I've spent half an hour all over the web because of Troy, starring Brad Pitt and other impossibly good looking actors. Early reviews of Wolfgang Petersen's epic indicate Warner Bros. is shooting for a PG-13 "Gladiator." The trailer certainly pushes all the right buttons (A thousand ships. Brad. Girl. Fight. Brad. Eric. Second girl. Respectable actors. Orlando. Marching. Fight. Girl. Fire. Trojan Horse. Crowd shot. Credits. May 2004.) Until the late 19th century, classical scholars considered Homer's Troy to be poetic imagination. Self-made archeologist Heinrich Schliemann actually found the city in Hissarlik in modern-day Turkey. Built, destroyed, and rebuilt enough times to have roman numeral designations, The archaeological remains of Troy VIIa (the scene of the famous battle) are extremely complex, with numerous stratigraphic levels dating back to the Early Bronze Age (ca 3000 - 2000 BC). Enough of that. Back to Brad.
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Now Hear This: Mo Betta Moblogs
In two weeks, TypePad, the hosted weblog system, will introduce new moblog features so different people can post entries to the same site. This may not mean much to the single-owner, single-user site operator. However, sites with multiple authors -- especially those on the run or technophobic -- can post simply by sending an email. Other features will include audio content -- "perfect for annotating a photo while on vacation." From your Palm handheld, your cameraphone, or your email program, weblogs are getting easier and better.
WordPress
"WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on web standards and user experience we can create a tool different from anything else out there."
Barcoded
I don't know if Scott Blake's Flash website let me create a barcode of myself, but thanks to the link from Boing Boing, I can't wait to scan this at work in a few hours and to see if it represents a "34-year-old, 190-pound US male. How fun. Or dehumanizing. I'm not sure which. Then again, I've been up since 6:50 a.m. Had myself filmed for an Apple training video, sold a few computers, trained three new employees, and sat on my couch reading a few dozen articles from National Geographic (China's pollution problems, Armenia's rebirth, and British Columbia's outback), The New York Times (TiVo's remote control, The White House's distortion of scientific fact for political gain, and every other article in the technology section), and The Christian Science Monitor (Islamic clerics sightsee in America and Iran's women daring to flaunt lipstick). Okay, time for bed.
Atom Gains Mass
Atom, the emerging format for editing, syndicating, and archiving weblogs and other episodic web sites, is gaining gaining traction with Blogger:
"Atom is one name for two things: It's both a new standard for developers, as well as a syndication format or "feed" for your blog. When a regularly updated site such as a blog has a feed, people can subscribe to it using software for reading syndicated content called a "newsreader." People like using readers for blogs because it allows them to catch up on all their favorites at once. Like checking email—without the Spam."The semantics and sniping among players in the RSS, RDF, and XML crowds -- all code words for "ways and means to get information to readers" is either dying down or being drowned out by actual innovation. TypePad supports the early version of Atom. Brent Simmons is testing an Atom-enabled newsreader. And I can stop reading dense background material and start reading dense weblogs instead.
Stewart, Americans, Winning Hearts and Minds
Comedy Central's fake news program Daily Show with Jon Stewart has more viewers than competing local news stations. And no wonder, with his razor wit cutting politicians and lazy reporters down to size. Funny as hell, and occasionally insightful as well. Meanwhile, the Washington Post finds a few Iranians thankful for acts of kindness and generosity from American soldiers they've met while on religious pilgrimages:
Esmaeil Omrani told of a relative with asthma struggling to breathe in the dust of Najaf. A young American in full battle dress advised him to switch inhalants, then gave the pilgrim his own, plus an extra for the road. "Everybody liked them," Omrani said. Hossein Amiri related a similar story from a thirsty relative given water by a U.S. soldier outside Najaf when the city was closed by a car bombing. "Between our countries, there might be problems at the top," said Amiri, 48, a civil servant. "There is no problem at the bottom."
It's never as bad or as good as it seems. We just need to pay more attention, I think.
Joss Stone
Paid $7.99 tonight for 16-year-old British R&B singer Joss Stone's debut album The Soul Sessions. She looks like a surfer, sings like a smokey soul star, and talks like a typical British teenager. I can't stand it. Super Duper Love (Are You Diggin' On Me?), Pt. 1 and Fell in Love With a Boy are getting heavy iTunes time as I try to type HTML tags in the dark rather than go to sleep.
