Davos Newbies

Grant McCracken: “We are learning that a number of unlikely places can play sunken ship – not the dead space that environmentalists warned us against but a place diverse species congregate and multiply. Dallas might, I think, be one of those places.”

McCracken’s blog is one of the most consistently interesting things I read. It’s filled with fresh insight and intriguing new notions. Everybody extols Austin; I needed to read McCracken to learn about sunken ship Dallas.

Daniel Dennett provides an excellent demolition of so-called intelligent design: “Since there is no content, there is no ‘controversy’ to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?”

The one thing his New York Times op-ed doesn’t deal with is the embarrassment of the Times’s own “even-handed” coverage of ID in the previous week.

The US Open has an RSS feed. Bing, as Dave Winer would say.

But the IBM folk who created the site should have another look. There’s the friendly orange XML icon on the home page, but don’t try copying the URL for your aggregator. It’s actually a link to a page that explains RSS, where there is a plain text URL to highlight and copy.

It’s a step forward, but it would have been so simple to do it better.