Daily Blague

When I was setting up the Daily Blague, I made what turned out to be an incorrect decision regarding archives. It took two weeks for the mistake to cause trouble. Thanks to Kymberlie and Shelley at Movable Type for locating the problem and correcting it. (And thanks to Kymberlie for her comments!) There remains much to be learned...

Since launching Portico in 2000, I have often felt that I'm wandering in a vast desert between two highly-populated coasts - an interesting situation for any liberal New Yorker. On one coast, everyone understands everything that Jason Kottke is talking about. On the other, nobody has ever even heard of Jason Kottke. Almost everyone on the first coast is under forty, and almost everyone on the other is over thirty. The young people on the Kottke-coast, moreover, all have lots of friends to help them out with Web logging problems. I have not personally met anyone, in my five years of publishing Portico, who operates a regular Web site, much less a Web log. Well, a slight exaggeration - but very slight. I've met three people. In five years.

Not that I'm the only dummy in town. There are fourteen million stories in the Naked City, and Janet Schoenberg's is one of them. Ms Schoenberg thought it would be cute to vent her spleen on eBay, by offering to "sell" the Housing Court judge whom she believed had "shafted" her. Right now, she doesn't turn up in a Google search, not at least on the first page, but I'll bet she will, sooner or later, because she has almost certainly bought herself a benchmark libel suit. This is a woman who has just been evicted from her studio apartment. But she will doubtless not be the only defendant in the case. The prospective plaintiff  has his eye on the ball: '"Judges are ill equipped to fight eBay," he said, clearly frustrated yesterday afternoon, before the advertisement had been pulled. "How do I fight eBay?"'