2300 words since my last update, 106,985 since January 1. I'm about to lose a few days to a trip though. Oh well.

Po Bronson looks at Silicon Valley after the bust. He likes what he sees: people working hard to build products, while making sure to have healthy personal lives, too. It's not as glamorous as riding IPO rockets, but it's a lot more sustainable.

This story is a few days old, but it isn't getting the play it deserves. I mean, no one reads the news on Sunday (original publication date), do they?

Anyway, remember the huge stocks of biological and chemical weapons that Iraq was poised to unleash on the world? Turns out they don't exist. Oops!

1050 words yesterday. 104,685 since January 1.

More fun with software toys. Joi Ito's Web, one of the sites I read regularly, has started a wiki. Wikis are freely editable collaborative text, similar in philosophy to open-source software. I'm still figuring out how they work and how one might enhance this site. ThinFilmWiki is my experimental effort. Contributors welcome.

Update: Wikis seem to encourage free-form evolution, like a scratch pad or sketch book. Blog posts and other static pages seem to encourage posting of finished thoughts. So the wiki is likely to contain notes and references for works in progress. We'll see how it evolves over the next few weeks.

Updated to reflect new wiki location.

Spent the weekend at the dojo, which didn't leave much time for writing. 1200 words since my last update, 103,635 since January 1. I'm now officially behind on my monthly goal. Oops!

A broken leg or other mobility crisis tends to convert people to the joys of remote work in a hurry. That's what happened to Indi Young, who offers some good tips for remote collaboration.

Jayson Blair was a reporter for the New York Times. Over the course of several years, he wrote hundreds of articles, many of which turned out to be fabrications. (New York Times link; free registration required.) He plagiarized, he made up quotes, he described locations in vivid (and often erroneous) detail without ever visiting them. The Times promoted him repeatedly, despite serious concerns about his sloppy reporting.

In the wake of the scandal, ethics experts at Poynter Online suggest that Blair's behavior was surprising only for its audacity. A newsroom culture that values speed over meticulous reporting and considers training and oversight a waste of time encourages all sorts of dubious corner-cutting. A borrowed quote here, a made-up source there, and pretty soon you're cleaning up the kind of mess now facing the Times.