I love clean sheets.
And now I love cascading sheets.
Having an organizing tool like cascading sheets is like having a girl's closet instead of a boy's. A boy is lucky if he HAS a sock drawer: a girl not only has a sock drawer, she may have them color coded.
Cascading Sheets are like that: you may send out hundreds of RSS scouts, but if they all come on back in to the campfire to let you know what they found at once, its as good as not having any information at all.
Those of us studying the results of the stimulus program ran into that problem on the government's site: plenty of info, but no real way to access a refinement of the massive number of numbers and documents flowing into the site.
When you have traffic in that kind of a cluster, you need a way first to route it, then to organize it before it's usable: here come the CSS troops.
With a cascading, visual organizer you can, even with multiple search engines, make uniform the VISUAL organization necessary: fonts, layouts (margins, indentations, etc.) colors....you may have thousands of scouts but when they come back in to report for duty they will be lined up, in appropriate uniforms and easily distinguishable for use.

Assignment the First: Is it true?
Let me begin by quickly noting that I must have something wrong here: my first assignment is a script right out of 8th grade health class; when considering a voice contribution, we should be sure to: 1)think about what we're going to say 2)say it clearly 3)try to keep our subject relaxed 4)if we're standing up, speak with our hands, 5)if we're off camera and this is all audio, use non-verbal qualifiers so as not to interrupt.....
Hard enough to read more than once; then to present, now to.....BLOG about this experience? Can't wait to eat my hat: want so much to hear "Susan, you did the wrong assignment"....please, Nikhil...ooops, never mind, you just emailed me.
I had it right.
Darn it.

PowerPoint: "not waving but drowning"?

Power Point presentations, I realize, have an almost immediate and universal effect on me: whether the lights go off or stay on, whether I'm close enough to hear the "whrrrr" or off in the corner, it's always the same. Right when it's evident that I am about to learn something, (generally a very genuinely happy state of expectation) I look up, see the Power Point, and GLAZE OVER, at least mentally: without a mirror I can't tell if tiny little curtains actually fall down over my eyes so that others could see...has Power Point made presentations more understandable, exciting, informative?
And I wonder sometimes: as revolutionary as my computer usage has seemed, how much has it changed my workday or personal chores? Do I spend enough time looking for the password for my bank account, then signing in, that I could have written a check after all? And why are my file cabinets still full?
I got some help with the Power Point from a Mr.Edward Tufte, who basically says PowerPoint, bah, humbug! What he actually says: "...the convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience...these costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of then information rather than focused spatial analysis..."
Mr. Tufte DOES go on, don't you think? What's more glazing...his riff on PP or an actual presentation...and although I knew I hated Power Point, I didn't know it was because my spatial resolution was being short-changed. Spatial resolution could come to the presentation and sit right next to me and I wouldn't recognize it...
Anyway, I'm happy we can "backpack" our way into a major news story (though there may be nothing new under the sun to say, or we may have the same goofy journalist with all the right equipment now able to ask terrible, canned questions with mikes smaller than their brains), and FINALLY, the mob gets to speak, one at a time ("let's go hang him as soon as we log off..."),
but the next time I sit through a PP I swear I'll start to smell mimeograph ink...
Back to the global "wonder": are we making some of the same, eternal mistakes and dressing them up in new clothes so we can all go to the "progress" party? Am I learning...or drowning? (not waving but drowning comes from a very disturbing poem by Stevie Smith).

Reading as much as I do in and about the internet, it's amazing to me that I've allowed so much text to remain a mystery: Mr. Briggs had me making noises in my hotel room several nights ago, excited that FTP now did more than remind me of Mario Andretti.
As a child there were words I was willing to read over, around, whatever it took to keep from going to the dictionary. It's amazing to me that I would have learned to install a hard drive by 1994 but not have had any idea what RSS meant.
So this course will not only unlock several acronyms, but will refresh my wide-open eyes which have succumbed to the occasional squint that comes from not knowing what you're reading but being too lazy to go find out. The damage is not so much the underlying meaning as it is your confidence as a "traveler" in a new world.
Little did I realize to degree to which I had succumbed to the intimidation that results when certain "road signs" (ftp) are meaningless...I was content to feel left out. As capacity in our machines increased, that meant that so did my intimidation; as new "fixes" or aps increased their reliance upon the original acronyms, so did the amount of intimidation.
How silly to have let this go on for as long as I did: like taking a driving test, this course will teach me to parallel park instead of drive around the block eleven times.
Journalism may well have to dust off its own myopia, as it begins to develop ears as well as eyes: the days when newspapers considered "letters to the editor" interactive are over, as reporters with old-style press passes shoulder up to 13 year old bloggers in Milan during fashion week. The "source" of the news event and the audience were indistinguishable, and the newspaper that thought it was writing to a "tween" who followed fashion (www.businessoffashion.com) realized that day that they were not only both reporting the news, but that the much shorter, much younger reporter was making it as she did so.
I can't be 13 again, and I can't be on the runway, but the new journalism does in fact allow me the "digital space" between those shoulders...I could, if I chose, write a personal note to both of them and then write about the experience for my blog!

Transubstantiation and digital wafers: Digitalia the first

Christopher Hitchens has called for a more universal resistance to what he deems the stranglehold militant Muslims have imposed upon journalists around the world. If we insist upon the right to use the word Allah or to make a likeness, they insist it is their responsibility to kill us.

Without so much as a wimper, he contends, writers everywhere have hidden behind, rather than taken up their pens in resistance to prohibitions announced as terminally offensive and the subsequent deaths of several journalists.

I'm not crazy about being told what words to use, either, whether it's in a Union office or a U.N. assembly, but I was confused about the Muslim use of the word Allah and the use of a non-believer-- is it similar to the word "nigger" being appropriate in a rap song sung by a singer sufficiently dark-skinned, but not by a white Judge on a gold course?

I learned, to my surprise, that the word itself is sacred: since the Koran was not passed down by disciples, but came, word by word, from the mouth of Allah (him?)self, his name is not merely a sound: it is the aural equivalent of a Catholic wafer.

And while Catholics must ingest both wine and wafer to have become one with their Christian god, even then a Priest must consecrate the process or it doesn't count. The sheer ease and "independence" of the Mulsim form of transubstantiation is part and parcel of its "global" troubles...Muslims need neither consecration nor a Priest to become one with their god. Stand-alone sacred is far too portable to be easily protected in a digitally-connected, religiously diverse world.

Think of the trouble Gertrude Stein would've been in...