Month: March 2007
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Keeping a pseudonym hidden: possible?
(started out as an email; decided to make it a blogpost, just in case I add thoughts later on). Liz Henry moderated a SXSW panel on fictional blogging. Here’s a wiki entry about it along with her notes (Here’s a list of panel notes along with a summary by Ethan Zuckerman). Several interesting issues came…
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Liberals and Arguments
The Nonsequitur (blogged about a few days ago) attempts to identify fallacies from political columns and blogs, but as it turns out, the majority of its examples come from conservative columns. Why is that? They write, We have spoken about this apparent lack of balance in our note on bias: most “liberal/progressive” newspaper pundits–unlike their…
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Acid Queen Story
The Acid Queen Story , a woman’s reminiscences about her high school days–her accomplishments and her fall from grace. Well-written–but not consciously literary–her campaign to run for president bears uncanny similarities with the “Pick Flick” election campaign in the film Election. Engrossing read, funny and sad and true-to-life. The author–a New York blogger named La…
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Blogging Guilt
I don’t normally succumb, but in the last day or two I’ve been feeling a bit of blogging guilt. You know the feeling; you haven’t updated the blog in three or four days, and you know your (unseen) audience is anxiously awaiting your return. As it happens I have been writing a lot (and working…
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Akismet and False Positives: Using keywords
Akismet (and the rest of them) use algorithms and various procedures to flag things as spam. Their track record is very good, but the problem comes when a poster makes a comment with 3 or more URLs. A lot of times akismet puts it in the moderation queue, but sometimes it goes directly to the…
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Happy Commenting!
Once again, I have realized why I am receiving no comments. I am requiring users to register before they can make comments. But I as an admin have to manually approve these registrations–which I have not been doing–I haven’t even been receiving the email! So I have disabled the registration requirement and just let akismet…
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Red-Nosed Day
Here’s a strange safe-for-work flickr fetish.
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Turkey will win Eurovision
I’m going to go out on a limb and predict Turkey will win this year’s Eurovision contest. It’s such a long way from the 1964 winner Gigliola Cinquetti
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Fair Use and Superbowls
Is posting a 30 second clip from the Super Bowl on youtube to illustrate the NFL’s copyrighted terms of service announcement an example of fair use? Probably.
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Gun Control vs. the 2nd Amendment?
George Will notices that a court case striking down Washington D.C.’s strict gun control law may finally be the test case that the NRA needs. Fascinating! (And it reopens a matter I thought had long been settled). Ultimately, Will makes a faulty comparison between the gun control debate and the political speech/campaign finance reform debate:…
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More Makeup! More Makeup!
I don’t exactly know what’s going to happen, but it looks like I’ll be giving a presentation which will be streamed as a live video in May. Intellectually, I know that it’s not all that exciting, but still, the thought that my voice and moving image could be accessible by anybody at a given hour…
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47 Hours of Music
I just finished downloading the prodigious SXSW music bit torrent (consisting of 739 mp3s). I calculated that it will provide 47 hours of music. I have started listening to it now…
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Wired For Books & Twittering Dorkwads
Mark Cuban on why Youtube is not a hosting company (and therefore deserving of DMCA protection): It may suprise you that I dont have a problem with what Rapidshare is doing. I see them as legit, while you know how I feel about Gootube. Why ? Because Rapdishare is really a hosting service. They have…
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SXSW Podcast
Here is where to find the SXSW podcast (this list of podcasts will be growing over the next week or two). I can’t seem to find the notes for many of the sessions. Are people becoming lazier?
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Incomplete Web Views
Here’s the panel listing of SXSW Interactive. Pretty typical. Most other conferences do basically the same thing. But it’s totally wrong. It doesn’t list speakers or more importantly, the room number for each panel. Is this too much information? Sure! But the loss in usability is outweighed by its sheer convenience of having all the…
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Attention, ye Internet Gods
Attention, ye Internet Gods, Why is it so hard to export all your Outlook contacts into a series of Vcards? It’s almost as if Microsoft doesn’t want us to use any contact/mail program except its own. Isn’t there some way I could get a zipped file containing vcards for all my contacts? Yes, I know…