Category: Culture

Proofs

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 5, 2006

Several people have been involved in a discussion around the question: do links subvert hierarchies.

It started with Doc Searls (Linkers page). Then Dave Rogers comments (Linkers page), kicking off the following flurry of cross-weblog linking:

Original Mike Warot (Linkers Page)

Wirearchy (Linkers Page)

David Weinberger (Linkers Page)

Sean Coon (Linkers Page)

Mark Bernstein (Linkers Page)

Forthcoming (Linkers Page)

Indefinite Articles (Linkers Page)

Ethan Johnson (Linkers Page)

Scott Reynen (Linkers Page)

More Doc Searls (Links Page)

Dave Rogers again (Linkers Page)

More Dave Rogers (Linkers Page)

Deciding Better (Linkers page)

A Hawkings (Linkers Page)

Karl Martino (Linkers Page)

Doc Searls again (Linkers Pa… when did they start giving out little gold Top 100 badges at Technorati?)

Mark Bernstein again (Linkers Page)

Mike Warot (Linkers Page)

Susan Kitchens (Linkers Page)

There’s a pattern formed by all these responses and counter-responses, and links thereof. I’ve provided all the pieces of the pattern. I leave it to the reader to now discover the pattern for themselves.

Diversity Weblogging

Feminists and other snobs

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 4, 2006

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

My appreciations for Frank Paynter for including me with other fine company in his recommendations of women webloggers for the Women’s Media Center. I, like others, was also left rather breathless by the sweeping arrogance of the site’s byline:

The WMC website is the only place for news on women; links to women columnists, bloggers, media organizations, and more…

The links to women webloggers are primarily to those that might be labeled ‘pure feminist’ weblogs, which I guess is the dividing line between women worthy of inclusion and those not. I read several of the ones listed, and they are terrific and should be included: in WMC and everywhere. It isn’t this that leads me to sigh, and feel tired; it is the lack of depth in the list, which shows an unspoken but very real bias among feminists against those of us in the technology field.

What these fine ladies seem to forget is that while they are busy writing about the bias against women, we’re busy out there being the women suffering the bias. We’re the ones in fields that have, if we’re lucky, one woman in four workers. We’re the ones showing that women can aspire to fields and jobs other than mommy, wife, nurse, teacher, and social worker in a women’s center.

Many of us are professionals in media, too, though we’ll not get Nobel prizes, or offered chairs at Harvard. We write on technology, and add that odd feminine element now and again to conferences and book shelves. We help keep the myth alive that any little girl can grow up to be anything she wants. We do so in many cases by having to fight men who don’t want us around. Worse, who don’t even see us when we are.

This we accept as part of the job. We don’t like it, but we were once the little girls who believed we could grow up to do anything we want, and we’re not going to give it up because of some adversity. What truly hurts, though, is we usually do this fight alone, because many of the outspoken feminists are snobs, and to them, we just don’t count.

Connecting Weblogging

Taken

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 1, 2006

“Obviously, your not from my south because down here we hate gay people and we hate your beliefs about this subject Shelley! Oh and I don’t have sex with my horse and obviously your bible isn’t baptist!”

I laughed when I read this, thinking to myself, “You can’t pay someone to write words such as this!” Of course, at this point I realized that yes you can. This comment is so stereotypical of ’southern Baptists’ that I knew almost immediately it was fake.

A little checking on the commenters for my Brokeback post showed that two at least–Holly and Hoss–are fake commenters, coming from known SPEWS listed IP addresses; arriving via search engine. Though Nate and Machelle don’t come from blacklisted IP addresses, they also came from similar search requests, each with suspicious sounding hotmail addresses. The rest of those who commented either had commented here before or have unique, and valid, email addresses.

Following the search engine trail, I can see the same type of writing used in my comments in comments in other posts, though which ’side’ the commenter is on changes from post to post. I imagine if we did some checking on IP addresses, we’d find that ‘Holly’ commented as ‘James’ or ‘Linda’ elsewhere.

I’m not sure if this flurry of emails is from kids out to have a little fun, or spammers generating ‘controversy’ for a movie in order to increase interest. I do know that next time I want to write on something such as Brokeback, I won’t included the name in my title.

In fact, I’m creating a new category, ‘unclassified’, and adding a robots.txt entry to exclude entries in this category from search engine web bots. There is no value in getting visits from search engines for controversial topics such as these.

In the meantime, I’ve closed down commenting in that post, but left the comments–as a reminder the next time I start to react to a throwaway comment.

Connecting

My digitalized tunes

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date December 30, 2005

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’m still importing my music CDs into my iTunes. I am now up to 1358 songs, and currently importing the Beatles White Album.

Handling CDs over an extended period, I’ve noticed how the CD packaging and CDs, themselves, have changed over time. Some of my older CDs, such as White Album, have thick, heavy plastic cases; the newer ones are thin, light, or even made of paper. The older CDs are thicker, and seem more durable; the newer are so thin they seem to be made of dragonfly wings.

I can’t remember buying my first CD player, or my first CD. According to this page at Philips, the first CD pressings for commercial sale happened in August of 1982. By the following January, half a million CDs had been sold.

1982. That was one year later than when DOS was invented, and one year before the release of Apple’s Lisa personal computer. That was 23, almost 24 years ago–older than some of you reading this. This means that many of you have never played a record in a record player; or tapes that used to get hung up in the cassette players, and turn into the same curly mess as our afros.

My ex-husband and I had a CD player our second Christmas together, I remember that. Or was it a cassette player? It was one or the other, I remember that. What I can’t remember is the year we got married. For the life of me, I can’t remember when we got married. Was in 1983? I can remember the stereo (it could play albums, still, so it must have been a cassette player); the place we lived (an apartment, with an artificial stream that attracted ducks in the winter); the city (Phoenix); even what I wore Christmas day (a light pink satin nighty with a darker rose satin robe with delicate lace down the front).

We had adopted a pregnant cat who had given birth to three kittens about 2 months before. I can remember them tearing at the Christmas tree and sleeping as a bundle on my lap. I had a perm, and my hair was a thick mass of curls.

I can remember the year we divorced: 2002, in Boston. (Actually it was in 2001: the year the dot-com I worked at closed, started my first weblog, took my one and only trip to London, and then moved to San Francisco because it seemed like a cool place to live.) We still lived together; something the judge commented on–perplexed at our friendliness after session after session of couples loathing one another. When we moved apart, I can remember splitting up the CD collection: his and hers. But I can’t remember the year we were married, or the first CD we bought. It’s in the pile I’m digitalizing right now. Somewhere.