May 24, 2005

By Sheila Lennon / The Providence (R.I.) Journal

7:44 p.m. Tuesday (Blogroll)

100 Pieces: Did you find something on the beach today? Nova Scotia artist Margaret Nicholson writes,

In April of 2005, I placed 100 pieces of clay sculpture along the coastline of Nova Scotia. Lost or found, they will be left to nature or chance. Hopefully for someone to find. The sculpture is all figurative fragments or small busts. Each piece is fitted with an identity tag directing the finder to this web site which will then describe the origins of the piece that they have found. I put these sculptures in places that would not be inaccessible but not immediately obvious. Many of the pieces are designed to blend into their environment. The project is monitored over time and open ended. There is no precise way to determine the end point.

Why did I do this?...

There's a map of what's been found — 27 of the 100 pieces, so far. Finders drag an X to the spot on the map where they found the objects, and leave a little note that displays when your mouse rolls over the X.

This would be wonderful adventure if it were done here in The Ocean State.

100 Pieces is a lovely site, made not with Flash but with javascript, so I was able to show you the photo above. Thanks to jenett for the link.

Related: Flickr has switched from Flash to DHTML for display purposes on photo pages, so you can now right-click an image and save it.

Firefox Tip — Multiple Home Pages. From "Dylan's blog" at MBoffin.com,

I just figured out that you can have multiple home pages in Firefox. As with all browsers, you can set a page to be the page that loads when you first load the browser. I just figured out that you can set Firefox to load several pages, each one in a tab when you start up.

Go into the Options, then the General section, and then to the text box to choose a home page. Type the web addresses of the pages you want to load when you start Firefox (or click the Home button), each separated by a | character (Shift-Backslash). For instance, to set MBoffin.com and Google as my home pages, I would type:

http://mboffin.com|http://google.com

This would load these two pages, in that order, in tabs when I start Firefox or click the Home button.

Happy birthday, Bob: Dylan is 64 today, but the photo at right is from '63 (AP).

Expecting Rain deals the headlines and tunes.

In hometown Hibbing, Minn., there's now a Dylan Drive. (photo)

The Wallflowers are on Letterman tonight — (CBS).

The Fourth Annual Bob Dylan Birthday Bash On Radio SNHU.

Radio SNHU is pleased to announce that its resident Dylanologist Dave Cox will be hosting his Fourth Annual Bob Dylan Birthday Bash on Tuesday, May 24, from 7 to 10 pm eastern standard time. As usual, he will be playing an assortment of classics, rarities and well chosen live tracks from his collection of over 400 Dylan compact discs. Featured material will include songs from the March/April tour of the USA and the sing-a-long songs from last summer. For a partial list of the playlist, click this. There will be free stuff to win and no commercials, so don’t miss it! You can email questions or requests to d.cox@snhu.edu

Related: In the spirit of the Dylan of my youth, here's a video clip of Bright Eyes — that's Conor Oberst at right — on Jay Leno doing, "When the President Talks to God." It is a free download at the iTunes music store.

(You may also download the song at Saddle Creek, Bright Eyes' indie label, see the clip there, and comment, too.)

Dylan was disturbing once, too.

Reincarnation press: Jason Fry of the The Wall Street Journal reports (Bloggers Take Center Stage, Publishers Discuss Changes In Newspaper Business) that Washington Post CEO Donald Graham, speaking at WSJ's "D: All Things Digital" conference, said,

In the blogging world, there's "one person who's Ben Franklin and 100,000 people who think they're Ben Franklin."

(Yeah, I'm Ben, of course. Who are the rest of you and what do you want?)

In the same story, Mena Trott (co-founder of Six Apart, which created the TypePad service and Movable Type software) offered this "advice for established media: ...start small and go slow in adapting to the blogging world: For example, let readers join the conversation in areas away from politics that are of interest to them, such as dining."

Mena, that's a bulletin board, and nearly every news site already has them. The core of blogging is not the optional discussion. (Mena's own blogs, Not a Dollarshort and, at SixApart, Mena's Corner, do not have comments enabled.)

WSJ pointer via Romensko, whom Jeff Jarvis is dissing because Romenesko doesn't consider himself a blogger. (A content management system with permalinks dropped on him, but he's still doing what he always did, even before Poynter picked him up, back when his site was called Media Gossip (The link goes to the earliest Romenesko collected by the Internet Archive, Oct. 4, 1999.)

Meanwhile, Jarvis himself has quit his job as president of Advance Net for a passel of other ventures, including advising the New York Times about how to mobilize the more than 475 "Guides" of About.com, which the Times bought in February for $410 million. Jarvis:

About.com can be a platform for distributed media and I'm eager to explore all the great things that will come of that. But first, I'm looking forward to working with the amazing army of About guides, who have created a great resource of content and service online. I'm doing this part-time, as a consultant, so I'll be free to continue blogging and doing other things...

Two hurt in mock light sabre duel: BBC. "Two Star Wars fans are in a critical condition in hospital after apparently trying to make light sabres by filling fluorescent light tubes with petrol." The force will not be with you if you don't think for yourself.