Category: Weblogging

Well, since love is out (“all you need is love…”), I guess I’ll have to focus on links, instead.

Speaking of links, in a posting earlier this week, I didn’t link to the webloggers that I referenced, and I noticed that AKMA did that in some recent postings, as did Mike Golby. A big benefit from all of this is that the writing flows so much more nicely without all the underlines or bolded or contrasting color text.

Seems to me that when referencing a weblogger in a generic sense, just using the person’s tag line or name (or however they’re addressed in the blogroll), should be enough. If addressing a specific post, then it makes sense to link to that posting.

Yeah, this isn’t the war on Iraq or a writing of great beauty, but damn, that’s all I have at the moment.

(I guess I’ll have to alpha my list if I do this. Sigh.)

All you need is links, all you need is links,
All you need is links, links, links is all you need.
Links, links, links, links, links, links, links, links, links

I really admire Doc for trying to find a middle ground between Larry Lessig and Dave Winer regardling Larry’s rather assertive and bold speech at Open Source.

I agree with Doc: we’re all on the side of angels, here. The important thing is that we all work towards something that’s important to each of us: Larry is fighting copyright restrictions and Dave’s fighting the Berman-Coble bill (by tring to get a Libertarian elected in North Carolina–no small task). It’s unfortunate when someone such as Josh Allen seeks an even wider split by highlighting the differences between Larry and Dave rather than any similarites. And while I may agree with Allen in his admiration of Tim O’Reilly’s article The Growing Politicization of Open Source, I disagree with him when he says:

How is it that the certain people have time to clone 30 year-old Unix utilities but not enough time to create really new things? How is it that certain people will politic so tirelessly to coerce California into using lousy software, while totally ignoring the individual liberty impacts of DMCA?

BTW, did I happen to mention that Josh Allen works for Microsoft? (Of course, in the interests of open disclosure and fairness, I must mention that I’m a co-author of the upcoming “Unix Power Tools 3rd edition” for O’Reilly. We all have our personal stakes in these conversations.)

I haven’t talked much about copyright laws in this weblog because this isn’t the fight I’ve picked. I think it’s a good fight, and I would contribute to the EFF if I had more money (sigh), but most of my political energy is focused on preventing a war in Iraq, and on stopping the current administration’s violations of the constitution. And if fighting these means voting for someone who might be for the Berman-Coble bill, so be it.

Confusing times when the angels you dance with one moment become devils the next. Why can’t everyone just agree with me. Life would be so much simpler.

Frank has posted the first installment of the Mike Golby interview. Fitting Mike’s status as the blogger with the most…words, the final interview approaches 20,000 words. Thanks to Frank for splitting it up.

Tidbit:

Recently, I’ve moved from a tight social circle where every blog entry I’ve read is reflected in my daily offering, across to clusters of newfound bloggers, and back again to individuals and groupings. Things change; people change. We float away, we come back. In recent weeks, I’ve been solitary, moving from writing intensely personal entries to giving ill-informed commentaries on current affairs. I’m exploring the boundaries of myself in this unknown space, not knowing what the hell is going on or what it or I am all about. I find it enormously exciting, invigorating, tough, rewarding, and addictive.

Gary continues his quest to get sued by major publications with his version of a famous financial magazine.

Yours truly is feeling the heat and the humidity and the work on the book. Want read weblog. Don’t want write weblog.

There’s yet another article out about weblogging, this one Living in the Blog-osphere by Steven Levy at Newsweek.

It started out with promise, though mixed with the usual condescension:

So what kind of Weblogs live in the dark matter? There are endless personal journals like Zack’s, exposing thoughts and experiences that range from the somewhat profound to the stultifyingly banal. There are collectively millions of links to obscure items tucked in dusty recesses of the Web. There are blogs devoted to cats, blogs about knitting, blogs about 802.11 wireless standards, blogs about “The Golden Girls” TV show, blogs about baseball, blogs about sex (hey, it is the Internet). One blog is written in the voice of Julius Caesar, tracking the Roman’s progress as he takes on Gaul. There are blog short stories and a blog novel in progress.

And then, rather than provide links to these “dark matter” weblogs, and interviews with writers of same, he continues with the same mundane questions asked of the same A-listers: Dave Winer, David Weinberger, Glenn Reynolds, Meg Hourihan, Rebecca Blood, Ev, and so on.

Worse, he writes example postings into his example weblog, a grotesque parady of the phenomenon.

David Weinberger, you have the ear of these people–why the hell aren’t you hitting these people upside the head and cluing them in on the ‘real’ world of weblogging? Levy makes weblogging look as exciting as reciting a shopping list. And providing safe but quotable sound bites isn’t helping anyone.

Here’s a clue for Levy and the other so-called “professional journalists”: no weblog entry is as banal as most of these mainstream “what is weblogging” articles. If we talk about what we have for lunch today, at least what we write is original.

How absolutely deadly dull.

Today for lunch I had homemade tacos, with fresh lettuce and tomato, cheddar cheese, and spiced beef, served up in a hard corn shell. I always put a sweet-spicey tomato dressing on top rather than salsa.

Afterwards, I played with my cat, Zoe. She’s ten years old, a beautiful silver tabby, and still playful as a kitten. She has two green eyes, though one is turning brown.

Now I’m going back to working on my book. Later I might go for frozen custard.

(All of this is blogspeak for Up Yours, Newsweek.)