• So maybe Gracenote (formerly CDDB) isn’t evil after all? I love anything that challenges the conventional wisdom, especially when someone’s gotten a bad rap. Good reporting, Eliot Van Buskirk! I’d been accepting the received wisdom about this company for years, apparently unfairly. Do we have a tech equivalent term for “urban legend”?
• There’s pubic hair dye now. So you’ve got that going for you. One color is called “Brown Betty”, which I thought was a type of baked good.
• Microsoft and Yahoo endorse Google’s sitemaps format for describing your website. I love when there’s this kind of informal collaboration, as in the underrated nofollow initiative, as well as my long-time favoriterobots.txt.
• That Sitemaps.org site should probably have a sitemap at some point.
• S.R. Sidarth in the Washington Post: “I am macaca”.

Allen’s actions that day stood out because they were not representative of how I was treated while traveling around the state. Everywhere I went, though I was identifiably working on behalf of Allen’s opponent, people treated me with dignity, respect and kindness. I cannot recall one event where food was served and I was not invited to join in the meal. In southwest Virginia, hospitality toward me was at a high point.

I don’t mean to belabor the macaca point, and the story is much more nuanced than it seems, but I hope all the slobbering politicians, regardless of political persuasion, take away a simple lesson from this: If you fuck with Indians in America, you will lose control of both houses of Congress.

• George H.W. Bush thinks one of the causes of political incivility is bloggers. He’s right.
• I’m going to be on Cranky Geeks again. Seems to me the show’s gotten a lot better since their blog switched to Movable Type. And I get to talk about the Wii and Vox, two of my favorite toys! Hooray.
• In case you missed it, you should watch the “I got a brown Zune” movie at the end of my last post. It’s the finest film you’ll see all year, or your money back. You’ll also find yourself saying to yourself, “I got a brown Zune!” over and over.
• I really liked the Jay-Z ad for HP until I’d read the Slate piece about the campaign:

Though they were just as expensive to create as the TV ads, HP opted not to buy television time for these spots. According to Roman, this was the plan from the outset. HP decided that Web ads have become radically more effective of late, and thus that it’s worth it to spend money on high production values.

I feel so manipulated! Eh, fuck it. I like the ads anyway. Three dimensional stadium rendering!