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I’m going to be away for a couple of weeks, but my pal Greg Knauss is taking over posting some remaindered links while I’m gone, aided by special guests David Jacobs and perhaps even Anil Dash.
Greg was the very first guest blogger here on kottke.org (and perhaps the first guest blogger ever anywhere) back in March of 2000 when I went to SXSW and they didn’t have wifi at the conference (nor did I have a laptop). Good times, back then.
When I get back, house on fire.
Anil on the conservatism of liberalism (by way of explaining why Craigslist is taking away everyone else’s classifieds business). “A complete unwillingness to be critical, an almost astoundingly low set of criteria for acceptance — these aren’t the traits that encourage a community or a culture to improve.”
Anil Dash offers a list of dos and don’ts for beating the iPod and iTunes.
You can now post from Microsoft Word to your Blogger blog. More interesting to me is how former Pyra folks remember this old idea. Matt says it was “something we talked about building back when the blogger api was brand new” and that Anil Dash, then a Blogger enthusiast, knocked up a working prototype (which I also remember). Ev says it’s “a product that I first thought about five years ago”. Both accounts are no doubt accurate, but how they’re remembered is interesting.
Anil has some thoughts about Jones Diner, my favorite NY restaurant (having been to a total of about four), and points to a Village Voice article about its possible closure.
Meg and I saw a “don’t close us down” petition on the counter when we stopped in last week, but I didn’t know the story behind it until I read the article. I hope it doesn’t get shut down. Jones Diner is part of that neighborhood’s culture and history. Cities need places like that…they add diversity, character, culture, and history to the neighborhoods in which they are located.
Andrew Glassberg, one of the folks trying to build an upscale modern diner in place of Jones Diner, asserts “we are all about eggs and burgers [and we] want that classic diner feel”. He’s missing the point; it’s not just about the type of food or some carefully crafted & marketed “classic diner feel”, it’s a lot more than that. When we were there the other day, about five minutes after we had ordered, a man walked in with hellos to both men working behind the counter, obviously a regular. Four minutes after that, way before we got our food, the man dug into a turkey dinner which he hadn’t ordered, but which they knew he wanted anyway. That’s just a taste of what places like Jones Diner give you in the context of a neighborhood that a modern diner just can’t.
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