Anyone who’s looking to drive down to Shockoe might want to think about taking the bus:

The city is now enforcing a no-parking restriction from 4:00pm until 3:00am on Main Street, from about 200 feet west of South 17th Street to South 21st Street. A spokeswoman for the department of public works says it will ensure better access for fire trucks and ambulances.

CBS 6 asked the spokeswoman about the impact it will have on the already hectic parking situation in that area. She claims a new pay-parking facility is being built, which will provide the area with about 100 extra spaces.

PAY for parking. And they’re building this in a lot that used to be free parking. Nice.

From the city’s press release:

The tow-away zone will ensure needed access for emergency vehicles and minimize cruising activities along this portion of E. Main Street.

Cruising activities? No it won’t. You just opened it up for more of that.

The city sees an opportunity to make some money (or whoever’s contracted to run the new parking does) and an already rough parking situation is now being made even worse. Did the businesses have any input on this? Did they support this? Or is this going to drive people away? Guess time will tell.

Technorati’s reading some interesting numbers on blogging and Business Week dissects them:

The numbers here show around 15.5 million active blogs, or blogs that have been updated in the past 90 days. Hurst pointed out, and I agree, that this is a more key number. That’s why I asked Sifry for this data. It’s a very different number from the overall 70 million total blogs that Technorati ever reports tracking.

As well, the percentage of blogs that are active compared to the total number of blogs tracked by Technorati is declining, according to the data that Sifry sent.

It also seems that the percentage of English blogs that are regularly updated has dropped as well. Does this mean that blogging has reached its peak? Has the bubble burst?

Blogs broke the 15 million barrier around September/October of 2006. What else happened in the fall of 2006?

The Congressional elections.

Potential millions of blogs were created to cover the 2006 campaigns and when November came and went, so did the blogs. Yet they’re still out there, inactive and charted by Technorati.

The following chart shows the raw number of blog posts over time:

Again, 2006 as a whole seems to be the peak of blogging activity over the last couple of years. Post November 2006 there’s a dip, a new peak around the New Year, and then it drops again.

I think it’s way too soon to say the blogging bubble has burst. Yes sites like MySpace and Facebook are impacting how people interact with one another on the web, but events like elections impact how people use the web as well. 2008 will probably see blogs being updated in record numbers once again.

On Wednesday, May 2nd Banditos will host Style Weekly’s annual music issue release party. I’m trying to find some times and something to link to with a bit more meat to it, but right now I’m planning on making it out there. Anyone else thinking about going?

The hookers work church corners because there are steps to sit on, and no one to call the police on them.

Listen to WVCW.org tonight at 8 for Jason and Bryan’s still unnamed show. Maybe we’ll come up with a name this week. Maybe we’ll play more than eight songs. Maybe our conversations will make sense.

Last week you missed talk on cartoons and Bryan’s discovery of someone ripping a riff off of Doug’s “The Beets”. What will we do this week?

Tune in and find out.

WVCW.org

AIM - wvcwradio

WheezerWeezer makes me happy. (Spelling’s hard.)

He’s just gone bad:

A Central Florida doctor is accused of sexually assaulting a woman during a costume party while he was dressed as the super hero Captain America.

Raymond Adamcik was arrested Saturday night at the On Tape Café and Lounge and booked at the Melbourne Police Department while still wearing blue tights and a Captain America head gear.

“It was just a group of doctors that were traveling throughout the city going from bar to bar,” Melbourne police representative Jill Fredricksen said.

Authorities said Adamcik was in possession of a large burrito and drugs.

Where’d he keep the burrito?

Smoking Gun has more.

(via Boing Boing)

The current Times-Dispatch.com website:

The Beta inRich.com site which the TD is moving to:

Personally, I dig the new design, though that may be more from how much I dislike the current design than anything else. While the new site is a bit more organized, it still doesn’t seem to have anything to anchor my eyes. The photo in the center starts to grab me but then there are arrows just to the left of them so my eyes wander there thinking it’s related. But that may just be me. Overall, it’s certainly a step up from the current look.

Vacant Richmond is a new site put together by PharrOut and Farrell IT that shows you vacant properties in Richmond based off of the city’s own list. Punch in an address, click search and you can see vacant properties near by as well as City Council contacts and who owns the property.

Don over at Save Richmond has a press release of good information about the site.

RVABlogs has set up a way to donate to the Jarrett Lee Lane Memorial Fund through the interwebs:

Jarret Lee Lane was one of the thirty-three Virginia Tech students killed on April 16th 2007. Jarret was Alicia’s (Alicia’s Pilgrimage) brother and Daniel’s (Daniel’s Pilgrimage) brother-in-law. Both are founding members of RVABlogs. Show your support to Alica, Daniel, Virginia, and the RVABlogs community by donating now.

Learn more about Jarrett and the Fund here.

The request to study whether special ordinances should be required for tattoo shops in Richmond has been struck down.

My apologies for the lack of a Carnival over the last couple of weeks. When there is no volunteer to host I typically will try and pick up the duty but school’s got me busy and looks to continue the trend for at least the next couple of weeks. I will be able to host again by mid-May but if anyone would like to host an upcoming RVA Blog Carnival, please shoot me an e-mail and I’ll get you on the list. Thanks for y’all’s patience on this.

You can check out all the past carnivals here.

I’m one of those people who has sites all over the place for assorted purposes. Some are used regularly, others are forgotten, but at one time or another I’ve probably joined most of the big sites for at least a little while.

Knowing that a good number of you all out there on the Internets are members of assorted sites and like to find other people on those sites, I’m gonna share with the world a list of places you can find me on the web. Social networking at its finest.

MySpace
http://www.myspace.com/sloopyster - I use this mainly to keep in touch with friends new and old who can’t find me through other means. A lot of old high school folks are on here as well as family. I don’t use it as much as I used to.

http://www.myspace.com/kenneyboy - this is my musical side. It’s a little underwhelming, but it’s a presence.

Facebook
http://vcu.facebook.com/profile.php?id=25508638 - I just keep this around to keep in touch with folks at the radio station and school in general. I’ve found myself visiting it more and more but I just haven’t been hooked like so many others.

LiveJournal
http://www.livejournal.com/lifeofjason - The personal supplement to J’s Notes, really. Nothing too spectacular, but it’s the way I keep in touch with my internet based friends.

LastFM
http://www.last.fm/user/jasonkenney/ - What I was listening to last time I was hooked up to the internet while listening to muzak.

Writing
http://www.writerscafe.org/profile/kenneyjs/ - This is a neat little site where you can read and share stories and have folks review and rate and all that jazz. Sort of a MySpace for writin’. I haven’t written anything worth posting as of late, but there’s stuff to read there if you’re bored.

http://ficlets.com/authors/kenneyboy - Ficlets is another writing site but it works with smaller stories and promotes a round-robin type of storytelling. You toss up a small story and others can write sequels or prequels to it. Or you can write off of someone else’s work. And so on. I hit this once in a while, whenever I feel inspired but don’t have the drive for a full story.

Non-Social Networking (not that it’s anti-social)
Artifice Comics - What can I say, I’m a dork. And as a dork I write comic based fiction. Yes. Superhero stories. In particular one called Bush43 about a guy wearing a George W. Bush mask kicking bad guys in the jimmy in Austrailia. The series as it is is done now but I might revisit the idea in the very near future.

WVCW.org - VCU’s independent student radio station. I’m the General Manager and also host a show with Bryan on Wednesday nights at 8. We haven’t named the show yet. Despite being on the air for three weeks now. Ah well.

So if you happen to be a member of any of these sites (or join up after seeing me there), shoot me a friend/buddy/whatevertheycallit request and you can be part of the ever expanding Network Of J~. Granted, the last two sites you can’t “join” or anything, but check there they are if you’re interested. See ya around the web.

The Missouri Review blog has a post up about why current event submissions usually don’t make the cut for the journal. One of Evelyn Somers’s points:

There’s a point at which events, whether personal or public, enter what one might call “the writer’s domain.” That point doesn’t come instantly. Wordsworth said something like this when he spoke of “emotion recollected in tranquility,” and it’s a commonplace that to write about an experience that’s too fresh can be disastrous because you lack the perspective/wisdom/whatever-you-want-to-call-it that sheds the necessary illumination on that experience. But when it comes to the public story, the headliner, there’s more to it. The hubbub has to die down first. We have to forget what the media told us. Historic tragedies can’t exactly become archetypes in the Jungian sense, but when they are stored in public memory for a while, they become more useful to the writer as fresh contexts that have lost most of the superficial silly-string originally clinging to them. This makes sense when one thinks about the great works of literature that address events in history. Typically they are written well after the fact, and they’re not in any way concerned with reporting or making sense. Often they manage to transcend even the far-reaching consequences of the largest events: wars, plagues and other tragedies that cause death on mass scales.

h/t Shelly Powers

Larry Sanger, co founder of Wikipedia and creator of Citizendem, on the “Daily Me” and Philosopher Kings:

But we are now confronting a new politics of knowledge, with the rise of the Internet and particularly of the collaborative Web—the Blogosphere, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, and in short every website and type of aggregation that invites all comers to offer their knowledge and their opinions, and to rate content, products, places, and people. It is particularly the aggregation of public opinion that instituted this new politics of knowledge. In the 90s, lots of people posted essays on their personal home pages, put up fan websites, and otherwise “broadcasted themselves.” But what might have been merely vain and silly a decade ago is now, thanks to aggregation of various sorts, a contribution to an online mass movement. The collected content and ratings resulting from our individual efforts give us a sort of collective authority that we did not have ten years ago.

…

As it turns out, our many Web 2.0 revolutionaries have been so thoroughly seized with the successes of strong collaboration that they are resistant to recognizing some hard truths. As wonderful as it might be that the hegemony of professionals over knowledge is lessening, there is a downside: our grasp of and respect for reliable information suffers. With the rejection of professionalism has come a widespread rejection of expertise—of the proper role in society of people who make it their life’s work to know stuff. This, I maintain, is not a positive development; but it is also not a necessary one. We can imagine a Web 2.0 with experts. We can imagine an Internet that is still egalitarian, but which is more open and welcoming to specialists. The new politics of knowledge that I advocate would place experts at the head of the table, but—unlike the old order—gives the general public a place at the table as well.

An interesting read. Mainly applicable to encyclopedia or reference sites, such as Wikipedia and Citizendem and a bit too much reliance on people’s willingness to listen to the “experts”. Anyone willing to sign onto such ideas tends to already follow them. Not that creating a system like this is flawed, it would allow a viable and reliable source to exist for those who do not pay attention and currently find things like Wikipedia or blogs to be the best source for information (no matter how flawed they may be).