Well, the migration seems to have been completed, though some of the spam seems to be resisting the powers of MT-Blacklist. It could be a local server issue, a complication arising from the import/export process, or something else entirely.
Thanks to the amazing Michelle Chua for the punched-up layout (and I must acknowledge I have mangled her original vision).
An excerpt from Bruce Sterling’s speech at SIGGRAPH 2004: “When Blobjects Rule the Earth”…
We are filling the atmosphere, and the seas, and the surface of the planet, and our own bodies, with our industrial emissions and our dead junk. In a world with 6.3 billion people, trending toward 10 billion, there is no “Away” left in which we can throw our dead objects. Our material culture is not sustainable. Its resources are not renewable. We cannot turn our entire planet’s crust into obsolete objects. We need to locate valuable objects that are dead, and fold them back into the product stream. In order to do this, we need to know where they are, and what happened to them. We need to document the life cycles of objects. We need to know where to take them when they are defunct.
In practice, this is going to mean tagging and historicizing everything. Once we tag many things, we will find that there is no good place to stop tagging.
Can’t argue with the diagnosis, but the prescription fills me with a dread borne of recent professional experience.
Via randomWalks.
I couldn’t help but wince when I read Alan’s recent post on comment-free weblogs…
I understand fully the bloggers who have dealt a blow by spam. I have too dealt with the scourge of blog spam, but rather than quitting and cutting of others, I researched, experimented, and found solutions to the problem.
It is an excuse that does not wash, and it is giving in to spammers.
But I see it more problematic- if you publish a weblog without a comment feature, you are using software just for cranking out web pages, and you might was well be using FrontPage, DreamWeaver, or GeoCities for that matter because it is just web content.
[Warning: defensive self-justification ahead]
I winced because I removed the comments field from this weblog last week. The culmination of a series of a events triggered by my host’s quite reasonable decision to cease support of the service. Without the protection of the MT-Blacklist shield, a plague of spam-locusts had been feeding ravenously on this space. I could live with the intrusion of the online pharmacies and Asian ISP’s, but the spam started mingling with my own words in ways that did not strike me as delightful serendipity.
When I looked at my site statistics and realized that a significant portion my readership was looking for “how-to
An excerpt from Bruce Sterling’s speech at SIGGRAPH 2004: “When Blobjects Rule the Earth”…
We are filling the atmosphere, and the seas, and the surface of the planet, and our own bodies, with our industrial emissions and our dead junk. In a world with 6.3 billion people, trending toward 10 billion, there is no “Away” left in which we can throw our dead objects. Our material culture is not sustainable. Its resources are not renewable. We cannot turn our entire planet’s crust into obsolete objects. We need to locate valuable objects that are dead, and fold them back into the product stream. In order to do this, we need to know where they are, and what happened to them. We need to document the life cycles of objects. We need to know where to take them when they are defunct.
In practice, this is going to mean tagging and historicizing everything. Once we tag many things, we will find that there is no good place to stop tagging.
Can’t argue with the diagnosis, but the prescription fills me with a dread borne of recent professional experience.
Via randomWalks.
I couldn’t help but wince when I read Alan’s recent post on comment-free weblogs…
I understand fully the bloggers who have dealt a blow by spam. I have too dealt with the scourge of blog spam, but rather than quitting and cutting of others, I researched, experimented, and found solutions to the problem.
It is an excuse that does not wash, and it is giving in to spammers.
But I see it more problematic- if you publish a weblog without a comment feature, you are using software just for cranking out web pages, and you might was well be using FrontPage, DreamWeaver, or GeoCities for that matter because it is just web content.
[Warning: defensive self-justification ahead]
I winced because I removed the comments field from this weblog last week. The culmination of a series of a events triggered by my host’s quite reasonable decision to cease support of the service. Without the protection of the MT-Blacklist shield, a plague of spam-locusts had been feeding ravenously on this space. I could live with the intrusion of the online pharmacies and Asian ISP’s, but the spam started mingling with my own words in ways that did not strike me as delightful serendipity.
When I looked at my site statistics and realized that a significant portion my readership was looking for “how-to
I posted a short rant the other day about a certain Dr. McPhail who seems to be on a one-man campaign to diminish the standing of weblogs at the Democratic Convention in Boston. A fun update on this wise man’s efforts from Jay Rosen:
BOSTON, July 29: Around 4 pm on Monday of convention week, when I finally got myself equipped and online, I opened my e-mail and found this note sent to me by professor Thomas L. McPhail of the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Jay: Do you tell your j students that they are wasting their time getting a j degree, rather they should just run out and become bloogers and pretend journalists with no commitment to ethics, laws, fairness etc. Tom McPhail ps how are the bloogers at the DNC? I am afraid that in the charge to get the scoop of the conference, that they may send out unedited or unchecked rumours as if it/they were fact. Thanks
That’s not the kind of note you edit or change in any way, and I haven’t touched it.
With gatekeepers like this, no wonder mainstream journalism is so intellectually challenging and erudite. Rosen later interviews Washington Post political reporter Thomas B. Edsall on the impact of weblogs on coverage. His own experienced take is considerably more nuanced:
We in journalism– there’s an orthodoxy to our thinking. You can come up with an idea and you know it’s sort of verbotten, or they’re gonna say, “oh, that’s only worth ten inches,” and they’re gonna put you inside the paper. It’s not worth the fight.
The blogs can sort of break the ice and make it clear that there is something pretty strange or pretty unique or pretty interesting or pretty awful about something that, given our way of looking at things– which tends to be very straight line: is it illegal, is it this, will somebody criticize it? That kind of stuff.
They have the potential and actually do open a lot of doors. There’s a lot of junk, but there’s an awful lot of good stuff too.
There’s been a fair bit of flapping about the credentialing of about thirty webloggers for this year’s Democratic Convention (a smaller number will likely be at the GOP shindig). I liked David Weinberger’s early take:
This event marks the day that blogging became something else. Exactly what isn’t clear yet, and the culture clash is resulting in public functions that, because there is no single culture of blogging, are Dostoyevskian in their awkwardness.
Take the breakfast the DNC threw for us bloggers. We were taken into a function room in the Back Bay Hilton with a breakfast spread and tables with actual table cloths. Behind us, separated by a few steps, were about 30 members of the Real Media. No scrambled eggs or tables for them. Nope, this was our damn breakfast.
The organizers finally got us all seated
I apologize to the point of mortification for the quiet in this space. My latest excuse is the troubling meltdown of my laptop — right the now the sucker is comatose. I thought I had backed up my email, but the recovered files are incomplete… my iCal files are inaccessible — hope I haven’t stood anybody up for a meeting — and I have done a poor job of tracking things like URLs and passwords for the million or so systems I access.
On a borrowed machine for now, so everything is taking twice as long as it should. My morale is deteriorating rapidly.
As you may have guessed, this weblogger has been on holidays. I’ll be away from ready Internet access until July 12 — and at that point will begin wading through the onslaught of unanswered queries and commands that have already begun piling up in my inbox.
And as detailed below, there’s a chance this site may disappear entirely in the interim, but obviously that’s my problem, not yours.
The full “Small Pieces” review will have to wait. The short version: fun, fun, fun — and thanks to all who participated.
June 17th is here, which means that our presentation for the NMC 2004 Summer Conference, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is only hours away from launch.
I don’t want to spend too much time typing away during other people’s presentations, so suffice it to say we’d love it if you swung by at 4:15 PST… whether to comment on one of the weblogs, post to the wiki, or via an instant messenger (instructions are available on the site).
A note on the wiki: the Usemod software does not handle simultaneous authors particularly well. During the live session (June 17, 4:15 -5:30 PST) we suggest (and plead) that contributors author their text in a separate application (Word, text editor, email client) and then copy-and-paste it in. This will streamline the entry process and preserve your work. You also might consider creating your own wiki space for the event (we will incorporate it into the event page). To learn how to start your own page, see CreatePage, and for simple design tips see WikiOnWiki/WikiBasics.
