Announcing Crispy on the Outside
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Folks, after much preparation, I’m happy to pull back the covers on my latest web venture: crispyontheoutside.com. It is an irreverent food blog authored by my good friend Baylen Linnekin. Its focus will be the delicious underbelly of the food world, with a special emphasis on outlawed foods and unconventional tastes. Just now Baylen posted this breaking story:
Gordon Ramsay quietly closed his second restaurant in six months over the weekend. Problems at La Noisette seemed to center more on the space than the food. With the closing, he also loses one of his dozen Michelins, and further shifts the focus of his empire to a more mid-market clientele. …
The shutdown was abrupt, and as of 2pm EDT, La Noisette — though most of their website was shuttered to all but the Google cache — was still accepting reservations. (I reserved online for today, and received immediate confirmation that “a member of our team will contact you shortly.”)
A favorite feature is “This Week in Bacon,” and great posts so far include “Pigs Shudder in Blankets During Cooks’ IHOP Knife Fight” and “McFlurry of Activity Shows Amy Winehouse Can’t Get off the Sauce.” Awesome.
Please check it out. I’d love to hear your comments. Also feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed. And we would be so grateful if your would write it up on your blog.
Amazon affiliate etiquette
Over at Unclutterer we recently ran a post announcing the impending release of Leopard and how you could get it the cheapest at Amazon. Of course, we get a cut of every sale we generate from our site. I always assume it’s universal knowledge that when blogs link to Amazon, they’re getting an affiliate commission of sales. But invariably there’s a comment chastising us for not being explicit about it. In this case it was from someone named Al who said, “It’s also probably polite to disclose that you’ll be getting a cut from any sales through your ‘pre-order’ link, too.”I was heartened to see that just about every other commenter came to our defense. That said, however, I notice that others, such as John Gruber in his post about Leopard, make it a point to disclose their cut. So, I’m trying to understand the etiquette here.
Why exactly is it polite to make the disclosure? It’s not as if a reader will pay more because they use our link. They pay exactly the list price; it’s Amazon who pays us the commission. We’re providing a service by highlighting a good deal, and if someone buys, then it obviously was valuable information to them. So what’s the concern?
Legal blog citation rant
Marginal Revolution points to an NIH style guide that includes a section on how to cite to blogs in academic medical papers. They rightly criticize the superfluous “place of publication” component as irrelevant to online publications (and likely print materials, too). Well, I’ve been wrestling with the citation of blogs in legal academic publications recently because the paper I’m finishing up now (with over 200 footnotes) is partly on the topic of blogs themselves and so internet-source-heavy.The 18th edition of The Bluebook, published in 2005, adds a new citation form for blogs. Past editions contained simply a citation form for web pages whether blog or not. The problem I’m having with the newfangled blog form is that it ignores that footnotes convey information in and of themselves apart from being a pointer to the source material. Trusting that an article from a respected legal journal has been vetted more or less adequately, I often just glance down at a footnote to see who said what, just to get a flavor for the source and never intending to go look it up. The new form for blogs makes this difficult. For example, if a blog has only one author, the form is like so:
Freedom to Tinker, http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/ (Oct. 17, 2007, 09:13 EST).
That is, you cite the title of the blog and the main URL and then just give the date and time of the post. It doesn’t tell you the name of the author, so if you don’t know any better you won’t know the above citation is to Prof. Ed Felten’s blog. Scanning the footnote quickly it’s of great value to know that it’s Prof. Felten who’s being cited. You also don’t know what the title of the blog entry is. Here’s the form for multi-author blgos:
Posting of James Gattuso to Technology Liberation Front, http://www.techliberation.com/ (Oct. 15, 2007, 16:27 EST).
While this tells you the author’s name, it doesn’t tell you the title of the post, which would likely give you a flavor of what the post is about. In this case it would be “New LECG Study Puts Cost of Unbundling at 30 Billion Euros.”
So, memo to the Bluebook editors: Why make it so complicated? Why not just author, title, blog title, date, and URL for the individual entry? It’s worked for newspapers for years. Blogs aren’t any different.
Joanne McNeil is still the most interesting blogger I know.
Justin Blanton suggests that all bloggers publish a list of the sites they read. I don’t have an easy way to do that, but here are the sites I link to.
I’m blogging
Blog influence on Capitol Hill
Here is the senior honors thesis (PDF) from GWU student T. Neil Sroka on blog readership on Capitol Hill. The bottom line is that blogs really aren’t that regularly read by members or their staffs. Nevertheless, it’s a very interesting read. I would be interested in a similar survey of federal agencies, where I think single-issue blogs might have more influence.-
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This is the personal site of Jerry Brito, a lawyer and writer in Washington, D.C. He’s an academic researcher and the creator of Unclutterer and several other blogs. More »
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