Category: Writing

Just writing

Categories
Weblogging Writing

Doppleganger

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Through the various link services, last week I found that my RSS entries were being published to a GreatestJournal site. I’d never heard of GreatestJournal, and when I went to contact the site to ask them to remove the feed, there is no contact information. I did find, though, a trouble ticket area and submitted a ticket asking the site to remove the account. The following is the email I received in return:

Below is an answer to your support question regarding “/RSS feed on GJ”
(http://www.greatestjournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=22973&auth=xnjd).

FAQ REFERENCE: Can I edit or delete a syndicated feed?
http://www.greatestjournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=135

Dear MS. Powers,

Your RSS feed is open for use on your website, which means that the user in question does NOT violate your copyright.

You might wish to take your feed down if you don’t want people to use it.

GJ Abuse.

_________________
NOTICE: This correspondence is the intellectual property of GreatestJournal & may not be reproduced in any form, electronic or otherwise, without the express written permission of GreatestJournal. Any reproduction of this correspondence on GreatestJournal itself, with or without this notice of copyright, may be grounds for the immediate suspension of the account or accounts used to do so, as well as the account or accounts to which this correspondence was originally sent.

Normally I won’t publish a private email without permission, but I found the company’s disclaimer on intellectual property and the email response to be particularly disingenuous, considering the nature of my request. Perhaps the company will delete the user account since I am publishing the response. Regardless, this is yet another reason not to provide full content within RSS.

First, a clarification: syndication feeds are NOT meant to be republished other than for personal use. I do not provide a syndication feed so that you can duplicate it in your weblog or site in its entirety. This would be no different than using a screenscraper to scrape my web pages and then duplicating them elsewhere. If a person specifically likes an item, or wants to comment on something I write, and quotes a post, then there is a human element involved in the effort and the use is selective; it is not a blanket replication of material, just because technology has made this blanket replication easy.

I’ve had my syndication feeds republished elsewhere, but never as anything other than a feed. There were no separate comments attached; nor name given that implied I created the site.

danah boyd ran into something of a similar nature recently when she found a weblog that was created from a mashup of several different weblog entries. I gather in weblogs like the one she points out, the results are based on searching on specific terms and then pulling together the returned bits from the search engines. A good example of this is a second post where one can see that “star” was the term used in searches.

There is little I can do about my writing being scraped and merged into a hodge podge of posts at some fake weblog; but there are things I can do about my syndication feed. I’ve blocked the GreatestJournal web bot so it can’t access the syndication feed. I’ve also returned to feed excerpts. An unfortunate consequence of this, though, is that when I link to other sites, these links weren’t showing up in any of the aggregators, such as IceRocket or Bloglines.

To counter this, I’ve gone to a rather unusual feed format: encoded to allow HTML, and with a linked list of references from the article. I use RDF to maintain this list of links, which also means that semantic web bots can easily find and consume this data (recognizing it as external links through the use of the SeeAlso relationship). I’m also most likely going to change the print out of this data to use microformats so that bots that prefer microformatted data can also easily consume the list.

Currently at Burningbird, I’m using my SeeAlso metadata extension to maintain these manually, but I’m working on a plugin that should be compatible with WordPress and Wordform, and which automatically scarfs up hypertext link marked as external links and stores the data into RDF files for each page (along with other metadata for a specific post). A second plugin than outputs the list and also the links manually input using the SeeAlso extension (which has already been converted into a metadata extension for WordPress); a third plugin does the same for syndication feeds. You can see the progress of this at my Plugins workspace. As you can see, it’s still a work in progress. Right now, I’m working on a way to access the current linked list count so that new links from an edited post start at the right number.

Categories
Writing

In celebration of taste

I’m reading a lovely little book titled Bittersweet Country, edited by Ozarkian author Ellen Gray Massey. It contains the best articles from a periodical named Bittersweet, published by Massey’s English class from the Lebanon, Missouri high school. The magazine focuses on the Ozarks, the culture and the way of life of the early Ozark settlers.

The first section of the book focused on kitchens: what appliances existed and how they were used, how food was prepared, giving recipes, and even providing diagrams of typical kitchen organization. Most had a big, rough table, usually made by hand, with benches for seats. On this, food would be placed–for eating in the next meal or to hold for the next day. It would be covered with a pretty cloth to keep the bugs off.

In those days, the settlers were frugal and nothing was every thrown away; even ash served a purpose because ash that is wet and allowed to sit and rot forms lye as a by-product. Lye was essential for both cooking and cleaning, and many homes had an ash hopper where ashes from the wood stove and fireplace would be thrown. When it rained, water would trickle through it, resulting in the lye. The cook would then combine this with water and dried corn and boil it for a time to create hominy–a fluffy, and tasty, corn dish.

(I found a recipe for homemade hominy at WikiBooks. If you’re not familiar with WikiBooks, it’s a Wikipedia-related site for …open-content textbooks anyone can edit. )

Reading about kitchens and cooking in Bittersweet reminded me to recommend an enjoyable weblog: 101 Cookbooks. The author, Heidi Swanson, features recipes from her collection of cookbooks–providing interesting background material as well as entré into a world of natural and vegetarian and vegan cooking. It’s a beautiful site, too: perfect for her topic and interests. (It’s not a site that reads well as an RSS feed, which is probably why she doesn’t provide full feeds.)

Ms. Swanson also features some rather fascinating and unusual recipes, such as today’s Lemon Verbena Drop, giving a little cocktail background as apéritif:

In the past I’ve had (a few) friends who tended to treat cocktails more like fashion accessories than beverages. They always opted for the drink that best matched their handbag or shade of lipstick. Bless them though, because they always looked cute. Or cute for a while. There is a place up the street that serves saketinis in a pretty range of sunset colors – reds, pinks, oranges. They serve them in ultra-wide, shallow martini glasses. Turn one way, and the drink in your glass slides right out the other side. It’s a given, anytime we go there someone will end up either wearing their own drink, or wearing someone else’s.

101 Cookbooks led me indirectly to the cupcake weblog, a weblog about all things cupcakes. But let’s not stop there. If you’re like me and find wedding cakes to be a true art form, then here’s a tip: use the Flickr tag wedding cake to see hundreds of photos of wedding cakes, traditional and anything but. My favorite cake so far is this rather unusual Seussian affair.

Categories
Books

The times that test us

I am hard at work trying to finish the last of my due and overdue projects. I attend the first of my Red Cross disaster training sessions next Wednesday and will most likely be deployed south as soon as I’m finished–where is anyone’s idea, but it could be Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, or Texas. If you need anything from me before hand, now is the time to holler.

This is a short post. It was a much, much longer one earlier. I had said a great deal in this post that I ended up pulling. It was filled with frustration, anger, and a lot of “I told you so’s”, directed at politicians, some religious groups, and several prominant political webloggers.

I wrote into this post, as if it were a sponge for all my dark thoughts. I wrote them down, one by one, and then deleted them in one single swoop and click of the mouse. This is my last post written out of frustrated anger–doing so is the typographical equivalent of kicking a flat tire: it does no good, and it really doesn’t make you feel better.

In the meantime, I have two exceptionally good books that I strongly recommend you read, especially now. The first is John Barry’s Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America; and Ted Steinberg’s Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America. I’ll have more to say on both of them, and then some, in the future.

Categories
Writing

Frolicsome reading

Fridays are a good day to indulge in the work of others that gives me so much delight. I am lucky in your gifts–too many to list all, so I’ll just have to pick out a few this time around.

Jerry has a photo of a rather intimidating looking spider and I really like the poem he wrote to accompany it. He also has started a great new site on electric cars and other fuel alternative modes of transportation.

Loren has been publishing some pretty damn amazing pictures of birds and I also like the philosophy that accompanies them. However, he doesn’t post enough cat pictures. Still, I guess the world needs variety.

Dori posted a link to a site that features the work of graphic artists who are bored. My personal favorite is the fisherman.

(Oh, the cable company came out to disconnect the video and leave the internet, but he disconnected both. I caught him before he left, he checked his order and saw in small print that I was keeping my internet but dropping the video. He didn’t have a filter, so he disconnected the video and internet on the ground floor (since the router is on the second floor), but left both cable and internet for the second floor. For the nonce, we have free cable TV upstairs, including my bedroom/office/sitting room. So tonight, Firefly, Stargate, and Battlestar Gallactica, watching I am. I wonder who will get pregnant next on Battlestar? I’m banking on the President.)

Gordon writes on a “who’s turn is it to make tea application” written in .NET. So that’s what you folk in the UK talk about on Fridays? Huh. Anyway, Gordon, I hate to break any possible myth, but I am not a foxy chick. I am a tough, old, bird. Oh, still with a puff or two of smoke in me. Maybe a faint sizzle. A zing or two. Or three.

Elaine talks quietly on loss and paths taken.

Christine is returning to school. Good on you, Christine! Because I think this is a cool thing she’s doing, I have heeded her request and turned photos back on in my syndication feeds. With a wistful hope that you all still do stop by from time to time. It’s lonely at times, me here with just the bots. Millions and millions of bots.

(A hint: I’ve been thinking about going back to school myself…let’s hear it for the League of Grey Freshmen!)

I can empathize–so much!–with Pascale. I am also to her sending my most positive thoughts and bestest of good wishes.

Here’s to Julie and Ted Leung, who are probably one of the nicest couples in weblogging. Tech, too. And gardening. Between Loren’s pictures and the Leungs’, I’ve been getting homesick for the Northwest. Maybe it’s time for a move. If I did, though, who would serve you Missouri Green?

Dorothea Salo, who has a great new job and a wonderful new location, has a black cat, a bat, and a Thing in a Box, so she’s ready for halloween.

I started playing around with the NewsGator API yesterday, and so has Danny. Oh, how much I love REST APIs over SOAP. Sigh.

Jeneane is a real mensch. Phil is still one of my bestest buddies (no, you can’t go on break, Phil — too many of my favorites are on break).

Finally, a shout out to those webloggers who write long posts they never publish, for one reason or another. You know who you are. I have three posts in my drafts–really, really good ones–that I’m holding until you publish.

I just noticed that like the speech of Yoda, my writing is becoming.

Categories
Weblogging Writing

Wincing words

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

There are certain words and phrases popular among webloggers that I’ve grown to dislike over time. Well some I disliked from the start; others I’ve come to dislike only after many repetitions. Whether people continue to use these phrases or not, I don’t care–to each their own. But if we are ever to meet someday and you use one of these words and I wince, you’ll at least know it’s because of the word, not your bad breath or the spinach stuck in your teeth.

The first is blogosphere. What kind of word is blogosphere? Haven’t we done enough damage with ‘blog’ that we have to tag on ‘osphere’?

To me, blogosphere implies that those who weblog live within a bubble isolated from the rest of the known universe. Every time I hear the term, I get a mental image of a huge beach ball floating on the water at the beach: drifting without purpose and soon to be lost. Except that in my visualization, there are millions of tiny little faces looking out at me from within the ball.

Brrrr! Gives me the cauld grue.

If we sail, do we use sailosphere? If we volunteer to help at the library, do we use the term bookosphere in reference to our activities in this environment? Why, then, blogosphere?

The second word isn’t a word, it’s an acronym: MSM. In case you don’t know the term–and goodness sake, how can you not know this term, it litters our pages like candy-shelled chocolate spilled from a bag–it means mainstream media.

First, what is MSM? Seemingly it has to do with professional journalism, but I look around at the people who use it, disparagingly, and notice that many of them are professional journalists–a contradiction leaving me going, “Well, huh.” Do we differentiate between us and this MSM by whether we get paid or not for our efforts? If I remember correctly, some of the more popular webloggers make a great deal of money from their weblogs.

If MSM is specifically professional journalism done by people who don’t blog, do we include all forms of journalism in this classification? If so, then if a newspaper gets a blog, does it stop being MSM? Or is it now, MSM…but with a blog?

How about movies? Are these MSM? They are media. They are main stream. Since most people who use the term MSM do so with a sneer, we have to assume that the ultimate hope is to replace this MSM. Are we saying that today there are podcasts to replace radio; tomorrow there will be vidcasts to replace movies? Look out Tom Cruise, move aside Cameron Diaz: here comes Adam Curry and Dave Winer starring in that blogosphere favorite, “The Odd Couple”?

It’s an Us and Them word, and Us and Them words never lead to anything useful. Besides, every time I hear MSM, I get hungry for Chinese food.

Blogosphere makes me wince, MSM gives me gas, but the phrase I dislike most of all is citizen journalist. I’ll apologize upfront to all of you who love this phrase, but I think it’s the most pretentious piece of twaddle to ever spill out of our brains.

If we’re citizen journalists, does this mean that the reporters down at my local paper aren’t citizens? Do I need to call the Department of Homeland Security on them? Could be fun, true; but I think I’ll pass.

Additionally, how is having a weblog so different from a ‘journalistic’ perspective that we need to have such specialized terms? After all, in this country at least, there’s long been a tradition of personal publications: flyers, underground newspapers, letters exchanged between a network of writers, even Joe the Wacko giving out his mimeographed opinions, printed on bright pink paper. A weblog is just medium, really. Less finger cramping than writing; not as pretty, though, as the bright pink mimeographed sheets.

Some would say that this form of journalism is different, because weblogging gives us a much broader audience. As to this, anyone with a box and a street corner can broadcast. Writing a letter to an editor is broadcasting. Joe the Wacko standing out in front of City Hall is broadcasting. It’s the will to have an opinion and make it heard that’s essential to broadcasting. And who is to say which broadcasting approach has more and lasting influence?

Listen to the phrase, too: citizen journalist. It’s a spooky phrase, and should make your spine tingle in warning. Replace ‘journalist’ with ‘copjustice’ and you have vigilantes; replace ‘citizen’ with ‘patriot’ and you have fascism. Replace both with ‘weblogger’, and you have me.