weblogs

I’ve been blogging since around November 2000 (arguably, earlier than that, that’s just when I started using software on the backend); this is for posts generally about blogging.

More on the unintended consequences of blogging

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It seems I’m not the only person in the blogosphere who’s recently faced surprising consequences due to the content of their weblog. Shelley Powers, aka Burningbird, had a rather interesting conversation with the ~~IRS~~ [California franchise (tax) board]{.underline} this morning…

The person I talked today was compassionate, and extremely helpful — but she was also very thorough.

Before she responded to me by calling me, she mentioned that she gone out to my weblog, this weblog, and read the entries scattered about in it where I talked about my financial situation. She mentioned about reading that thanks to unemployment, I can at least keep my car; about the other things I put online that I didn’t think I would hear back from the mouth of a member of a representative of a governmental tax organization.

I’m not faulting her or shouting out cries of ‘government invasion of privacy’ just because she was thorough. What privacy? I put all this online for anyone to read. Am I going to blame the government, or my creditors, or anyone else for that matter because they read what I write?

She’s since gone back and deleted any posts dealing with her financial situation — and I don’t blame her one bit. It must have been quite a startling revelation when she heard that from the lady she was talking to.

More and more, we need to face the fact that barring password protection, there is no such thing as a “private” weblog. Once the information is there on the ‘net, and available to be read, you can bet that it will be, and not always by those you expect it to be. Some people might say that anonymous blogging is the answer, but I’m not convinced of that — for more on that, read the conclusion to my Fifteen Minutes of Fame post. Best to just accept the fact that anything you put out there can can be found, assume that it will be found, and post accordingly.

(via Scoble)

LISTBlog

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My friend D has just gone live with her newest project: LISTBlog.

The objective here is simple – compose lists based on the topic chosen by the post’s author. Feel free to leave your list in the comments or on your own blog with a link and/or TrackBack to the particular list you’re participating in.

List #1 — Songs you hate to love.

I am so going to lose what credibility I have for my taste in music with this list. The majority of the time, my musical tastes focus on the goth/industrial/alternative side of things, though I listen to a wide range of different styles, and I’m not sure there’s a genre out there that I don’t enjoy something from.

I do, however, have a weakness for well-crafted “pop” music. What used to be a perfectly acceptable genre — “pop”, or “bubblegum pop” — has of late become the realm of such quality acts as Britney Spears and her ilk, and overall isn’t nearly as listenable as it has been in years past. However, occasionally, a song will come along that, even when voiced by an artist that will cause most sane, rational people to run screaming from the stereo, I find myself liking. It rarely, if ever, has anything to do with whatever flavor of the week is providing the voice for the song. Instead, what will catch me is the hook, the production values, and the writing. Even if it’s a hideously dumb song, if it’s assembled well, it’ll often work its way into my brain.

Here, then, are five songs destined to cause me to hang my head in shame and forever regret publicly admitting that I actually enjoy them. ;)

  1. Spice Girls: “Wannabe” (And, incidentally — as long as I’m damning myself — the Spice World movie was far more entertaining than I expected it to be, and is solidly in my “guilty pleasure” movie list. Pick it up sometime, try to ignore the fact that it’s “THE SPICE GIRLS”, and just watch it for the zany British humor.)
  2. Britney Spears: “Oops! I Did It Again…” (I can’t explain it. I really can’t. But this song makes me laugh every time I hear it.)
  3. Los Del Rio: “The Macarena” (Back when I was DJ’ing and the Macarena was at the height of its popularity, it got played about weekly, and [since I have no shame] I’d get up onto a stage area by the DJ booth and do the dance. It didn’t take long before I’d end up with a group of girls watching me — apparently, in their words, I “do good things for the Macarena.” I’m still occasionally tempted to break into it in the middle of a Sisters of Mercy tune at The Vogue, though I haven’t been that crazy/tipsy yet….)
  4. Ricky Martin: “Cup of Life” (I actually think Ricky gets short shrift much of the time. While the more “American” pop-oriented tracks I’ve heard from him generally fail to impress me, the songs with a stronger Latin feel aren’t bad at all.)
  5. Kid Rock: “Wasting Time” (Actually, any Kid Rock song off of Devil Without a Cause. I was just berating myself for this the other day. I know I generally have decent taste in music. I know I shouldn’t like Kid Rock in the least. But for some reason, every so often, his blatantly ridiculous pot-smokin’, 40oz-drinkin’, wife-beater wearin’ white trash attitude is just what I need. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go kill myself.)

Public / Private / Secret

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Triggered by a recent tech gathering that has caused a little bit of ruckus due to it’s perceived “invitation only” nature, Danny O’Brien ended up touching on a subject that I found fascinating: the difference between our “real world” conversations and the conversations we have through our websites, and some of the key differences between them.

In the real world, we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate. The public is what we say to a crowd; the private is what we chatter amongst ourselves, when free from the demands of the crowd; and the secret is what we keep from everyone but our confidant. Secrecy implies intrigue, implies you have something to hide. Being private doesn’t. You can have a private gathering, but it isn’t necessarily a secret. All these conversations have different implications, different tones.

[…]

On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering. is shattered. E-mails are forwarded verbatim. IRC transcripts, with throwaway comments, are preserved forever. You talk to your friends online, you talk to the world.

This is why, incidentally, why people hate blogs so much. My God, people say, how can Livejournallers be so self-obsessed? Oh, Christ, is Xeni talking about LA art again? Why won’t they all shut up?

The answer why they won’t shut up is – they’re not talking to you. They’re talking in the private register of blogs, that confidential style between secret-and-public. And you found them via Google. They’re having a bad day. They’re writing for friends who are interested in their hobbies and their life. Meanwhile, you’re standing fifty yards away with a sneer, a telephoto lens and a directional microphone. Who’s obsessed now?

The first part of the article is about the tech conference, so you’ll need to scroll down about halfway to get to what I found to be the interesting section of the article.

While I hadn’t analyzed it at all, I think on some level I’ve always approached this weblog knowing that it resides in that hazy area between public and private. While it’s certainly public by virtue of being available on the ‘net for anyone who stops by or finds their way here through Google, it’s also in many ways private — it’s primarily about me, my life, and what I’m going through or thinking about in the world around me, and as such, of interest primarily only to friends or people who know me.

But because of the online mix of public and private, I’ve generally tried to find a comfortable middle ground in what I post and what subject matter I choose. While the tone of what I write here is generally of the “private”, conversational tone, there are certainly conversations I’ve had in the real world that I would be hesitant to post here — not because they’re “secret”, but because put in a “public” forum and taken out of context, they can be seen in a far different light than they’re intended. As an example, describing a friend as “the only person I know who’s so flexible he can put his foot in his mouth with his head up his ass” might be (and was) amusing to my group of friends and even to the person in question, but were that posted here, out of context and on its own, the intended humor might not be seen.

I think I’m rambling a bit now — it may be a bit soon after waking up to really dive into this. Still, Danny’s post fascinated me, and it’s worth turning over in your head for a bit.

Longhorn gets Scoblelized

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Robert Scoble has started a Longhorn blog. Information might be light until the upcoming PDC, but it could be a good source of info on Microsoft’s next OS. I may be a Mac user, but it’s good to keep an eye on the other side of the fence. ;)

A couple thoughts, purely on the presentation. The UI looks bearable, and seems to match some of the leaked Longhorn shots we’ve seen so far. The headers for each of the sections in the sidebar look a couple pixels too high to me, though, like they’re crowding the divider lines. Who knows how much of that is just a web rendering issue (or even a browser issue), though. Comment support, but no Trackback, which is a shame (or maybe Trackback is there, but Robert doesn’t have it turned on — I see a ‘Trackback’ counter under the ‘Statistics’ section of the sidebar).

Code-wise, it’s less of a mess than I’ve come to expect from Microsoft, but it could use some improvement. While the main content is structured with CSS, the overall page is still heavily table-based. Images are missing title tags, and there’s still some ALL CAPS tags used (according to specs, HTML tags should be lower case). Still, it’s at least readable code, which is better than I was guessing I’d see when I pulled up the source, and it doesn’t seem to have any IE-specific nastiness. Maybe there are a few people in Microsoft who are starting to get a clue. ;)

Weblog Ethics

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Rebecca Blood has an excerpt from her book The Weblog Handbook posted dealing with weblog ethics that’s well worth looking at. I do my best to abide by these rules — to me, most of them are pure common sense — but it’s not a bad idea to occasionally refresh the concept in your mind.

  1. Publish as fact only that which you believe to be true.
  2. If material exists online, link to it when you reference it.
  3. Publicly correct any misinformation.
  4. Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry.
  5. Disclose any conflict of interest.
  6. Note questionable and biased sources.

Comment spam for Dean?

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Well, this is a shame. It appears that ‘Laura in DC’ has recently started a new pro-Dean weblog (at http://deangrassroots.blogspot.com/ ), and is so excited about it that she feels that spamming weblog comments is the best way to get the word out.

Earlier today, I saw her comment to this BackupBrain post and gave her the benefit of the doubt — maybe she was just being a little pushy. Then, not long ago, I found an identical comment on this Esoterically.net post.

‘Laura in DC’, if you happen to find this — we’re glad you support Dean. We’re glad that you’re excited about him, your weblog, and whatever else in life you might be excited about. But spamming comment threads is just going to piss people off and cause problems for you in the long run. If you’ve got a good site, people will find it. Trust in links and Google, but please — ditch the spam.

Update:

Laura stopped by John P. Hoke’s Asylum too. Damn, now I’m starting to feel left out. ;)

Update:

I just checked back to Laura’s site, and realized that she issued an apology on the 19th — just a case of a “newbie” getting a little over-excited. In the long run, not that big of a deal.

Blogging from Afghanistan

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Ben Hammersley, who’s generally a good read anyway, is currently working his way through Afghanistan. He’s been there for roughly a week now, and he’s been posting some really good stuff. Definitely worth adding to your list of reads. It’s a very, very different world from anything that I’m used to, that’s for sure. For instance…

Yesterday I moved from my hotel into the spare room of the house of the correspondent here for Radio France. Sebastian is trying to start a little side business by renting out rooms, drivers and LandCruiser he is about to buy, to visiting journos and documentary crews. His driver, Babrack, although probably not spelt that way, is an ex-Mujahadeen who credits Stallone’s performance in Rambo 3 for teaching him the correct technique for firing a rocket launcher and looking good at the same time.

Welcome to Tim's Place!

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I wanted to pass on a friendly welcome to Tim, who has just joined our happy little family here at TypePad. I’ve known Tim for a while now (we go back…way back…well, at least back to Alaska), and he’s a frequent and welcome contributor to discussions here and at my old weblog, usually under the alias “Tim Who?” A good guy, and a great photographer (this photograph amazed me) — feel free to stop by and say hi!