Charles on… anything that comes along

Seth Finkelstein has a rather nice pre-emptive strike on the issue of pre-emptive articles about what the Supreme Court’s decision on Grokster (PDF - go read it yourself) means.

When the court’s decision finally is released, to a first approximation, there can’t be more than about a dozen things to say about the result. The top three being:

1) Industry wins, civil-libertarians say “Bad”, analysis: Court slap “pirates”.
2) Industry loses, civil-libertarians say “Good”, analysis: Congress will pass new law, slap “pirates”.
3) Muddled decision, Industry, civil-libertarians say “Good/Bad”, analysis: Some say congress should pass new law, slap “pirates”?

All that remains is to fill in the details (the fastest pundits may have already half-written articles set to go, with just the relevant quotes to add).

So, as a matter of mathematics, the number of people trying to say something about this, vastly outnumbers the basic number of things to say. The insight of power-laws is that the distribution won’t be uniform. Sure, anyone can write about it - but there isn’t much of a reason to read what anyone writes. Blog-evangelists consistently neglect this factor. Not to mention the relative privilege necessary to be able to take the time to spend pouring over a document and writing analysis.

Basically he’s saying “You’ve read three blogs, now move on and Get A Life, OK?” (BTW it’s poring, Seth.)

Finkelstein is an interesting person, with interesting things to say; subscribe now!

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1) Get NetNewsWire to output the stories from a Smart List as an HTML page of links, rather than an ordered list of links within the program. This is rather like the Preaggregator concept, but applied to a Smart List, not a normal feed. (You can’t do it with Preaggregator, because a Smart List doesn’t have a feed URL.) Then I could terrify y’all with the latest bird flu stories, for example. But I suspect this is impossible without Brent Simmons’s intervention.

2) Get Spotlight to index .php files so I can find weird functions referenced from one Wordpress page in another. (OK, usually they’re in the file called “functions.php”. but even so, the lack of .php indexing ain’t good. They’re only text files, but it won’t touch them.) This failure bugs me.

Update: Brent Simmons (see comments) is right: you definitely can do No.1 using Applescript. Kudos to him for making NetNewsWire so scriptable, something that few organisations, Apple included, do. The benefit though is that users can build in their own bizarre features. Which I shall do once I’ve completed this presentation on the future of journalism…

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