OK, let's try this again:
Radio Free Blogistan has moved. The last entries posted to the old address are the ones you see here dated October 25, 2002.
For current entries, please go to the new address: http://radiofreeblogistan.com/.
categories: salonika fireweaver knowhow memewatch metablog outspoken radioactive syllabus x-pollen
11:12:21 PM 
say what []
Since fireweaver is squatting on the home page, I got through to radio.userland.com and set up ftp upstreaming to send that category to http://fireweaver.com/blog/.
Posting this entry to the home page and fireweaver should get fireweaver pointed where it's supposed to be and will also I hope restore the integrity of the home page entries.
categories: fireweaver metablog
3:09:42 PM say what []
Meanwhile, this is more or less a dummy post to see if the rendering will fix itself. For some reason I am suddenly also unable to reach http://radio.userland.com/ where the information about #upstream.xml syntax and the script that fixes URL errors after upstreaming changes can ordinarily both by located.
Update: Ugh, it gets worse and worse. When using that abovementioned script, Salon blog users, be sure to replace the string "radio.weblogs.com" with "blogs.salon.com." I now have nested redirection problems!
Publishing this to several categories to see if it will stop salonika from squatting on the home page (now that fireweaver is pointing offsite.
categories: salonika fireweaver metablog radioactive
2:49:45 PM say what []
If my upstreaming changes today work correctly, then this may be the final post to Radio Free Blogistan at the http://blogs.salon.com/0001111/ address, in which case, I want to make it very easy for any future readers directed here by old links (sorry, everybody!) to get to the new home page at radiofreeblogistan.com.
If I were really cool, I'd redesign this page so that it contained the moving message and then loaded the new page at http://radiofreeblogistan.com/ automatically, or immediately redirected to that page, or something cool like that. Instead people ending up here will have to follow a link like this one or the one in the title of this entry.
If the move fails, then this message will seem kind of lame and embarassing in retrospect.
For the technically minded, I will continue to use the Salon hosting and address for my salonika category, and possibly for hosting images and other large files within my storage quota.
The blog-related categories (knowhow, metablog, radioactive, syllabus), along with a few knew ones (uh, i don't know... bloggerz, stereomovabletype?) will also be upstreamed to sections of radiofreeblogistan.com.
The others will be squirted off to more appropriate hosts (for completists: fireweaver will show up at Dreamweaver Savvy once I get the templating integrated, memewatch will migrate to memewatch.com, outspoken will fold back into Bite Media, and x-pollen will go to x-pollen.com).
I'm starting another new category today, unrelated to blogs. It's called "Agent7," it's about my clients and colleagues in the worlds of technology and publishing, and especially their instersection, and it will end up at waterside.com once we get the server-side includes inserted into the appropriate page.
Update: The first try failed. I tried to copy the old #upstream.xml file into the subcategories that I didn't want coming over to radiofreeblogistan.com but that somehow resulted in a strange out-of-date rendering of the home page.
To fix that I'm editing this file and reposting after throwing away the bad upstream files and restoring Radio to community upstreaming. If things get back to normal, I'll try the FTP approach, possibly by publishing yet another change to this cross-category entry.
categories: salonika fireweaver knowhow memewatch metablog outspoken radioactive syllabus x-pollen
1:59:17 PM say what []
Ev says that any compromised data has been restored and that if you kept your FTP information at Blogger you may want to change your password now, although it is not clear whether that information was accessed. Anil Dash recommends changing your username as well.
categories: metablog
12:56:38 PM say what []
I ask because I want to publish news of technology and publishing to my literary agency's website, which is hosted elsewhere from my own personal sites, naturally. I'll use Radio most likely, since it's so easy to spawn a new category and have it upstream by FTP, but I had mocked up the blog in MT until I realized that I might not be able to publish to this nonlocal host.
categories: metablog radioactive
10:58:45 AM say what []
The BloggerDev mailing list is abuzz this morning with people complaining that their settings have been switched around by someone using the monicker hax0redbyme.
The first symptoms showed up when users tried to manipulate their blogs and found their view site link within the Blogger application redirected to http://blogger.com/hax0redbyme/.
A list member checked the team listings for one his blogs and found that most of the team member entries had been changed.
Requests for passwords generated the message ""Password request sent to hax0redbyme! You should receive the email momentarily."
Some are concerned that the Blog This! bookmarklet has been insecure (though I can't see how it's any different from any other process that may or may not cache your login information wth a cookie). And others are thinking beyond the potential loss of data into the question of whether the hacker has now gathered FTP login information or other info on the many thousands of active Blogger accounts.
News when it happens.
categories: metablog
10:09:29 AM say what []
ShortStrings (no permalinks, but it was posted Tuesday, October 08, 2002), says Andrew Sullivan reports that Christopher Hitchens's new book on Orwell went from 1,074 to 4 on Amazon's best seller list after he chose it for his next book club discussion. (More...)
categories: memewatch metablog x-pollen
12:17:30 PM say what []
I decided to try to plumb the native talent of clients and other people subscribed to the Waterside "virtual conference" mailing list:
I'm trying to arrange wireless access at the 2003 Waterside Conference (in Berkeley), and I wanted to ask the members of this list whether anyone has experience setting up this kind of impromptu wireless shared access in the past, especially in other conference settings. I plan to blog the conference and hope other participants will do so as well, providing live real-time coverage of keynote speakers, panels, workshops, and hallway encounters.
Here are some of things I'm trying to sort out:
- Will this work with one DSL or T1 ethernet access points, a hub to do DHCP, and one or more Airport or Linksys type wireless base stations? If we want to offer wireless access in the main auditorium as well as, say, in the demo room, would I need a second access point, or can a second base station pick up the network by being wthin range of the first base station?
In a nutshell, are there hardware elements I am overlooking or networking concepts I have egregiously wrong? I have a spare hub, yards of ethernet, and one base station, so I think I can provide almost everything just by stripping my office...- The hotel wants to know "how many computers" will be using the access, saying they need to set aside separate IP for each one. I think they don't understand DHCP or that they need to be told that one computer (my hub) will be needing just one IP address, thanks. It's all subnet masking behind the DHCP/NAT server, right?
- I'm obviously semiclueless about this stuff, so I'd like to take out to dinner anyone planning to come to the conference who knows more about such matters and who would be willing to help me in a pinch in configuring and setting up the access on site.
I'll keep you posted.
categories: metablog
11:17:31 AM say what []
I'm going to follow dws's model of how to do this (from his RadioFAQs channel). If you'd like to contribute occasional content to RFB, here's what you should do:
- Tell me you're interested (email is fine).
- Set up a "Blogistan" category in your blog.
- Send me the URL for the RSS feed for you new category.
- Post any content you want to contribute to RFB to that category, including a credit link to yourself (so that if we use the automatic aggregtion of the muliauthor tool, the posts will not appear to have been written by me).
- I'll do the rest.
To do so, I am planning a three-tiered approach to content submitted by outside contributors.
The first tier will be discretionary, in that I will subscribe to a potential contributor's RSS feed and manually post entries I feel are appropriate.
For anyone who consistently contributes content that makes it into RFB, I will proceed to the second tier, adding their feed to my multiauthor tool's list of incoming feeds and thereby automating the inclusion of their posts (removing my discretion from that step). I will continue to make the decisions about what categories posts belong in and, most importantly, whether they are to appear on the home page. A contributor on this level will appear on a new masthead page as a staff writer.
The third tier will only come into play if a staff writer becomes so involved as to be willing and able to take on a share of the responsibility of deciding which categories posts should go to, whether to include suggested entries from outside contributors, and which content belongs on the home page. If this tier comes into play, RFB will have fully transitioned to a publication model.
I don't know whether any of this will work. Maybe no one will want their content showing up here, but it will be an interesting experiment, and I hope it will continue to increase the value of this blog to those learning about weblogs.
If the content increases too quickly, most of the new contributions may appear in a special RSS-only feed. We'll see.
Other future plans I have for RFB include reforming the categories. I'll probably stop rendering non-blog-related categories here (such as fireweaver, memewatch, outspoken, and x-pollen), and add a few new blog-related categories, such as one for each of the major products.
Instead of using RFB as a central clearinghouse for my other blog posts (via x-pollen and the multiauthor tool), I'll treat it more as a blog-about-blogging channel that can, when necessary, be fed from other blogs.
Meanwhile, I plan to move my personal blogging from Bodega (at Livejournal) to a new x-pollen site. This blog will probably become my home base, feeding other topic-specific sites as needed. On the one hand, I like the differentiation of separate brands for separate types of content. On the other hand, simplicity is a virtue (and a pragmatic benefit) and that other way (toward infinite taxonomical subdivision) lies madness. On the third hand, inertia is powerful.
Meanwhile, if you are interested in contributing links and thoughts about blogging trends and phenomena to Radio Free Blogistan, if you have an idea for a subbeat you'd like to cover (such as a product-specific column), or just want to discuss these and related ideas, please drop a line to submit@radiofreeblogistan.com.
categories: metablog radioactive
9:06:10 AM say what []
I'm also trying to set up a TrackBack ping-based metablog to aggregate all (or as many as possible) of my other log entries into one rolling meta index. For the MT blogs, it's easy to make them ping a specific category in another blog (which I'm calling metaxian), but I haven't figured out yet how to capture and display those pings on the MT index page. I've followed the instructions (I think I have) but so far nothing is showing up at http://x-pollen.com/metaxian/ .
My next step will be to look at the discussion forums at movabletype.org to see if these questions have been asked and answered. Since http://blogroots.com/blogpopuli.blog and the KMpings site are both working examples of the kind of metablog I'm trying to create, none of this should be rocket science.
I was hoping that each ping could trigger a blog entry, which could then roll off the home page and be archived as usual, but it appears that the pings must be listed as their own entities, so I don't know what that says about archiving older pings. I have much still to learn about all of this. Suggestions are welcome.
categories: metablog
10:35:17 AM say what []
This is the kind of thing I imagine Doc Searls or Chris Pirillo to know, but I'm asking my readers because you guys seem to know everything.
Here's what prompted this. I suggested to Waterside (my literary agency) that we make their annual conference bloggable this year. Here's what the hotel said: "We have done wireless Internet before in our meeting room, but the clients have always brought their own equipment for the connection. We just turned on the lines for them to access."
And here's what they asked: "Also, we will need to know how many computers will be using the lines so we know how many IP addresses to set up. Will you be bringing in your own wireless equipment? If not I can find out the cost to rent for you."
I can bring my airport but that will probably cover only one room (probably wherever the panels and speakers will be). We may want another base station in the demo room, I would imagine.
I've got an extra hub, so that's not a problem, and lot's of ethernet cable. Am I missing something I'm going to want ot rent?
But here's my real question? Why do they care "how many computers" will be there? We don't need a unique IP address for each computer, right? Shouldn't we be able to use DHCP? I would think several hundred participants would use the wireless at least to get on the web and check mail if not for blogging.
categories: metablog
1:00:17 PM say what []
Favorite new Salon blog: SEMI TRUTHS: The Radio Active Salon. Best feature: True news stories followed by semitrue embellishments. Bonus: Mentions Michael Jackson and pr0n.
1:41:48 PM say what []
I remember in that strange Terry Gilliam film The Fisher King that the two homeless guys eventually get pitched to participate in an upbeat sitcom (or was it reality show? that's what it would be today) about homelessness to be called "Home Free!"
Homeless people have had homepages for a long time now, especially since municipalities such as Santa Monica (which Harry Shearer refers to at the end of each Le Show as "the home of the homeless) started making sure homeless people could get Internet access through public libraries or kiosks. They learned what that consituency wanted most (lockers and showers, if I recall) because they suddenly had a voice apart from their for the most part anxiety-provoking physical shambles.
I first heard about The Homeless Guy's blog on Metafilter, with a Kaycee-scarred angle of worrying whether the guy was for real or a clever hoax. Since then the story of Kevin Barbieux and his blog has been percolating up toward the mainstream. Blogger features his blog in its blogs of note module on the its home page (looks like Die Puny Humans is off the list).
There's something to be said for Blogger's utterly free option (using the ad-sponsored blog*spot service) in that it opens the door wider to online publishing than any other service I can think of. Blogger's always had trouble doing the Eudora thing — turning that onramp into a toll road — but the service being provided in the search for a viable business model is undeniable.
Before anyone starts talking about blogging being the next street-newspaper bootstrap solution for the marginalized, consider that Kevin Barbieux's blog is well written and organized. He provides frequently asked questions and answers right up front, and mixes the blog content with other links and information about himself. This draws me in as much as the provocative title and premise.
categories: memewatch metablog
10:31:41 AM say what []
Come into the game if you're not playing now. Make it harder for me to make a living as a writer by competing with me for attention. This will only toughen me up. I'm prone to slack off without that nervous mammal prey feeling. Find out what you have to say, when given the microphone. Learn how you would write if you took the time to practice writing simple declarative sentences (file under do as I say and not do as I do). You have a voice. Use it.
categories: metablog
2:23:49 PM say what []
I don't think this situation will last too long (although I am heading to southern California for a wedding on Friday and won't be back in action till Tuesday, so this site will go dark during that period, for the first time since we launched).
But there is a natural ebb and flow to blogging, so acknowledging burnout and overload is probably a good thing. Yesterday my body went on strike and demanded that I sleep most of the afternoon just to get caught up on the fatigue cycle. I took this as a sign to stay away from the computer except when absolutely unavoidable.
Ironically, I just started a new, private intranet-ish k-log project blog sorta blog for tracking the still secret project. So the blogging goes on as a knowledge capture and project management tool even when I'm not reporting on the metablog scene here in RFB.
In the meantime, I direct you to the fine links in my various blogrolls hither. Most of the time I find out about intereresting developments from them. Blogging News has been doing an especially good job lately of covering the biggest stories and most quotable quotations in the blogosphere.
categories: metablog
11:51:00 AM say what []
