I will be helping a friend move from Mac OS 9, where she relied upon a flavor of Netscape as her email client of choice. So some info on getting that data out will be helpful, I imagine.

to Mozilla 1.0 from N4.x.

Exporting the addressbook from N4.x.

Export from N.x to Outlook/OE.

Export from Yahoo to Mozilla, re-export to Address Book.

OE to AdBk.

Or I might consider trying an Apple-provided import script that supports multiple formats, including Palm, OE, Eudora, and Claris Emailer. Hm… maybe I should finally try to merge my Palm contacts with my woolly, overgrown thornbush of a Eudora address book.

Hmph. It only picked up 24 contacts, out of several hundred. Must not have known where to look.

So here’s an ancillary question – can you get email archives out of Netscape?

Certain mummies may be chemically transformed into adipocere, or ‘grave wax’. (This links to a pretty comprehensive site on the subject which includes some very, very grisly photos, so buckle your seatbelt. Probably NSFW.)

When a body is subject to wet conditions for a period of time, it can transform into a kind of soap.

When I was a child, the Smithsonian Institution displayed, among countless other human bodies in the various display halls, the body of The Soap Man, the butter-colored corpse of a victim of a Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic from the late 1700s, William von Ellenbogen.

Sadly, in my opinion, the display of human corpses has become generally frowned upon in the context of institutions of higher learning, and with some exceptions, one by one the skulls and femurs have moved into storage.

The imeptus for this change was the passage of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act. Unsurprisingly, the great majority of the human remains on display in museums across this great nation of ours were once inhabited by members of Native American culture.

The wide range of Indian remains on display at the Smithsonian and elsewhere reflected the interest in physical anthropology that dominated the developing discipline between 1875 and the beginning of the First World War. In a recent New Yorker piece on the great German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, this set of interests and the agenda – that of seeking to prove or disprove racial superiority and purity, frequently via braincase measurements – was detailed at length. The article in question is The Measure of America by Claudia Roth Pierpont, and appeared in the March 8, 2004 issue The New Yorker. For some reason, I found the article here, in what appears to be a stray Lexis-Nexis feed.

The approriate decision to remove the Amerindian remains appears to have prompted a reconsideration of the educational purpose of displaying soap mummies.

The accidental educational message of some of the displayed material is quite clear. Chicago’s human body slices (linked above) are visibly drawn from persons of African-American heritage, and the implication can’t have been lost on the generations of African-American teens that have poured through that city’s Museum of Science and Industry since the slices were first installed.

Yet the most important educational message that the soap man taught me as a child was that science could be spooky and entertaining and a source of mystery and thrills. The subtext to this message was a salutary hostility to superstition. The Soap Man was not an imperialist trophy or statement of racial inequity; he was a scientific curiosity, whose supposed educational message (fat becomes soap when leached with certain chemicals) was greatly overshadowed by his entertainment value and consequent demystification of death and corpses. I worry a bit, I guess, about the abandonment of the field to vernacular exhibitors and well-financed ghouls.

A footnote for Seattle readers:

One of Boas’ most important collecting partners in his trips to the Northwest to build his collections for the NYC-based American Museum of Natural History was the store that today displays Sylvester and Sylvia, our own beloved Curiosity Shop. Boas also worked for Chicago’s Field Museum, to a lesser extent. The store helped with all of the US-based anthropological collecting expeditions to the Northwest at the turn of the century, and in effect, when you stand in that crowded little corner of the pier and look up into the welter of century-old curios hanging from the rafters, you’re looking through time into part of the world that Sylvester and Sylvia inhabited.

On March 3, 2003, Mr. Lope explored some of the parameters of comment spam. I refrain from crosslinking to his linked sites for obvious reasons.

And with that, Danelope Week draws to a close. Thanks a lot for coming and stay tuned for occasional updates.

The excercise proved fruitful in ways I was not wholly expecting. The idea of picking one person’s weblog and randomly mining it for synchronistic links echoing your own editorial topic for the day over a period of time is, as far as I can tell, original to Danelope Week. I think it would be fascinating to see others do this.

I beleive the full and appropriate name for this practice is obvious: I hereby dub it Seven Link Boots, after the famous boots of myth and legend.

TypeKey: Six Apart’s answer to comment spam. A centralized ID system for weblog commenting.

This should help to resolve comment spam. Will it be widely adopted? There are reasons to wonder.

Google/Blogger, for example, may already have some sort of commenting system under development that is resistant to comment spam. Furthermore, if TypeKey is wholly proprietary (and given the sound, business-oriented development decisions that have come out of Six Apart lately, I can’t think of why it would be open) Bloogle may actually have a reason to design against TypeKey.

You see, TypeKey has the potential to dramatically increase the market value of the company Six Apart. That value increase would rest upon two facts, inherent in any system such as TypeKey.

One: as in TypePad, the user-base for the application necessarily provides valuable personally identifiable information to Six Apart. That information, plus the direct relationship to the user it represents, is marketing gold, and translates directly into a higher valuation for the company.

Two: I believe that the long-term solution to the knot of regulatory and business problems surrounding ‘legitimate’ spam – commercial and marketing emails that you actually have given permission to receive – is to centralize the consumer information, and for the advertising entities to provide incentives to the user to create ever-more elaborate profiles. The user could then, in theory, set, edit, and change levels of permission to receive the spam in exchange for incentives – free magazine subscriptions, downloadable sotware (sic!), DVDs, that sort of thing. The system should also provide auditability of marketing campaigns directed at the user – a record of the user’s legitimate spam.

Managed correctly, the system would be deeply attractive to users. By this, I mean managed for the benefit of the user base rather than for the advertisers, something which will be no mean feat. A primary requirement will be keeping the UI free of advertising clutter; communicating that idea to the geniuses who came up with the flashing, blinking ad banner and the audio-enabled java display ad will cost some sad sack their sanity. Interestingly, both Glogger and Six Apart have clearly demonstrated that user focus is a core component of their business practice and software development discipline.

Because weblog commenters are likely to be a highly desirable slice of the online audience – ‘influencers’ in marketing parlance – TypeKey represents a nearly-ideal deployment environment for such a system.

I have no idea, of course, if that’s what’s being considered. But the pieces are in place. I think this development and the simple possibility that it could lead to places beyond the proximate driver of weblog commenting and comments spam is very intriguing.

So why do I say that Bloggle might wish to design against TypeKey? Well, since user-base numbers are a crucial metric in determining the relative success of an application, and because this extends Six Apart’s potential registered-user base beyond both TypePad and MT’s user base into a population that both includes and exceeds the total set of blog-using people in the world, Googer will be under pressure to respond. The typical American software company business response would be to circle the wagons and make life hard for the competitor. By now, though, I think we all know that Google is not a typical American software company.

The real question is, will they become one after the IPO?