Category: Internet

A quick tour round the block:

• “CSS is like Legos.” — Tom Harpel at Tandoku, about the design of Subtraction.com. The title of Tom’s piece is an hommage to Bob Dylan’s last album, Love and Theft, on which the master has subsequently been proved to appropriate lyrics from an obscure Japanese novelist. Tandoku is Japanese for “independence.”
• “every day 14 kids are killed, 81% from guns. … but there you have the vice president holding his phallic symbol of power and protection and defense and safety. three incredibly handsome men checking out that nice long hard shaft. whoops a kid just died. in ninety minutes another one will go. dont let it get you down though, fellas, odds are it was a brown kid.” — Tony Pierce’s Busblog.
• “The internet doesn’t touch people who decide in the voting booth how to vote. The internet doesn’t touch a whole lot of people. But we won the activist universe.” — Matt Gross, ex-blogger in chief for Howard Dean, speaking on Presidential Blogging during BloggerCon II: Electric Blogaloo (thanks to Tom at TheMediaDrop for the summary).
• “I’m in the refrigerator. — I’m in the ice box. — They’ve got me put away and they’ll pull me out like a carton of milk when they need me, and then put me back.” — Secretary of State Colin Powell, as quoted by Bob Woodward in a 2002 60 Minutes interview about his book on the first 100 days after 9/11, Bush at War.
• “I prefer not to develop back problems while reading, so I’m waiting for the paperback.” — self professed Bookslut Jessa Crispin on the new Neal Stephenson book, perhaps ironically called Confusion.
• “I didn’t get into this to make money.” — perhaps unnecessary quotation from Ned Batchelder in the New York Times, on how making about $2 a day in Google AdWords from his blog isn’t leading him to quit his day job any time soon.

I was reading Tim Bednar of e-church’s paper on blogging and religion, “We Know More Than Our Pastors,” (highly recommended, btw), when I ran into this quotation. I call it out since I think it resonates with what I fumblingly tried to say yesterday. If you are looking at the PDF draft of the paper, the quote is on page 10 (emphasis and hyperlinks added):

Steve Collins explains that his blog is “not spiritual, except that everything human is.” Andrew Careaga reinforces this idea; “I try to consider most of the conscious activities as spiritual activities, even if not exactly religious.”

This passion to live incarnationally unites these bloggers. Jordon Cooper writes about his blog and describes what I mean:

Many of the sites 20,000 monthly visitors can’t seem to get their head around how a site that has so much about postmodern thought and the church can also have links to the Calgary Flames and the Saskatchewan Roughriders […] I started to get e-mail back saying, “wait a minute, it is knowing about you that gives the site some character and credibility.” […] People went on to say that without the personal stuff, the site just became a collection of links posted by someone they don’t know. My stories about my life gave it some context and something to judge it by for good or bad.

This holistic engagement between author and audience is what makes blogging unique and compelling. In this respect, these “Christian bloggers” are no different than all the other opinionated bloggers except that they intentionally bring their faith in Christ to bare [sic] on everything that interests them: hockey, Microsoft, George W. Bush, Jennifer Lopez or Strongbad.

Without the personal stuff, this site is a collection of links posted by someone they don’t know. I don’t know if anyone has articulated it this way before, but I think it points to something important that I’ve discussed before: personal voice. Specifically, personal voice isn’t just a defining characteristic of blogging, it’s the whole value proposition.

This weekend is the second BloggerCon. Unfortunately, no such fortunate confluence of events as last time will allow me to attend. It’s a shame; between no paid panelists, lots of interesting discussion groups including one on religion and blogs, and a really good group of attendees, it sounds like it will be a lot of fun. Congrats to Dave and the gang on putting on another show; I look forward to following the proceedings from here. I hope someone will archive the IRC backchannel; last time that was one of the most interesting parts of the proceedings.

Oh, and if I’m the only one to reference my favorite movie sequel title, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, in conjunction with BloggerCon II, I will be sorely disappointed. Or relieved. Or something. (Of course, that film DID feature both Ice-T and Martika, so it couldn’t have been ALL bad, right?)

Well, the Script-dotting (q.v.) of my reaction to Bush’s press conference seems to be slowing down. Thanks to all the readers who participated in what must be the most spirited discussion ever on this blog yesterday. Special thanks to Gary Robinson, who kept the tone of the discussion high and brought forward some interesting points.

At some points during the discussion yesterday, I had one of those “oh no” moments. I normally don’t worry about things I write on this blog, but at one point I began to sweat a little. I now know co-workers, old friends from high school, and others who read my blog, in addition to my RSS subscribers and all the Google visitors. Am I making a mistake by putting my political views out there? Maybe.

But I’ve had my political views out on this site almost since it began, certainly since 9/11. It’s not possible to put the genie back in the bottle.

I think this is one of those deep-breath moments that must come to every blogger. To really blog, unless you blog exclusively for work (or everything you write on your blog is untrue), you have to put it out there. Otherwise it’s just lists of links or news about gardening. But even with lists of links, you’re subject to having people guess your politics. In these echo chambers, one’s choice to link to Oliver Willis or Joshua Micah Marshall (or Greg Greene) instead of Instapundit or LittleGreenFootballs says a lot about who you read and who you think is worth talking about. But if one is to add any value to a blog it has to have your voice in it.

I talked about this with Esta some time ago. She’s now blogged her concern about her blog’s effect on her employability as a minister. So I’ll present my side of the conversation. One: your blog shows, if nothing else, that you can think and write. Really well. Two: your blog shows that you are a real person with real experience. I think that knowing about an individual’s struggles with the Black Dog, or about their difficult life decisions, makes one’s appreciation of their work that much richer. Particularly if the job they are going into is one where empathy is a very large part of the job.

So that’s good for Esta. I would argue that being as open as possible about things that matter is good for all of us. If nothing else, it can get you into conversations with a CEO you might never otherwise meet.

BoingBoing added Technorati support to their template, enabling site visitors to click a link and see all the other weblogs that are commenting on that particular item. Dave Sifry at Technorati explains how anyone with a Movable Type weblog can do the same.

It’s pretty simple to do. The URL at which the Technorati Cosmos for a particular post lives is a static construction with the permalink of the item at the end, like http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&sub=mtcosmos&url=permalink. The problem for Manila is that the only way I can get the permalink of the post is through the permalink macro, which takes no arguments and always spits out a linked graphic.

UserLand, if you’re listening, I’d like a macro that would just return the permalink URL so I could pass it into other things like the Technorati macro.

A round up of odd April Fools’ gags across the Net:

• The first annual March for Web Standards hits Washington, DC today. Hide those nested tables and non-validating pages, everyone!
• The EFF is merging with the Department of Justice and spoiling for a fight with the ACLU. Place yer bets.
• Read Google’s S-1 filing with the SEC yet? I bet Larry and Sergey were surprised that that lava lamp wholesaler got as good a deal as he did.
• Via Pho, a new Internet RFC (3751), the Omniscience Protocol will help copyright holders determine when computer users have committed an illegal activity with their properties (see also Slashdot).
• The BBC says that a Cold War era nuclear landmine was to be filled with chickens to regulate its temperature.

People are getting arrested for using power outlets in public locations like train stations and businesses to charge their laptops. The Register calls it power rustling. Next up: for-pay electrical outlets in airports? I think it’s already being done but I can’t find the reference on my blog.

Wait! I know! What we need is an elaborate system of chalking based on hobo signs that could be used to indicate the presence of open, unmonitored electrical outlets.

• Boston Globe: Job Losses Mount in Bay State. The paper points out that while the jobless rate dropped to 5.3% last month in Massachusetts, much of that was due to people not looking any more. For the record, the jobless rate in Washington State is 6.1%.
• Clancy Ratliff: Dude, who put a screw in YOUR spring roll? How not to handle a food tainting issue.
• Tom Harpel: Visualize Your Home Directory. Disk Inventory X is a hard disk space visualizer using treemaps, the same visualization technology used by Microsoft Research’s maps of Usenet.
• Bryan Strawser: The Trouble with the Freedom Trail. Pointer to Boston Globe article about how to move the Freedom Trail away from monuments and to where the action actually happened.
• Zork over AIM (via MeFi). “You are in a maze of twisty little emoticons, all alike.” What the MeFi article doesn’t say is you can also play Hitchhiker’s Guide, Deadline, Wishbringer, or Planetfall, among others.

The New York Times on Rauschenberg’s latest exhibition. I first saw his work in an exhibition in the National Gallery in 1990—a retrospective of the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange works. I still have a print of Malaysian Flower Cave, though it’s somewhat dented from falling off dorm room walls.

I spoke too soon yesterday; my cold has now migrated back up into my sinuses with a vengeance. Bear that in mind as you read this sad abbreviated list of links with minimal commentary and have mercy.

• If you’ve a date in Paris, she’ll be waiting in … Nanterre?
• Igino Marini has done digital revivals of some of the Fell types (the oldest surviving type punches in England), including a really killer Great Primer set. For free download. (thanks AKMA)
• Kids! Build your own official NASA paper space exploration fleet! Scissors and glue not included. (thanks Boing Boing)
• Don’t like the Supreme Court? Legislate them into irrelevancy by introducing a bill to allow Congress to override their rulings. Balance of powers be damned, and surprised no one thought of this before. (thanks Metafilter)

Am I the only one who thought about this line from the first Star Wars movie when the announcement came out about the tenth planet (or planetoid, as the case may be)?

Of course, I also can’t pass up a chance to point out other battle stations, in this case made of Legos. Here’s the second Death Star as a full size sculpture, and over seventy pictures of an incredibly detailed minifig-scale multi-level diorama of all the scenes that took place in the first Death Star. All I can say is, I thought I was obsessive, but I was wrong.

The Register points out it’s been 10 years since what is generally considered the first-ever unsolicited commercial electronic communication, also known as spam. It was ten years ago on Friday that arch-fiends (and US law firm) Canter and Siegel cross-posted to over a hundred newsgroups offering a chance to participate in the Green Card lottery.

Yes, the first spam was on Usenet, not email. I remember it well. It raised such a stink across almost all the groups I was reading that one could read nothing else for days. I sometimes think that this spam, coming less than a year after the AOL floodgates opened dumping thousands of new users onto Usenet who showed neither inclination nor capability to learn the culture, was the penultimate hammer blow that sealed the end of the golden age of Usenet. (The final blow, of course, was the emergence of the Web, which technically started in 1993 with the release of Mosaic.

Around the block:

• Esta writes about the Baptist Church protesting the Laramie Project and seeks constructive ways of providing opposing images of what Christianity is all about.
• Craig emailed me about a study of RSS statistics in progress over at All Things Distributed. So far they are reviewing data from their own logs, which is a little suspect as far as their market share study (with only 141 unique agents represented) goes. More interesting is the study of polling frequencies; looks like a lot of people leave the frequencies at their defaults.
• Dave points out that Scott Young, UserLand’s new CEO, is now keeping a weblog to discuss the company’s direction.
• Looks like Tara and Matt might be moving out of the neighborhood. Can’t really blame them; I don’t know when “bang for the buck” has applied to any part of Kirkland, except perhaps when talking about Very Large Bucks Indeed.
• Dave Hyatt reports on updates to WebCore, the heart of Safari and other web apps from Apple.
• Oliver Willis points out the hypocrisy of those who argue that 9/11 justifies all the president’s misdeeds, then turn around and slam the victims’ families when they protest the president’s policies. Quoth a Lt. Smash (there’s a moniker crying out “I am the voice of reason!”): “Do these ladies get a free pass because they’re widows? How long does that free pass last?” (scroll down into the comments)
• ALA: Zebra Tables: CSS liberated tables from the burden of being design frameworks; now it helps them display tabular information better.

The next time someone asks you what blogs are good for, tell them, “Well, according to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, they kept the heat on Trent Lott for his racist tribute to Strom Thurmond and forced Lott’s resignation as speaker of the House.” Read the case study (PDF) here; it may be the most impressive write-up on the power of weblogs that I’ve seen yet. (Courtesy Scripting News; and of course Dave’s fingerprints are all over this case.)