Category: Internet

Moxie announced she was taking a blog hiatus on March 6. Since then, she has posted eight times, six of them with new material. Yesterday, she announced (with the ninth post) that she was back for good. Which, together with Tin Man’s return, only goes to show you can’t keep a good blogger down. Thank goodness. We were all going into go-go boot withdrawal.

Doc Searls: “Liberalism may not be absent from the blogging world, but it’s certainly impotent.” He’s talking about peaceblogging, not liberal blogs in general. I wonder how he missed Tom Tomorrow? It’s not as though he’s low profile.

I could recommend a few other key liberal blogs, and so could my friend Greg, who should certainly resent the blanket description of his blog as “impotent.” Go get ’em, Greg.

Looks like another blog research project. Masters student at University of Buffalo in Communication. Results will be posted here.

There’s another Jarrett who blogs who is hosted by my ISP, Weblogger. Finding Jarrett Interactive Design was a bit like finding I had a doppelgänger, and one who shares many of my sentiments about the coming war.

Oh, and his name is Jim.

Yep, Jim and Tim. My only consolation is I don’t think he’s a relative.

I guess I wasn’t the only one to notice how popular Trogdor is. From his creators: Trogdor the arcade game! Stomp ten peasants to achieve “burnination”! Watch out for the sword wielding knights!!!

Dare Obasanjo: “I really need to stop futzing around with XML and go back to school to work on getting an MBA so I can actually get paid to have these conversations with myself.”

Let me know how that works out, Dare. Or if you have recommendations for how to make it work. I know a lot of MBAs (including myself) who would love to know. 🙂

Wil Wheaton points to a survey of bloggers being conducted as part of a thesis investigation at Georgetown University. It appears to be a fairly well thought out survey with a good variety of demographic and behavioral questions about blogging.

Though I have a few criticisms of the survey (the caps on the choices numbers of daily and weekly visitors are really low, and the sample she’ll get will be nowhere near random), I still think that research on blogs is worthwhile and encourage you to visit the survey.

Creative Commons discusses adding a potential new commons license that explicitly grants sampling rights. Interesting idea, and they quote Don Joyce of Negativland: “[A sampling option would] stop legally suppressing it and start culturally encouraging it — because it’s here to stay.”

While I respect Mr. Joyce’s work, I’d like to hear from other musicians on this one. I can’t help but think that putting a license that grants blanket rights to sample might be opening the door for free riders. An artist like Negativland sampling something is one thing: someone pulling a P. Diddy and creating a new song that practically clones the original is something else, and I’d want to be sure that I was protected against that by default.

Besides, if someone creates a new hit song whose hook, chorus, or other major melodic element is wholly derivative of my performance, I’d want recompense in the form of royalties. The draft broadly proposed at Creative Commons doesn’t appear to allow for that option.

New high water mark at Weblogs.com today. The rate of growth of the blogosphere diameter is now up to more than three blogs a day. Data and updated graphics here.

…that not all hiatuses are permanent. Moxie posted a set of Homeland Security pictograms a few days after going on hiatus:

If radiation is at your door—do not open the door unless you know the radiation personally.

Cheers to Moxie for letting us know she’s still alive and funny, and hope she comes back soon feeling better than ever.

Bill Turner at BrilliantCorners points to the DC Subway Blogger Map. I still haven’t seen one for Boston, but of course mapping anything onto the tangled mass that is the Boston T would be tricky. Plus all the college kids would probably have had to choose between locating their blog at their college’s T station or their home one. (For me, that would have been between Kendall on the Red Line and Government Center on the Green.)

And of course we’ll never see a map like that in Seattle, because there’s no subway and the bus system is too boring. Oh well. We still have GeoURL.

William Gibson points to a Tokyo newspaper article about supposed secret tunnels under Tokyo: “AKIRA-inflected secret city beneath Tokyo; retired construction workers whispering about the diamond-cutter required to tunnel existing concrete, when the maps show nothing but soil should have been there…”

Gibson also notes “subway fantasy is a genre unto itself.” Hard not to be when there’s so much disused or abandoned infrastructure just out of sight, just around the corner. I used to be fascinated by the glimpses of old platforms or entire disused lines you could see in Boston on the Green and Red Lines. There are, as you might imagine, dozens of sites about the phenomenon, including this one on New York and this one on Boston. There’s a master list here.

To point 3, I finally made myself finish Small Pieces Loosely Joined. It’s funny to think that I have some prior art for that book, written in 1993, that talks about how the Internet (which for me consisted of Usenet, IRC, and email) has its own semiotics, where words to signify new identities. Eight years later, after the .com boom bubbled and popped, David Weinberger argues that even the Web is largely a creation of our words, in spite of the efforts of folks like the Audblog people.

I still have hard copies of the issue of the short-lived undergraduate research journal Aleph in which the paper was published, but no soft copies of the paper. I’ll have to dig up the paper and re-key it.

As I always suspected, blogs look like they will provide a wealth of fodder for grad studies—mostly, in my opinion, because we talk so much about ourselves and our processes. My decision to license my blog under Creative Commons appears to have set in motion a paper proposal in a grad intellectual property class. I’ve let CyborgWoman know she can ping me for material as she needs it. I wonder who else is out there doing this other than Greg and Doc.

Confession: I’ve been diving into Buffy this week, particularly the second season. Hey, it was on sale at Costco. And while I’m saddened by the revelation that Ms. Gellar will be leaving the show, it’s still a tremendous body of work.

Talking with Greg the other night, he confessed to never having been much of a fan—never having watched it at all, in fact. I would suggest that it has to be taken in the right spirit—as a potent allegory of the struggle to grow up, to gain power over one’s fears, to face one’s demons. And once you can watch it on that level and still appreciate the camp and the humor, you’ll be hooked.

The Tin Man has been watching it much more closely, and he’s annotated most of season 7. He’s been looking at some of the other big themes: redemption, sexuality, power and powerlessness. And of course kicking ass.

Other Buffy fans out there: Julie Powell, who appears to be more than ready for the series to end in spite of being hooked on it. And Esta, who has the right perspective.