opensourceCMS is a very cool idea. It’s a sort of playground where you can kick the tires of lots of open source groupware, weblogging and content management software. This kind of software requires some skills and time to install so having a way to try it out and see what it feels like to use without having to install it yourself (and then uninstall it if it isn’t what you want) is very useful. Of course nothing you do with it is permanent – ‘Each system is deleted and reinstalled every two hours. This allows you to be the administrator of any system here without fear of messing anything up.’

The site owner has revealed that it will vanish on the 9th of June, thus putting an end to a fascinating blog that shot from nowhere to (relative) fame in a little more than a year by providing a place for (mostly American) junior academics and PhD students to vent their frustration and share knowledge.

I was initially complacent, thinking ‘well if I want it I can always check out the Internet Archive’ but the last ‘backup’ of the site by the Internet Archive took place “5th June 2003”:http://web.archive.org/web/20030605225140/http://invisibleadjunct.com/ – a year’s worth of insights will be lost forever! Will nobody step forth to persuade the mystery owner to keep it going? Or hand it over to a third party?

(This also is an unwelcome reminder of the ‘fragility’ of cyberspace – how, even with the Internet Archive, pages can appear suddenly and disappear suddenly without leaving a trace…)

How would you sample home pages and weblogs in the UK? My definition would be: “sites that are not primarily in furtherance of professional goals (eg online CVs, galleries of art from artists etc), are not explicitly temporary, are substantially the work of a single individual, and are not closed to the public either explicitly (through a password) or implicitly (for example collections of photos from an event without an accompanying narrative that are only meant to be accessed by a small group for a short time even if they are openly available online).”

If I had a long list of random UK home pages I could weed out the ones that didn’t belong myself, however.

I thought about sampling randomly from directories compiled by Geocities or Freeserve/Wanadoo but I looked and it seems they no longer index their pages. Do they have directories somewhere I missed?

Using Yahoo or DMoz would introduce obvious biases because submission is not automatic.

Tripod still does have “directories of its UK users”:http://www.tripod.lycos.co.uk/directory/homepages/ and it seems like the best bet so far but how representative would Tripod users be of all users? Searching for ‘personal home page uk’ in Google gets me nowhere.

How should I balance blogs with home pages? Using the stats from Pew suggests I should include about one blog for every four home pages. What do you think is the best way to randomly sample weblogs? There used to be a master directory of Blogger ones. Is there still? Is there any up to date info on the relative popularity of the various weblogging platforms?

Jill Walker mentions how people visiting a post on the “Noetech blog”:http://blog.noetech.com/archives/2004/04/13/overhaulin.shtml which mentioned watching a TV show seem to think that the blogger actually runs that TV show.

It’s bizarre but this sort of thing has happened to me, too. I “mentioned”:https://blog.org/archives/000617.html months ago that Philip Pullman’s trilogy was being streamed by the BBC and I received several comments (since removed to avoid confusion) that clearly suggested the commenters thought that Pullman was reading or even writing the blog. It’s as if readers just skimmed looking for their keywords, ignored the context and blurted out whatever was in their heads…

I guess if I want readers “all I need to do”:http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html is talk about how I enjoyed American Idol during spring break and when I finished I listened to Howard Stern talk about Iraq with Halle Berry and Lindsay Lohan.

Thanks to “Lila”:http://blog.mathemagenic.com/ for the link

I have been thinking for a little while now that something needs to change in the practice of blogrolling. People use a lengthy blogroll to indicate what other blogs they consider interesting (telling something about their own interests) and to encourage others to link to them, but what use are they to the rest of the people actually reading the weblogs themselves? “BlogRolling”:http://www.blogrolling.com/members.phtml’s practice of just listing them all in a column without comment seems to me particularly pointless – who is going to go and look through all the blogs on someone’s list of 50 – a mix of friends and work colleagues and random interesting stuff – on the off chance that some of them will be interesting?

That’s why I have a “single link”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/derb/ on my already over-crowded right hand bar which leads you to the 104 weblogs I am currently tracking, all sorted into categories and sometimes even with descriptions thanks to “bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com/. But I worry that automated tools that measure my connectedness like “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com/ will not capture this and visitors may overlook the link.

So do I include a long useless list of links somewhere just so robots can read them? What do you think? Is there a better way to tackle this? Could bloglines and the blog indexing/ratings people get together somehow?

But it seems that one of the best-known conservative bloggers has come to the same uneasy conclusion that I have about the Iraq war.

The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively. I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong.

I backed the war originally (though I held my nose – I certainly wouldn’t call it noble). Unfortunately, I don’t think the aftermath of the war could have been managed worse by the US.

I am relieved to find early pictures showing Brits also abusing Iraqi prisoners “were false”:http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/20983.htm, though it seems there “may have been some bad apples after all”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/story.jsp?story=521760.

Not to be left behind by “blogger’s recent improvements”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_weblogs.html#001103, Moveable Type has announced a public test of its “new version 3.0”:http://www.moveabletype.org/mt_30_beta_survey.shtml though not much information is available about what’s in it (in fact it appears the new version means more a change of architecture than additional features “at least at first”:http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2004/04/wheres_the_beef.shtml#more).

Unfortunately, at the same time that they announced the beta programme they announced a change in pricing structure and if you look at the MT page where they “announce the new pricing”:http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2004/05/its_about_time.shtml you will see a growing groundswell of anger – mainly about their decision to restrict the number of authors you could have for a weblog and still be able to consider it non-commercial.

To their credit, in response they have “dealt with the problem”:http://www.sixapart.com/log/2004/05/movable_type_30.shtml pretty effectively – they are now offering ‘Personal Edition Add-On’ packages that let you add more authors to their $69.95 low-end paid-for package (which covers up to five authors). I think this is fair – if you want up to three blogs for yourself alone you can download their software for free. For multiple authors on the same blog, you have to pay even if you are non-commercial, but only around $14 each.

People with earlier versions can keep using them for free, whatever configuration they have.

Thanks to