Standard Deviance had a good 6 month run with Blogger on Blogspot, but it's time to move on to greener pastures. The url for the new-and-improved Standard Deviance is
http://www.standard-deviance.com
and the new RSS feed is
http://www.standard-deviance.com/feed/rss/.

You should be redirected right ... about ...now.

Standard Deviance is on holiday today in a land where the internet is slow and the air is clean. Can you beleive such places still exist?

Be back tomorrow. See you then.

There were several blog stories out there in the media today, and each and every one of them has amusing errors. ClickZ news had a report on Gawker today with the headline "Rumor: Gawker to Bow Travel, Gaming Blogs". ClickZ news cited Steve Rubel as the source of the inside information saying "Denton's plan was initially reported by public relations exec Steve Rubel in his own blog, Micropersuasion." Hmm. While we haven't heard anything about the shocking news that Nick Denton is going to complete the trifecta of porn, gadgets, and video games with a video game blog, we do recall hearing about this travel blog some time ago, certainly before Rubel "initially" posted the information yesterday. Hmm. Where could it be?

As seen on NickDenton.org November 19, 2003:

I'm scouting for editorial talent. Particularly people who can write wittily about travel and furniture. If you have a blog on either subject, or know of a good writer, email me.

Thanks ClickZ for breaking that story.

Additionally CBS Marketwatch had a story on blogging, the cottage industry. Obviously their fact/spell checker was on vacation this week:

Software makers are tapping into the growth, including Google, which is set to go public later this year. The search giant bought Eblogger two years ago. Other popular blog software makers include Livejournal.com and Moveabletype.com.

Google bought Blogger two years ago, not eblogger and it's spelled MovableType.org not MoveableType.com. Again, we hate to burst the eager journalists bubble, but perhaps Marketwatch should research their topic before publishing an article. Just an idea.

Following the handover of Iraq this week, the Iraq embassy in Washington D.C. raised its flag for the first time since 1990. However discord remained when the Iraqi diplomats raised the traditional Iraq flag instead of the new flag chosen by the Coalition Provisional Authority. The Iraqi people have not warmed to the new flag. How odd. I wonder why.

Maybe because...
It was selected by the US.
Iraqi people have no say in it.
The designer, although Iraqi, lives in Britain.
All the other Arab league flags include black and red except Djibouti and Somalia.
It bears no resemblance to the old flag.
It looks a lot like this:


Nah, they raised the old flag because they're difficult. Don't they want democracy?!?


Iraqi Flag Raised Over Washington Embassy [AP]
Flap over new Iraq flag [AP]
New Iraq flag: Designer speaks out [CNN]

Our friends over at New Yorkish have been following the ever-extending empire of Gothamist King and Queen Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung. So far Gothamist has launched Chicagoist, and have announced plans for LAist. New Yorkish discovered that Jake has registered more -ist domain names, including Bostonist and DCist. After reading New Yorkish's findings, we decided to do some investigative journalism (or cyberstalking) of our own. We searched the -ist domain names for the 50 largest US cities and found that in addition to -ist sites listed above, Jake has registered Denverist, Phillyist, and SFist. We also searched select international cities and found Torontoist and HongKongist. The Dobkin Empire has yet to register Tokyoist, and Londonist is taken by someone else.

We here at Standard Deviance have been mulling it over and we've decided we need to start our own empire of niche blogs. We've chosen a topic we have a lot of experience in: Mocking Nano Publishers. We're rolling out Calacanisist next month and following that we'll launch Dentonist, with Dobkinist coming out in 2005.