Updating MoveableType

I'm taking my moveable type server off line for a while to fix it up. If you have an edublog blog, it may be unavailable for the next while. I'll modify this comment with updates as they happen.

The moveabletype database is busted. I can leave it alone, meaning I can't add new blogs, or I can start an new one, which means I have to back up everyone's blog and rebuild them. Nothing's lost either way, but I'm not sure how much time I want to put into it at the moment. Thinking.

MOO and LJ

Spent the afternoon trying to compile MOO on OS X. Not much luck, but I'm half way there. First had to get a GCC compiler installed on my laptop, then everything went fine, until the 'make' died. Waiting for instructions.

Also Katie and I met about how we're going to get Livejournal.utoronto.ca spruced up this term. May be fun. I wasn't going to do it alone.

Fixing things up...

Spent some time tracking down a problem in the CGI scripts we use to submit poems and fiction at The Harrow, and was thinking about doing some work on Livejournal @ UofT when Jeremy informed me that LJ is giving up the use of codes and everyone gets free accounts now. I'll have to think of how that works out for us.

Oh, ya. I'm still... doing something...

But what :)

Tell Paul Martin NO to missile defense

http://www.paulmartintimes.ca/ is paul martin's new blog space, and he's got a poll asking about our participation in Bush's missile defense program.

Why not fill out the poll? And save our country.

Off to RCAT to speak on blogs and scholarly communities

I'm giving my talk on Blogging and the The Significance of 'Communities of Scholars' in the Academic Environment at RCAT in 30 minutes. Hope some of you can come by. Here are my notes: Community of Scholars if you can't.

The Significance of 'Communities of Scholars' in the Academic Environment

The Resource Centre for Academic Technology brings you two perspectives
on the value of "Communities of Scholars" that use weblogging (blog)
technology in today's academic environment.

Please join us Wednesday, November 19th,
1-4 pm, Room 4049, 4th floor,

Robarts Library.
Refreshments will be served.

For a richer description of this event or to register go to: http://www.utoronto.ca/cat/whatson/blogging.html

*** Journaling Communities for Scholars
By Jason Nolan 1 - 2:15

This presentation will look at two of the major weblogging tools that dominate the market: Livejournal and MoveableType. Each tool as a particular role to play in academic writing. Moveable Type works best as research tool for sustained reflection, while Livejournal is suited for very large groups of students and classes. By January 2004, livejournal.utoronto.ca should be available for limited use with the opportunity of providing all members of the university community with their own journals.

**** Digital Citizenship and Communities of Scholars
By Robert Luke 2:30 - 3:30

Cultivating communities of practice and learning networks that foster civic engagement and ensure open access is a key step in ensuring that "digital citizenship" is founded upon fundamental rights of participation and engagement for the public good.

When communities of practice are fostered and created around the use of new technologies, digital divides can be ameliorated, accommodated, and overcome. These communities are the Community Learning Networks, the Community Access Centres, the Open and Public Knowledge Initiatives, and the informal community based groups that share information and knowledge, support the acquisition of information and knowledge, and support and encourage community members to participate in the knowledge based society.

In this presentation, Robert Luke will define "digital citizenship" and explore the relationship of digital citizenship to public research and communities of scholars.

***

Registration: http://www.utoronto.ca/cat/whatson/blogging.html

Questions or comments: contact Mia Joy Quint at 416-946-3558 or write to mia.quint@utoronto.ca.

-- Mia Joy Quint Instructional Technology Training Liaison Resource Centre for Academic Technology University of Toronto (416) 946-3558

Please see the Academic Technology Newsletter: http://www.utoronto.ca/cat/newsletter/

Audio Blogging

"audblog is a service that provides bloggers with theability to post audio to theirÝblogs from any phone .Atthe end of the trial sign up we will provide you with the telephone number...allyou have to do is call the number and the world hears you. Use it to make a difference...Use it tomake your voice be heard."

Funny thing is that I've never had a cell phone. I guess I'm inverted.

Livejournal.utoronto.ca

I've just installed a livejournal server at uoft with the help of Brad Whitaker, one of the LJ developers, and James Wilson in meds. Special thanks goes out to Derrick de Kerckhove, Michael Edmunds, Mark Federman from the McLuhan Program, and Lawrence Spero (Pharmacology) for helping me make it happen. More info will follow, but please, if you want to help out, let me know, either with a comment here, or by email. The goal is to offer blogging to the entire unviversity community, and I can't do it alone. Thanks.

And no, the address is not http://livejournal.utoronto.ca, yet.

flyblogging = Blogspam

Spam Rapidly Increasing In Weblog Comments notes that BBC News has a nice article discussing 'flyblogging', the phenomenon of spammers leaving advertising-related posts on personal weblogs. And there are some comments on tools. Interestingly enough, Live Journal has built in antispam tools. You can set your journal so that only users with accounts can comment. Too much trouble for spammers. And of course this LJ facility also means that you know who is reading/commenting, and you can read them back, easily enough.

I've had to turn off some of the comments functions on my MT because of the spamm... did it last month.

UofT Bulletin on Blogs

... and me.

No one told me, until barry mentioned it just today, that the UofTBulletin (pdf) has a nice article on blogs that mentions me. You think they'd have contacted me or something, but no, I guess enough of my life is on the blog that contacting wouldn't make any difference.

Here's the text:

Net News
Getting
Blogged Down
By Audrey Fong
IN CASE YOU HAVENíT HEARD ABOUT THE ìHOTTESTî THING IN THE EVERchanging

Internet subculture, a significant number of Internet users
are jumping on the blog bandwagon.

Although some portray blogging ó a daily web log or journal ó as
a faddish digital phenomena, others believe it is here to stay. In fact
some academics like Jason Nolan, lecturer and scholar-in-residence at
the Knowledge Media Design Institute, have been blogging for years.
Others, such as Professor Henry Farrell of political science at U of T at
Scarborough, are fairly new to blogging. ìBlogs are pretty much what
you make of them. They are clearly flexible in their interpretation,
manifestation, implementation and distribution,î Nolan said.
Nolan, who views keeping a daily web log as an empowering communications
medium, has been doing it for over two years. ìBack in
1994, the World Wide Web was going to give everyone access to their
own web page and the potential for them to have an online presence,î
he said. ìIíve seen how hard it is for the average individual to negotiate
all the aspects of maintaining a web presence, even without considering
the difficulty of conceptualizing and organizing content.î
Many academics see blogs as potentially useful teaching, learning and
research tools. They can be used to update course information and
provide journaling and/or research tools for students as well as the
ability for researchers to share information with colleagues. ìBlogs are a
valuable sounding board for ideas at their early stages,î Nolan added.
Farrell also sees many advantages of blogging for academics. ìItís a
medium that allows one to give forth on issues of interest without having
to write academic articles or go through the pain of getting op-eds
accepted by papers with wide circulation.î Although Farrell sees blogging
as a congenial way to mix scholarship and his interest in current
affairs, literature and various other topics, he hopes to incorporate a
blogging component into a course next spring.
Nolan is currently researching problems with blogs ó whoís
actually doing it and identifying the cultural biases of blog technologies.
To view Nolanís blog, click on http://jasonnolan.net/; Farrellís blog is at
http://www.henryfarrell.net/blog/.

Done

Entered my last post on the AoIR blog for this year. I'll leave the feed on until at least midnight for people to post their little posts... I hope that they're having good thoughts about what was really a pretty good conference.

Crazy conference...

Well, the strange thing is is that I've not had much chance to blog. I've been tooo busy. Most with doing ad hoc tech support; lending out my computer to folks, converting file types, and even setting my computer up as a basestation at one point. Check the conference blog feed to see what everyone's been saying/doing. And I'll see what I can catch this morning.

An Internet First...

Barry Wellman blogged! And I have witnesses. I'll dig up a picture to prove it as well.

Broadening the Blog I & II: Thoughts

Thoughts on the morning... sessions I attended... and presented at...

Broadening the Blog I

Alex Halavais, Thomas Burg, Cameron Marlow, Matthew Rothenberg

I'm not giving a transcript of this presentation, but rather just the thoughts that I have on what I heard. If I misheard, my apologies. I came in late, as I was running around the hotel with "macStumbler" checking to see where the wireless network was active. Then I tracked down the apple rep, and found out that he'd not plugged the wireless in yet. Ack. Missed Alex and Thomas

Cameron: interesting take away message for his presentation was the problematizing of the notion of blogsphere, and how it made him uncomfortable. Whereas blogdex has become one of the defacto arbiters of who/what is cool, the intention is not the intention.

Matthew: Mining the data... me talking about you doesn't make us a community, if you're not aware of me. But metadata and linking and indexing. It is difficult to to let you know who your community is. Strangely enough, the notion of the Livejournal.com doesn't seem to make it on the horizion. Especially the marinel.org/jouel linkage mechanism for LJ.
- Matthew noted that he too is getting blogSpam, which has been driving me crazy. That is the same as emailspam but where someone posts multiple comments to your blog, with links to viagra or porn sites.

(gak: something borked on my computer and I lost some comments I'd typed on the questions.)

Someone said: the maps and mapping of blogging are reductionist misrepresentations. Cameron (response) sees it as individual/individual.

- Take away: how has the Internet changed under the influence of blogs, in light of the commodification of the net as a business tool (after 1994) in that the opening of opportunities afforded by blogs for community and communication has so quickly been 'polluted' by spam. Does this mean that every new affordance is infected by spam as soon as it leaves the womb?

Broadening the Blog II
(~45 participants)

Well, I got through my paper, before the time was up... which is strange,since I've talked on a similar number of points in 30 minutes and

Elizabeth Lane Lawley

"Cultural Capital Dominance in the Weblog Economy" - Self-reflexive sociology of Bordieu and the cultural validation/reputation (class and power) and who controls these kinds of environments. She wants to apply Bordieu's model to the context of weblogs: field/habitus/cultural capital. I wish vera was here for this, as she's a big Bordieu fan.
http://mommamusings.net

Q: what is the cultural capital of the average blogger?
- or what is the cultCap of the bloggers we are aware of or conduct inquiry on.
Q: are not blogs self reflexive ex officio?
Q: anyone studying trash blogs. Some of us want to be beyond the horizion
Q: what about livejournal popularity contests of cheesecake photographs
- marenal.org/joule - daily friend/unfriended lists.

Q: what is a blog? handrolled? chronological series of posts?
- no comments, no pinging, no talkback, no permalinks
- just an online web based journal

Taso Lagos "Parallel Society: Weblogs, Micromedia and the Fragmentation of the Public Sphere"
- Event based expression of cultural/political action.
- Is the public sphere fragmenting, or chaotic?

Aaron Delwiche
"Reconstructing the agenda in the world of Do-It-Yourself Journalism"
- blogs lived after september 11 (Alex says), and when Trent Lot was borked for his comments via a blog (His comments on Strom Thurman's birthday, and how Strom would have created a better place if he'd become president. Twoo weeks later, Trent is toast.)
- agenda setting theory is Aaron's thing... looking at journalistically focused blogs.
- not telling people what to think, but what to think about... I never realized that this was called agenda setting theory, but it has always been what I thought that journalism was about. Of course, I'm interested in what people are not thinking about.
- but his analysis is interesting... showing how communication studies is relocalizing itself into blogging bringing in its prior conceptions of the field. Somehow individual stories are not, and will not be 'news' nor important. Their lack of cultural capital is obvious. And we're still a capitalist society, be we economic or social capitalists.

- Q: is the media setting the agenda on terrorism in blogs? or is the tool we use to see what is being blogged biasing the view of what bloggers are talking about? If 90% of the bloggers are doing an infinite number of things, and 10% are talking about what isin the media, then are we looking at blogs? or only navel-gazing at media hounds?

WHAT ABOUT THE LURKERS!!! The people reading but not actively participating in blog discourse.

AoIR Blog

KAT, Bernie and I, and hopefully with the help of Bram and Susan, will be running the Aoir blog for the AoIR 2003 conference. I'll be blogging the conference here as well, no doubt, so don't be shocked by a change of content.

KAT has whipped up a very cool RSS feed to bring together all the other blogs that are run by attendees of the conference.

iSight Cam

Yes, it is the iSight firewire cam! Picked it up yesterday, after talking with Ken of the NRC. The cam works with iChat (AIM for you plebes) and allows for video and audio chatting. It will also work as a blog cam.

I plan on using it while KAT!, bernie and I blog the AoIR con this month.

History of Technology at Sheridan

I went out to the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning today. It's out in Oakville, west of Toronto. Commuting. Ugh. Got to the train station at 8:35 for a 9:43 train. But there was a 15 minute line up for train tickets. Missed it. However, after getting a ticket,and having an hour to wait, I went up to the great hall at Union Station. Kenny had sent me an IM last time he was there tosay that there was wireless access. And there is. And it is free. Or seems to be. The network is Bell based, so it maybe recognizing my sympatico account and letting me on. There was a Bell guy there watching me, he'd been installing an internet Kiosk thingy, and he asked me how I was connecting, and was a bit shocked that I could get on, but he too thought it might be because of my sympatico account.

Trains. I like trains. For all too many reasons. They are the great good form of transportation. Though, of course, in Canada, we are punished for taking the trains. Poor and irregular service. And when you do get to a station, it is in the middle of nowhere, and you really need a car to get anywhere from it. Or a bus in this case. I did catch the Oakville transit bus to Sheridan, and got there 15 minutes before I needed to. Sheridan looks very nice, though it seems to be modelled after a shopping centre rather than a university... that is you can't get near the campus unlesss you're willing to wade through a couple of thousand cars. Well modelled after York University. Obviously I have transportation issues on the brain. Don't mind me. I'm a broken record player when it comes to tranportation issues. Sheridan is definately a bright and shiny up and coming Institute. I thought it was more of a college, but obviously not. It's got 'institute of technology' written all over it.

I finally got to meet Dan Zen. I fit in with what appeared to be the manditory departmental dress code: black. I don'tthink that either of us were sure of what to expect from the other, or from the experience, but we both seemed to be willing to 'wing it'. Plugged in my laptop, only to find that I couldn't synch up with one of their two large screens, so we went back to using their system. They did have a bright and shiny touchscreen that allowed me to point and click right on the screen, but I didn't get to make too much use of that. Just a cool building, interesting educators, and an attentive group of students I would rather have spent the afternoon talking with than lecturing to...

Then my mind went blank. And I don't really remember what happened. I call this lecturing. I guess I don't really have room for meta-awareness when I'm trying to get all my synapses firing in syncrhonous orbit. But after an hour, everyone wanted to continue, so I spent another 30 minutes covering what seemed to be the right constellation...

About me:
- computer hostile
- programmer suspicious
- designer demanding
- conceptualizer and creator online learning environments
- http://jasonnolan.net
- Scholar in Res @ KMDI
- Senior Fellow McLuhan Program in culture and tech

New Media?
- Consider the book _New Media: 1740-1915_
Early web... an online community
- What is the net suposed to be?

Why Was the WWW created?
- Network for american military
- able to withstand nuclear attacks

Where to find the old net?

- Ed Krol
- Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet
- http://rfc.sunsite.dk/rfc/rfc1118.html
- The Whole Internet 1992
- OReilly
- Old Web
Browsers
- http://www.dejavu.org/
- Usenet archives et al.
- http://www.archive.org/ wayback machine

How did we communicate on the Internet before the WWW
- ASCII RULED
- talk/IRC - synchronous
- Usenet (uudecode) images
- gopher, FTP - static documents
- telnet
- MUD/MOO polysynchronous
- early chat spaces were MOO-based 'talkers'
- Lost Library of MOO
- Jason's MOO http://projectachieve.net
- development trajectory from MOO > Microsoft
- Pavel Curtis founds LambdaMOO at XeroxParc
- http://lambda.moo.mud.org
- Pavel starts Placeware
- Placeware bought out by Microsoft (summer 2003)
- Microsoft markets Placeware as LiveMeeting

Why are blogs the realization of the net?
- everyone can create
- Internet is still text

Cultural assumptions of the internet
- internet is for everyone
- the tools you are given limit what you can say.
- Hegemony of ASCII paper (http://jasonnolan.net/papers)
dead technologies
- ideas for the future
- medieval illuminated manuscripts > web pages
- public documents
- images and text
- marginalia and comments

Know where the future's coming from
- moos > placeware
- moos > video conferencing
- moos > Multi User online gaming
- moos > COLLIDE - hacking as community

The future of community
- Userdesigned design (UDD)
- flash > UDD
- VRML > UDD
- users > prosumers
- controlling the user to enabling the prosumer
- designers will be designing tools
- designers will design infrastructures
- designers will provide the language for design
- designers will not design passive toys

Hint: the triads of technology
- how can you have an opinion without experience?
- how can you have experience without diverse experience?
- the compleat user has experience on at least 3 platforms
- Unix, Windows, Macintosh
- Photoshop, Fireworks, GraphicConverter
- Dreamweaver, InDesign, raw html coding
- MSword, Wordperfect, AppleWorks
- IRC, ICQ, AIM
- enCoreMOO, MOOcanada, LambdaMOO

The Role of the Delete Key in Blog and Business fears

[Two articles on blogging... I'm wireless at union station, heading out to Sheridan to give a talkon tech. Missed my train.... oops. next one's here.]

The Role of the Delete Key in Blog

Is a blog still a blog if someone else edits it? A recent policy change at The Sacramento Bee has raised questions about whether taking an editor's pen to a Web log before it is published detracts from very nature of Web logs, or "blogs,'' as the online diaries are called.

---

Guardian Unlimited | Online | Why blogs could be bad for business

Why blogs could be bad for business In today's corporate culture, where knowledge is power, the information-sharing capabilities of weblogs may not be entirely welcome, writes Neil McIntosh

Blogging and the law...

Today I met with Rajen Akalu, who works with the Bell University Labs' Centre for Innovation Law and Policy, and folks from the university's Law Library to talk about blogs. It was a great opportunity to share the joys and challenges of blogging in academic environments. I hope they'll be coming online when we do our Livejournal install this month.

Totemo Isogashii Desu!

Alex just reminded me that I have my AoIR papers due October 1. I'm on his second panel Broadening the Blog Thursday, October 16 10:00 am - 11:15 am. Topic: The Bias of Blogging: The Cultural Assumptions of Ubiquitous Blogging on the Digital Divide. And Saturday, October 18 10:00 am - 11:15 am I'm on a panel Theorising Networked Community talking about The Hegemony of ASCII: Rethinking Research into Online Communities in Light of the Deep Structures of the Internet. I think that the paper for one of them is done, but I'm not sure which one. :)

[Scarfed the Isogashii (busy) from Alex]

That said...

I do have plans for the future. I'm meeting with Michael Edmunds who directs the InfoCommons at UofT, and Derrick De Kirkhove and Mark Federman of the McLuhan project later this week. The goal is to push a large scale blogging tool on the University of Toronto. I'm pushing for livejournal.com. To that end, I've been talking with Brad Whitaker, one of the founders of LJ. I... could... work... and it would be great to have a blogging tool on campus that was centrally managed, and useable by literally thousands of students.

As of this moment, LJ has 1280099 users, of which 611679 are active. They are making 2647 posts an hour; 44 a minute... and this is 8am on a sunday, EST, on a holiday weekend for many of us. Robust or what.

Steve Mann: Power in the Darkness...

[I start by apologizing to all and sundry for this post. Steve asked me to come by and blog this evening's activities, and it was a great opportunity to participate. This record is just what I heard, saw and felt... as with any other personal blog, it is ideosyncratic. Though, it is not, as you'll understand why I say this when you've read more, narcissistic. Just a uniperspectival view on a very interesting evening.]

This is my first Steve Mann event. Well, mostly. I was present at TedCity (now IdeasCity), back in 2000? when Steve and his crew of cyborgs gave Jeanie Beker a cyborg fashion show to end all fashion shows. But that's another story... probably to be found via your favorite search engine.

I'm left with the assumption that everything is normal tonight, despite being in the middle of the largest power outage in Canadian history. All Toronto is without power, except for Steve, of course. He's wired in more ways than one. He's got electricity, and has placed a television out on the street before his gallery telling people what's going on in the world around us... next to a neon sign saying "Open". Inside is lit by three flood lamps, powered by some unseen force.

The show starts with Derek De Kerkhove introducing the program... with the three participants slowly immersing themselves into a large clear plastic bath tub. Steve (Natural Born Cyborg), Maurice Benayoun (Poet of Electricity) and Pierre Levy (a delight and dismay). Parenthetical descriptors are Derek's. The metaphor of the public bath in western culture holding forth over the night. [No comment was made regarding the male only space of the bath in public discourse.] Interesting sight though. [Most of the Internet is down as I edit this, so I can't provide links to everyone's web sites.]

Of course, there were an equal number people taking pictures and recording the event than were not. And this was not seen as strange by any participants. And there was a baby crying in the backyard... which lent a strangely organic counterbalance to the cybertheorytalk.

Many things were said that reflect what Derek, Steve, Maurice and Pierre are known for. And with my limited battery power, and the speed at which their ideas were flying back and forth, and the amount of water being splashed about, I wasn't going to try and generate a transcription of what was said. Perhaps some folks who were recording it will take the time to transcribe the whole two hours and send it to me? Or perhaps not. Suffice it to say that it was the dynamic interplay of these ideas, and their being performed in an art gallery that made this a particularly energetic and interesting discussion... despite the heat zapping everyone's energy.

And energy was often a point of reference, "People will do anything for a bit of electricity" Steve noted. Poignant tonight, in that we're willing to give up our freedom, from technology, in order to maintain our ordered existence. And this extends from reliance on electricity, to acquiescence to surveillance, and beyond. It was if Steve had personally requested the power outage, to illustrate his point, commenting on how the vulnerability that is build into electric circuits, in the form of circuit breakers... "penny wise and fuse foolish" as he put it, are optimized for the expected, and optimized for unstable eventualities. This is not the case with our society, or our social/technological infrastructure. It is too costly to build for unlikely contingencies, and our safety and freedoms are left to pay the price when something does go wrong. The whole notion of hubrisic notions of invincibility is the target of his musing in this regard. Trying to build an invincible system attempts to build a system that has no provision for instability, no systemic circuit-breakers.

[About this time Stefano calls from somewhere far away, it seems, and is piped into the room via a hands-free phone. But nothing seems to be coming from the phone, after a first wave of hellos. Which is unfortunate.]

After a while, the bath metaphor takes on a different, and more powerful notion. While these three guys are sitting in a tub, discussing surveillance and sousveillance, I'm struck by how a voyeuristic positioning forced on us observing these three men in a tub. The juxtaposition of the nursery rhyme three men in a tub with the feeling that we're interloping in on a private conversation is too strong to shake off. Though comments and interjections from the audience are invited, it feels difficult to break the invisible barrier and virtually immerse oneself into the tub/conversation. Over all, I get an interesting sense of where the bath fits into this evening, from the perspective of the speakers. I'm really hearing three men sharing with each other, and vicariously with the audience lounging at the pool's edge, their philosophical musings on life and culture and language. Such a discussion would not be out of place in any Roman or Turkish bath.

[lacuna]

As Piere suggest, we've moved to a collective intelligence of a post-metacity. Beyond the spoken (the individual). Beyond language and writing systems (of the city and the nation state). And onto a level of metaphoric abstraction of the interdependence of the whole species. He wants to transform cyberspace into a domain of the collective intelligence of the human kind... though we are not really aware of the discource of this realm.

[And my battery dies, under the stress of the darkness that has embraced us all... well, not really. I have just commandeered the one free powered jack, aside from the three powering the lights. And I'm off in a dark corner, recharging and typing away.]

Oh, and Derek brings up blogs! which are a stated aspect of the evening, but Pierre dismisses them (I'll convert him later...), as merely easy web tools, easily commented on and interconnected... as a 'kind' of connected intelligence... only one or two steps along... not a new symbolic layer, such as he's trying to build, but very limited. Of course, that's probably due to the standard lack of long term hands on experience with new technologies that major thinker have. (See my dissertation for a long discussion on this problem. And if you can't find it, then that just supports the point.) Is what he's saying only another philosopher's top down visionary approach, versus what blogs represent as a bottom up movement, unemcumbered by wetware of the actual user's experience (wetware being the average you and me, who may blog, but are not struck by the obvious truth of visionary pronouncements), or is Pierre talking about a whole new layer of abstraction that is embedded in a whole new metanarrative. This is vapourware that you can sink your teeth into.

My statement is not to diss what they're trying to accomplish. I'm totally comfortable with academics and artists who work with grand gestures and totalizing statements. I'm more shocked by people who want to dismiss anything greater than the diversionary and mundane. The ides of these three men in a tub can be either contextualized as the cutting edge that is leading us forward to knew ways of understanding ourselves, or as the anchor that ties us to artistic and philosophical traditions, relocalizied into the digital age. Either way, they represent the edge which allows us to reflect on ourselves at the center. And if we lose the ability to reflect on ourselves, we wallow and are lost. As Pierre says (as in a precis by me), these new tools will allow us to move more fully into the world of ideas, beyond the fixity of Plato, into the dynamic mutation of abstraction that can be made visible with new tools. A merging of philosophy and technology.

The last word, Pierre ... the web has existed only for 10 years, almost nothing in term of the cultural revolution/evolution, and the Internet for 30. We have no idea what it will being one generation. Cyberspace is a process, something that is becoming... and we're all responsible for this evolution... especially if done together. Currently the Internet is narcissistic... personal website/blog... the mirror of collective intelligence of a large organization/country... the circulation of ideas between all the creative/organizationa/productive aspects of our societies. Though we have no means to visualise it yet, with cyberspace and tools of abstraction there are possibilities.... Not that it will be something beautiful to see, or that what we are doing together will be beautiful or magical, but rather the real (mimetic) mirror of what we are...

Maurice closes the discussion... "everything is good with a good glass of wine, and friends." At which point the discussants exit the tub, and dry off, and we all repair to the Village Idiot Pub for some beer in the uncharacteristically sultry Toronto night.

[Please post corrections, comments and links to any material you have.]

Brainwave Building Blog

[Steve asked me to post this on my blog... and I'm only too happy to comply.]

Brainwave Building Blog

Deconism Gallery/Arts Complex
was designed as a blog --- something we call "buildinglog"(which, like cyborglog, abbreviates to "glog").

We've all seen smart buildings, smart lightswitches, smart toilets,and intelligent user interfaces, but what happens when you have"smart people"? What happens when you wire up the "intelligence" ontopeople?

2003 August 14th and 15th we explore what happens when the intelligentbuilding meets intelligent occupants.

The August 14th event will be an intellectual discussion aboutthe relationship between cyborglogs and buildinglogs.Three panelists (Maurice Benayoun, Pierre Levy, Steve Mann),moderated by the Director of the Marshall McLuhan Program inCulture and Technology, will enter an immersive multimedia space(a brainwave bath) while discussing the implications of the post-cyborg age.

The August 15th event will be an actual collective (de)consciousnesswhere the occupant-cyborgs interact with the building, to create an audiovisual experience from their brainwaves, as partof a brainwave (de)concert performed by jazz musiciansBryden Baird, James Fung, Dave Gouveia, Sandy Mamane, and Corey Manders.

For more information, see http://eyetap.org/deconism/index.htm

Blogging at UofT

Hossein Derakhshan emailed me about his project: University of Toronto Blogs. If you're here, check it out.

blog toys

Playing with Netomat, that I found on Joi Ito's blog. It is a java based tool for making multimedia thingies for the net.

Looking for old blogs

Looking around on a server, I found my earliest surviving month blogging March 2001. Nothing special about it, except that I was using GreyMatter at the time, and that all my earlier stuff is gone. Snifff...

Blogs have First Ammendment Rights... in the US

I got this from Chika (in Japanese), via Yuka (in Japanese). Chika's somehow related to Joi Ito's Neotony crew, btw.

Free-er Speech on the Net

"How comparable is content posted to the Internet to content published in, say, a newspaper? Not comparable at all, a federal court decided last week, and the ruling may have broad implications for many people who post content to the Web, including Web loggers (bloggers), and participants in collaborative communication forums. "

The full text of the legal decision is available as a pdf

Japan: Gaiax trademarks BLOG

Joi Ito notes that a Japanese company is trying to trademark the word blog, in Japan. Scary. Though he notes that stranger things have happened, even if this doesn't float.

Fun... wow! Deleting Blogs!

I just deleted all the blogs, with minor exceptions, from Roger's fall class, and my KMD1000 class. I left anything on that had been updated since April 2003 though. Nuking 60 odd accounts/blogs seems strange, but I want to keep things clean, and I just added about 20 blogs for Gary's class at Nodak. Sigh... cleaning up is so hard to do. I also took the BBQ apart today and cleaned off all the rust and re-assembled it, vacuumed the balcony, and I should get 3 loads of laundry done.

So, even if I nuked your account, the content is still there, and I can rebuild the account and you can continue. Email me if you want access to your blog back. If the directory is gone, ie you can't view it. Then it is gone.

Updating MT on the server.

Just a warning to anyone whose blog I'm hosting. I wouldn't update your blog for the next couple of days. I'm still updating the software and the server, and I may have to restore from backups if something goes wrong. Actually, you can update the blogs, but keep a backup of your blog on your server, using the 'export' function.

I'll let you know when I'm done.

Blogs and Weblogs: Opportunities and Conceptual Firewalls

Just finished my presentation on Blogs at the Nexus conference at UofT. Small group, but very enjoyable. Here's the PowerPoint slides of the presentation, if anyone's interested. I said I'd put it up for the folks who came to listen, as we were a bit rushed for time, and I didn't leave the opportunity for folks to write down some of the URLs.

Blogging Presentation

May 9th I'm presenting on Blogs and Conceptual Firewalls at the Nexus Conference at UofT. If anyone's signed up for that conference, drop by to say hi!

Blogs and Weblogs: opportunities and conceptual firewalls
The tools that we create to communicate limit what can be said as well as offer new opportunities for expression. Information technology developers who seek create multilingual tools suffer under the often unconscious burden of the inherent cultural and language bias inherent in the Internet. As a result, many of the technologies we create to facilitate communication reproduce cultural norms, rather than challenge them. Considering the example of the newly emerging technologies surrounding weblogs (blogs) this presentation will outline the scope of the problem, and conceptual frameworks for challenging the hidden barriers to developing learning tools.

A(o)IR: It never rains.

I heard about my conference proposal for AOIR Toronto this fall. My proposed paper "The Hegemony of ASCII: Rethinging Research into Online Communities in Light of the Deep Structures of the Internet." was ACCEPTED! And I'm also presenting on a blogging panel. I'm also doing the tech for the conference, and I was a conference reviewer. BUT the review process was blind, so I don't feel too bad. The bit that makes me happy is that I'm the only one at the conference giving a paper and doing a panel. Someone else is doing two panels. Apparently I wasn't suposed to put in two proposals. There are 367 out of 560 proposals accepted. I just wish I could remember what the panel was about... (Jason runs off to dig through his outgoing email. Found it. It is called "Broadening the Blog" chaired by Alexander Halavais, SUNY Buffalo)

It is unAmerican to provide web services to nonAmerican media sources. Oh, and technology is apolitical... right :)

Julia D sent this to me a couple of days ago. Akamai Cancels a Contract for Arabic Network's Site (registration required). I rant on enough about the cultural hegemony inherent in the actual structure, utilities, encoding and code of the internet. I sometimes forget to look at what's going on on the surface. In this case, it is unAmerican to provide web services to nonAmerican media sources.

[Full text of the article is below, in case you're worried about the registration fro NYT getting you dumped on an unAmerican government list]

Akamai Cancels a Contract for Arabic Network's Site

April 4, 2003
By WARREN ST. JOHN

In a move sure to complicate the efforts of Al Jazeera, the
Arabic news network, to get its English-language Web site
running, Akamai Technologies abruptly canceled a contract
on Wednesday to provide Web services for the site.

Employees at Al Jazeera headquarters in Doha, Qatar, said
they were frustrated by the decision, though not entirely
surprised. "It has nothing to do with technical issues,"
said Joanne Tucker, the managing editor of the
English-language site. "It's nonstop political pressure on
these companies not to deal with us."

Akamai, based in Cambridge, Mass., would not comment on the
reason for the cancellation. But Jeff Young, a company
spokesman, issued a statement confirming that Akamai would
no longer do business with Al Jazeera.

"Akamai worked briefly this week with Al Jazeera to
understand the issues they are having distributing their
Web sites," he said. "We ultimately decided not to continue
a customer relationship with Al Jazeera, and we are not
going to be providing them our services."

The English version of Al Jazeera's Web site was shut by
hackers roughly 12 hours after it went online on March 25.
For a time, Web users trying to gain access were directed
to a Web page bearing an American flag. Akamai, whose
clients include MSNBC and CNN, maintains a broad network of
servers that provide protection from hacking attempts. It
was for that reason, Ms. Tucker said, that Al Jazeera hired
the company.

"Basically this was our answer to the hacking that has been
nonstop and pretty aggressive," she said. "We had a
done-and-dusted deal on March 28. Then yesterday, we get a
letter from them terminating the contract."

Akamai's decision is one in a series of headaches for Al
Jazeera since the start of the war. Defense Department
officials criticized the network for showing images of dead
and captured American soldiers. After that episode, the
network's American financial correspondents were banned
from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and the
Nasdaq. On Wednesday, Iraqi officials expelled one Jazeera
correspondent from Baghdad and barred another from
reporting there. American officials have also accused the
network of unduly emphasizing civilian casualties in Iraq.

Al Jazeera contends that much of the traffic that shut
down its site was from Web users simply curious about its
coverage. The search engine Lycos reported yesterday that
"Al Jazeera" was its most-searched-for term last week.

Ms. Tucker said that Al Jazeera hoped to have its English
site up within 24 hours, but that without Akamai's many
servers, the site would be more vulnerable to hacking
attempts.

The site went live just after 7 p.m. last night.

"It
doesn't derail us," she said. "We can withstand the hacking
up to a point, but if they focus it all on one server it
would put a lot of pressure on that server.

"We hope that won't be the case," she added. "We're working
on it all the time."

Ms. Tucker called the hacking attempts "pathetic." "It's a
narrow, pro-censorship attempt to silence a news site," she
said.

This is not the first time that Akamai has had to deal
first-hand with tensions between the Arab world and the
United States. The company's co-founder and chief
technology officer, Daniel Lewin, 31, was on American
Airlines Flight 11 on Sept. 11, 2001, when the plane
crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/04/technology/04WEB.html?ex=1050593603&ei=1&en=9e9846594854ea35

HOW TO ADVERTISE

Urbane Legends

Another strange story passed on by Rannie from The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century: "What happened to me and the new girl (or, "The girl who cried Webmaster")"

Why is everything we read on line believed so uncritically? I'm sympathetic, but just plain not shocked. What shocks me is how people may be turned off something like blogging because it mirrors real life.

what is it good for...

I was reading a post on Joi's blog about blogs and googlewashing and whatnot, and had a thought...

The funny thing about blogs is their lack of historicity in the minds of so many people. Blogs are just the confluence of a bunch of odds and ends with about as much great earth shattering newness as, say, DOS or the html/www was. Sure, they turned the world on its collective head, not because it was doing something special, but because it wasn't. DOS was lobotomized Unix. Html lobotomized SGML. Blogs just plain lobotomized *.

As with all killer apps like this, the deal is that they don't stretch anyone's paradigms, or challenge anyone's cosmologies, so they can become ubiquitous... be adopted by the treadmill of the pundits who make up the rolling wave of the A-lists, and in the end, not cause much change to the way things are at all.

It doesn't mean that they're not useful, valuable or fun. Just that they're not much more than that.

I am always suspicious of anyone who gets the notion into their head that they've come up with a solution to a problem. Not that I don't want to hang out with them, or be their friend, but unless you realize that solutions create problems, not solve them, I gotta wonder what you're smoking.

iBlog software

I just set up an iBlog using the :: iBlog :: software from lifi. I am just playing with it, and it won't replace my software I'm using now, but some of you may like it... WALLAH? Yuka! as it does japanese properly. It will update via ftp and webDAV, and it integrates fully with OS X to allow you to work in and with iTunes and iPhoto.

I'm going to put it through its paces.

[Update: Sarat at lifli.com has been communicating with me a couple of times already, and I'm sending him crashlogs and info to firm up some problems in an otherwise wonderful looking program.]

War Satire Blogs.

Joi Ito's has a list of a couple more interesting Satire blogs related to current events. such as GWB, Saddam and Kim Jong Il.

And Joi's blogrolled me back, so he gets a gold star next to his name, and can sit inside during recess to check his email.

Conceptual Firewalls...

If you've not heard, though I have only been home mere days, I'm heading to Texas. Salmon and I are leaving 7am on Friday to drive to Austin. She's organized a panel discussion on the topic of Conceptual Firewalls. Though I keep thinking of it as 'cultural firewalls'. Hopefully we'll infuse the proceedings with some zing that they weren't expecting.

SXSW /interactive/panels/sunday

Conceptual Firewalls: While blogs have the potential to foster community and to support independent publishing, access to internet technologies and online communities in general remains uneven. The "firewalls" take many forms: linguistic, cultural, economic, gendered. If blogs and blogging communities are to enable anyone to publish anything at anytime, it's crucial that we consider the ways in which they may or may not partake of these same inequalities. Heather Champ (The Mirror Project), Cameron Marlow (Blogdex), Jason Nolan (Knowledge Media Design Institute), Katharine Parrish, moderator (squish), Ana Sisnett (Austin Free-Net) %uFFA5%uFFCARoom 17A

Google buys Blogger/Pyra

Yes, I know you've probably heard this before, but anyway, the Google/Pyra story is interesting for me, obviously. It brings blogging on to the social scene at a level that may help in my job search. At least the question won't be "what's a blog?" and "Who cares about blogs?" any more.

The Joy of Dross

I was about to post a comment responding to comments made by RK and Pea to my micro-rant on voice, but then I decided to make it a post.

I don't know how false. My point is that blogging is about having a voice, not about having to say something intelligent or interesting. You, RK, would know better than most of us, which famous writer wrote her/his best stuff the first time pen was put to paper? Probably 100000:1, could be more. Blogging is a tool of public voice, and it is still in its prenatal stage. And new writers have to find their footing. Of course writers who already have a skill in a nother public writing medium (academics, professional writers, journalists) can leverage their prior skills and experience, and leap over those who are new writers and new bloggers.

Yes, publishing the mundane facts of your life can be boring... unless you happen to be Catspaw who can turn the act of clipping her toenails into high drama, or Blatherings where Debbie's life is subject of her cartooning. What's different? Well, they're both out to manipulate the reader, rather then being out to share the facts of the day. They're ready to beg/borrow/steal from their own lives in order to caputer some market share of your attention, and some cycles from your cortex processor.

[Sorry, this is pre-coffee, so I may be losing the fight for clarity.] That said, we don't expect the first painting, poem, written page to be perfect. But we do have a fetish that when something is public, it should be interesting and professional, and we have a defacto write, nay a divine command, to position ourselves within a 'great chain of blogging' that puts the writer of the mundane at the bottom. Bet I can't completely escape from that either.

Personally, I am more interested in the writers of the mundane than I am about reading what goes on in The New Yorker. Always been that way for me. I figure that enough people read the big journals, journalists and rags that I'll pick up anything interesting by cultural osmosis. Same goes for blogs. Though there are some big names, at least in their own minds, on my blogroll, it is only because I've tripped over them in the same manner that I have tripped over everyone on the list. At random, as friends in other contexts, or as friends of friends.

Ok, my point is that it is a new medium, a new form of expression. We can focus our attention on those who will, reasonably enough, want to hijack for ends that jive with their previous medium, or we can focus on the people for whom this is their first location for public voice. There are more of the latter, and most will fail, but some may take up blogging in a new way, and add to our palate of forms of written expression in ways uncharted. And I'm curious as to what they'll do.

Another point is that, unlike is the case for previous forms of publishing, it doesn't take much cash. It IS an elitist western form of communication... you need a computer and access to the internet... which leaves most of the world out. That number goes up and down by a billion people depending on what the chinese government's doing. But all in all, it has given more voice to more people for less gelt, and right off the bat I started hearing, in other media, how blogs would bring down writing, pollute the rarified air of journalism with the dross of the average d00d with nothing to say. And thank god for the editors, and more for the filter of time, that separate what is worth reading from what is not. The only rationales I can imagine for this position is that people want to keep their own privledge and power, and don't want to be threatened in their position of authority, and that, as a reader, people want to know what is right and good to read without having to discern what is interesting for them to read. If it is in the 'Time Literary Suppliment' it must be good. But if it is on a blog called the "fetid gerbil" who is to tell us if it is good or not. What if we read something trashy and find that we like it. What if we really do enjoy a good wallow?

Luckily, we have http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/ which is probably the greatest tool invented for limiting the scope and diversity of blogging that I've ever seen. Or it is the greatest tool that I don't understand. It tells you what is best. It tells you who is reading whom, what topics are hot. And everything else is not. So? If you can't find out what's important to you, you can find out what is important to everyone else and read that. There are others that help you find the best of the best: blog of the day and the list who show you what is good out there. I guess I shouldn't complain. It is just the way things are.

I just want to encourage people to keep blogs. Boring blogs. Blog the minutae of your life. Do it the way you want. Don't think that it has to be interesting. And don't care if anyone reads it. Fight the temptation for audience, and embrace the temptation to find something interesting to say to and for yourself. And I think that people should consider how controlled and directed their tastes are towards what is 'best to read' and worthy of reading, without much in the way of criteria beyond the fact that they were trained from an early age to appreciate such things. And you don't challenge your training? I do think that a bit of unlearning is a good thing, when it helps you to find a home closer to your heard, and a bit farther away from the dictates of taste and style. And even if your true and eternal home is rapt and wrapped with all that it 'best in our culture' (you unpack that... my hands are sticky) at least you'll know that it is, cause you've hung with the backwoods homeys for a while.

[I reserve the right to disagree with this after coffee...]

Steve Mann announces Glogs

Cyborglogs ("glogs") is what Steve's using to describe what he and Joi Ito, and others, are doing in the blogging world... He's always got something new up his sleeve... collecting intel.

And he'll be doing, I think, his first public lecture on Glogging in my KMD1000 class this week. Don't miss it...

As Steve puts it: Cyborg Logs (also known as cyborglogs, or "glogs" for short) are timestamped stream-of-deconsciousness personal diaries often made public in realtime on the World Wide Web. Unlike Web Logs (weblogs, blogs) that are done from a desktop, glogs invite the public inside the life of the glogger, and allow others to communicate with the cyborg by modifying his or her visual perception of reality in realtime.

China Blocks Bloggers

Kat ICQed this to me... from Ron Deibert's lab: China blocks bloggers

Bloggies

Eszter
reminded me of the Third Annual Weblog Awards. Gotta look closer to see what's up this year with them. As Eszter says, they at least recognize that blogs exist outside of the USA.

Edublog returns...

I've resurrected the EduBlog.com blog to keep track of blogging focused materials. I'll probably move it from blogger.com to MT sometime soon, but for the moment, I'm just happy to have it back up.

Thanks KAT!

Kat thought I'd like this one.

Paying for Moveable Type

I went to movabletype.org : Donate and donated $30 CDN for my MT software that we all have been using this year. With 20+ blogs of Rogers, and the 25 of my students, plus all the other odds and ends, I figured that we're getting our money's worth out of it.

The Trott's have done a great job with their software, and I'm happy that it has been so serviceable to us all.

Anyone wanting to donate to me, can buy me a beer. Hmmm... maybe I should put a paypal donate icon on this site, and let users donate to me.... wheeeee.

---

Addendum: I did add a 'pay pal' link at the bottom of this page. If anyone wants to help with the costs of running the various blogs on edublog or jasonnolan.net, please feel free to do so. If you're a student in ENG3150, however, I'm already being compensated by Roger and Yorku. Thank you very much. And if you're at KMDI, I think of it as part of my teaching duties. As well, I will accept beer in place of donations. Prefer it actually.

Welcome to 100 Words

Found Welcome to 100 Words from Joots' post "Learning Curve Five - 100 Words and Then Some"
And it had the best warning: "PS: 100 Words is not a blog."

Blog-in-denial.

Blogging is

I've just finish a solid draft of an entry for the Encyclopedia of Community on blogging. Please read it (click on more...). I'd like some feedback and opinions. Please don't copy it or archive it anywhere. THANKS!

Blogging, keeping a blog (web log) or online journal, is the process of creating, organizing, interacting with and archiving posts to a web environment. Blog entries focus on an individual, theme, or organization. They may be posts that explore someoneís personal thoughts, update users on a software product, or organize news of the day around a specific issue. Most blogs are updated daily, or more often, functioning as a window onto the authorís world. The web site where you keep your journal is called a blog. You are a blogger. And the act of updating your site is called blogging.

Blogging is less a private act of keeping a journal than it is personal publishing. Every blog has an audience, intended or unintended. Most sites have comments functions built-in or as add-ons like blogchat and enetation (See Weblogs Compendium.) that allow visitors to contribute to the discussion. Unlike other online tools that allow for dialogue between individuals, blogs are primarily monologues representing the voice of the blogger(s) who run the site. In terms of knowledge community, blogs are conceptual tool for sharing stories and personal narrative, allowing individuals to manage and present an online identity. And many blogs become linked to each other through various means. Most blogs have a permanent link (permalink) for each post which is a link to a specific archived entry. Constellations of narratives and community develop as blogs and specific blog entries are linked in a dynamic hypertext of interwoven communication. Tools such as Blogdex track this web, making it possible to locate an individual within the hierarchy of bloggers. Oneís position in the community is determined by who reads you. If a blog maven links to your blog visits can rise from a half dozen a day to thousands.

Blogs have be traced back to 1997, though the exact genesis of the term is in dispute. According to Rebecca Blood, they were termed weblogs by Jorn Barger, and only 23 were known to exist when ìPeter Merholz announced in early 1999 that he was going to pronounce it 'wee-blog' and inevitably this was shortened to 'blog'.î (Blood, 2000) Blogs are children of older online technologies (Krol 1992), but the blogging revolution comes from the ease at which it is possible to update and maintain a blog.

Tools for blogging can be anything that allows you to maintain a chronological lists of entries, and are often open source or free to individuals. Early on, blogs were updated using a text editor, hand-coded html, and FTP. The main tools are Blogger, Livejournal, Moveable Type, Greymatter, Radio Userland, Bloxom, Manila, Zope, Slash. Blogger is the easiest to use. Bloxom is barebones. Live journal has the best community features. Moveable Type excels at flexibility and power. Userland targets corporate and organizational users. Zope and Slash are group environments. The rest fit in between, with specific features and options to make them all the best choice in various circumstance.

Blogging is hyped as publishing for the masses. Children and seniors, homemakers and industry executives, programmers and poets are keeping online journals, but these masses are overwhelmingly English speaking individuals in the developed environments. They are relatively technologically literate and have regular access to the Internet. As blogs are inherently about me, they are more of interest to cultures that privilege individualism. Western mountain climbers on Everest keep blogs, chronicling their day with text and pictures, updated by satellite. Their Sherpas do not. There are claims that blogs are without bias, and a location for free speech, because they are not controlled by corporations. However, there is much self and community censoring, and corporations are starting to notice. And viral marketers may already targeting the community. Blogs are also criticized for clogging up the internet with meaningless, irrelevant and irresponsible content. Often this comes from professional journalists and individuals who feel content needs to be vetted, reviewed and edited.

Blog Software
Blogger - http://www.blogger.com
Livejournal - http://www.livejournal.com
Bloxsom - http://www.raelity.org/lang/perl/bloxsom/
Manila - http://manila.userland.com/
Radio Userland - http://radio.userland.com/
Moveable Type - http://www.moveabletype.org/
Slash - http://www.slashcode.org/
Zope - http://www.zope.org

Group Blogs
Metafilter - http://metafilter.org/
kuro5hin - http://www.kuro5hin.org/
Memepool - http://www.memepool.com/
Alienated - http://www.alienated.net

Personal blogs
Crabwalk - http://www.crabwalk.com/ - Blog personality
Meg Hourihan - http://megnut.com ñ Blog personality
Neil Gaiman - http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp ñ Fiction Author
[thanks for the correct Gaiman URL Kat!]
jill/txt - http://cmc.uib.no/jill/ - Academic
Joots - http://www.backwash.com/content.php?id=127 - Columnist
Catspaw - http://www.insanecats.com/ - Student blog

Blogging Tools and misc.
Weblogs Compendium - http://www.lights.com/weblogs/tools.html
Weblogs - http://www.weblogs.com/
Blogphiles - http://www.blogphiles.com/
blogrolling - http://www.blogrolling.com/
Bloglet - http://www.bloglet.com/
Salon Radio Community Server - http://blogs.salon.com/
Dallas Forthworth Bloggers - http://www.dfwblogs.com/
Blogdex - http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/
Blog Articles Archive - http://edublog.com/~laurel/blogs/index.htm
GTA Bloggers ñ http://www.gtabloggers.com

References
Blood, Rebecca. (2000) ìweblogs: a history and perspectiveî http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Doctorow, Cory, Rael Dornfest, Scott Johnson, Shelly Powers, Benjamin Trott and Mena Trott (2002). Essential Blogging: Selecting and Using Weblog Tools. Sebastopol: OíReilly.

Krol, Ed. (1992). The Whole Internet. Sebastapol, OíReilly.

Nolan, Jason. (February, 2002) ìCeci n'est pas un blog!î E2K http://netauthor.org/e2k/jan2002/features.html111

Essentialized Blogging

My copy of Essential Blogging is in the UofT bookstore. Gotta get it today. There are going to be problems with it, I can tell, from looking at the authors. But I need it. And I want it. And I got something to write for barry on the topic sort of soon.

blog humour

Catspaw found this at http://www.somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/goldmine/google//luckyglauber_blog.jpg and thought of me. Sweet.

But I hadn't heard of...

Blogging Kitties

Yes, I'd head aboutEssential Blogging from OReilly. But what I didn't know about was the cat pictures on the cover! Thanks dave.

Ceci n'est pas un blog!

I was looking for a bibliographic reference for Foucault's book Ceci n'est pas un Pipe, and found the following reference on blogging. This is particularly neat, because I wrote an article for NetAuthor titled Ceci n'est pas un blog last January. Anyone know what it says?

Geradon.be: Ceci n'est pas un blog

Ce matin, davantage par ennui que par rÈel intÈrÍt, je me suis mis ý rÈpertorier les blogs qui avaient pris le parti de me linker. Je ne sais pas si je dois percevoir ý la vue du faible rÈsultat constatÈ un manque d'intÈrÍt quasi-global ou une mÈsestimation gÈnÈralisÈe. Peut-Ítre suis-je rÈellement mauvais, peut-Ítre ne suis-je pas drÙle ? Sur un panel de 50 blogs, ý peine un blog sur trois me linke. AprËs 5 mois d'activitÈ, je me sens 'hachement incompris. Peut-Ítre que finalement, mon blog n'est pas un blog. Je vais y rÈflÈchir.