Facebook sets out best practices for news sites

This is actually a pretty fascinating read — so much so that, given my relative lack of anything better to do up here in Reno at the fam fam reunion, it actually spurred me to create this blog and add to it some special features, such as the devilish Facebook like button.

On an interesting sidenote, Poynter's web site, itself frequently a fount of social media best practices, doesn't make the sharing of its content very easy. Hit the share button and all you get is an unannotated link to the article named after the website rather than the article.

In any case, here's the article:

7 Ways to Use Facebook to Merge News with the Social Web

Jonathan Thompson coulda died but lived to tell about it

Jonathan was my editor at High Country News and now he's writing sardonically about his experiences in Germany. It's well worth the read. And in the tradition of writing well about that which tortures us, it is, of course, hysterically funny.

Read the post here:

gin gelato: Das Krankenhaus: Or how I got Pneumonia in Berlin and (hopefully) live.

My favorite McMurtry song today

I'm sitting in a precious Tulum, MX motel getting work done while my soaking wet father explores nearby ruins by bicycle.
This song popped up on my media player and gave me yet another reminder of why I love James McMurtry, and why, if I had half a brain, I would move to Austin to be able to catch him playing every Wednesday night.



"James McMurtry atones for his sins on electric guitar in this live performance recorded surreptitiously on a cell phone and delivered by carrier pigeon to a secret transmittal station in the desert outside Socorro New Mexico where it was uploaded via satellite to an offshore web site where I then downloaded it to share on YouTube."

This song made my friend Candace very, very happy.

Check out this song:

I Wrote A Song About Your Car by Mike Doughty

"I wrote a song about your car. I wrote it fine and feckless," Doughty sings.

It's a fabulous theme for Candace McNulty and me. She is the friend who, in the tradition of Grey's Anatomy, I refer to as my person. Tonight we are in her house, writing fine and feckless with her music and cats to keep us warm and the green afternoon light and tile floors to keep us cool.

Life is good here.

My friend Shabbir goes to Bangkok and takes good pictures

Don't believe me? Check them out here!

Facebook | Shabbir A Bashar's Photos - Swadee-Khap!

The sea floor has never been so weird

Well, I suppose it has. We just didn't know about it. Regardless, on to the taxonomic comic relief: Check out 10 of Wired magazine's favorite deep see worms, et al.

10 Crazy-Looking New Deep-Sea Creatures | Wired Science | Wired.com

The genealogy of a stateless family – and the need to become a citizen - CSMonitor.com

The genealogy of a stateless family – and the need to become a citizen - CSMonitor.com

Twelve million isn't a lot of people, but it's a fascinating predicament. And it makes me wonder what will happen to the children of undocumented Mexican immigrants if Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce has his way.

Also note at the bottom of the story where the Christian Science Monitor, once a thriving paper outlet now a hopefully-doing-OK online outlet, has joined the ranks of High Country news in finding alternative ways to fund its journalists' exploits.

So I'm gonna try something different with this blog. For the last couple of years I've been posting article commentary via Facebook, and from the feedback I've been getting, a lot of my FB friends have enjoyed it. Which is great. It's fun being all witty and snarky and throwing out my take on things, but the problem is that the content I've been creating is helping Mark Zuckerberg sell those friends' eyeballs to advertisers (for an apparently pretty damned healthy amount).

I stuck with it anyway because I figured my reading base was more on Facebook than anywhere else. I did, anyway, until a coupla weeks ago when I decided to deactivate my Facebook account to see if life was any better without it. And lo, I discovered it was.

Posting to Blogger is a little more of a pain in the ass than posting to Facebook, but what's life if not one grand experiment, eh?

Us 'Mericans are getting fatter and fatter.

Check out this article: A Picture is Worth... In 1991 The Fattest US States Were As Thin As The Leanest in 2009 : TreeHugger

The writer calls out agricultural incentives for producing corn-based sugars and cheap protein, but I can't help but wonder how much our fat-free, pro-carb craze has fed into this.

But regardless, I have to once again harp on the fact that if we build human-friendly cities, neighborhoods and even shopping centers where people can walk, people watch, ride bikes and generally engage in activities that make them happy anyway, we would probably a/ stop self-medicating with food and b/ get more exercise and ergo, slim down.