If you can read this, you’re sitting too close to your monitor. (For those of you arriving late to the party, my homepage was displayed at 50% scale for the whole day.)

In other news on this lovely April 1:

– Google buys Metafilter

– Matt’s Script Archive merges with CPAN

– Joi Ito met the Pope

– Tori Amos to play Mary Poppins

– Aaron abandons Google for Overture

– From Slashdot: the Evil Bit RFC, Gentoo switches to RPM, whitespace-only programming language, Distrowatch loves Windows XP, anti-cracker application for PC/Mac, Enlightenment goes gold, new Lord of the Rings movie delayed

– From the Mefi thread: The End of Free gets ads, Chris Pirillo gets blurry, Thinkgeek’s new products, DC Comics buys Elfquest, SomethingAwful’s boring fetish

– From the K5 thread: WinXPHints

– Word 5.1 for OS X

– Honda’s Mecha car salesman

– Minidisc.com gives up on the format

– Dave Matthews fan site changes to John Mayer fan site (is there a meaningful difference?)

– Bradlands goes Brady Bunch

– Inmate wins freedom in new reality show

– Movable Bloggerland

– Phonescoop covers Nokia’s rotary cell phone and Samsung’s Gollum Phone

– New BBEdit pricing option

– Teevee’s brilliant Reality Network

– Digital Web displayed upside-down and backwards

More April 1 updates throughout the day.

This Japanese website appears to define the geometry of breasts (in eight parts), miniskirts, bathing suits, and women in glasses. I can’t make heads or tails of any of it, and the Babelfish translation doesn’t help at all.

Can someone translate a little and tell us what they’re talking about?

Probably the most obscure and underrated genre of gaming is text-based interactive fiction, made popular with the Zork series in the 1980s. Commercial text adventure games are long gone, but hobbyists like Andrew Plotkin and Adam Cadre continue to push the boundaries of the genre.

I finished Plotkin’s Shade in only 15 minutes, but it continues to resonate like only the best short fiction can. Take a few minutes to play it online right now, and let me know what you think of his strange and beautiful world.

A couple hints are below, for those unfamiliar with Interactive Fiction.

Continue reading “Shade and Interactive Fiction” →

Another stupid Internet Explorer trick… This webpage actually opens your CD-ROM drive without prompting, using VBScript to access the Windows Media Player API. If you hate Internet Explorer, feel free to include the below sample code on every page of your own site.

July 29, 2003: The Windows Media Player API won’t let you close the CD-ROM drive once it’s open. Sorry.

Continue reading “Open CD-ROM Drive with VBScript” →

Recently, I noticed that several webloggers that discussed the suspected chemical weapons plant found in southern Iraq on March 24 weren’t mentioning those claims turned out to be false, even after the story was retracted revised on USA Today, New York Times, the Washington Post, and Yahoo’s front page yesterday.

I thought this particular example would be an interesting case study to study how bias affects story selection on weblogs. So I searched Technorati for weblogs that linked to the four most popular URLs (1, 2, 3, 4) about the chemical plant. Starting with a list of 148 weblogs spanning the socio-political spectrum, I located the relevant entry on each site and searched for followups or updates.

In brief, here are my findings. 112 weblogs linked to the original story, but didn’t follow up with another entry or correct their existing entry in any way. 28 weblogs linked to the original story, and later posted a correction or other addendum. 8 weblogs only linked to the story after it proved to be false, but didn’t link to it when the news originally broke. The complete list of categorized links is below. (If you have any corrections, please e-mail or leave a comment.)

If you look at the sites, it appears that conservative weblogs tended to only link the original report, liberal weblogs tended to only link to the correction, and mixed and group weblogs linked to both.

I’m not going to jump to conclusions with these results; they don’t necessarily imply bias from their authors. The followup article could be considered less newsworthy as the breaking news, for example, or it might be more a reflection of a reluctance to rehash a story that a weblogger has already covered. I would love to hear from any of the webloggers, explaining why they did or didn’t follow up with an update to the story. Any theories or interpretations of the data are also welcome.

And if you can think of a polarizing breaking news story that many left-wing, anti-war webloggers jumped on but later neglected to retract, e-mail me.

Continue reading “Bias Affects Story Updates on Political Weblogs” →