Category: Weblogging

Categories
Weblogging

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Both my mineral collection and the items I had in my unit in San Francisco sold this last week while I was out of town. The mineral collection in particular is going to a very good home. In fact, one of the side trips this next week is to deliver the collection because I don’t want to risk damage to them through regular shipping.

Thanks to both sales, I can now take my long awaited research trip, as well as stock up on more film and more importantly, a new slide scanner. Not an expensive one – good enough to scan slides and negatives to send to editors. For publication purposes, I’ll still need to then have them professionally scanned – after they’ve sold, of course.

I have quite a few things going on, including looking at the possibility of switching to new blogging software for my sites, as well as starting two new weblogs. I’m also helping a friend with his new publication (though I haven’t done much for him yet). I’ve been trying to work through a new book deal, but I am now beginning to lose hope that it is going through, and this is disappointing.

I also thought this week of closing down Burningbird because I think that the tread on this weblog’s tires has worn too thin: too many expectations about what will, or will not be, written about here. Still, expectations are not granite and I’m not frozen into a crystalline, unchanging form. If I choose to re-invent myself and my writing, what I write has nothing to do with the URL and everything to do with me.

However, I am eliminating the publicly published blogroll entirely, even as a secondary page. I know Halley considers this a selfish act, but blogrolls neither help community, not add to the value of writing. In fact, I’ve chatted with Dave Sifrey and Kevin about eliminating persistent links such as blogroll links from the Technorati measurements, focusing instead on links that are included within writing. Kevin has already cleaned out most of the non-weblog links from the rolls, but filtering out persistent links is going to be a harder algorithm to derive though I have no doubts they are, at least, considering it.

(I’ve always admired Dave for being one of those people who continues to listen to his clients, individually and as a group, regardless of how successful his enterprises are.)

Weblogging is, in part, community, true, but I don’t need blogrolls to become part of the community, and blogrolls aren’t going to give me entree into any circles. Connecting with people deliberatly is what makes a community, not putting a link up in a sidebar and forgetting about it.

When I read something that should be commented on, or at least, pointed out, I’ll do so – just as I did with recent postings to Sheila, Yule, Loren, Doug, Liz, and even Halley. And the community can invite themselves in by commenting and I put their weblog URLs attached to their name in the Recent Comments/Trackbacks. Both serve to direct attention to sites in a, hopefully, more direct and meaningful way.

Jonathon Delacour wrote on this recently, in response to a general ‘argy-bargy’, the colloquial term he used to cover recent discussions about lack of exposure for women webloggers. He mentioned, admiringly, about Steven Den Beste’s practice of changing his blogroll to highlight new sites, and I agree, it is an effective approach. However, I would rather highlight what a person writes when they’ve written something that has amused, delighted, astonished, overwhelmed, outraged, or saddened me then to put the links in a blogroll. If, as some people think, a link is part of the semantic web, then I’d rather my links be meaningful. Or as Jonathon writes:

Perhaps bloggers would start to believe that if enough people (us) are doing the same thing (basing blogrolls and links on the quality and originality of the ideas and writing) then we must know something they don’t (that excellence rather than reputation deserves to be celebrated).

(Of course, I realize that people will most likely pull my link from their blogrolls, and if this is the way of satisfying ‘quid pro quo’, so be it. I rarely get visits from blogrolls any more: most people come here through aggregators such Bloglines, which I use, or pages such as Technorati. If my rank falls, and I am visited less, than that, too, tells me a story.)

When I choose to write and not do so as part of the community, then I want people to stop and read what I say rather than be sidetracked by changing blogrolls, or influenced because I include them, or not, in a blogroll. I don’t want to mix community and writing, because the one becomes both filter and censor on the other; at some point you can no longer tell if the silence or acclaim that greets your words is based on what you write, or who you are.

Categories
Weblogging

Blogger strike

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I woke up this morning and the side of my mouth looks like the Goodyear Blimp is now residing there. You might think this would put me in a poor mood, but the sun was out and there were these two little finches on my window sill, trying to get warm and chattering away, which can’t help but cheer even the most dedicated Grinch.

No, I’m not in a poor mood, but I am in a disappointed mood when I saw blogger after blogger who was nominated link to the Wizbang Awards with cries of “It’s all fun!” and “Vote for me!”, as if we haven’t learned a damn thing about all our discussions of popularity contests, A-Lists, and Power Laws this last year. At first when I didn’t see such links I thought the group as a whole would not perpetuate the same old shit, but after the last couple of days, I can see it’s business as usual.

Someone wrote me yesterday about their nomination and I won’t say who, it’s up to them to identify themselves, and asked me about these awards. Is this a link pimping thing? Well, yes, I said, but it’s a good thing if quality writing like yours gets some attention (though I find it unlikely people will look beyond the usual suspects). However, don’t feed the link pimping I wrote, meaning don’t link to the award.

However, the top cream, the A-Listers, they don’t have any such problem with fulfilling what only gives them more air, so I feel pretty stupid for my advice.

David Weinberger wrote on this, facetiously I do believe, or I don’t know my Joho:

And good news! They let a woman onto the list of best overall blogs! Congratulations, Megnut! To be fair (i.e., to try something new), there is a category for Best Female Authored Blog. No, there isn’t one for Best Male Authored Blog, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, I’m darn proud of Joho’s humiliating showing.

David should be proud of his humiliating showing – would he rather be Little Green Football and win? It would seem that in blogging, David, bigotry outs over gentle wisdom and openess when it comes to popularity. Bigotry or arrogance, one or the other.

And there’s two women in the top list, Meg and Michele over at A Small Victory. And you’re not last anymore, David, so you’ve lost that distinction.

Yes I was rather pleased at the explanations for why there was a Female Blogger category because there was no chance a woman can win, which I guess goes to show women webloggers how much our writing matters. It’s good to get reaffirmation like that. More, there was additional confirmation of this when I see the people link to Douglas Bowman “Who/Where are the Women” posting, who wouldn’t link to the same questions of women and writing when raised by women such as myself, or Misbehaving.net, or Maki, or Netwoman or, well, I could go on.

As I wrote in comments at Misbehaving, “I wonder how much more credence this question will be given because it’s posed by a man, rather than a woman?”.

I wish that I could talk all the women webloggers and all the non-A List webloggers to go on strike for a week, not to write, not to post, not to say a damn thing online – just to show if we are background noise, buzz if you will, we’re pretty damn important to how all this works. That if we’re not listened to when we speak, then perhaps we’ll be listened to when we don’t.

Business as usual: You, the buzz, to the linking; the popular to be linked and voted; and me to my usual rants that make no difference.

Update

I had an email from a person who is in the awards who thought I was shouting at them with my discussion earlier about the Wizbang awards. The person also said that the essay sounded self-centered and that I didn’t care about the people in the awards who are not as well known.

I guess I am not a very good writer after all, because what I wrote ended up disconnected from what was perceived.

I do have a fairly good rating in Technorati, and people must wonder why I write so much on this – what do I have to bitch about: the A-Lists, the hunt for links, and women’s writing. I have people coming by, writing comments, linking to me, and I’m a woman. What do I have to complain about?

True. All true. That’s why I felt more obligated to write what I do, because I remember all too well coming close to quitting two years ago this Christmas, when I was alone in San Francisco and felt even more alone online because no one was around, or commented, or seemed to see me.

I’ve never forgotten this and hoped to make a difference, but I’m fighting against human nature. I wasn’t helping, and once you get to the point of having to explain your motivation, you’ve already lost the battle.

To be honest, if the Wizbang awards person had taken the nominations, went out to Technorati and found the least linked of them and put only them into the award lists, I would have promoted the hell out of it. I wouldn’t have been on that list, but I still would have promoted the hell out of it.

Do me a favor folks. Disregard my earlier rants about the Wizbang awards. Instead, go out there and look at the lists. From each, find the sites with the fewest links in Technorati, visit them. For those you like, leave a comment or two, and then vote for them.

And vote for the women entries in Best Overall Blog – Megnut, A Small Victory, Dynamist, of Jen Chung of the Gothamist, or BoingBoing (group blog with xeni). Unless you’d rather have Little Green Footballs vindicated as the Best of Blogging.

Last Update

I read some of the comments associated with the so-called cheating on this ‘award’, and then read what Meg wrote in comments to this post, “This award is stupid and meaningless, and I don’t even want to link to it”, even though promoting the contest would be more votes for her.

I sheepishly admit to the truth of what Meg is saying, and wonder myself why I bothered to link to it – it wasn’t worth the effort, and if some people had fun, who am I to complain.

Categories
RDF Weblogging

The gluttony of information

There’s an elegant bit of synchronocity in play when one is inundated with emails and assorted and sundry articles on RSS on the same day one’s mouth is operated on. Where before I might blow over the discussions, I was driven in my fixated, drug-induced state to focus on everything that everyone was saying. Every little thing.

For instance, The W3C TAG team – that’s the team that’s defining the architecture of the web, not a new wrestling group – has been talking about defining a new URI scheme just for RSS, as brought up today by Tim Bray. With a new scheme, instead of accessing a feed with:

http://weblog.burningbird.net/index.rdf

You would access the feed as:

feed://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.rss

The reason is that using existing schemes opens the feed in whatever tool you use to access the page, such as the browser. However, what you don’t want is to open the feed, but to access the URI directly for the purposes of subscribing to the feed. Using a MIME type doesn’t apply because MIME types operate on the data loaded, and the URI of the subscription isn’t necessarily part of the data.

An example used was the mailto: scheme, which is used to open an application and pass in the value attached to the mailto: – the email address, rather than load that data in the browser.

The response to this topic in TAG was more discussion than has occurred on many another topic lately, a behavior which tends to happen with RSS. This amazes me, when you consider that RSS, or from a generic point of view, the technique of using XML to annotate excerpts of syndicated material that’s updated on a fairly regular basis, is actually a pretty simple concept. It’s handy, true, and I’m just as taken with Bloglines as several of my compatriots – but it is still syndication.

But that’s not all. Doc also discussed RSS today, but his take was more on an advocacy of syndication. More so, he focuses on that aspect of syndication he considers most relevant – notification:

Meanwhile, it seems to me that notification is the key function provided by online syndication. And that’s the revolutionary thing. Publishing alone carries assumptions framed by the permanance of all the media that predated the Web in the world. Hence the sense of done-ness to the result. The finished work goes up, or out, and that’s it.

But the Web isn’t just writable. It’s re-writable. I’m writing this live on the Web, and I’ll probably re-write parts of it two or three more times.

Hence the need for notification.

I agree with Doc that syndication in conjuction with aggregators is pretty handy. Since I started using Bloglines, I visit my favorite weblogs much less frequently than I used to, waiting for the bold text and the count to tell me how many new posts the person has published. And I can see from my referrers others are doing the same because most of my visits now come from aggregators and bloglines or Technorati or Blogdex or some other somewhat generic resource.

Of course, I still know people are visiting…I just don’t know who, or from where. And though sometimes I may wonder, wistfully, if my old friends still visit as much as they used to, I contrast this with my being able to read that many more weblogs now. Sure, this also impacts on the conversations we used to have across our comments and across our blogs because we don’t alwasy visit to read the comments as much, or to add our own, but we’re much more connected into the stream of information than ever before.

Previously I had perhaps 20 or 30 weblogs on my blogroll I would visit a couple of times a day. Now I have over 100 that I only visit when they update, and I’m a veritable information maven neophyte compared to others. I remember in a recent comment discussion with Steve Gillmor that he mentioned he was subscribed to 3762 different feeds if I read his comment correctly.

Speaking of Steve Gillmor, his name popped up in several places today in connection with RSS. He had a conversation with Doc, who blogged some of it:

He’s advocating thinking larger than the Web as it stands. Blogs are a subset of RSS. So is sndication a subset of RSS. He says. In a time constrained universe, it’s a killer app.

It’s the platform for synergy between the stakeholders and the journalists. He says. To limit it, by implication, which you do here by focusing on syndication as being the nub of what this is about, is self limiting in terms of understanding the new economic model that’s emerging here. Among other things.

He wants to respect :the disruptive nature of RSS.

This technlogy has already supplanted email as the core of your desktop. A conditional yes. On the other hand, my email is far more searchable, and manageable, and private and personal, which makes it highly significant, though hardly disruptive and therefore kinda irrelevant to this discussion. Of course, Steve points out, this won’t be the case “when RSS scoops up 80 or 90% of that functionality too.”

Gillmor then went on to write more about RSS in an article that basically says Apple and Sun are challenging Microsoft Outlook through the use of RSS. At least I believe it says this because, for the most part, I found it to be almost incomprehensible in its blind reverence for RSS.

But a disruptive technology is emerging that could change everything. For my money, it’s RSS (known alternately as Really Simple Syndication or Resource Description Framework Site Summary). I’m not talking about the embedded Outlook plug-in of today’s PC; I’m talking about a technology that could be as disruptive to personal computing as the digital video recorder has been to television.

I read Gillmor’s article three times and still couldn’t figure out exactly what he was enthusing about other than RSS is going to change the world. But it was one paragraph that finally gave me the clue:

It’s the combination of these system services that produces the RSS information router. IM presence can be used to signal users that important RSS items are available for immediate downloading, eliminating the latency of 30-minute RSS feed polling while shifting strategic information transfer out of e-mail and into collaborative groups.

What Gillmor is talking about is being wired to your machine. With RSS, not only can we skim more and more information resources, at faster paces, but we need not even be active in this effort – we can have the information resources notify us when we need to read them.

Rather than fight information overload, give in to it. Embrace it. Accept complete saturation as nothing less than that which is to be achieved. Apply the same practices to our consumption of information as we’ve applied to food and consumer goods and foreign policy, because we can never have too much.

After all this reading about RSS today, I finally get it. I finally understand the magic:

RSS is the both the McDonald’s and Wal-Mart of data.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

Best blog with a female spirit

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This is too tedious for words because I have things I need to be doing, but I would not be me, which would be remiss and inconsistent and therefore uncomfortable for you and that’s to be avoided at all costs (at least on a Tuesday, shaking your world being allowed on a Wednesday), if I did not make some form of response to this newest of weblog awards, the 2003 Weblog Awards. Normally I find these events to be, well, rather uninspiring except for the fact that the creator has created a Best Female Authored Blog award, as compared to we can only presume, Best Blog’s almost guarantee of male winnership.

Among all the plethora of nominations there would seem to be one criticism, whereby the author wrote that the award struck them as a Pretty Good Blog…For a Chick award. Both Misbehaving and Netwoman have responded, but my favorite response came from Feministe who wrote, after seeing herself nominated:

This is a sticky subject – being notable for being a female writer. I’d rather just be a marginal writer than a notable female author. While it hints of sexism, I have to acknowledge that I feel pride in being female, or feminine, or whatever, as I define it. I also feel pride in my writing. But they aren’t exactly related. While one informs the other, they are not correlational.

Thanks for nominating me, guys, and I apologize if I seem ungrateful. I just don’t want it suggested that I’m just okay.

For a girl.

Of course, one could say that this award is the result of conversations we’ve been having about women’s writing and weblogging and lack of acknowledgement for women’s writing. Many a man is probably slapping his head right now going, They wanted acknowledgement and we created their own special category. What more do they want.. True we do seem to be picky about such things and I realize that we are tedious with our demands to be seen.

How odd, though, that I read about this award following an evening spent watching National Geographic specials focusing on women: first one on the life of a Geisha, followed by one on taboos that focused on gender specific issues, such as the fascinating story of the Sworn Virgins of North Albania – women who eschew their feminine side, formally, in order to participate in all activities normally only allowed to men. It was an amazing contrast in stories: going from women who epitomize the art of femininity so strongly that this image transcends cultures; to women who with the blessing of the village become seen as men from the day they make their decision, and treated as such. So much so that they may hold any job and afterwards, sit down and have a beer and smoke a cigarette with other men in a place where women rarely leave their homes without shawls wrapped around their heads.

Completely opposite stories, and yet, they are strangely similiar because both feature women who wear a costume, of one form or another, to successfully compete in a world virtually dominated by men.

But returning to the Best Blog written by Female award. Rather than join in the voices raised in consternation at the seeming sexism apparant in this award, I want to congratulate the creator because, in my opinion, he hasn’t created an award to differentiate women’s writing from best writing – he’s created an award to recognize that which epitomizes the female spirit in our writing, regardless of our gender.

Or at least, that is how I seek to view it, and based on this I would like to offer some nominations of my own of weblogs who best demonstrate the spirit of Women’s Writing:

  • Mike Golby because no one better demonstrates the power of passionate commitment than Mike, and women’s writing is, above all, passionate.
  • Stavros the Wonder Chicken whose embrace of life in all of its highs and lows shows us life is not meant be accepted with trepidation, and women’s writing is the very verbalization of embracing life.
  • No one is better able to demonstrate the subtle awareness of others that is so characteristic of women’s writing than Joi Ito, with his tact and diplomacy.
  • Dave Winer because the best of women’s writing contains a little bitchiness.
  • Love of a child represents a sense of wonder in women’s writing and no one loves their child more than Papa Scott or Gary Turner so I must list them both.
  • Women’s writing focuses on true courage as compared to contrived – the type of bravery that rarely gets medals. This is best represented by Kevin Walzer who demonstrates courage by quitting his job to support his full time poetry publishing business.
  • Within some of the best women’s writing there is the figurative grandmother, the wise woman who sits in the corner spinning yarn and tales equally, and in the process helping to continue traditions without which our lives would be so much duller. But it is hard to find candidates from among the worthies who best exemplify this so I must list them all: Euan Semple, David Weinberger, AKMA, Tom Shugart, Rev Matt, and Steve Himmer.
  • The women’s touch is said to be delicate, so women’s writing can be no less, delicate and balanced like stones tumbled just so into art in a cold, clear stream. There is no better at this than Jonathon Delacour, Oblivio, and Wood s lot.
  • I don’t wish to imply that women’s writing is all that is noble and grand because women can also be sly in their writing; words flickering like reflections caused by stones dropped into a glassy lake, or the tongues of snakes smelling the air. To be assertive or even aggressive in writing is to court degradation or death and so women’s writing can be at best subtle, and at worst, devious. However, to nominate those who are good at this passive aggression would be an aggressive act, and therefore negate the categorization.
  • Women in their writing are aware of the past but they must by necessity be facing forward because women have long been held to be the care takers of the future while the men seek to influence the past by destroying the present. Three writers consistently demonstrate this concern for the future with their very strong awareness of the times today: Doug Alder, Allan Moult, and Norm Jenson.
  • Women write of what interests them and this interest can be natural and scientific, worldly and not. Technical writing is not beyond us, though we are not known for it. There are fine technical voices to nominate for this aspect of women’s writing but they are mentioned so frequently that they must be exhausted, and so we’ll let them rest this time.
  • My list of attributes of women’s writing would not be complete if I did not mention writing that nourishes the soul, with equal parts life and poetry, food and sex, with just a touch of mask, mysticism, and madness and for this I would have to pick Loren Webster, Joe Duemer, Wealth Bondage, Rageboy, wKen, and Jeff Ward. I will leave it to you to differentiate who writes about what.

And at the end of the list I can see so many more candidates for this award, and I sorrow leaving them out, but the list grows over long and I grow over tired. In fact, there is not a person I do not read, male or female, who does not demonstrate in one way or another the ancient and fine spirit of women’s writing, earning the only award I can bestow – my time.

And now a return to my offline contemplations, and women’s writing of a different kind.

Categories
Weblogging

Adding trackback entries for individual archive pages

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’m firing on all (one) cylinder today.

Sam Ruby references a citation at Simon Willison, who quotes Tantek:

 

“…we now have Trackback and Pingback to help automate generating comment hyperlinks to blog-on-blog commentary. While I certainly applaud these efforts at automating the plumbing, I must ask – why is there any distinction in the presentation? I ask because many blogs present separate and different interfaces for their comments, trackbacks, and/or pingbacks.

 

Good points. After all, these technologies are nothing more than threads to a communication.

For Movable Type, it’s fairly simple to make a modification to your individual archive page to list trackback entries along with your comments. I’ve made this modification to my individual archive pages and thought I would pass on the how-tos of my mod.

Warning: To implement trackback within the archive page following my preferred approach, I did need to make a minor modification to one of the Movable Type’s Perl modules, Trackback.pm. It’s a minor change: it forces a re-build of the archive page when a trackback occurs so that the new trackback entry displays in a manner similar to how new comments are added, automatically, to the page. You can download the modified file here and replace the in your MT directory (put it into /lib/MT/App/). However, you do so at your own risk. You can find the edits I made because I surrounded the edit with comments containing my name, ‘Shelley’.

Repeat: You do so at your own risk. This modification is not vetted by Movable Type’s creators, Ben and Mena Trott.

For those taking the leap of faith, to add the trackback entries to your individual archives, add the following to your individual archive template:

 

<MTEntryIfAllowPings>
<MTPings>
<div class=”comments-body”>
<a name=”<$MTPingID$>”></a>
<a target=”new” href=”<$MTPingURL$>”><$MTPingTitle$></a><br /><br />

Excerpt: <$MTPingExcerpt$>
Weblog: <$MTPingBlogName$><br />
Tracked: <$MTPingDate$><br />
</MTPings>
</MTEntryIfAllowPings>

Note that the re-build of the page does slow the trackback ping, and if the remote site is having performance problems, the rebuild may not occur. However, the exact same process is used with comments, so whatever performance problems we’ll have with comments, we’ll have with trackbacks. Additionally, malicious people (known as spammers) could exploit the ping to add trackback entries pointing to junk — but they can do this anyway with the existing system. Web services are vulnerable that way.

Other trackback embedding approaches are discussed at the Movable Type forum on a thread related to this issue. I didn’t care for the approaches mentioned, excellent as they are, primarily because I would rather put the processing burden on the instance when the trackback occurs, rather than each time the individual page is accessed (by accessing MySql or forcing the page to be PHP or using SSI). I’m putting the burden on the ‘write’ because trackbacks follow the ‘write once, read many times’ pattern.

Still, don’t you like it when you’re given ten different ways to do something?

Update:

Oopsie! I didn’t read the MT thread that closely to see that Phil had already created this work around. Teach me not to read the entire thread more closely! And I missed this change originally at Phil’s. Honest!

So, dibs on this bit of creativity goes to Phil! Darn! And here I thought I did something new.