Via Corante's Blogging News (at least I think so&8212;I can't verify the link now), another good exploration of the essence of blogging that tries to distinguish the medium from the uses it's been put to so far posted August 1 at mediageek. Good set of related links at the end of the entry:
I make no claim to be revealing some eternal truth here that nobody else has ever expressed. For all I know I'm regurgitating some other blogger's insights that I may never have even read. Are an infinite number of bloggers like an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters?But this is what I'm thinking, and you're welcome to comment.
Earlier:
* The Mainstream Is Addicted to Itself, or I Have Met Narcissus and She Is Journalist, 7/22/02
* Blogging, "Warblogging," and Punditry. Is There an Effect? Is There a Point? 1/16/02
* Meta-blogging? Intertwining Grassroots; Connecting the Blogging World, 12/13/01
* Blogging as a Form of Journalism? 5/25/01
categories: metablog
8:36:38 PM 
say what []
Pushing rectangles takes exception with my "to the ramparts" melodrama about the plight of Davezilla:
I am not a lawyer... but I don't know that any of these chuckleheads are, either. The way trademark protection works, you need to actively police the usage of your marks. This is in contrast to copyright where protection extends from the moment of creation without any particular action on the part of the creator. You (or your legal representative) HAS to send out these letters and has to be able to prove that the letters are sent to ever get any protection for the mark in the future. However, the action taken beyond the letter is permitted to be proportional to the encroachment on the mark.I mostly agree with this. When Wired News wrote about my problems with Mattel and the Barbie trademark, Steve Silberman quoted me to that effect.
The letter is not necessarily an indication that there will ever be any further action or even communication with "Davezilla". Most likely the letter is not about Davezilla at all, but about filing away a stack of papers to haul out for some future eventuality. That's the way trademarks work.
"I do understand why a publicly owned corporation has to defend its copyrights," Crumlish observes. "What's being silenced is any reflection, any meta-conversation about Barbie."Notwithstanding my conflation of trademarks and copyright (I learned a lot defending myself), the fact remains that a number of noncommercial, parodic or artistic websites making fair use of the Barbie trademarks dissolved themselves (or had their ISPs crumble beneath them) rather than face Mattel's deep pockets.
Rectangles has it right, though. There was never a followup to the first cease-and-desist letter I received, no response to my reply. (In the meantime, though I lost my academic host and found refuge on the servers of an S.F. cybercommune.) The stack of paper image nails it.
He also corrects my glib misstatement, passing on of an urban legend, about Danish King Christian X (I swear I'm not making this up):
To answer the question in the first quote: you're thinking of "Danes" but the answer is neither, since the event never actually took place.A quick trip to the Goog turned up numerous debunks. This one is typical:
On page 14 of Queen in Denmark by Anne Wolden-Rµthinge (Gyldendal, 1989, ISBN 87-01-08622-7 and 87-01-08623-5), HM Queen Margrethe II says:"One of the stories one often hears about the Occupation, and which I persist in denying each time I hear it, is the story about Christian X wearing the yellow star of David as a demonstration during the Occupation. It is a beautiful and symbolic story, but it is not true. I do not mind it existing or being told, but I will not support a myth, even a good one, when I know it isn't true, it would be dishonest. But the moral behind the story is a far better one for Denmark than if the King had worn the star. The fact of the matter is that the Germans never did dare insist that Danish Jews wear the yellow star. This is a credit to Denmark which our country has cause to be proud of: I think this is an important fact to remember. The myth about the King wearing the star of David, well, I can imagine that this could have originated from a typical remark by a Copenhagen errand boy on his bicycle: 'If they try to enforce the yellow star here, the King will be the first to wear it!' — I don't know whether this was the actual remark, but I imagine it could have been how the myth started. It is certainly a possible explanation I offer whenever I am asked. To me, the truth is an even greater honour for our country than the myth."
categories: memewatch x-pollen
6:03:50 PM say what []
One the first page of Google results for "Radio Free Blogistan" yields an entry in the Fierce Highway blog, about an online music format.
Now here's the weird thing. The post immediately before that is called Navel Gazing. So now I'm wondering. Is this (a) a coincidence, (b) something I picked up subliminally on earlier egosurfing safaris, (c) utterly unremarkable in that perhaps "navel gazing" is already a well establish jargon term for personal-housekeeping blog entries?
categories: memewatch metablog x-pollen
4:37:10 PM say what []
Warflying or warstorming: spotting networks from the air: Over Perth, they spotted 90 networks. Does this mean we now need warweatherballoons to mark networks? Jason Jordan wrote to note: I reckon we're the first to brag about going "War Storming". That's a phrase I've coined to describe a combination of war driving and barn storming.
[80211b News]categories: memewatch x-pollen
3:47:00 PM say what []
I've cleaned up the template I'm using here and made it a little more generic (put a real banner box across the top and top-aligned the blog and masthead boxes. The idea is to provide other Radio users with an all CSS floating design template. By editing the CSS (I did most of it in Dreamweaver), you can choose colors, border (or none), background images (if desired), font styling. There are no FONT tags in this design.
This is only part of the picture, because the entry, day, and other templates are still table and font-formatting based, but I thought I'd offer it up as I work on the modifying a blog template in Dreamweaver tutorial, as something other Radio users can play around with it if interested.
Dreamweaver displays the layout pretty accurately, and I included placeholder text to help visualize formatting changes. This has to be stripped out before actually pasting the source code into the home template box (or however you prefer to update your templates—lately I've just been opening them right in Dreamweaver, though I edit them in a new file, partly because Dreamweaver doesn't offer a design view of .txt files, at least not by default). Dreamweaver doesn't show the dots or dashes either, if you use them.
This template can easily be modified for Blogger and Movable Type (I plan to do so), but not so easily for LiveJournal (so I probably won't).
If you do grab the file and play with it, be sure to back up your existing template somewhere so you can revert to it if need be! Also, let me know if you have any problems or if my markup doesn't validate or violates any other good design principles.
categories: fireweaver metablog radioactive
3:31:12 PM say what []
Scanning my headlines page just now I noticed for the first time an inadvertantly suggestive error* (what I've called in the past a Freudian typo):
Gnosis Coints MasturbloggingPut aside for the moment the philosophy-major angle that I am masturblogging right now by linking to my post about the word masturblogging.
Ignore my oh-so-clever James Joyce by way of Lewis Carroll quibble in the comments to that post.
No, instead look instead at the mistake. I wrote "Coints" instead of "Coins." Students of poetry will know about traditional puns on "your quaint charms" and like that. The curious can look up coynt in the OED.
So, do I fix it?
* Layer upon layer: I mistype error the first time 'erros',
categories: memewatch metablog x-pollen
3:00:16 PM say what []
At least, the Goog has never heard of it:
Did you mean:bolshevik
Your search - blogshevik - did not match any documents.
No pages were found containing "blogshevik".
Speaking of blogistan, I'm also somewhat surprised that old-time hackers didn't prefer blogdom into usage. There are many precedents in the Jargon File.
categories: memewatch metablog
2:00:47 PM say what []
I'd rather call it knowledge husbandry to connote the idea of a daily rhythm of proven techniques for putting one's house in order, and cultivating one's gardens. The k-house is your computer (digital data storage and retrieval). The k-garden is your blogs. Your blogpatch, if you will.
I'm no gardener, but my partner is, so I've witnessed how it works. Every year the garden gets better. Some plants wilt and die, unwatered or getting the wrong amount of sun, wind, predators. But others thrive. Some plants volunteer, not all of them weeds. Other organisms and nutrients join the dance and the ecosystem gets richer through the tending, through the encouragement of good dynamics and deprecation of those that do not bear fruit.
Planning is great, but feeding back what the system is learning from experience is how nature and the universe evolve. Not to get cosmic, but any plan will do as long as you regularly revise the parts that don't work. Any filing system is fine to start with. Just prune the dead files and occasionally subdivide the overloaded ones.
Back to blogs. What I just "got" this morning is that every project should have a blog. Every ongoing endeavor deserves a journal. Frail memory cannot support our multiphased planet-culture soaked consciousness without the aid the outboard (or backup) brain.
In a way we're seeing a trojan horse to what many have touted as the next computer interface, an array of time-ordered events and documents (with the UI to be a spacial representation of the timeline, I suppose also browsable by categories), in the infectious adoption of blogs—not just by writers, techies, and artists who, like pornographers, always pioneer a new medium and exploring its expressive range, but as a knowledge format.
Another ingredient that is helping gel these thoughts for me is a conversation I had Friday with Jordan Frank from Traction Software. That disussion deserves its own entry, as it intrigued me a great deal with something that in tackling enterprise knowledge husbandry, goes far beyond my PEP (Personal Expression Platform) writer's dream application.
One last note. Mike Masnik from Techdirt.com was kind enough to toss a "great blog" into one of his e-mail messages to me. Later, I asked him if I was keeping it up. ("How Am I Driving?") His reply:
Still been great. Occasionally things are a bit random (but what blog doesn't have the occasional random post?) and I skip over some of the more specific discussions about things like how do specific things in Radio, but it's been good for keeping up on what's going on in general in the blogspace.So let me take the opportunity to explain how to focus this blog. Read my recent post about categories and decide which one most closely fits your interests. I cross-post liberally, so you may find that one single category is all you need to follow.
For example, if you want to read about blogging and you're interest in blog-related memes then the 'metablog' category will be sufficient (that is, you don't need to read 'memewatch' also because any entry on blog-related memes will also be posted to 'metablog')If a single category works for you, consider making bookmarking or blogrolling its home page, and/or subscribing to
So, as reader of 'knowhow' who isn't interested in Salon Blogs, Dreamweaver, or Radio Userland could bookmark knowhow or subscribe to its RSS feed.
What else? The 'metablog' category probably carries 80-90% of the posts. All blog pages contain navigator links listing all the active categories, so nothing ever prevents you from peeking at streams you're not as interested in, but I wanted to mention this to improve your reading experience and give you more control over your own media feed.
Oh, and as an experiment, if anyone links to this entry, please consider using the following linktext: xian gets it. Thanks! I'd like to track the meme....
categories: knowhow memewatch metablog x-pollen
1:17:41 PM say what []
I'm still rolling this over in my mind, not fully convinced of that absolute definition, but it has prompted a chain of thoughts about what these differences are. To some extent I think some of it has to do with ownership of your own words. Not just in the Well sense that Ray Ozzie mentioned (referenced in an earlier post in this log), but in a literal sense.
An example. I was just reading Tom Friedman's editorial about the fog of war and the lack of clear war aims on the part of Palestinians (and perhaps on the part of Bush's hawks). At the bottom of the column is an invitation to join a moderated discussion of Tom's views. I had no interest in signing in and joining that conversation. If I have an opinion about what Tom wrote, I'll quote him and link to his editorial in my Mediajunkie blog. On some level it's selfish: Why should I donate content to the New York Times? Especially when they reserve the right to moderate it?
If I wanted the audience, the tradeoff might be worth it. I made a similar decision when I decided to stop blogging in relative obscurity and sign up for this Salon blogs experiment (six days left on my free trial!). I calculated that there might be an audience of (a) Salon readers, (b) Radio webloggers, and (c) curiosity seekers whom I might reasonably have a chance of adding to my own readership. So far, so good.
So, I like discussion boards, but I decide whether to participate based on the audience. I do comment on blogs that permit it, when the mood strikes me. Usually it's to add something reactive that does not inspire me to write up a full view of my own. To my mind hosting an opinion on my own site is a more permanent method, with a stronger aspect of ownership. I can't track down all the various comments I may have posted all over the Net. In effect I've donated that content to whomever curates the specific sites.
Back to the problem of unwelcome or unkind commenters. There is an element of badmouthing someone in their own front parlor. My attitude is "there are streetcorners for that kind of trash talk." Asking me (or Dave, or whoever) to host and pay for content that detracts from my work or my mission is a bit of a stretch.
Someone said that we have a free press in the U.S. for anyone who owns a press. In 1994 I realized that owning a press no longer required a huge industrial capital investment but rather an investment in a small server and an Internet line. We're reaching a point where just about anyone can host their own words, regardless of content.
Just as anonymity (which I believe can be justified in many circumstances) has a tendency to discredit an author's views in the eyes of some readers, so does taking the responsibility to manage and archive one one's words and keep them in the full view of the public tend to reinforce one's credibility.
Some semi-baked thoughts for a Sunday morning.
(A postscript. My browsing this morning led me—unsurprisingly—to Doc Searls' weblog. In it, among other things, he distinguishes between diaries and journals. Both have roots in words meaning "day" (in the sense of daily), but the connotations are different, at least in English. Journal has the advantage of relating to both journalism and the computer-sense of journaling. I wanted to discuss this and add a pithy comment along the lines of "We lepers" vs. "You lepers" in light of the ongoing discussion of Lessig's warning tone but got confused trying to work his Discuss link. How ironic, I thought as, I gave up on the interface. I'll just write about it in my blog.)
categories: memewatch metablog outspoken
11:41:20 AM say what []
Where "right now'" is defined as a 30-second envelope around the time I posted this:
Where can I buy Amish products online? Where can I learn about the sexual practice oral sex? Where can I find a map of the state California? Where can I find tour information for the band or musician Eminem? Where can I learn about postpartum weight loss? Where can I find the online store Macy*s? Where can I find the lyrics to songs by 2pac/Makaveli? Where can I learn about earwax blockage? What is Ask Jeeves? Am I in love? What does my name mean? Where can I see photographs of bathrooms? Where can I find tourist information for Queensland? Where can I find a map of the country Jamaica? Where can I find job listings in Minnesota? Where can I find a guide for identifying the sea creature other creatures? What is a good beginning exercise program? Where can I buy MP3 downloads online? Where can I find product reviews for cellular phones? Where can I buy Brass Boot shoes and accessories online?
categories: memewatch
12:25:53 AM say what []
