I did it, upgraded to Blogger Pro, I wanted to be able to make links to specific posts. Spell check etc. But now there is another damn learning curve – like how do I use the spell check?
Later: Ok, I can check the spelling! From the Blogger site, my old “Blog This!” does not show it – YET. Testing it now. Seems to work. I won’t be going on about it all, but one thing is really good, the small screen problem I had in Mozilla is fixed.
Still later… have been unable to publish (till now if this is through!).
Later… there were problems – promptly fixed by blogger – thanks Bill!
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PC Magazine – WiFi explained
Broadband Block Party July 1, 2002 By Rob Flickenger (thanks Cory at BoingBoing)
The show must go on!
Google alt.music.mp3 — This is the thread where streamer, p2p radio was announced. I have a sense of the importance of this sort of development and of people like this becoming heroes of a new era. That would be a victory for what is right.
Identity, Ethos and Vigilance
Michelle Finley writes in Wired: Attention Editors: Deep Link Away
Hupp said deep linking is not illegal as long as it’s clear whom the linked page belongs to.
“Hyperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act,” Hupp said in his ruling. “There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library’s card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently.”
Website designer Laszlo Pataki cheers the judge’s decision but thinks that the case should have never gone to court.
“Why bring the lawyers in when there are simple technological fixes that could have solved the problem?” Pataki said. “For instance, Ticketmaster could have blocked all referrals from Tickets.com. That’s an easy thing to do, so I suspect that by taking the legal route TicketMaster wanted to either get publicity or squish Tickets.com.”
And here we are – in a deep link! I have deep linked into the print format of the item. And it seems right, feels right! There is no deception here, this is a story from Wired, click and it will take you to Wired. There are some issues here though.
- Identity and ownership
- Technological fixes
I hate that word “belongs to” in the quote above. I have just made a resolution to always do what I have done above, to add the authors name. Identity is important for both author and owner. WHO am I deep linking to? If that is obscured then it is plagerism. Law might say so but more than that, it is the ethos that counts. Ethos is more important than the law, because it must win out over bad laws. Ethos is free, laws belong to those who can pay lawyers.
Identity works the other way to. I link therefore I am. My links define me, I am not an island, I am a node in a larger net, and without the net “I” die. Weblogging has made that so clear. So do the best writers about the knowledge ecology, knowledge is a conversation, it always was.
Technological fixes; that scares me. Right there on the top of daypop today is an article by Robert X. Cringely, Bob writes:
This is NOT about making things better for the user. This is about removing the ability for the end user to make decisions about how his or her computer functions. It is an effort by Microsoft to take literal ownership of Internet technology, Microsoft’s “embrace and extend” strategy applied for the Nth time, though on a grander scale than we’ve ever seen before.
Technological “fixes” used by Palladium, and similar already being implemented by Microsoft in Windows Media Player “updates” (see Dittohead in BSDvault)
Maybe this is a case for stopping MS by law (what a joke), vigilance is needed and the ethos that we have a right to our personal space. It might initially be inconvenient, but not using Windows Media or Windows media player is an important start, a bit simpler than moving all the way to GNU/Linux, but a good step. Vigilance is not free, the price is effort, it means reading great efforts like TCPA / Palladium FAQ by Ross Anderson, who concludes:
No doubt Palladium will be bundled with new features so that the package as a whole appears to add value in the short term, but the long-term economic, social and legal implications require serious thought.
Xanadu
The behavior of ants has been likened to a distributed mind, a demonstration of collective intelligence. In Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach an ant colony is even used as a main character to drive home the point that the actions of dumb individuals can add up to a smart collective. Xanadu was supposed to enhance the intelligence of the human race, too, but a new feature in your web browser is unlikely to have ramifications that profound. Yet in both language and art the act of linking nouns together creates new meaning, which is a nice bonus we’re sure can be pulled off with a few hours of surfing.
Smart Mobs? Does linking and back linking and networking make a mob more intelligent? I don’t know.
OK, I have done it, will this happen:
Link to this page and it will link back to you automatically
Have a response to something said on this page? Want others to see it after reading this article? This page can detect where a visitor is coming from and provide a permanent link back to it that all other visitors can see. Link to this article from the page where you’ve posted your response, and a reciprocal link to your page will be made automatically and for free.
Later: But it won’t happen… only the top 20 referrers get listed! Could I make my weblog do this?
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dive into mark/June 26, 2002
On daypop, how useful! And no wonder this is a popular link. How and why not to use javascript links and how to work around it! – makes sense.
Networks – Bound by Love
Backlinks — Love
Jon Udell using a biological analogy to look at blogspace
O’Reilly Network: Blogspace Under the Microscope [May. 03, 2002] I said in an earlier column that blogspace is a laboratory for group-forming experiments. As we conduct and observe those experiments, it seems useful to reflect on how life itself uses information loops to sustain multicellular collaboration.
The analogies are compelling — though also, let’s admit, fashionable and subject to abuse. Happily, biologists and information scientists are now talking to one another more and more. Having that conversation in blogspace might be a good way to get to the root of what blogspace is becoming, and how, and why.
“It’s hard to avoid the sense that there’s some biological force at work here.” This reminds me of the physical analogy that Moreno uses with the notion of “social atom”. There really is a pattern to seemingly random behaviour, chaos theory works with that, social net-work theory does too. However Moreno enabled the psychological work as an integral inescapable part of that investigation. Social net-works are patterns of what he called tele, feelings projected into… space. What is that space! Now it is blogspace! Moreno called it the sociometric matrix. (Hence the movie? 🙂
By going for the biological analogies it becomes easy to avoid the psychological. How about this: Patterns of linking – new norms and technology for doing so – are expressions of archetypal forces. That leads us to examine them as stories, myths, gods.
So what is the backlinking an expression of psychologically? On the net we tend to keep strict control of how public we make our choices and also our chosen-ness. We reveal our popularity, say being in the top 40 of daypop, or showing off the hit counter, but keep access to the logs private. Biologically, technologically there are reasons for that… from a marketing perspective there are economic reasons. Psychologically? Our chosen-ness, our choices are both the stuff of cyberspace, and the stuff of who we really are. What we click and what we link reveals a lot and who clicks and who links us does too. What are these forces of attraction? Forces of attraction on a physical plane… are magnetism, gravity. But see where it leads when we look through that psychological eye: Love. Eros. We want to control Love. It can’t be done. There must be a story there.
How about this passage by Stanley Richards: Eros, Master od Perversity
It comes about like this: Eros draws us to what is opposite because he is the desire for union. Giving way to Eros means permitting yourself to be attracted, not merely to what you like – but towards what is different from you, even radically different, even to what repulses you. For Eros is the great joiner. He reaches out to join you to what is unlike you: the opposite sex, the opposite idea, the opposite way of life, the opposite goal, the opposite course, the opposite god and, heaven help us, the opposite morality.
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The Alphabet versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain
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From the books web page:
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“… the European witchhunts followed closely in the heels of the printing press.” I have been reading with interest the Playboy McLuhan interview and the same printing press is just prior to nationalism and industrialisation. Makes sense to me that they are all linked. Good reviews on Amazon.
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Good design is not only pretty graphics or a good user experience, good design communicates.
Less is more – YES. This is more from Brig mentioned in my last post. What has Jung got to do with it?
Cybertime
Cybertime
Meg Hourinan in O’Reilly Network: What We’re Doing When We Blog [Jun. 13, 2002]:
What distinguishes a collection of posts from a traditional home page or Web page? Primarily it’s the reverse-chronological order in which posts appear. When a reader visits a weblog, she is always confronted with the newest information at the top of the page.Having the freshest information at the top of the page does a few things: as readers, it gives a sense of immediacy with no effort on our part. We don’t have to scan the page, looking for what’s new or what’s been changed. If content has been added since our last visit, it’s easy to see as soon as the page loads.
Additionally, the newest information at the top (coupled with its time stamps and sense of immediacy) sets the expectation of updates, an expectation reinforced by our return visits to see if there’s something new. Weblogs demonstrate that time is important by the very nature in which they present their information. As weblog readers, we respond with frequent visits, and we are rewarded with fresh content.
Cyberspace is what we called it but cybertime might have fitted as easily. Space is shrunk so we have a global village (perhaps) and time has altered the notion of now. It has altered it to the extent that we have to use words like “real-time”, synchronous, asynchronous. The passage by Meg Hourinan draws attention to this simple phenomena, the use of time… not unexpectedly in web logs. Yes the content is “fresh” or stale… but a strange thing happens, by logging it old content becomes fresh. I think so anyway. I often log old items here, because I think they are still fresh. Sometimes because they are particularly old, like my notes on Huxley’s Crome Yellow. The asynchronous nature of email and web groups is a way that the now has stretched. But for it to be experienced as a stretch we need to see the date. This dating of items is needed so we can get the timing right on the wave we are surfing. Dating items on the web was there from the early days with the conventional Last Updated line at the bottom of the page. With weblogs it has promoted itself to the top. Hmmm, as in newspapers, hence the weblog is more like journalism. Journals too have dates. Rebecca Blood mentions
In early 1999 Brigitte Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the Eatonweb Portal. Brig evaluated all submissions by a simple criterion: that the site consist of dated entries. Webloggers debated what was and what was not a weblog, but since the Eatonweb Portal was the most complete listing of weblogs available, Brig’s inclusive definition prevailed.
All this is of particular interest in that it echoes what happens in the psyche. From the outside it looks as if people in therapy are examining the past, but that is not so. What they bring to a session is “fresh” — because they brought it! And why? Because the pattern of the past will be repeating in the present and the pattern is the interesting thing. Patterns of the soul – archetypes – are worth catching. To be fully there – the ‘past’ also needs to be time-stamped — it is impossible to imagine a specific feeling without a specific moment (or span of them). The underlying pattern is outside of time. Fits with the idea that the soul is eternal. e-ternal, not a reference to the e words but just wondering if it means outside of time?