Thanks to my poll I know that some people at least are interested in how I made my weblog in the first place and weblog-related hints – so here are a couple, mixed in with a rant about how complex all this stuff is getting to be.

I feel as if there’s a kind of arms race going on as more and more weblog-related technologies are implemented. Weblogs used to be simple – I just typed in some text on a web form and magically it appeared on my site.
Then I put in a counter so I could track my traffic.
Then I decided I liked the idea of being able to categorise my writing for easier access (see long list at R), so I moved to Moveable Type. Then I started to hear more and more about RSS and XML so I added this XML feed – I no longer remember how but someone else’s computer is generating it automatically.
I have always been interested in the idea of content rating as a voluntary way of ensuring kids are protected from unsuitable material, so I gave my site an ICRA rating.
Then trackback came along so I had to figure out what it is and what it does (let you see who is linking to you) and I had to change my template so that people could do it.
Then I learned about affero and decided it would be fun to give people a way to express their aggregate opinion of my site.
Then I was intrigued by the idea that sites could indicate where they come from so I registered my site at geourl.
Then I thought I would put up a poll to find out how people were using blog.org.
And now I spotted a feature I thought was really interesting – offering people the ability to search the weblogs I read myself (which you should now see at R). But in order to use Micah Halpern’s code I had to convert my list of weblogs I link to into “blogrolling” format (I still don’t quite see why editing one’s HTML template to add or subtract a simple link is so hard people use external software to do it, but it does mean that my list of links is now in a database and can be used and accessed in other ways as well). And then I got a Google API key so your searches wouldn’t use up his allowance.

So altogether having a moderately sophisticated weblog has tied me in to at least nine different organizations or sites providing different complementary capabilities! And I know there are lots of other weblog capabilities I haven’t yet implemented – and that there are features provided by the sites I have already used that I am probably not fully utilizing.

Weblogging takes too much time and intellectual energy at this moment in its evolution – and that’s not even counting the time and energy that go into writing these posts! Of course you can always just ignore the various new technologies coming out and keep plugging away with simple text and links but there’s always the risk that one of those new facilities will turn out to be the Next Big Thing and if you don’t have it your weblog risks looking hopelessly out of date.hot free movies momfree movie galleries housewifes fuckingsex movie indian freesex no movies latina membership freelesbians movie freemovie long free pornfucking machine free moviesmovies free midget porn Map

blam! is a weblog add-on for book and other product reviews, linked to Amazon. The interesting bit is that it pulls various bits of information from Amazon into one’s posting automatically (including a link to a book jacket photo if there is one) and can also automatically post your review to blaxm, which is a meta-weblog containing other people’s reviews. (It’s a pity it doesn’t post them into a more flexible database instead, but it’s a beginning).

This is an early example of the kind of collaborative content tool I would like to see- something that lets you express yourself personally but at the same time share the results with the world in a structured way.

I found blaxm a little frustrating in its implementation – but through it I found allconsuming which doesn’t yet provide the same e-z integrated automatic posting that Blam does (or is supposed to anyway) but is built around a database interface and has some interesting features of its own (it’s easier to look at it for your self than to explain).

A minor grievance is that since these rely heavily on Amazon’s database, if the book you have isn’t there, you can’t use these tools to indicate you have read it – at least not easily. Oh well – nothing’s perfect.

Here’s an example review I just did using Blam (together with the sample HTML they recommended I paste in here, which as you can see doesn’t work too well):

At Home With Computers

Elaine Lally

A useful academic book for anyone who wants to examine the place of computers in everyday home life (in Australia). It takes an ethnographic perspective which means at the end of the day you can often think, “but that was obvious” – yet it is sometimes useful to state the obvious in an academic form. It looks at such issues as “why do people buy computers?”, “who uses them in the home?” and “where do people place their computers in the home and why?”



[Later] Oops – I forgot to credit Ant’s Eye View for helping me find this stuff in the first place.free full download porn length moviesadult free movies watchsex movie free clipsmovies amatuergay movies blackfree gay movies longmovies playboy freenude beach movies Map

Despite the media coverage of weblogs, Pew finds they are barely on the radar of most Americans:

“Some 4% of online Americans report going to blogs for information and opinions. The overall number of blog users is so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs.
The early data suggest that the most active Internet users, especially those with broadband connections are the most likely to have found blogs they like. ”

Pew’s research suggests between one and four percent of Americans publish online depending on what you ask – 1% “Create a web log or “blog” that others can read online” while 4% “Create content for the Internet, such as helping build a web site, creating an online diary, or posting your thoughts online”. That could even just include posting your thoughts to someone else’s messageboard.

To my mind this emphasises the importance of making the weblog and other content publishing tools we have easier and promoting the possibilities they offer over making the tools more sophisticated (though we should be doing both).

Of course making them work multilingually is also going to be key to international adoption, and making them work well offline (so you don’t have to compose while connected).union credit 1stadvantageagricredit iowaunion allegany credit teachers countycredit counseling ammendalice opening credits show videoof tvameritrust credit card financialcsun school accreditation businesscredit union lubbock alliance Map

… does indeed appear to be defective yeti.

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This article in the Disenchanted webzine raises at least two interesting points – both related to class online:

He/she maintains because the Internet conceals identity:

people are choosing peers and personal competitors from the ranks of classes they’d otherwise never try to hold a candle to. Most of us judge our accomplishments against other people within the same age, income, and sometimes ethnic group as us. So a young lower-class kid is not going to feel he has to compete against the accomplishments of a upper-class, middle-aged man […] But since we began looking for friends and peers on the Internet, those traditional class distinctions have been ignored because they’re almost invisible […] That in turn has meant the pressure to excel is enormous on the young and the unaccomplished. Without visible class distinctions there’s no filter, and without the filter there’s a compulsion to compete with people who are ?out of your league¦.

I suspect there may be something to this effect but I believe it is somewhat over-stated. It is often not that difficult to judge the status of people writing online. If they are in the media (which is what most people consume online anyway) you will probably assume they are high status individuals. And these days people (like myself) often provide “about me” information when they publish. Moreover, the way that people write and what information they use can itself often be a guide to their status even if you don’t know anything else about them.

The other interesting assertion in the piece is that “the higher classes are now looking for other ways to recognize each other within the context of the Internet.” The author suggests that in future reputation systems attached to digital signatures will be used not to help people identify posts that would be likely to be interesting – instead they will be used like having a degree is today as a blunt instrument to indicate your status in society.

If you want to create an exclusive Internet club who’s members can only be two levels of trust away from Charles, then it’s as simple as writing a few lines of code on the login screen. If you want to screen job applicants, then you can require their electronic signature (which could be considered reasonable now that many people apply for jobs online)

I think that there will probably be a pretty high correlation between people’s online reputations (at least as regards “information quality”) and their social status. Higher status tends to indicate better education tends to produce more insightful postings, all things being equal.

However, I am more optimistic than the author – I believe that if what you produce is thoughtful, then online reputation systems (if they work, and none I have seen so far are without large flaws) would tend to highlight your work, whatever your social status. After all, why filter for status when you can filter for quality directly?

What interests me is what will happen if “low quality/high status” information sources start to get ranked below some “high quality/low status” ones. Will online reputation systems be able to undermine entrenched social forces?

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Dave Winer says “On Wednesday last week at a meeting unrelated to weblogs, a Microsoft exec let it slip casually (heh) that the next version of FrontPage does blogging.” There has been a certain amount of skepticism that MS will follow all the standards in their implementation. For my part I will not be fully contented until MS builds weblog support into free software so anyone who is interested will have easy to use and well promoted software to produce a weblog with.

audblog has been receiving a lot of interest recently (and there are other similar projects). It would let you (in effect) phone your weblog and add an entry as streaming audio. While interesting I am not convinced it will be hugely popular, since you can’t caption the entries until later which makes it hard for a browser to know what they will get. I also worry that in future if such technologies become more widely used weblogs will be much harder to index and search.credit tutorial roll elements adobe premiereabilfiy attorney gambling oregonringtone jackson 52005 fees forester click subaru credityouth abs gambling300 credits endingemergency ringtone 51abuse gambling addiction Map

Phil Gyford has produced An introduction to weblog terms for weblog readers. It explains RSS, permalinking and trackback – some of the more commonly mentioned weblog-specific pieces of jargon.payday loan advance fast cashunsecured loans alabama consolidation debtloan improvement 11 home13 loan payday linklink 14 loan paydaypayday 26 loan linklink 8 payday loan9 link payday loan9 payday payday loan 13 advancestudent private loans access

Joi Ito has written a fascinating paper – Emergent Democracy about edemocracy, weblogs, the power law, trust and “emergence” (self-organizing systems).

It’s fascinating and I think it moves the debate along significantly but I don’t altogether agree with the optimism it expresses about the democratising power of weblogs. I also fear it bites off more than it can chew – bravely, Joi Ito tries to tackle edemocracy, privacy and copyright law in a single paper.

See below for a more in-depth initial analysis. In the spirit of the democratic weblogging phenomenon he describes, I welcome further comments.

I wrote a paper recently on a very similar theme: “Do the new digital media enable wider participation in the public sphere?“. I certainly wish I had read Joi’s paper earlier, but I hope mine still has interestingly contrasting things to say and I would be happy to email the full paper to people who are interested in reading further.

Thanks to Cory @ boingboing for the link
(more…)

Heather Havrilesky who used to write entertainingly for the late lamented suck has her own weblog now and recently found out that undergrads at the University of Texas are studying weblogs including her own. She waxes amusing about this…

If you are interested in serious sociological studies of home page creation they appear to be surprisingly thin on the ground. I just read an interesting overview in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication and found a good site from Nottingham Trent University that references other sites about identity and web pages – largely but not exclusively focusing on gender issues.

I have yet to come across many academic papers specifically about weblogs but doubtless they will be arriving soon. I was interviewed a while back by Dr Donald Matheson who is studying weblogs and I will link to the results of the research I was included in when it becomes available.6102i ringtonesproduct farrington a8310 nokia free ringtonefree 6800 ringtone polyphonic nokiaringtones alcatel tones mradd ringtones an iphone toringtone adult ozzy8350 ringtones Map