about the final score. It's the fact that showed a full-game's worth of effort. They pressured at the defensive end all game. On offense, they played well the full-time too. They attacked the basket whenever the could. When they couldn't they passed the ball around well. They did it against man-to-man and the 2-3 zone. If they can keep playing like this, then that Villanova game should be forgotten completely...

I don't blog about the San Antonio Spurs here as much as I'd like. Luckily, there's someone who does. To get my thoughts on my favorite NBA team, just read this blog, and then look for my comments on his posts.

Today, I found the first reference to my name in my Bloglines search feed. Stefano Demiliani apparently liked my tip on seeing rel="nofollow". I guess I need to keep posting useful stuff if I want to become an active member of the blogosphere...

Just testing adding a photo and posting it to the blog with Flickr.

Toby, sleeping on the bed. ='0' style='border:0px;padding:0px;background:transparent;' align='absmiddle'>

If you use Firefox and want to see if this new tag is getting used, add something like this to your userContent.css file:

a[rel="nofollow"] 
{
     text-decoration: line-through ! important;
     border: dotted thin gray ! important;
     color: gray ! important;
     background-color: white;
}

This will put a strike-through and a dotted border around the link text, and make the text gray with a white background.

Jeff Jarvis: Shame on the New York Times. Jeff provides a detailed rebuttal, as well as an ethical condmenation of this NYT article. Jeff, ever the optimist, considers this an attempt to improve journalism and the NYT:

: Let me make one thing very clear: I like, read, and respect The New York Times and I care about journalism and that is why it's worth going after this story: to turn journalism into a self-correcting mechanism, as we call our new medium.

I'm not feeling that optimistic. I take it, instead, as another sign journalism right now is a very sick industry. It seems likely that it will take something more drastic before the problem is fixed.

As soon as I heard Google's announcement on preventing comments-spam, I immediately thought of another use of this technology. But, wouldn't you know it, Scoble already brought it up. In fact, he makes it the center of his post, and leaves the "comment-spam prevention" as an aside at the end.

I think Robert's on to something. Getting rid of comment-spam will be a (hopefully successful) behind-the-scenes, implemented by the software developers and the search engines solution. But the effect on us, as web users and content producers will be to have the power to express even this simplest of editorial statements about our links.

But, if we're wrong and people don't use it enough to change the nature of linking on the internet in any meaningful fashion, this could still be a great win. So many people have turned off their comments in frustration due to comment-spam. If this gets rid of that, many blogs might be able to become more conversational, and, in turn, keep the blogosphere more responsive, interactive, and community-like.

Welcome my wife, Diane, to the blogosphere, and witness her get drunk on the power of self-publishing.