UPDATE, 2/21/08: I was sent the audio of this speech, and Rumsfeld does not say "pods," he clearly says "blogs." My apology for the error. The point about lumping email and talk radio still stands.

After lying low for a while America's premier linguist is back. Here he is, as quoted by Sharon Weinberger of Wired's defense blog, Danger Room, speaking at a conference on network centric warfare:

"There are multiple channels for information . . . The Internet is there, pods are there, talk radio is there, e-mails are there."

Yes, the pods! Seed pods, perhaps. Connected by a series of tubes, no doubt. Lumping talk radio together with email, all I can think of that unites these things is that they transmit words, and require electricity. By that measure we might as well throw in intercoms and bullhorns. All of this makes more sense when you remember it's coming from a 75 year old man who apparently doesn't have an email address.

The quote is part of a talk in which Rumsfeld proposes a successor to the U.S. Information Agency (now part of the State Department) and the ill-fated (and ominously named) Office of Strategic Influence. The full Wired post is worth reading.

This one is making the rounds; perhaps my favorite commentary so far is by Spencer Ackerman of the recently-launched Washington Independent.

Labels: Danger Room, Donald Rumsfeld, pipes, pods, Sharon Weinberger, Washington Independent, Wired

Lisa from Sophistechate has built a refurbished feed for Wordie lists using Yahoo! Pipes. It takes the feed from any list page, and adds the row of lookup favicons that appear under the words on the site to the words in the feed. Like so.

One thing to note is that once you've generated the pipe, you won't immediately see the transmogrified feed on the Pipes page, which threw me at first. You first need to click the 'My Yahoo,' 'Add to Google', or, to see the raw feed, 'More options' link.

Thanks Lisa! This joins angharad and uselessness's Wordie Bookmarklet as another very cool member-contributed utility.

Labels: feeds, pipes, sophistechate, Yahoo

Apologies for Wordie going kind of bonkers while I sorted out DNS issues related to changing hosts. I just ironed out some config kinks on the new server, the transfer finally went through, and from reports in the field, they seems to have propagated throughout the pipes.

If this outage really has you hot and bothered, this might soothe you.

Labels: dns, pipes