Welcome to the ‘new’ Web, same as the ‘old’ Web

Grok Headline matches for Welcome to the ‘new’ Web, same as the ‘old’ Web

MacWorld and ‘shareware’

MacWorld and ‘shareware’ 11/17/2003 07:46 PM
The Rogue Amoeba folks write in Macworld, “Shareware,” And The Future about how it can be difficult to get your software reviewed in MacWorld unless you’re a large software company.

NetNewsWire has been reviewed in MacWorld, but that doesn’t take away from the good points made in this article. (And the article also points out that MacWorld has made progress in this area with its new capsule reviews.)

Gus Mueller does ‘Edit in
BBEdit’

Gus Mueller does ‘Edit in
BBEdit’ 02/10/2004 02:51 AM
Gus Mueller (of VoodooPad fame) posted a Cocoa class for doing an edit -in-BBEdit. Very cool.

“The Associated Press
‘insurgency.’”

“The Associated Press
‘insurgency.’” 12/26/2004 03:20 AM
Salon

salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/12/22/executions
track this site | 2 links

Microsoft hardware partners
‘getting jumpy’

Microsoft hardware partners
‘getting jumpy’ 04/04/2005 06:46 AM
Macworld UK Apr 4 2005 10:43AM GMT

Behind the Red Shed, with Jonathan
‘The Wolf’ Rentzsch

Behind the Red Shed, with Jonathan
‘The Wolf’ Rentzsch 03/27/2005 04:16 PM
Dru nkenBlog interviews Jonathan Rentzsch on mach_inject, garbage collection, WebObjects, the OS X Finder, and plenty more. “Finder X is the compromise between the Mac OS folks and the NeXT folks. Neither won, everybody lost. Oh my god, the entire bastardized notion of switching from metal to aqua and hiding the sidebar when clicking on the toolbar chiclet in the upper right-hand corner.”

inessential.com: Webl0g: Comments for
‘On shipping software’

inessential.com: Webl0g: Comments for
‘On shipping software’ 12/22/2003 06:41 AM
inessential.com: Weblog: Comments for "On shipping software" .. the importance of shipping your software

inessential.com/?comments=1&postid=2743
track this site | 4 links

Super Shuffle CeBIT show stealer
‘a stunt’

Super Shuffle CeBIT show stealer
‘a stunt’ 03/22/2005 10:04 PM
Macworld UK Mar 23 2005 12:26AM GMT

Technology ‘not stifled’ in
century-long copyright battle

Technology ‘not stifled’ in
century-long copyright battle 04/07/2005 05:15 PM
Macworld UK Apr 7 2005 7:31PM GMT

Another ’honor’ victim:
Daughter, raped by brothers, killed by
mother

Another ’honor’ victim:
Daughter, raped by brothers, killed by
mother 11/18/2003 10:21 AM
practical approach to the 'family honor" business .. should read this horrifying story

azcentral.com/news/articles/1114HonorKilling14-ON.html
track this site | 8 links

What’s in Howard Dean’s
Secret Vermont Files?

What’s in Howard Dean’s
Secret Vermont Files? 12/02/2003 01:54 AM
Dr. Dean in High Gear .. unlikely admirer: .. MSNBC Reports: .. great lengths .. (*)

msnbc.com/news/999347.asp
track this site | 7 links

’The War Has Started’ --
Allied troops in firefight in/near Basra

’The War Has Started’ --
Allied troops in firefight in/near Basra 03/19/2003 10:46 PM
article at This Is London, .. has already begun .. Evening Standard .. More Shots Fired .. It Starts .. First

track this site | 18 links

Cat on a Mac, we’ve got snow

Cat on a Mac, we’ve got snow 01/07/2004 03:11 PM
Sheila posted some pictures: Papa finds a new place to sleep; il neige.

What’s New in NetNewsWire 1.0.7

What’s New in NetNewsWire 1.0.7 12/23/2003 04:58 AM
NetNewsWire

ranchero.com/netnewswire/whatsnew/netnewswire107.php
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But I can tell that it’s about the
same thing

But I can tell that it’s about the
same thing 03/14/2005 04:38 PM
One of the common feature requests we get for NetNewsWire is to handle this situation:

Say you’re subscribed to several Mac news feeds. Then one day Microsoft updates Office for Macintosh, and each feed includes a news item about it, so you have several news items about it.

You only need to read that particular piece of news once. So why not make it so NetNewsWire detects that these are all about the same thing, and mark them as read automatically once you read the first one?

Here’s why:

Consider these two news items, ripped from today’s headlines...

MacMinute

Title: Microsoft Office 2004 update released
Description: Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) has posted Office 2004 for Mac Update 11.1.1, which includes improvements to Excel add-in calculation, increased PowerPoint and Word 2004 stability, additional support for device drivers and enhanced appearance of imported graphics...
Link: http://www.macminute.com/2005/03/07/office-2004/

MacCentral

Title: Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac updated to 11.1.1
Description: Microsoft Corp.'s Mac Business Unit (Mac BU) on Monday announced the release of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Update 11.1.1. The update includes improvements to Excel add-in calculation, improves stability for PowerPoint and Word, adds support for new device drivers and improves the appearance of imported graphics.
Link: http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/03/07/office/index.php?lsrc=mcrss-03 05

They’re about the same thing

Both items are obviously about the same thing. You can tell by looking, instantly, no thought required.

But computers aren’t that smart. How does a piece of software know that these two are about the same thing?

The titles, descriptions, and links are different.

There are many of the same words—but you really don’t want your aggregator to start making guesses here. Imagine two completely different stories, but each one has “Apple iTunes” in the title. “Songs on Apple iTunes Music Store now free” and “Apple iTunes sold to SixApart” are not the same piece of news.

What’s the solution?

Artificial intelligence would be helpful here. But we don’t have that.

One possibility would be a new kind of link element—an external link element that is meant to identify the source of the story. For instance, if you go to the full version of the above example news items, both of the stories include a link to the same page on the Microsoft site, a page about this update to Office.

Were that link to be included in the feed, with that item, as a special link-to-the-source link, then an aggregator could know that the news items were really about the same thing.

One nice thing about this is that it’s likely that the folks at MacMinute and MacCentral would pick the same link. They wouldn’t have to coordinate, it would just work. (At least in this example. It wouldn’t always be so clear-cut.)

The bad thing about this idea is the potential for abuse—or just plain laziness. What if people make the link-to-the-source link just a link to http://apple.com/ for any story about Apple—you’d end up with stories that are not about the same thing being marked as read. Nuts.

Another problem is that you still might miss something interesting. Say MacX posted a basic news report, but MacY posted a lengthy piece with interviews and and all kinds of goodies. You wouldn’t want to miss MacY’s report—but you would, since it was marked as read when you read MacX’s news item.

In other words, I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s worth thinking about.

I don’t care how you

I don’t care how you 04/09/2004 04:10 PM
I don’t care how you read my content; I just want you to read my content. If you want to read on the web, fine. If you want to read it through email, fine. If you want to read it through RSS, fine. It doesn't matter! I'm not here to sell a delivery vehicle; I'm just here to tell people, “Hey, this is what’s going on in the world.” When syndication just so happens to be one of those ways, a stronger way, a better way, of getting information out there, then, yeah, I’m going to have to proselytize because no one else is really doing it. They’re getting caught up in the politics or they’re just talking about RSS as kind of, like, you know “Oh, well, we’re doing this,” but they’re not really evangelizing it, and there are very few RSS evangelists out there....

What’s coming in NetNewsWire

What’s coming in NetNewsWire 04/20/2004 02:14 PM
The next release of NetNewsWire is going to be a big upgrade, perhaps bigger than you were expecting. (And it will be a free upgrade.)

There are lots of new features. What follows is a partial list—I’m leaving some surprises.

(Also: NetNewsWire is in private testing. If you’re interested in helping test, please send me email. We have a great group, but there’s always room for more.)

Browsing in place

One of the most common feature requests we get is to be able to open links inside NetNewsWire, so you don’t have to jump out to your browser. This is there—and it’s an option, so you can still open links with your browser if you want.

We jazzed it up a bit and added tabbed browsing. (It even remembers your tabs between runs.)

Searching

Searching works as you would expect, with a standard search field in the toolbar. It searches as you type.

Persistence

There’s a setting for how long you want to keep news items. There’s a global setting, but you can also set it at the group level and for individual feeds.

Flagged items

You can mark items as flagged. They get a little flag icon, and there’s a special feed that shows all your flagged items. Flagged items are kept permanently (or until un-flagged).

Activity window

A new activity window lets you know exactly what’s happening in the current download session. You can cancel the entire download or cancel individual items.

At the same time, we’ve provided a much larger range of options for concurrent downloads, so that you can better tune NetNewsWire’s refresh speed.

Per-feed refresh settings

Some feeds you want to refresh often, but other feeds you want to refresh every four hours, or once a day, and so on. You can now set all this on a per-group and per-feed basis. Settings inherit, so you could set your Macintosh group to refresh every two hours, but then have some feeds inside that group that refresh more or less often.

You can also set feeds that don’t refresh at all. (This was a surprisingly common feature request—people want to save feeds sometimes but have them not refresh.)

Synching

People who use multiple computers will be able to synchronize their subscription lists and the read/flagged status of news items between two copies of NetNewsWire.

Smart feeds

There are two main approaches you can take—either filters (as in email apps) or smart feeds. We went with smart feeds. You can create smart feeds that show headlines from other feeds. It’s much like smart playlists in iTunes or smart groups in Xcode.

Scripted feeds

You can write AppleScript scripts or shell/Perl/Python/etc. scripts that return RSS or Atom. Scripts can take parameters or not. These scripts can do whatever scripts can do—I expect some people will write screens-scrapers, but you can also use them for things like watching a drop folder on your hard drive or monitoring log files and so on.

Search engine feeds

You can subscribe to searches at Blogdigger, Daypop, and Feedster. You just tell NetNewsWire what to search for and choose your search engine.

Feeds that haven’t updated

We get a lot of requests for different subscription management features—but the most common was to find out which feeds haven’t updated in a long time. You can now see all feeds that haven’t updated in n days (where n is a number you choose).

OPML subscriptions lists and groups

You can export your OPML subscription list with groups intact, and you can import OPML files with groups.

Atom feeds

It reads Atom feeds. If you’ve been using the Atom beta, note that we’ve fixed a bunch of bugs (most notably the bug where summaries-only feeds appeared as title-only feeds).

Surprises

I haven’t mentioned some little things (like favicons in the Sites Drawer, an Errors window)—but I’ve also left out a few big things. As I said above, if you’re interested in helping test, just send me email.

I’ll be on Inside Mac Radio

I’ll be on Inside Mac Radio 02/14/2004 05:17 PM
I’ll be on Inside Mac Radio sometime today between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. Pacific. (That’s in just a few minutes, at the time I’m writing this.)

RatherBiased.com | News | What’s
New

RatherBiased.com | News | What’s
New 09/19/2004 11:43 AM
RatherBiased

ratherbiased.com/news.html#48
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CamelBones - What’s New in
1.0.0-beta1

CamelBones - What’s New in
1.0.0-beta1 04/04/2005 01:47 PM
CamelBones 1.0.0b1: “This new approach is a huge improvement over the old proxy-based bridge, and makes a number of things possible with this new version that could not be done previously: Support for Cocoa Bindings, NSDocument-based applications, Custom NSView subclasses.”

Don’t Fear the Assembler

Don’t Fear the Assembler 04/06/2005 09:36 PM
Jonathan Rentzsch: “I don’t think you have to be a hard-core geek to pick up PowerPC assembly.”

Probably true. And now it’s on my to-do list. (Hey, I learned it once when I was a kid, I could do it again. It can’t, after all, be as difficult as AppleScript.)

Adriaan’s State of the API address

Adriaan’s State of the API address 12/17/2004 06:34 PM
Adriaan Tijsselling: State of the API address: “In the end, though, it still depends on the blog system developers and how far they want to go in supporting and (properly) implementing the Atom API (without resorting to poor hacks).”

I agree with pretty much everything Adriaan says in this post—and especially the part about not “resorting to poor hacks.” Until you’ve tried to write a weblog editing client that works with a bunch of different systems, you have no idea what a pack of spiders are the various implementations.

Adriaan talks about having a weblog editing API “wrapped in a consistent, tightly-specified, well-documented IETF-controlled XML format and internet standard.” Right on to that.

An additional hope of mine is that, at the same, the API doesn’t take a computer scientist to implement. If it’s difficult and complex, both Adriaan and I will handle it, yes. But the thing to remember is that there’s a ton of creativity and interesting ideas in the scripters and hobbyists out there, and they’re not going to tackle stuff that just takes too long to see any results. That’s one of the reasons that XML-RPC and RSS have had success—they’re so easy to get started with. And that’s worth remembering.

Watson’s Life Coming to an End,
Soon

Watson’s Life Coming to an End,
Soon 09/23/2004 09:46 PM
Dan Wood: “There’s been some discussion on the Watson Users’ email discussion group about the future of Watson and where Sun is going. I am sad to say that it looks like Sun doesn’t seem to be focussing on getting the port of Watson released any time soon.”

This is sad: Watson is cool. But we’re looking forward to hearing what Dan is working on next.

Ranchero Software: What’s New in
NetNewsWire 2.0

Ranchero Software: What’s New in
NetNewsWire 2.0 09/23/2004 07:50 PM
2.0 (beta) version of NetNewsWire .. what’s new in 2.0

ranchero.com/netnewswire/whatsnew/netnewswire20.php
track this site | 6 links

It’s a Multi Language World

It’s a Multi Language World 03/22/2005 05:12 PM
James Duncan Davidson: “I’ve heard rants before about how Java is the best damn language out there and that every piece of functionality should be implemented in Java. And I’ve heard the rants taken further and say that the one thing that Company A (or B or C, but usually A) to make themselves more appealing to developers is drop everything else but Java.”

Steven Frank’s tip for improving
your RSS

Steven Frank’s tip for improving
your RSS 01/18/2004 06:02 PM
Steven Frank has a great simple tip for improving your RSS: subscribe to your own feed (or feeds).

What if your feed appears weird, or doesn’t appear at all, in NetNewsWire? Validate it. Ctrl-click on the subscription and choose Validate this Feed. (Yes, this command should also be in the main menu. In the future it will be.)

It the feed is valid, but NetNewsWire does something strange, then let us know about it: it’s mostly likely a bug.

But if the feed is not valid, you have a few options for fixing it:

1. If you’re running your own software, then you may have a bug to fix.

2. If you’re running someone else’s software, but you’re using a customized template or script to generate your feed, check your work.

3. If you’re running someone else’s software, but you haven’t customized anything, report a bug to the person or company who created your software. Be sure to include the URL of your feed, so they can validate it too and see what the problem is. (Important: be nice. Software has bugs. Most developers are conscientious and work hard at fixing bugs.)

Why I’m switching to Mailsmith and
SpamSieve

Why I’m switching to Mailsmith and
SpamSieve 01/07/2004 03:09 PM
I’m switching from Apple Mail to Mailsmi th and SpamSieve.

I had grown increasingly unhappy with Mail back in the Jaguar days. Performance was a big issue, but there were also user interface issues—the big one being that I couldn’t navigate the mailbox list via the keyboard.

Another issue was that the spam filter was getting less and less effective and I was dealing with spam by creating filters again. There’s no way I want to go back to that world. (I spent five years in Eudora creating spam filters by hand.)

But I decided to stick with Mail for a while, since Mail would be updated in Panther. And when Panther shipped, there were some nice improvements in the new version of Mail, but it didn’t specifically address my problems.

And then performance got worse. Even just checking mail became this long process. At first I thought it had to be the server. But then I downloaded the Mailsmith demo—and checking email was quick.

I also downloaded Eudora and gave it a shot. I had used Eudora for many years in the classic Mac OS. But I didn’t really like it in OS X: something about the look of it these days just rubbed me the wrong way. Just a personal taste thing, I’m sure.

So I used Mailsmith some more—and I found I liked it. It was faster than Mail. It’s very scriptable and customizable—for instance, I wanted to give some of the menu commands the same keystrokes that I was used to in Mail, and I could. Mark as Spam is now shift-cmd-J in my copy of Mailsmith.

Two other wonderful features of Mailsmith: it does not display HTML email and the text editing engine comes from BBEdit. But the very coolest feature may be SpamSieve.

Simply put: it catches my spam far more accurately than Mail ever did. Mail never came close. That’s the main thing SpamSieve has to do it, and it does it.

But it goes beyond that—you can see statistics on how well it’s doing. You can look at and edit the blocklist and whitelist. (Not something I’ve had to do, though.) My favorite of these extra features is the Show Corpus command. It shows you the words SpamSieve has seen, how often they’ve been in spam vs. good messages, and what the spam probability is. This fascinates me.

For instance, the word “terminate” has appeared 13 times since I started using Mailsmith. It has appeared in spam 12 of those times. Another for instance: any email sent to webmaster@ranchero.com has an 89% probability of being spam.

SpamSieve is a generous piece of software, in that it does its job very well but then gives you the extras that make it fun. And it’s written by Michael Tsai, another small, independent developer with a weblog.

Dan Gillmor’s suggestion that we
all send money

Dan Gillmor’s suggestion that we
all send money 12/27/2004 07:21 PM

weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/011142.shtml
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Bartelme Design’s cool styles

Bartelme Design’s cool styles 04/04/2005 04:06 PM
We didn’t get permission in time for this latest NetNewsWire beta to include Bartelme Design’s style sheets. (My fault! I should have emailed sooner than Saturday.)

But we did get permission, so the next beta will include BD Aqua Floating and BD Graphit Floating. You don’t have to wait, of course, you can go download and install them yourself.

(To install a style, just double-click on the *.nnwstyle file.)

Father’s Day Gifts for Geek
Daddies

Father’s Day Gifts for Geek
Daddies 06/18/2004 04:18 PM
“Father’s Day is just around the corner and you’re probably still looking for the perfect gift. There isn’t much time left to shop, but I have a handful of hairy hints that just might do the trick. Geek Daddies are notorious for not spending enough time tending to personal grooming. Father’s Day presents a special chance for you to give that special something that keeps on giving, all year long. Sure, some folks might think of these gift ideas as gags, but other folks will see them for what they are: acts of personal grooming kindness.”

Brent’s Psychic Predictions for
2004

Brent’s Psychic Predictions for
2004 12/30/2003 02:53 PM
Are RSS aggregators pretty much there, just needing some tweaks and small features—or at they still at the very beginning of their evolution, with a long road still ahead?

This question was asked on the NetNewsWire beta testing list. It’s a good question.

Answer: aggregators still have a long road ahead. What you see now is just the beginning.

I have an idea of some of the things you’ll see in 2004 (not just in NetNewsWire but in aggregators in general). So consider this as Brent’s psychic predictions for 2004.

1. Atom syndication support. Some aggregators already have this, and I suspect most will by mid-2004.

2. Synching. The idea is to synchronize not only your subscription lists but also the read/unread status of individual headlines—and to make it so it works between different apps, even apps running on different operating systems.

3. Easier subscribing. One of the problems for new users is the problem of subscribing to feeds. The “feed” URL scheme is a step forward here, because it makes it so you can subscribe to feeds directly from your browser. It also means instead of lots of ways to do this, which is inherently confusing, aggregator developers and users can collapse it down to one way. (I suspect there will be other good ideas too—especially in the realm of finding feeds.) Making all this easy for new users is a high priority.

Anyway... individual aggregators, NetNewsWire included, will add lots of other new features not listed above. The above are just the things I predict aggregators will do in common for 2004. I expect lots of innovation to come from all over, but I can’t predict what those innovations will be.

Years from now aggregators will be like email apps: we’ll know what an aggregator should do and what the UI conventions are. But for now we get to be creative, try new ideas, see what sticks. So—my last prediction—I except 2004 to be fun.

More details about Postel’s Law,
Atom, and NetNewsWire

More details about Postel’s Law,
Atom, and NetNewsWire 01/16/2004 11:01 AM
Here’s something that happens all the time. An RSS feed has errors in it. It displays in NetNewsWire, but it displays incorrectly, with some weirdness. A NetNewsWire user validates the feed and sees that it has errors. Then the user emails me asking if I can fix the weirdness anyway so it would display perfectly.

Here’s the thing: being forgiving doesn’t always work. You end up not showing exactly what was intended, and users notice it, and they want to see what was intended.

It never ends, either. There’s always something new to work around. What happens is all the pressure to make things work comes down on the aggregators.

Despite all that, I agree with Postel’s Law. Atom is not a special case.

But with Postel’s Law you still have to make decisions. What’s the baseline? I’m saying that the baseline for Atom in NetNewsWire is XML well-formed-ness. NetNewsWire will probably end up liberal regarding other aspects of the spec. (I’m hoping there will be some guidelines regarding what to be liberal about and what to be strict about; but, if not, I’ll work it out anyway.)



What does this mean in practice? Some stats...

So far I’ve subscribed to 34 Atom feeds to test with.

I just tested each against the Feed Validator: 14 of these feeds are invalid according to the Feed Validator.

NetNewsWire displays all but two of them. In both cases the error is an XML parsing error.

So, obviously, there are degrees of strictness. NetNewsWire will not be as strict as the Feed Validator—not even close.

Choosing XML well-formed-ness as a baseline is not some unrealistic dictate that will prevent Atom from being popular.

I like Atom, by the way, and I’m applying this standard because I like Atom. I would be utterly pleased if in the future people would say things like “Well, you pretty much know it’s going to be well-formed XML, because it’s an Atom feed.” In other words, I’m doing what I can to make sure this future comes about, where people can do cool and creative things with Atom feeds and real XML parsers. I want Atom feeds to have the reputation of being high-quality.



You might wonder in what ways is NetNewsWire’s RSS parser forgiving of XML errors. It’s not as forgiving as you might think.

First thing to know is that it uses an XML parser (Apple’s CoreFoundation XML parser). There’s no pseudo-parser here.

It tries to be forgiving of string encoding errors with this algorithm: first it tries to parse the XML with the encoding specified in the feed (or UTF8 if not specified). If the parser won’t parse it, then it tries a few other encodings. Sometimes this gets the job done, though there may be some loss of fidelity.

It also tries to be forgiving of unencoded ampersands—but it does so in an inelegant way, and what you end up with is a feed where all the HTML tags are visible in the descriptions.

So those are also the two things NetNewsWire is not doing for Atom. In the case of the two feeds with errors, it’s possible that applying these work-arounds might have worked. But then the bugs in these feeds might never be found. (And it looks possible that in the case of one of them it’s a bug in the weblogging software that generated the feed. Everybody wants bugs like that to get fixed.)

What’s your favorite
info/inspector window?

What’s your favorite
info/inspector window? 01/22/2004 02:10 AM
Of all the apps you use, which has your favorite info/inspector window?

Eric Czarny’s new XML-RPC Cocoa
code

Eric Czarny’s new XML-RPC Cocoa
code 02/17/2004 12:10 AM
Eric Czarny posted a new Cocoa XML-RPC client implementation. I took a quick look at it—and it looks good. Eric is using the design patterns you’d expect from a Cocoa implementation. Cool.

Bush-Cheney ’04 Announces First
Television Ads

Bush-Cheney ’04 Announces First
Television Ads 03/06/2004 01:53 AM
the new television ads from the Bush Club .. The entire campaign .. commercials .. TV ad .. pubs

georgewbush.com/tvads
track this site | 11 links

Eyelid Piercing [The Publisher’s
Ring]

Eyelid Piercing [The Publisher’s
Ring] 05/25/2004 02:43 PM
Out of things to pierce? Try an eyelid .. jeezuz maryann joseph!!!!!!!!!!!! .. eyelids

bmezine.com/news/pubring/20040519.html
track this site | 4 links

How Four Blogs Dealt a Blow to
CBS’s Credibility

How Four Blogs Dealt a Blow to
CBS’s Credibility 09/14/2004 06:37 PM
here’s an old-media report

daily.nysun.com/Repository/getmailfiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:A rticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2004/09/13&ID=Ar00102
track this site | 4 links

Elliott Smith’s death is still an
open case

Elliott Smith’s death is still an
open case 01/02/2004 01:14 AM
Elliot Smith : Murdered

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3358779.stm
track this site | 3 links

Expert Cited by CBS Says He Didn’t
Authenticate Papers

Expert Cited by CBS Says He Didn’t
Authenticate Papers 09/14/2004 08:49 AM

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18982-2004Sep13.html
track this site | 4 links

"What was once a hell wrought by Saddam
is now one of America’s making"

"What was once a hell wrought by Saddam
is now one of America’s making" 09/15/2004 03:30 AM
Christopher Albritton has done some great reporting from Iraq, and his blog gives a real taste of what life is like for American soldiers, Iraqi citizens, and of course American journalists. Through the wonder of the internet, we are getting the opportunity to read something like Michael Herr's Dispatches as they are being written. One of his posts at the beginning of this summer, Heart of Darkness, made incarnate all the fears that I expressed at the beginning of this war about having an monolingual, English-speaking, predominantly Christian, understrength army, not trained for occupation, occupying an ethnically, politically and religiously divided Arabic country in the Islamic heartland: a recipe for disaster. Albritton wrote: Violence, too, is never distant. A few days, there was an IED attack against an American humvee near the Interior Ministry. It killed one American soldier and wounded three others. We were on our way to the Oil Ministry and we detoured to the site of the attack. As I rushed up to the cordon, I yelled out to the soldiers that I was press. They responded by waving me away. I tried to ask one soldier a few questions about what had happened. Traffic streamed around us and cars horns beat out a cacophonic concert. “Can’t talk to you, sir, go away,” he said. “Well, where was the attack?” I pressed. “I said go away,” he growled. “Can I speak to your commanding officer? Who is he?” “He said get the fuck out of here!” a second soldier screamed and both soldiers pointed their weapons at me. There are few things more threatening than seeing scared and pissed-off American soldiers pointing weapons at you. The Iraqis know this feeling well. I quickly retreated and returned to the car, shaken at the Americans’ hostility. This feeling of trusting no one has gotten to me; it’s palpable and the constant vigilance is exhausting. My mood is black and I can feel a depression that is never far away. Not writing for the blog is a source of guilt, too, but TIME has kept me so busy with stories that don’t bring me in touch with average Iraqis much. I’ve been moving between the CPA and the former members of the Governing Council. I also can’t seem to get excited over stories of abused Iraqis. There are so many and they have a numbing quality. Also, the hostility I...
Grok Description matches for Welcome to the ‘new’ Web, same as the ‘old’ Web
GrokA matches for Welcome to the ‘new’ Web, same as the ‘old’ Web

Welcome to the ‘new’ Web, same as the ‘old’ Web

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: