sances.info

Alright, one last unauthorized excerpt from Schmidt (which I've finished now) and I'll get back to fixing that front page feeds blog post, I promise.

Schmidt ends, as he begins, with a reference to newspapers and the audiences who read them:

"The Wall Street Journal is for decision-makers--not just those in business, but all decision-makers throughout a society that is dominated by business. Unlike the New York Times and other newspapers for wider audiences, and contrary to popular mythology, the Journal does not push the establishment's side in its reporting. It serves the establishment in a different way: by informing its members from an above-the-fray perspective, trusting them to come to their own conclusions. One of its most important functions is to give top managers the comprehensive social intelligence they must have if they are to boss their employees effectively and market to the public successfully. Thus the Journal keeps its subscribers up-to-date on contemporary sociology and popular culture, giving the bosses the intimate details of the lives and aspirations of individuals at each and every level of society, from skid row on up, while always quickly reporting on anyone who is doing something out of the ordinary. The fact that the Journal does not use photographs, together with the widespread but incorrect belief that it contains only boring financial data and articles that praise the system, help keep the wrong eyes from seeing the big picture." (278-279)

In other news, I think the Newseum has blocked my server's IP address to prevent me from scraping full-sized images of the New York Times front page. Understand that I was scraping the images once daily, copying them to my own server, to reduce the amount of hits to Newseum's servers. So if 100 people click "full size" on my Google gadget every day, the Newseum website isn't bogged down.

At work today I also successfully turned a non-syndicated web calendar into an iCal feed. Now that was a fun puzzle to solve.