Category: Blogging

Catching up on the RSS reader and the furor over MSN Spaces, the new Microsoft blogging service. Most of the noise was about the nifty censorship features, but to my mind, the most offensive bit of the terms of service is the sharecropper’s intellectual property clause.

For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a “Submission”), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission.”

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Microsoft infers that, because most bloggers don’t make money from their blog content, they therefore don’t mind if you sign your rights over to Microsoft. This is tyrannical record-company contract terms transferred to the long tail.
You start as a blogger, and become a successful novelist, inventor, consultant? Sorry darling. Your ideas already belong to Microsoft. Free is pretty darn expensive.
The censorship features wouldn’t be so bad, if only they could be turned off. I gave a talk a while ago at a conference on community uses of technology. The main audience questions about the use of blogs in schools and community centers were about obscenity, and trying to keep a kid-friendly environment without overwhelmingly time-intensive moderation.
The problem with general-purpose censorship and IP sharecropping is that it keeps out grownups. Who is MSN Spaces trying to appeal to?

The helpful folks at the local computer shop were unable to find the part for my Fujitsu laptop anywhere on the planet. So back it goes to Fujitsu, for an expected $500 repair.
I’ve figured out how to recover Thunderbird mail after a crash. The next step today is to figure out how to recover the mail folders, so I can have a working foldering system.
It’s an interesting experiment in discovering the level of dependence on a working, email-based folder system; and on a portable computer for productivity and mental clarity.
Living without a living, foldering system feels like having short-term memory loss. Work-related stuff lives in Socialtext. Customer correspondence from our sales and service systems is fine. So my long term memory is ok.
Immediate correspondence is by phone and instant message/IRC, and that’s fine.
But correspondence that’s not tied to a repository, and doesn’t get immediate responce, goes into a deep black hole. I usually have an excellent assisted memory of what happened 3 days ago, or last week. For the last month or so, that part of memory has been crippled.
My volunteer projects have suffered most, since they depend more on email, and less on database-backed systems.
The other piece that’s missing is computer-aided reflection. The core, daily/weekly/monthly priority setting and planning uses paper. But there’s a more meditative process of reading and thinking and writing that requires a laptop, coffee, background noise.
I haven’t used a desktop computer since… 1991 maybe, when I bought a beloved Powerbook. The desktop works for “leaning forward tasks”. But not so well for reflection.
Blogging will be lighter til I have a laptop back in hand.

Live reports of voter stories and voting problems.
I love the visibility into turnout and problems as they happen.

Just read a lovely review of October Sky by Victor Ruiz, in Spanish, with the help of a bookmarklet phrase translator.
The brouhaha about Ublog’s acqusition by 6Apart and some conversations with Spanish bloggers on Joiito was inducement to read blogs in Spanish and French. But I don’t have enough vocabulary to read fluently. Picking up a dictionary — or even opening another browser window to google-translate — is sufficiently slow enough that I just won’t incorporate non-english blogs into daily browsing.
I really wanted a one-click method of translating an unfamiliar word. So I modified a couple of these translation bookmarklets to accept phrases instead of whole pages.
Words that give meaning and context to the story — cohete = rocket, huelgas = strikes — are suddenly a click away.

Technorati’s pairing with CNN to cover the Democratic convention is a sign of the times. Tools for

Ross Mayfield says that paid PR is less important when the CEO blogs, responding to a PR and blogging event.
Ross is overstating a bit — he has PR background, and is really good at it.
On the other hand, the PR responses to this post overvalue outsourcing. Traditional PR and marketing agencies developed as intermediaries to bridge the vast gulf that opened between producers and consumers in a world of mass production, mass distribution and mass advertising.
Real people can now talk to each other across the gulf. Intermediaries are less important when the parties can talk to each other.

A PR and blogging discussion is full of PR pros eager for a new world where they ghostwrite corporate blogs. The idea makes me vaguely nauseous.
Blogging becomes a sub-discipline of speechwriting — execs and politicians hire wordsmiths, and celebrities hacks to answer fanmail and ghostwrite bios.
I’ve always been skeptical of the Romantic pose of the Cluetrain guys — blogging is the true, authentic voice, cutting through the phony, saccharine hype of marketingspeak.
But an outsourced PR blog is a corporate newsletter — it’s the pep-talk tone of the American Airlines letter from the CEO, multiplied by a million.
Then again, if it’s really boring, we don’t have to read it. In the world of blogging, the limit is the number of blogs a reader can scan in a day. If a CEO blog is interesting, it will get linked and found. And if the propaganda is BS, easier to link and puncture the bubble — viz the response to Movable Type’s new pricing.
With comments and trackback and Technorati and Feedster, there are more ways to find the real conversation.

It’s been here forever — tucked behind warehouses on E 5th street across from railroad tracks. Only a few minutes from my house, but it’s one exit on 35 and an unmarked street. I found it for an AustinBloggers meetup that I came late for. Patio and uncombed garden, decor is austin boho pseudo-ruin. Outdoors which looks comfy but I’m shunning the mosquitoes.
Free wifi, good coffee, and excellent vegetables with breakfast. The (only) problem with Green Muse is the extremely limited menu — their coffee cake is great but not so healthy as regular breakfast food, and the panini sandwich is… edible. Nice to have coffee, wireless, lectric, and nutrients in the same place.

I think this comes back to my understanding of a weblog as a representation of a person online – an avatar with a voice. A self-representation is about being both true to yourself and knowing how to self-edit in different circumstances. That’s what a weblog is to me. — Tom Coates

Bruce Eckel is trying to cultivate bloggingas a genre for expressing ideas that aren’t yet complete thoughts. “I now believe there are three modes of written communication: books, articles, and ideas. The first two I have long experience with, but I lack a medium for ideas. ”
Eckel draws an interesting connection between initial simplicity — getting something out quickly — and elegant simplicity, which takes a lot of work to prune a complex expression to a simple form. They aren’t the same thing at all, but getting material out into the world helps give you the feedback that lets you refine and polish.

What is the balance between simplicity and expedience? “Do the simplest thing that could possibly work” is certainly not saying “do the most elegant thing” because the goal is to get something working, without too much effort, so that you can try it out and see if it solves any portion of the problem. “Trying it out” is what will produce the valuable information that can be fed back into the next iteration, and will also begin to tell you what’s most important about the problem.