Sandee’s not such a fan of the new theme here at MaisonBisson. Without really telling me that I should have discussed the new decor with her before making any big decisions, she does say she feels it doesn’t suit her style. There are lots of ways to resolve the, um, difference of opinion, but we decided that just as Sandee gets most of the authority regarding the kitchen and I get the office, we can find a way to share the website.

The result is Nest. Sandee’s picked out the drapes and carpet, I’m tweaking the installation and moving the relevant stories from our back catalog in. It’s a little amusing to see our tag cloud prominently reflecting our interest in drinks and homemade sweets, but i guess those are the things that we enjoy sharing most. Pictured above are scenes from the top stories: a toast, our submission to AT’s Fall Color contest, and the Sumo Sac review.

I hope to eventually create a combined feed of the blogs, but if you’re interested you can follow the Nest feed here.

Another great comic from XKCD:

“I feel like I’m wasting my life on the internet. Let’s walk around the world.”

“Sounds good.”

[panels showing the world's great beauty, a truly grand adventure]

“And yet all I can think of is ‘this will make for a great Livejournal entry.’”

blog, blogging, blogs, information behavior, internet, journaling, life, livejournal

Nicholas Lemann, in a story on blogging and citizen journalism in the August 7 issue of The New Yorker:

[N]ew media in their fresh youth [produce] a distinctive, hot-tempered rhetorical style.

…transformative in their capabilities…a mass medium with a short lead time — cheap…and easily accessible to people of all classes and political inclinations.

And quoting author Mark Knights:

…a medium that facilitated slander, polemic, and satire. It delighted in mocking or even abusive criticism, in part because of the conventions of anonymity.

Of course, Lemann and Knights are talking not about bloggers but pamphleteers in later Stuart Britain (1685 through 1714, apparently). Lemann is using Knights’ Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture to make a point:

Societies create structures of authority for producing and distributing knowledge, information, and opinion. These structures are always waxing and waning, depending not only on the invention of new means of communication but also on political, cultural, and economic developments.

Or, more directly, he’s bringing a rhetorical hammer down on the internet cheerleaders hailing blogs as a true revolution in news media and reporting. “[I]t is not quit as different from what has gone before as its advocates are saying.”

But Lemann isn’t opposed to bloggers or citizen journalism. Lemann imagines them “fanning out like a great army, covering not just what professional journalists cover, as well or better, but also much that they ignore.” Instead of stirring a stale pot, Lemann seems to plea for bloggers to deliver on the promise:

Reporting — meaning the tradition by which a member of a distinct occupational category gets to cross the usual bounds of geography an class, to go where important things are happening, to ask powerful people blunt an impertinent questions, and to report back reliably and in plain language, to a general audience — is a distinctive, fairly recent invention. It probably started in the United States, in the mid-nineteenth century, long after the Founders wrote the First Amendment. It has spread — and it continues to spread — around the world. It is a powerful social tool, because it provides citizens with an independent source of information about the state and other holders of power. It sounds obvious, but reporting requires reporters. They don’t have to be priests or gatekeepers or even paid professionals; they just have to go out and do the work. (emphasis added)

blog, bloggers, blogging, citizen journalism, journalism, Mark Knights, Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker

How can I not appreciate thenonist’s link dumps and other posts when they’re illustrated with works like those above?

The men in suits come from May 29. June 4 offers us these funny trading cards and a gallery of horror movie damsels (in distress, of course). June 5 offers a good look at sincerity among other things.

And all of this amidst a context of intelligent commentary and smart politics.

blog, damsels in distress, galleries, links, quality, russian theater, thenonist, trading cards

My buddy Cliff emailed me excited about the following quote he found on the Yahoo Finance message boards:

Sun vs Dell

All you need to know about Dell & Sun was predicted 8 months ago by some blogger in his parent’s basement. The draft ads are cool:

http://spiralbound.net/2005/09/15/sun-talks-some-smack/

How come the big brokerage house analysts can’t figure this stuff out?

Cliff doesn’t really blog from his parent’s basement, but well, he was happy for the link love.

basement, blog, blogger, blogging, cliff pearson, dell, industry analysis, link love, parent’s basement, sun, sun vs. dell

I meant to post about this weeks ago, but HigherEd BlogCon has now come and gone. It had sections on teaching, libraries, CRM, and web development. (Aside: why must we call it “admissions, alumni relations, and communications & marketing” instead of the easier to swallow “CRM”?)

The “events” are over, but everything is online, and most of it is free. Ryan did a good job of covering the first few days, and what would a blog conference be without a common tag?

Special thanks to Meredith for pulling it all together. Eh, hopefully I’ll be more on the ball next year.

blog, blogging, conference, education, higher education, higheredblogcon, libraries, teaching

Anybody who questioned the Pew Internet and American Life report about how teens use the internet and how they expect conversations and interactivity from the online services they use might do well to take a look at this comment on my Chernobyl Tour story:

Student Looking for Info that your not give us
February 3rd, 2006 10:11

you people suck. We have to do a school report and you are not giving us any info on what happened to the people, and the environmetn, we need a story from someone and about someone who lived through this inccident.

Ignore the bad spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Ignore the personal criticism. Instead, think about enormous shift of worldviews that allows a reader to make that comment about a popular story on a top-ranked website. Yes, the internet really is conversational — even if some people may be bad conversationalists.

Now imagine instead that the comment was on a related post at a library’s reference blog. Kindly worded or not, that’s a reference question. It’s an opportunity to serve a patron who obviously isn’t being served by traditional library services, and it’s a huge argument for libraries to make sure they’re blogging this stuff and fully participating in the Google Economy. Afterall, the person who made that comment certainly didn’t search the library.

Keep reading: the language of your website, institutional blogging done right, and designing library services for today.

library, libraries, web 2.0, social web, social internet, blogs are conversations, blog, blogs, comments, blog comment, blog comments, teens, internet generation, reference blog, millennials, future libraries

A friend revealed his reticence to blogging recently by explaining that he didn’t want to create a trail of work and opinions that could limit his future career choices. Fair point, perhaps.

We’ve all heard stories of bloggers who’ve lost jobs as a result of the content of their posts. And if you believe the Forbes story, the blogosphere is filled with teaming hordes intent on ruining established companies and destroying the economy (okay, I exaggerate).

But the Forbes story was found empty after Kurt Opsahl pointed out the criticisms leveled against blogs applied pretty equally to printing presses (or, just about any other media, probably). And most anybody watching political reporting on the cable channels will find examples of bloggers whose careers were made by that trail of work and opinion.

So I countered my doubtful friends fear with this: your successor will be a blogger, and when you re-enter the market, you’ll be competing against bloggers who will be able to point to a history of work and writing as evidence of their fitness for the job. As employers continue to lose faith in the claims made on resumes or by references, those blog posts will grow in value.

He started blogging the next day.

blog, blogs, blogging, bloggers, risks of blogging, risk, changing modes of communication, professional advancement, advancement

Most of my reading is non-fiction, so I depend on Bob Garlitz to keep me current with the rest of the literary world and a bit of the art world.

bob, bob garlitz, garlitz, art, literature, stylist, blog

Arguments about Wikipedia’s value and authority will rage for quite a while, but it’s interesting to see where the lines are being drawn.

On the one had we’ve got a 12 year-old pointing out errors in Encyclopaedia Britannica (via Many2Many) and now on the other side we’ve got John Seigenthaler, a former editorial page editor at USA Today, piping mad about some libelous content in his Wikipedia biography page.

Now, I have to agree with Seigenthaler in as much as I would never want anybody to make such claims against me, and I’d probably consider my legal options in such a matter, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets a chuckle over the matter. I mean Seigenthaler is the founder of The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, after all.

It all sounds the same as the Attack of the Blogs story in November issue of Forbes Magazine. That story began ominously:

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

But Forbes and Seigenthaler both conveniently ignore the fact that lies, libel and invective are common in other, older media. And Seigenthaler should know well the limitations of editorial authority over the millions of words published by hundreds of writers in a newspaper every day. Mistakes are made, and yes, counterfactual material is often slipped in. (Sadly, it’s also worth noting that real lynch mobs of the post-reconstruction South often enjoyed the support of their local newspapers.)

And unlike those old media, corrections are easy and quick, and in context with the original information. Take a look at how the Wikipedia entry addresses Seigenthaler’s complaints as an example.

Yes, the decision structure around these social applications is different from old media, but that doesn’t make it any more wrong or bad or dangerous. It is, perhaps, a comment on the obscurity of Seigenthaler’s biography that it went uncorrected for four months, but it’s also a comment on how responsive the system is that accommodated Seig’s corrections so quickly. Now, imagine how much Seigenthaler could contribute to Wikipedia. Imagine how much richer our online community could be with his participation?

And that’s what Seigenthaler and the Forbes article miss: the blogosphere and Wikipedia are built by those show up to the game. People and companies who ignore it do so at the peril, but there are many examples of success for those who participate.

wikipedia, wiki, social, social software, community, communities, moderation, editor, editorial control, Seigenthaler , John Seigenthaler, usa today, editorial, opinion, slander, libel, blog, blogs, bloggers, forbes, fear, findability, google economy

The sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL last month for $25+ million got a lot of bloggers excited. Tristan Louis did the math and put the sale value into perspective against the number of incoming links the the Weblogs Inc. properties. It’s an interesting assertion of the value of the Google Economy, no?

The various properties have a total of almost 50,000 incoming links, which work out to being worth between about $500 and $900 each, depending on the actual sale price, which everybody’s mum about.

So Dane Carlson created this (now broken) how much is my blog worth? app based on those numbers and powered by the Technorati API. Zach took a stern look at it (while it was working) and decided the numbers probably represent the gross ad revenues of a blog over four years (or two years with strong growth).

tags: ad revenue, ad revenues, aol, assertion, blog, blogger, bloggers, bought, citation analysis, google economy, link value, linking, links, sale, sale price, sold, technorati, weblog, weblogs, weblogs inc, weblogsinc

Note: these are my presentation notes for a brown bag discussion with library faculty and university IT staff today. This may become a series…[[pageindex]]

More: my presentation slides and the Daily Show video.

Introduction

Public awareness of blogs seems to begin during the years of campaigning leading up to the 2004 election, but many people credit bloggers for swaying news coverage of Senator Trent Lott’s comments at Senator Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday celebration in December 2002. Blog reaction was strong, and critical of both Lott’s comments and the limited coverage they received at first.

Media attention to blogs has grown since, with political blogs like the top rated Instapundit and Daily Kos among the most visible. A November 2004 episode of The West Wing featured blogs in the plot, and blog coverage has now become so common in cable news that The Daily Show did a piece on it.

Most everybody understands that “blog” is a truncated contraction of “web log,” but there’s little consensus on what a blog is. What is or is not a blog can’t be strictly defined by style, form, content, structure, or even the technology employed.

Types of Blogs

Political blogs get a lot of attention, but preliminary results of an MIT Media Lab sturvey of bloggers found that 73.62% (28,141) of respondents said that half or more of their posts were “personal.”

The Washingtonienne may be the most (in)famous of personal blogs, but LiveJournal, the blog hosting provider most identified with personal blogs, claims over 8 million user-bloggers (2.5 million “active in some way”). LiveJournal’s media relations page quotes a story that connects LiveJournaling with emo rock, saying:

The impulse to LiveJournal is the same as to go to the show and sing your heart out in front of strangers.

Though LJ blogs are derided by many as “mundane, banal or even primitive, inhabited mainly by teenagers producing thoughtless and valueless babble,” the service has also attracted serious study, including in peer production of popular culture and a mood study by Gilad Mishne of the University of Amsterdam. Danah Boyd, study of linking patterns noted that personal bloggers are among the least likely link to other sites in their postings and that there is an assumed familiarity between the blogger and reader.

Starfishncoffee is one LiveJournal blogger, but I would also describe the anonymous Feel-good Librarian as a personal blogger.

Other types of blogs:

Promotion — think “online book tour”

• Freakonomics Blog
• Findability

Niche News

• The Shifted Librarian
• Wi-Fi Networking News
• Copyfight

Blogmedia — for profit blogs with editors and staff writers

• Engadget
• Gizmodo
• Boing Boing

Numbers

Technorati, an online service near the center of the “blogosphere,” claims to track 20 million blogs and 1.6 billion links. Though Technorati is not a blog, it offers services like blog searching, link tracking, and “tag” indexing. They also, of course, rank blogs based on the number of their incoming links.

Alexa, recognized as the Neilson ratings for websites, allows users to graph site traffic and compare it against other sites. This graph for BoingBoing, the site Technorati lists as their #1 blog, shows they’re ranked #4,195 of all sites in the world. That ranking compares favorably with The Chicago Sun-Times #1,233 position.

According to the Jan 2005 Pew Internet & American Life Project report on blogs and blogging, of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the internet…

• 27% (32 million) read blogs
• 12% of have posted comments or other material on blogs
• 7% (8 million) say they have created a blog or web-based diary

James Torio’s MA Thesis in Advertising Design discusses the commercial and marketing aspects of blogs:

Blogs are effective for disseminating information because they have similar characteristics to word of mouth. People tend to listen to the recommendations of friends and trusted resources and many Bloggers are viewed this way by readers.

Torio suggests that companies ignore bloggers at their peril, and offers as examples accusations of censorship by Microsoft (handled successfully by acknowledgment, p.74) and the issue of Kryptonite locks that could be hacked with a Bic pen (completely ignored, p.77).

Blogs Are Conversations

Indeed, that personal and conversational nature of blogs seems to be hugely important in their success. Chris Bowers, in an informal study that looked at popularity of political blogs over time and their community-building features, like the ability to comment or contribute, found that such features are vital to growing readership.

Jenny Levine, The Shifted Librarian, points to Ann Arbor District Library as a an example of an organization that makes good use of a blog in their relations with their patrons:

The posts are written in the first person and in a conversational tone, with the author’s first name to help stress the people in the library. The staff isn’t afraid to note problems with the new catalog, the web site, or anything else. Full transparency — nice. You can feel the level of trust building online. They respond to every comment that needs it, whether it’s a criticism, question, or suggestion. And some of the comments are fantastic. Users are even helping debug the new catalog.

Risks

The notion that blogging is a risky career move is remains persistent. A rather negative story in The Journal of Higher Education noted (discussion):

A candidate’s blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant’s blog comes up on any computer. Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger’s tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag.

Wikipedia, in fact, lists a few relatively well-known cases of bloggers fired for their blog postings, including former employees of Delta Airlines (for pictures) and Friendster (for discussing technology decisions).

Though causality can only be inferred, a 2004 MIT Media Lab Blog Survey found:

[T]he frequency with which a blogger writes highly personal things is positively and significantly correlated to how often they get in trouble because of their postings; [...] generally speaking, people have gotten in trouble both with friends and family as well as employers.

Legal

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers and guide toblogging anonymously are worth a look. Also of relevance is a recent Delaware Supreme Court ruling that establishes precedent that readers are expected to use context to aid their evaluation of meaning.

Cold Water

• Dvorak vs. Blogs
• Why your Movable Type blog must die

The Google Economy

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen describes blogs as “a Web-native content genre,” continuing:

[W]eblogs are part of an ecosystem (often called the Blogosphere) that serves as a positive feedback loop: Whatever good postings exist are promoted through links from other sites. More reader/writers see this good stuff, and the very best then get linked to even more. As a result, link frequency follows a Zipf distribution, with disproportionally more links to the best postings.

Google was quick to understand the value bloggers offered in identifying new resources to index, and what resources to index more often, a fact that lead to their purchase of Blogger, recognized as the first blog service, in early 2003.

As it turns out, hyperlinks are among a blog’s most valuable products. Because the web makes it easy to do large-scale citation analysis, and because every popular search engine now uses the technique as a significant component of their search ranking, the large number of bloggers hold great power over what we can or can’t find in those search engines.

The Google Economy is a recognition of the role linking and link-ability have on the propagation or success of an idea, product, or service. More discussion of this can be found in Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, subtitled “what we find changes who we become.”

Blog Technologies

• social software
• tags, tagging, and folksonomies
• trackbacks and pingbacks
• RSS and microformats
• moblog
• podcast
• vlog

Get Yourself a Blog

• Ask Ken
• WordPress
• TypePad
• Blogger

tags: plymouth state university, lamson library, tech tuesday, tech tuesdays, blog, blog study, blogger, bloggers, blogging, blogs, content structure, libraries, library, livejournal, media, networked information, presentation notes, typepad, wordpress

I’m a big fan of the WP Geo plugin, but I want more.

My biggest complaint is that I want to insert coordinates using Google Maps or MultiMap URLs, rather than insert them in the modified story editor. So I wrote a bit of code that reads through the URLs in a post, finds the “maps.google” or “multimap.com” URLs, fishes the latitude and longitude out of them, and adds some geocoding tags to the body of the post.

Take a look at how it works with these posts in my archive…

You should see one or more blocks of links like the following (from my Osceola Weekend post):

geolocation: geo:lat=44.006336, geo:lon=-71.547260, geotagged, geolocation:44.006336,-71.547260 geobloggers

Go ahead and click the “geobloggers” link. I could have added these links using the old Geo plugin, but I still would have had to insert the coordinates separately. Actually, that brings up a good point: my code also inserts post metadata in the same format the Geo plugin uses, so I can take advantage of all the good functions it has, like the one that inserts the “<meta name=“ICBM” content=“44.006336, -71.547260” />” tag in the header of this post (caveat: I had to disable the add_action code in Geo that feeds the postmeta table, as it was conflicting my code).

I’m releasing this now, to start some public discussion, but please recognize that it’s a very early beta.

Download: bsuite_geocode.zip
Install: place unzipped “bsuite_geocode.php” file in your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it via the WP control panel. See the WordPress Codex for more detail.
Use: write posts as usual, adding links to Google Maps or MultiMap as appropriate. Links to those sites that have latitude and longitude components will be used to geocode the post.

Example of a working URL:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=19.355507,-155.072365&spn=.191780,.318003&t=k&hl=en

Example of a URL that won’t work (note how there’s no “ll=”):

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=decker+canyon+rd,+malibu+california&spn=0.019857,0.039750&hl=en

I’ve got a lot of features and uses in mind, so consider this only a start. Please post bugs and suggestions in the comments.

Also, see these previous posts on geolocating the news or geolocating everything or just search the archives to understand why I’m so excited about things like this.

tags: beta, blog, blogmap, blogmaps, blog gis, geo, geocoding, geolocation, geotagging, gis, google maps, lat, latitude and longitude, lon, map, maps, mapping, metadata, multimap, plugin, plugins, wordpress, wordpress plugin, wp plugin

WordPress’s Pages open the door to using WP as a content management system. Unfortunately, Pages can’t be edited via XML-RPC blogging apps like Ecto. This might be a good thing, but I’m foolhardy enough to try working around it.

Here’s how:

Find a text editor you like and open up the wp-includes/functions-post.php file.

in the wp_get_recent_posts() function, change this:

$sql = “SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status IN ('publish', 'draft', 'private') ORDER BY post_date DESC $limit”;

to this:

$sql = “SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status IN ('publish', 'draft', 'private', 'static') ORDER BY post_date DESC $limit”;

Now, in the wp_update_post() function, look for this block of code:

// Escape data pulled from DB.
$post = add_magic_quotes($post);
extract($post);

and insert this block underneath it:

// XML-RPCs apps can't return “static” post status,
// so we have to work around it
$page_status = NULL;
if($post_status == “static”)
$page_status = “static”;

And follow that up by looking for this block:

// Now overwrite any changed values being passed in. These are
// already escaped.
extract($postarr);

and insert this block underneath it:

// set post_status static if this is a page
if($page_status)
$post_status = $page_status;

Fair warning: this works in my limited testing, but don’t blame me if you try it and it breaks something. You’d be a fool to mess with this on a live install, so don’t.

tags: blog, blogg as cms, blogg as content management system, blogging, cms, content management system, ecto, hack, hacking, hacking wordpress, php code, wordpress, wordpress hack, wordpress hacks, wordpress pages, xml rpc, xmlrpc

Danah Boyd posted about the biases of links over at Many2Many the other day. She looked for patterns in a random set of 500 blogs tracked by Technorati as well as the 100 top blogs tracked by Technorati. She found patterns in who keeps blogrolls and who is in them, as well as patterns about how bloggers link in context and who they link to.

The patterns Boyd points to would certainly effect the Google Economy, our way of creating and identifying value based on linking structures. And though she’s emphasizing gender differences, the patterns show broad differences in linking patterns between content types as well.

Discussion?

tags: bias, biases, blog, bloggers, blogs, gender, gender differences, google, google economy, link, linking, rank, ranking, social life of information, technorati

I stumbled upon captnkurt’s Information Nation where he popped a link over to Eric Myer’s Stereotypes. The gimic — and it’s a fun one — is that you can mix and match bits of faces. I don’t know why I like the combo above so much, but, anyway.

The thing about this is that it reminds me of Troy Bennett’s Human-IntoFace, reported here back in 2002 and 2004.

Separately, I need to go back and take another look at captnkurt’s story about CouchSurfing.

blog, blogspot, couchsurfing, eric meyer, faces, mix and match, photography, stereotypes, troy bennett

Jenny Levine is talking about an example of The Perfect Library Blog over at The Shifted Librarian.

The posts are written in the first person and in a conversational tone, with the author’s first name to help stress the people in the library. The staff isn’t afraid to note problems with the new catalog, the web site, or anything else. Full transparency — nice. You can feel the level of trust building online. They respond to every comment that needs it, whether it’s a criticism, question, or suggestion. And some of the comments are fantastic. Users are even helping debug the new catalog.

Jenny quotes some examples, go look.

tags: blog, blogging, communication, corporate blogging, institutional blogging, jenny levine, librarian, library, library blog, organizational blogging, suggestion, the shifted librarian, transparency, trust building

Stealing from Corante/Copyfight:

It’s a short, one-sentence blog post + a link, à la Kottke remainders. [It's] to share links to articles, resources, and websites of interest that do not necessarily require paragraphs of context or analysis. Enjoy!

tags: blink, blog, post a link, remainder

UPDATE: bstat has been updated.

bStat is a hit and search term stats tracking plugin for WordPress. In addition to reporting lists of popular stories and popular search terms, it will report recent comments and a unique “pulse” graph showing the activity for a story or the entire blog over time.

The documentation for the current release (b3, as of July 9, 2005) explains the public functions and their use. I believe they reveal themselves in their names, so here’s a list of most of them:

• bstat_todaypop
• bstat_recentpop
• bstat_todayrefs
• bstat_recentrefs
• bstat_refsforpost
• bstat_discussionbypost
• bstat_discussionbycomment
• bstat_pulse

You can see them at work in the column at right. Look for the headings “Today’s Most Popular”, “Recently Commented”, and “Top Incoming Search Terms” Today. I built many of these features into my old pMachine-based site and you’ll find a wish-list of features at Richard Akerman’s SciLib Pad. Among the many features not yet implemented is RSS output of these lists.

Aside from the “pulse,” the most unique feature of bStat is the way it counts stats. Many hit tracking packages either increment a single counter for hits over the life-time of a story or create a detailed record for every hit. Most people agree that “hit counters” offer too little detail, but often, those detailed logs provide too much. Reporting from those detailed logs incurs a big CPU hit, forcing bloggers to compile stats at regular intervals and never offering “live” stats to the public. bStat solves this by creating a hit counter for each story each day. This allows us to see changing traffic patterns over time. Separately, bStat tracks incoming search terms in a similar manner. The result is a reasonably detailed and lightning fast stats tracking app.

tags: blog, bloggers, bstat, bstats, hit counters, live stats, logs, plugin, pmachine, pulse, search terms, statistics, stats, stats tracking, traffic patterns, wordpress, wordspress plugin

LibDev launched today. From the Welcome message there:

LibDev is a site for those interested in libraries and networked information. Want to find a way to apply tags or social bookmarking to library content? Interested in how Wikipedia can serve libraries? Want to find a better way to do patron loads or talk about what identity management means to libraries? Looking for single sign-on solutions so patrons can move seamlessly from the campus portal to your OPAC without re-authenticating? Do you know your library is sitting on a goldmine of valuable data that you can’t use because there are too many systems and vendors who can’t or won’t talk to eachother?

LibDev might be for you.

Readers of following the library and tech categories here might want to check things out there. I’ll probably cross-post the most interesting items there and here, but I hope/expect to see some unique and valuable discussion there.

tags: blog, campus portal, imagineering, integration, libraries, library, library blog, library content, library integration, library portal, opac, portal

David Rothman points to a Daily KOS story that points to a MyDD story titled “Aristocratic Right Wing Blogosphere Stagnating.” What’s the point? Of the top 40 political blogs, more than half are ‘liberal,’ and more importantly, they support community involvement — including basic features like comments — that the conservative blogs shun.

of the five most trafficked conservative blogs (over 200,000 page views per week), only one [...] even allows comments…

[...]

Community moderated blogging platforms [...] have provided us with an excellent means of finding new voices, and these are the voices that are generating the accelerated growth in the liberal and progressive blogosphere when compared to the right-wing blogosphere.

Chris Bowers may have a point. He’s certainly got the numbers and I suggest taking a look at the links above to get the full weight of the story.

Though I’ve had my own frustrations with comments here, I keep them open because I believe that honest debate is the center of democracy. I keep them open despite my concerns about the tone of comments in stories like this, and despite the comments from conservative snipers in a number of my political stories. Republicans are working hard to stifle debate in our traditional news media and our universities, it’s no surprise they’re doing the same for new media too.

Technorati Tags: aristocratic, blog, blogging, blogosphere, blogs, chris bowers, comment, comments, community, conservative, daily kos, dailykos, david rothman, debate, democrat, differences, difference, honest debate, liberal, mydd, politics, progressive, republican, snipers, stifle, story

Cliff worries that his website, Spiralbound.net, doesn’t get indexed by Google often enough. He’s a good guy, so I figure I’ll prime the pump for him. Here, Google Google.

Solaris Docs: Migrating Veritas Volume Manager disk groups between servers
Solaris Docs: Solaris Disk Partition Layout
Solaris Docs: Copying A Boot Drive Between Disks With Different Partion Layouts

If you’re looking for those, you should also take note of these here at MaisonBisson: Configuring Sun T3 Storage Arrays and Things To Remember While Doing Upgrades on Mission Critical Sun Equipment.

Fireworks Factory Explosion Video

Related at MaisonBisson: Camera Goes All To Hell, Bits Recovered From Memory Card

Cellophane Tee Shirts

Related at MaisonBisson: Beef T-Shirts.

Clean Graffiti

tags: blog, cafepress, cellophane, disk partition, explosion video, factory explosion, fireworks, fireworks factory, google, servers, solaris docs, sun, tee shirts, things to remember, veritas, veritas volume manager

Welcome the flacks. I don’t get many comments on stories here at MaisonBisson, so I was interested when I found a comment to my story about the Outfoxed documentary just an hour after I’d posted it.

Here’s my theory, and it’s supported by stories in Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media and Al Franken’s Lies: conservative groups spend a huge amount of time identifying and attacking every liberal criticism. This mysterious Matt (perhaps from Ohio?) is a brownshirt on a mission. Are such personal attacks fair? No, but neither are Matt’s attempts to reframe my stories. It’s that reframing that so identifies the comments as conservative.

Answer the point, Matt. The question is about Fox news, an organization soundly criticized as biased and inaccurate by darn near every liberal, a bunch of centrists, and even a number of it’s own staff. You’re rhetorically and logically wrong to think you can disprove that by claiming other sources are more biased. But that’s how conservatives work: think Obi Wan as a republican saying “this is not the argument you’re looking for. You liberals should go chase your tail while we rewrite the constitution and shift your tax money to the rich.” Or something like that.

And that’s what’s happening in Matt’s comments to the Farenheit 9/11 story. Oh no! “Farenheit 9/11 contradicts itself.” But the Hitchins quote you offer as proof is less coherent than he claims the movie was. Here’s a fact, and let me suggest you watch Fog of War and read some psychology texts to understand it, people are not always logical, reasonable, or consistent. Furthermore, it seems people — heads of state included — will often tolerate extreme cognitive dissonance while in pursuit of money and power. The Hitchins quote plainly illustrates this fact, further darkening the sad conclusions Moore makes.

I will, however, compliment Hitchins’ rhetorical style. The play of equally unlikely and exaggerated opposites (“they do, or they do not; he is, or he isn’t”) create a lulling rhythm that leads nowhere, but appears sound.

As for Moore’s facts, let me repeat what I wrote in my earlier story: “Collectively, Bushwacked, Lies, and The Iron Triangle all lead the reader to the same conclusion Moore comes to. These authors’ references show a diversity of well researched primary sources — including government documents and qualified informants — that paint a fairly clear picture. It’s this brush that Moore uses for Fahrenheit 9/11.” I’ll gladly listen to any equally detailed and documented rebuttal, but please, no more empty accusations and false claims.

Finally, however, I’m amused by the apparent criticism of Moore for suggesting that troops should never have been sent to Iraq. That’s the point. Isn’t it? Our troops are suffering death and disability and and our nation deficits and diminished civil liberties in a war with no end in sight. This like like Vietnam and McCarthyism all it once if you think you can silence Moore and others for saying so.

[UPDATE]: Matt’s still at it….

Fox News is undoubtedly the most conservative news channel, and any argument to the contrary is intentionally misleading or stupid. Anybody who can count can tell you that Hannity gets three times as much air time as Colmes, and a mildly perceptive time counter will tell you that Colmes’ boss, Hannity, doesn’t allow him any time or opportunity to cross, correct, or criticize him. And that’s what happens when centrists are allowed any voice at all. Yes, one example is sufficient to characterize the entire network.

The problem isn’t that Fox News is biased, anybody who understands the history of journalism can tell you that the idea of unbiased news coverage developed sometime during WWII, peaked around 1970, and has been fading since. Democracy actually thrives amidst the cacophony of biased news outlets, so long as there is diversity and sufficient numbers of them. The complaint against Fox News is that they falsely claim the banner of “fair and balanced” despite contradictory evidence.

This is one of the reasons that former Fox News news anchor Jon Du Pre is speaking out against the channel. This is why former contributor Jeff Cohen is doing the same.

What is reframing? I put up a story about Outfoxed, you try to dismiss the argument with a comment that claims the source is too liberal to be listened to. I put up a story about Fahrenheit 9/11, again you try to dismiss it by claiming Moore is self contradictory. Another reader comments that he too has a family member in Iraq and is glad to find bumper stickers with a message he appreciates, and you dismiss him too. You ask what it means to (attempt to) reframe these stories? Clearly you know better than I do. Not once have you addressed the facts of any of these stories; you’ve made no attempt to demonstrate contradictory evidence.

What makes a liberal or conservative? The authors I name use primary evidence to discuss facts. Facts, by definition, can be neither liberal nor conservative. The authors don’t agree with my perspective, they’ve presented logical arguments based on independent evidence. That these authors make conclusions based on these facts that are offensive to people like yourself does not make them or their work liberal. You paint yourself as a conservative by claiming they’re liberals. Once again, these are facts, and nothing you’ve written here contradicts them.

But you knew that, you knew all of this. Why would you write such misleading comments in this blog, so far from the rest of the world? What motivation could you have? In the big picture, this conservative sniping serves a purpose, and I have to commend your efforts. But aren’t they sort of wasted here? In a larger forum, there’d be at least one idiot who didn’t see through you and would instead join with in wearing me or another blogger down with endless arguments about points off from my message.

Today, my message is about how conservatives like yourself are doing everything they can to snuff the flames of opposition. I’m up for a debate, but this isn’t debate. It’s a delay and distraction tactic. So here are your options: reveal yourself and enter a real debate with evidence to back your arguments (include citations), or leave. Further comments that do not meet this criteria will be edited or deleted as the commercial speech they are. This is an odd decision to make, as I believe strongly in the first amendment protects to free speech, but I also agree with the courts that commercial speech is subject to lesser protections. Further, I won’t let my blog, a media I pay for, be used as a mouthpiece for lies and deception in support of a candidate and ideology I oppose. That is to say, you can’t have both Fox News and my blog, but I’d gladly trade.

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