Finding Good Blogs in a Sea of Spam
The 16 free WordPress hosts I began in February have been a gigantic maintenance hassle because of spammer abuse, but they have lauched two cool new sites: The Ad Whisperers, a blog about TV commercials, and Political Fretwork, a liberal blog that mines the press for political news.
Last night, Ad Whisperers linked to a phone commercial that has an unusual selling point -- our company will stick with you through all the changes in your life -- even sexual orientation:
You may have seen the new Fido cellular phone ad touting how flexible the company's plans are. You may also have done a double-take near the end when you realized that the man -- who had first been seen making out with a blonde and then with a brunette and a baby -- was now snuggling up with a guy on the couch.
Forget low roaming charges and free calls to my five. I want a phone service that'll support me on the down low.
Fretwork pulls together stories from various sources as they're breaking, like this contrast between Bush's saber-rattling to pass a war budget without a withdrawal timetable and Mogtada al-Sadr's saber-rattling to end the occupation, noting a disturbing observation from Middle East scholar Juan Cole:
Chillingly, some of the demonstrators appeared to be soldiers in the Iraqi army.
If I could get one killer blog a month on these servers, it would be worth the aggravation of checking the WordPress MU servers daily to delete spammers.
Cluetrain Derails in Blacksburg, Virginia
One of the best-known techbloggers was embarrassed Monday when he sent the following private e-mail and it was published by the recipient:
From what I gather so far (and info is incomplete), most of the cell phones in use by students at Virginia Tech, and the system they used as well (much more feature-rich than phones provided by big carriers, and user-programmable to boot) were provided by a company in New York run by my friend ... . I think what they're doing is critically important: helping the users help themselves and each other. And using this tragedy to create the phone systems we want, rather than what the carriers are willing to give us.
Though he backed away from this sentiment, for reasons that should be obvious, he can't deny thinking that the massacre might be a useful lever to get better phone services.
Not long ago, another prominent techblogger proclaimed that a new computer chip was more important than cancer, using a news story about an actual teen with cancer as his example:
... having cancer is important to that one person. Intel chips change the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Yesterday, a third techblogger's first take on Cho Seung-Hui's release of a multimedia manifesto was to claim him as a vlogger, a person who publishes video updates of his life as a blog.
The Virginia Tech shooter sent a package of video and pictures to NBC.
In other words, vlogging comes to mass murder, in ways no one anticipated (or no one I know).
It makes perfect sense, in a perfectly senseless way.
I've been a techblogger for a long time, hyping stuff that excites me about web publishing, programming and affiliated forms of geekery. But there ought to be subjects that are larger than their ability to sell cutting-edge technology, and I'm pretty sure that mass murder and childhood cancer are two of them.
I Shall Wear the Bottoms of my Trousers Rolled
Today is my 40th birthday. On this day at a medical clinic near Dallas four decades ago, my grandfather Bill hounded a senior nurse as she weighed and measured me, convinced I would be switched with another newborn through accident or malice. The only other kid in the nursery that morning was a girl, so I'm pretty sure my folks are the ones who produced me in a night of Champale-fueled abandon that probably involved a Chevy Malibu.
My parents married in late September 1966. I was born full-term. Twelve years later I finally did the math and began pestering my mother for an explanation during a car ride to my grandparents' house, fearing that I was a living breathing example of the breakdown of the American family. My aunt Pam halted the line of questioning and put my mind at ease by threatening to beat me.
With this birthday, I am officially entitled to a mid-life crisis.
Although I am a lapsed Catholic, I stuck with the church long enough to master guilt, so horndogging in the tradition of our nation's 42nd president has been ruled out. (Today's news that gonorrhea has developed drug resistance helps reaffirm that decision -- we're getting closer to Eddie Murphy's doomsday scenario where you poke your nether regions in the wrong place and they immediately explode.)
Because I refuse to clean my garage and live in a covenanted community that forbids curbside parking, a sportscar is also out of the question.
Normally in this circumstance, I would settle for some completely unnecessary home theater or computer purchase, NBA or baseball tickets, or perhaps Silver Age comic books in pristine mint condition. I live my life so close to the edge I get dizzy.
But this is one of life's moments that comes with spousal immunity from prosecution, so I'd hate to waste it. I think I'm going to use this opportunity to become one of those people who goes to the beach in a leopard-skin mankini.
The Internet's Chorus of Calumny
Frank Paynter's getting his groove back after the Internet's long tail knocked him around like a stegosaurus. For all of the talk about how bad it is to be the focus of an angry mob, an angry Internet mob gums its prey rather than biting. Once you get used to the slobber it's not so bad.
Now that the horde's moved on to Tim O'Reilly and his stinking badges, Paynter's mocking the outrage brigade by quoting Karl Marx:
All this chorus of calumny, which the party of order never fail, in their orgies of blood, to raise against their victims, only proves that the bourgeois of our days considers himself the legitimate successor to the baron of old, who thought every weapon in his own hand fair against the plebeian, while in the hands of the plebeian a weapon of any kind constituted in itself a crime.
Katharine Newman, a college student in Virginia, works me over a little for defending Paynter, Jeneane Sessum and Chris Locke:
The reaction of some of the Big-Fishes who owned these group blogs became defensive, arguing that they were being unfairly indicted for hate speech, which they weren't particularly accused of authoring. And that was when the story really got under my skin. All these Big-Fishes standing in line to say they wouldn't apologize for what they hadn't said, to decry Sierra's story as a black mark on their careers? Backing these Big-Fish, folks like Nick Denton and Rogers Cadenhead? I really would have hoped not.
I defended them because the mob was 99 and 44/100ths percent wrong. Once people had a compelling story -- mean web publishers drive female blogger into hiding with misogynistic death threats -- they never let go of it, because the facts were more complicated and less entertaining.
Exporting a Manila Site Using OPML
The RSS Advisory Board site now includes all of the articles, weblog entries, and comments from the group's old Manila site, dating back to the group's founding in 2004.
I never got a copy of the old site's root file from Harvard, so I collected the content using an obscure but cool feature of Manila: All site content is saved in the discussion board as individual messages, each of which can be downloaded as an OPML file. For example, open this weblog entry from Craig Burton's Manila blog in OPML format.
I wrote a Java application that used Apache HttpClient to download the files and XOM to process the OPML.
OPML sucks, but I got thousands of weblog files into a MySQL database so I can't complain. Manila stores message text in the text attribute of outline elements, some of which may be nested. Weblog entries are formatted using the most insane thing I've ever seen in an XML dialect:
<outline text="<newsItem>"/>
<outline text="<title>Hackers selling IDs for $14, Symantec says</title>"/>
<outline text="<url></url>"/>
<outline text="</newsItem>"/>
You need to be an XML dork to appreciate this, but it's XML elements stored as escaped markup inside XML attributes.
Councilman: Stop Apologizing to American Indians
I filed my first story today for Watching the Watchers -- a Republican city councilman in Texas thinks its time to stop apologizing to American Indians:
A Houston city council member said on his radio talk show that the U.S. should "stop the continuous apology for what was done to the American Indians" and drop federal programs and treaties that provide casino rights, educational support and welfare.
Michael Berry, a Republican councilman in his third term and mayor pro tempore who hosts a morning show on KPRC, said on the air March 27 that he opposes such benefits for the same reason he opposes paying slavery reparations. "If you're against apologizing for slavery, then you gotta be against giving welfare to the American Indians because of the fact that 200 years ago they were whipped in a war. ... We conquered them. That's history. Hello!"
I'm the new publisher of Watching the Watchers, which began in 2004 as a media watchdog and liberal news site. I'm looking for 700 to 1,000 word articles and opinion pieces, particular if they shed some light on a current story that's being botched by the national media.
That's not the case here. I got an email tip about Berry's remarks, which have been bouncing around American Indian sites but haven't attracted mainstream media attention yet, and thought they were newsworthy.
Kathy Sierra and the Mean Kids Controversy
There's more than one side to the story about threats made against technologist Kathy Sierra, as an article by Dan Fost in today's San Francisco Chronicle does a good job of explaining.
I strongly sympathize with Sierra, because it sucks to be the target of somebody's rage on the Internet. I imagine it's considerably worse for women, for whom misogynistic threats from men are depressingly common, as my Java book coauthor Laura Lemay relates.
But Sierra's weblog post made the publishers of the now-defunct Mean Kids and Unclebobism blogs look like they endorsed or even authored the odious threats against her, which appears to be an unfair and inaccurate accusation to level against Chris Locke, Frank Paynter and Jeneane Sessum. Her partner Bert Bates continues to hold them responsible as this controversy rages around the web.
I've read several dozen Mean Kids posts by poking around the caches on Google and Bloglines. From what I've seen, the site began in early February as a harmless spleen-venting exercise, as Sierra acknowledged when she suggested herself as a target:
It's about f'n time. It's always Tara Tara Tara.
Like other exercises in misanthropy on the web, Mean Kids became less playful and more malicious over time, especially in terms of the audience it attracted and new authors it took on. When one of the site's writers posted a racist and hateful post about blogger Robert Scoble's pregnant wife Maryam on March 16, describing her as an "Iranian princess" and "brown sow," Paynter responded by shutting the site down and was rebuked by another contributor as a "control freak." Locke shut down the site he created in response, Unclebobism, for similar reasons.
You can fault them for beginning rant sites that ended badly, as if there's any other way those sites turn out, but it should be pointed out that Paynter and Locke closed both blogs in rejection of offensive content before Sierra's post. Sessum's involvement in Mean Kids was a single post that quoted a John Lennon song.
The Internet's newest incarnation of mean kids -- the torch-wielding mob going after people named by Sierra -- should focus their wrath on the people who made the actual threats and the reprehensible post about Scoble's wife.
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