I was looking at Rosenberg's column this morning on the Supernova conference, which began with a teaser about the future of weblogging being possibly imperiled by market dynamics. Along the way I saw a link to Sifry's Technorati. This is one of those services that's supposed to show you who's linking to you. Technorati, like its competitors, only catches between 20 and 40 percent of the links that I know are running to the Raven, so unfortunately the holy grail of link-tracking isn't here yet. This highlights the weirdness of the Web in that information cannot be retrieved via a search with certainty, only probability.

Public Enemy

Now what does that title make you think of? A mobster? A master criminal? A "recording artist"? Dollars to donuts you weren't thinking about technomaestro Moby, who was savagely beaten yesterday morning outside the Commonwealth Avenue club in Brighton.

Ironically, Moby had just finished a holiday concert in which he'd expressed his opposition to "aggression and violence." As the story has it, Moby was signing autographs when he was approached by a couple of guys in their 20s who pretended to want Moby's sig, too:

One of the men, wearing a green hooded sweatshirt, punched Moby in the back of the head and on the right side of his face, breaking the singer's glasses and cutting and bruising his face.

Eminem's most recent US tour also included the mock murder of a Moby impersonator, which culminates with the rapper "shooting" the Moby look-alike.

Justice Delayed

I wasn't sure I wanted to mention this story, but I've been tracking it for several days as it ties in with one of my research papers. In brief, a 35-year-old Dallas man, Kenneth Atkinson, has received the maximum penalty of life in prison for the systematic torture and sexual abuse of his daughter, referred to by the media as the "closet girl." The mother in the case has already received a life term as well.

The 8-year-old girl weighed only 25 pounds when she was rescued from a "trash- and feces-strewn closet" last June. A standing ovation from the Raven goes out to the girl's new mother, who confronted Atkinson after the sentencing hearing:

Sabrina Kavanaugh, the adoptive mother of the girl, told Kenneth Atkinson after sentencing that the girl, now 9, still shows fear when his name is mentioned.

Standing before Atkinson after the sentencing, she called him "sadistic and evil," and said she hoped he would be beaten and sexually abused in prison so he would learn the fear that the abused girl still suffers.

On a related note, Catholic Cardinal Bernard Law resigned this morning.

To all those who have suffered from my shortcomings and mistakes, I both apologise and from them beg forgiveness.

Leggo my Egghead!

Over at Arts & Letters is a stimulating review of Richard A. Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. You can read it if you like; I won't walk through it here, but would like to comment on Posner's definition of what an intellectual is:

There is therefore a vague redundancy in the term "public intellectual," since the placing of ideas in a larger public context, acting as social critic, is what the intellectual most essentially does.

12:03:07 PM