Morgan Wilson: musings

should I stay with Salon blogs or switch to TypePad?

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 06:06:06 GMT

I find it quite amusing and ironic that less than two weeks after I promised myself that I wouldn't switch this blog to MovableType, I am feeling very drawn towards switching to MovableType's TypePad. Of course, I did give a proviso to this undertaking - "unless Movable Type became idiot-proof." While no blogging software is truly idiot-proof, except possibly AOL Journals (see this amusing piece about them), TypePad seems way more user-friendly than standard MovableType and a lot easier to work with than Radio Userland.

So I'm seriously considering defecting to TypePad. So here are my pros and cons about switching to TypePad -

Pros:
- I don't really like the Radio Userland software that much. Although it's easy enough to start a bare bones blog with it, it isn't very user-friendly IMHO. I find it difficult to understand for customizing and think that the documentation is poor - especially when compared with TypePad.
- I haven't really been following the flame wars associated with Dave Winer. But what I've heard makes me feel uneasy about the future of Radio. I worry that Radio Userland is isolating itself in the blogosphere.
- TypePad is web-based, so it's very easy to update from anywhere. No more being tied to the one computer!
- TypePad offers more gadgets for blogs - which are really easy to implement. This goes back to one of my complaints with Radio - yes, you can do a lot with it, but a lot of it is quite difficult and arcane to configure.
- I like TypePad's photo album feature
Cons (and there are quite a few):
- It's more expensive than Radio. I'm interested in the intermediate $8.95/month option.
- I'd also need to get a separate news aggregator (maybe this isn't all bad), which I may need to pay extra for if I want a good one.
- I think that initially, my readership would plummet. (but is this really an issue?)
- I would leave the Salon blog community, which I like a lot. I would get onto the Salon blog webring, but that wouldn't be the same. The issue is, if Salon blogs is on a sinking ship (Radio), do I show solidarity and stay until things get worse, or do I just seize what seems to be a good opportunity at this moment?
- It's not as if TypePad is the only option for me, either. Maybe Blogger Pro will get better under the ownership of Google. Maybe I should support fine Mac only software such as iBlog. And don't forget AOL - for which I'm already paying for. Nobody will probably take an AOL blog seriously, but it might offer a way of communicating with a wider audience.

Well there's no rush to do any of this. I'll give myself a least a week before I do anything rash.

the exploded library is now one year old

Sat, 02 Aug 2003 01:35:00 GMT

I wasn’t planning on updating this blog today, but then I realized the date - which happens to be the exploded library’s first birthday.

I started this blog as a lark. I was writing an article on blogs and thought that the best way to really understand what blogs are about was to make one of my own. During the past year, my intentions have changed a number of times, as have the content & style of this blog.

I am surprised that this I’m still doing this. The blogosphere seems even more transitory than the rest of the web - better blogs than mine have arrived and then faded in the past year. I think that this is because blogging is so personal. Even if a blog isn’t about personal events, its oxygen supply is dependent on the blogger’s personal life, which we often don’t know about.

Here are some important happenings of the past year: Switching to Salon blogs; switching to blogging on my iMac; taking a few more risks with my content - especially about political issues. Most importantly, it has been slowly discovering what I really want to do. I prefer to take a limited number of issues and look at those from a slightly different angle. Maybe this is looking at the law as a librarian, or viewing library issues with a legal eye. Viewing the US against my Australian perspective, or commenting on Australia from my viewpoint as an ex pat who's living across the Pacific. This blog is about ambivalence as much as it’s about law libraries.

So what’s on the horizon for the next year? Hopefully more regular updating. I know that Google prefers it when I update every day or so - but that doesn’t fit in with my temperament and circumstances. I find myself very attracted to writing a lot when the inspiration takes me, and then doing nothing for a little while.

I can promise that I’m not switching this blog to Movable Type - which everyone else seems to be doing - not unless they make an idiot proof version. I may consider switching to iBlog. I’d like to personalize this blog even further with some of my own graphics.

Input into this blog - I have a low tolerance for information overload and if I added every worthy blog or news source into my aggregator, I would never get anything done. That said, I would like my aggregator to be dynamic and up-to-date while still manageable.

I want more value-added content. Although bare links (called "mere mentions" in this blog) and unsubstantiated rants have their place, they are more ephemeral than pieces which combine links and the other fruits of research with analysis, commentary and opinion. This also shows how librarians can add value in the exploded library. I plan to be updating my article on news aggregators (which thanks to Yahoo, gives me a large proportion of my hits).

Most importantly, I still want to be blogging in another year.

Music: Björk, Live at the Royal Opera House DVD, Human Behaviour

gated information and the role of libraries

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 14:22:53 GMT

Recently I got access to digital cable – it’s not something that I pay for, but is a nice perk provided by my generous landlady. It made me realize that I am on the über-privileged side of the digital divide: hundreds of TV channels, broadband internet connection. I also have access to non-public material sites such as on Salon and AOL Then through my work I have Westlaw and Lexis passwords, and free interlibrary loans – within reason.

My point isn’t to brag, but I can say that I have access to a lot of stuff which is out of reach of less privileged people. Before I had access, I had no idea of the type of things that I was missing. I’m disturbed to see how effective technology has been in separating information from the haves and have-nots. Ten years ago in Australia, there was no pay-TV and barely a world-wide web (and what there was limited to educational and scientific purposes). The main sources of information were printed publications and the free broadcast media of radio and TV. I know printed magazines and journals have never been exactly cheap, but many of these were freely usable in public and academic libraries.

Is there any way of categorizing information as essential or non-essential information? I wonder if there are some types of information – particularly legal and governmental - which all people have a right to access and use in a free society. Especially when society says that ignorance is no excuse for not obeying the law and everyone has equal rights & duties in the political process, irrespective of their income. So does mean that everything else would be non-essential information – entertainment for which it is entirely fair that people pay for. I’m not sure if there’s a clear dividing line between what’s essential and what’s entertaining. For example, national (and especially local) news provide information without which it would be very difficult to participate in the political process, but they also contain entertainment sections. And if news is essential, then what about magazines or lifestyle programmes aimed at particular groups – women, men, different ethnic groups – these may contain more entertainment than news, but what news they cover might be the only way that their particular constituents access any news.

Another quandry is with the arts, sciences and other academic disciplines. If it’s in society’s interests that all people are able to make advances in the arts, sciences and other fields of learning, how is this possible if only elites have access to this material? Are we saying that only the elites – those with the means to pay for this material – have anything to contribute in these areas and that the poor deserve to shut out? Or do we think that great art can happen in a vacuum and that it is not necessary to know of what’s been tried before?

The point of all these unanswerable questions is that libraries are the buffer zones – or safety net, if you want a different metaphor – of the digital information divide. Fund public libraries adequately, and you won’t need to answer these questions about who is worthy enough to receive which information. Most importantly, libraries are no longer about books. They are just not about books, microfiche, videos, audio tapes, CDs, DVDs or online databases – important as all these things are. Libraries are repositories of information, in whatever form. In an ideal world (and I am allowed to be idealistic and naive sometimes), libraries would collect all useful information which has been broadcast (via TV, radio or the web) and is not otherwise available in fixed formats, such as tapes or discs produced by the broadcaster. </idealism>: Of course, this is not going to happen because of two big reasons. Firstly, libraries are currently too understaffed and underfunded to imagine adding this to their workload. Secondly, this would be against existing copyright laws.

Safari, Opera and Explorer

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 14:09:17 GMT

It’s a chicken or the egg type question – did Safari come about because Microsoft was not working on new versions of IE for Mac, or did Microsoft stop working on IE for Mac because Apple started competing with Safari?

When Safari first came out, I was annoyed. First of all, it had that tiresome brushed metal interface (although I’ve since found out that this can be removed with Metalifizer). Secondly, it made me concerned the other Mac browsers, such as Opera, OmniWeb and Camino wouldn’t be able to compete. Although I like all the software which Apple throws in with its computers, I want there to be a viable market for third party software developers for the Mac.

I’ve since come to like Safari. I think that it’s arguably the best free browser for any operating system. It’s very fast – both to load and for browsing. It has tabs and it renders pages very nicely.

Overall, I still prefer Opera 6 for Mac for the following reasons.
I already paid for it, so might as well get my money’s worth
I really, really like some of Opera’s time-saving shortcuts: how you can use the “z” and “x” keys as backwards & forwards buttons; how you select the location bar by just pressing F8 (in this way, it’s much better than Safari, which makes you drag over the whole URL or press Command-L); how bookmarks can be given brief nicknames which retrieve the bookmarked site when entered into the location bar; full screen browsing is easily turned on or off with F11.

Opera’s not without its problem. It takes more time to load than Safari – which I can forgive because Safari’s got an innate advantage in this area. The most two severe problems are that less pages seem work in Opera than Safari and that it is more prone to crash than Safari. These are major problems, and if they continue to get worse, I will reluctantly have to switch to Safari.

my thoughts about designing web pages for users of different browsers

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 13:55:59 GMT

If you don’t use Internet Explorer for Windows, you are on the margins of the internet. It’s kind of like being a non-American in our unipolar world. The mighty behemoth, IE does what it likes. Standards be damned, its practices are the de facto standards which matter.

I’m in charge of a web site and know first-hand how tedious it is develop a site which works tolerably well for almost all browsers, without being intolerably bland. I recently had a discussion/argument with a respected colleague about this issue. He said that there are so many different permutations of browsers, that getting our sites to work for all of them is an exercise in futility which leads to the dreaded Lowest Common Denominator. For me, this is not an all or nothing matter. I try to support what I subjectively think are the main types of people on the web – and the browsers they often choose.

There’s Mr and Ms Average – people who use IE for Windows, 5.x and 6.x – the browser that everyone uses when they don’t have a choice (or exercise choice) in what browser they use. Needless to say, it’s got to work very well for this browser. I admit, some people might consciously choose this solid but boring browser. For me, I only use this browser when none of the others works or I might to use some third-party software which only works with IE – such as the Google toolbar.

You have to acknowledge the technical laggards of the world – people using IE and especially Netscape 4.x. I’m not saying that a site has to work well for these people, but see how the home page looks and hope that the site is functional. Sometimes minor tweaks in the code will improve performance in these oldies without mucking things up for everyone else. If that’s not possible, use a script to redirect them to a text-only of your home page. This text-only version could also benefit the visually impaired who are using a text-only browser.

You also can’t ignore people who are bravely (or stupidly, depending on your point of view) using non-Microsoft software – namely Mac and/or Linux users. I don’t know where the market share statistics come from, but I work in education and see a lot of Macs around and talk to a lot of people who are passionate about Macs. So even if you are a hard-nosed Windows-head, you don’t want to needlessly piss these persistent people off, because they can be vocal in their criticism. If nothing else, make sure that the site works in IE 5.2 or Safari. If you don’t have access to a Mac, send the URL to a friend, acquaintance or relative who has a Mac and ask for feedback. The same goes for Linux, make sure that it works for at least one Linux browser, especially if you know that Linux people will be using your site.

Another small but influential group are the geeks who may be using alternative browsers such as Mozilla or Opera. They may very well be your peers. They are also the people who often look at web pages critically. You don’t want them to be sending you emails saying that your web site isn’t working for them.

At the other extreme are the AOL users. Although Windows AOL is based on IE, it is not identical. AOL for Mac OS X is based on Netscape 7 for OS X. Although testing maybe difficult for AOL, if you become aware of a problem, try to find out what it is and how it might be fixed. Because there are still a lot of people using AOL as their browser.

All this sounds like a lot of extra work, but the only significant task is to get out of the “IE 6.x for Windows or bust” mindset. Because once you start testing your website on a few different browsers, you’ll get a feel for what works and what doesn’t work on the other browsers.

These are only suggestions for the minimum. Because I am a Mac head, I’m going to make sure that my web sites don’t work well for just one current Mac browser, but for as many as possible.

missing out on the AALL conference in Seattle

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 05:16:07 GMT

My biggest regret of the summer is that I’m not attending the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries, which is currently taking place in Seattle as I type this. It would have killed me to go all the way to beautiful Seattle and just be in the conference venue – and not have any time (or money) to stay there a bit longer and go bushwalking (hiking). I don’t like the sort of travel that encourages people to ignore the differentness of place. And somebody had to watch the library here while most of my co-workers are away. Next year the conference is in Boston, somewhere I’ve also wanted to visit. I’ll make sure that I attend that conference and have the ability to explore that part of the world, if only a little.

P.S. One of my pet peeves is that all library professional associations are named after the buildings we work in. Would it be too shocking to have an American Association of Law Librarians?

Music: Liz Phair, Liz Phair, Take a Look

my thoughts on government-mandated web filtering in public libraries

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 02:05:34 GMT

It almost goes without saying that I think that this decision is wrong. Another example of the US Supreme Court being split down the middle with Justice O’Connor being the swing vote that gave the conservatives another thin majority. I hope that history judges the Rehnquist Supreme Court as harshly as it judges Dredd Scott.

That said, I do think that this is a difficult issue. I don’t want weird people viewing porn and wanking over the keyboards where I work! It horrifies me how the most innocuous search term in a search engine -- or mistyped URL can lead to some very nasty results. This may sound like heresy to some librarians, but I don’t think the status quo was working well. Something needed to be done, but I think CIPA went way too far. It’s wrong to make everybody (meaning the less privileged teens & adults on the other side of the digital divide who can’t afford their own internet access) view the internet through the filter of what’s appropriate for a child. Even the Supreme Court admits this, but says that it’s sufficient that an adult can request to have the filters temporarily turned off. A commentator on today’s FutureTense (I must give a link to this Minnesota production) was correct when he mentioned how people will be very reluctant to ask library staff to have the “porn filters” turned off.

So I call on all adult library patrons to thwart this paternalistic Supreme Court decision to demand that filters be turned off when they visit their public library. Not so you can look at porn, but just so that you can use the internet that hasn’t been filtered or dumbed-down or bowdlerized (now that’s a word that’s due for a revival!). Any librarian worth her or his salt would be happy to turn off the filters for this reason. Don’t expect such a positive reaction if you actually are planning on looking at porn in a public library.

Whenever I get a minute, I should reread some jurisprudence. The law is only one means (the very official and blunt tool) for governing people’s behaviour. There are also personal ethics and social mores. I would hazard to guess that although most librarians would fight for your legal right to read anything you want, they would not be thrilled about somebody viewing porn in a their library or any other public place. Generally, social restraints are more pervasive but less enforceable than legal rules. That is why there is a danger when conservatives want all their social mores embodied in the law. There is a place for socially disapproved but legal behaviour. It is a murky area which is both a nasty cesspool and a helpful compost heap – which is fertile for humour, self-analysis and new ideas. Furthermore, there is something about the smell of this cesspool/compost heap which keeps the Borg of Conformity & Tyranny at bay. Because as soon as you want the law to mirror social mores – the first issue is who’s mores get chosen. Because that’s the thing, although a lot of social mores are held in common, they are not uniform. And although in a democracy, the majority has the right to do what it wants according to its constitutional powers, it would be very dangerous for a majority to use the its power to impose all of its social mores on everyone else – whether that majority happens to been in Parliament / Congress or the Supreme court.

musings about Content

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 16:21:38 GMT

I was thinking of adding something like "a radical law librarian's perspective" at the end of the description, but decided against it, because I didn't like the idea of my description being 3 lines long.

I was also toying with the idea of capitalizing the word Content or putting the word in quotation marks because I find it deeply ironic the way that all of the important things on the web have been reduced to being just one form of content or another. Sometimes I get the impression that some techie people think that one sort of content is interchangeable with any other sort of content. Of course, in a way this is true, but this attitude defeats the whole idea of content in the first place. The whole point is that words, images, sounds etc have context, and are not interchangeable! Also it leads to travesties like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which side-steps the crucial idea/expression of idea distinction by declaring everything to be digital media.

Anyway, I didn't do this because a capital letter would have stood out like a sore thumb and some people think the ironic use of quotation marks to be pretentious - or something which Dr Evil likes to do :) Not that I really care if somebody thinks I'm pretentious - that's her/his problem - but I am aware that quotation marks lose their effectiveness if they're used too frequently.

from How to Save the World's survey of Salon bloggers

Thu, 17 Apr 2003 03:59:39 GMT

Q6 How do you gauge the success of your blog?.

Most popular answers, in declining order of importance: personal satisfaction, compliments received from others, having fun, buzz (number of hits and ranking), opinions from people I know, number of new visitors, consistency of my writing, number of people who've blogrolled me without my asking, therapeutic value received from blogging.
Several of you commented on how easy it is to 'cheat' in number of hits, and how number of hits can sometimes be misleading for other reasons. A few suggested that for that reason the right-hand (number of hits since inception) Salon Ranking column list should be eliminated, or at least cut back to latest-30-days ranking.
A few people said the Salon 'community' really hadn't gelled and that we as a group need to do more things proactively to welcome and include fellow 'sloggers', and make Salon blogs a real community.

[How to Save the World]

Too bad I missed out on that one - my blogging was in a hiatus at the time.

the most inflammatory symbol in these times?

Wed, 02 Apr 2003 04:55:21 GMT

There's an Episcopal church across the road from where I used to live. I had mixed feeling about living in such close proximity to a church. It was a very nice sandstone building which had a warm glow in dusk. The Anglican church is also the major protestant denomination in Australia. Although I've never been particularly interested in it, living next to one seemed to help with my periodic homesickness. On the other hand, I did not like being woken up by the church's choir and organ on Sunday mornings. And it was often very difficult to find street parking during summer and autumn on the weekends because of all the weddings held at the church.

I mention all this because last weekend I walked by this church and noticed that its "pray for peace" signs had been defaced. These were were very tasteful lawn signs with a purple background, a white dove and the words, "pray for peace" along with the name of the church. Somebody had taken a black marker to these signs and blackened out the white dove.

To me, this seemed like an attack on the values of this church and afront to my entire neighbourhood. It reminded me of this Carol Lay cartoon.

denial of service attack against LiveJournal; concerns about the longevity of Salon blogs

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 04:56:07 GMT

It's been a quiet week on the blog - reflecting the reality that I've been unwell during this week as well as very busy. I'm a little behind in reading all the news in my aggregator, although I did read about Salon's dire financial situation. People are wondering what will happen to the Salon blogging community if Salon folds. All I can say that is that cost of starting a Salon blog is the same as starting a general Radio userland blog - so I would be very surprised if the existence of our blogs on the web would be threatened.

I had been thinking that in the worst case scenario, at least I have the LiveJournal version of my blog. That somehow seems more secure. That was before LiveJournal was shut down for around 24 hours with a denial of service attack. At first I had no idea what the cause was. My imagination invented disaster scenarios that my two LiveJournals had just vanished for ever. It would be very annoying to see the exploded library mirror go away - but that would be nothing compared with losing my concealed more personal journal. This one has more or less superseded my paper journal.

All this makes me wonder whether words are safer if they're stored as marks on paper or as a string of 1s & 0s on a computer storage device. I guess either way has its downsides - although most of the time we aren't aware of how potentially transient electronic information can be. Backup, backup, upgrade to newer software and hardware when you can. Not doing this would be like keeping a paper diary on the backs of ATM receipts, hoping that none get lost or go through the washing machine...