I just revamped my blogroll. (I'll probably do more later.) I haven't done this thorough a job in years, so check it out, There are a lot of interesting new sites listed.
(Also, if you think your blog belongs on my list, let me know.)
After some thought, I have decided to change my comments policy. When I first began this blog, I ran an open comment section where comments posted immediately. I really hated to have to permanently turn on comment moderation. I liked the spontaneity of an open comments section, but it had been heavily abused both by spammers and by malicious people. So with some regret I began requiring that comments be held for approval.
Today, I go one step further and have the courage of my convictions. I will no longer publish pseudonymous comments. Yes, some of my best friends are pseudonymous, and all kinds of people say they have all kinds of good reasons for not using their real names. And I've had lovely, insightful, valuable comments from people who don't use their real names online. But I've had a lot more abuse and harassment from the pseudonymous, and on occasion my trust and willingness to believe that someone had a good reason for concealing their identity has been horribly abused. Enough is enough.
On average, people behave worse when given the opportunity to conceal their identities. You yourself may well always be on your best behavior when undercover, but you give cover to others' dreadful behavior and to loathsome creeps. I will no longer be offering up web space to pseudonymity, though I will not be purging the site of past comments left under the previous policy.
I am getting incredibly sick of having to use special tools to sort out who is speaking. I don't care if your hundred best friends know you by the name of a Tolkien character or some such, if I don't know who you are and you aren't willing to share that information, I am no longer willing to publish your comments. If you need the witness protection program, you are in the wrong place.
While I do not dispute your right to use an alias on the Internet, cyberspace is large, and if you need to do that, you can do it elsewhere.
Continue reading "New Comments Policy: I will no longer publish pseudonymous comments." »
I have been accumulating material on Westport, NY, where we bought a house last year, for a while. I hadn't decided what to do with it. Should I write a book about how exciting it is to buy a house in a nice place, and the wild adventures of restoration and gardening? Or poetry? Or what.
It finally came to me in the past week: I have launched a new site: WestportOnLakeChamplain.com, which will be a sister blog to this one. The left sidebar gives really extensive tourist information for Westport, NY.
I am using blogging software a little differently. The literary model for the site is the scrapbook: Since I have over 2,000 photos to work from, various blog posts from over here, plus other info I've been accumulating, I'm setting the posing date as the approximate date the photo was taken, or the news story appeared, etc. Transplanted blogposts from KathrynCramer.com appear there at on the date they appeared here.
I have a lot more material to add. (My mom pointed out I haven't put up anything about Champ, the monster of Lake Champlain yet!) So the site will grow both forwards and backwards in time.
My intention is that after you have had the full rich WestportOnLakeChamplain.com experience, you will want to go there and join my Utopia. My utopia involves looking at the sun rise over the lake while washing dishes and getting pretty good pasteries for breakfast, fresh from next door, and being able to find pleasant conversation on my front porch between the hours of 6 AM and 10 PM.
So go have a look. Make lots of links to it! Visit frequently!
Visualization of www.kathryncramer.com generated by www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/ today, 11/12/08:
Visualization of www.kathryncramer.com generated by www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/ nearly two years ago, on 12/6/06:
Now that the election is over and we can turn our attention elsewhere, I've been evaluating what direction to go with this blog: Do my own thing? Revisit popular themes that struck a chord with my audience? Try some thing new? Go more for visualizations and blog innovation? I'm mulling it over.
But one thing is certain: I've got an audience out there. I founded this blog in February 2003 out of upset over the advent of the Iraq war. I added Sitemeter May 12, 2004. Since then, Sitemeter has recorded over 1.3 million visits and nearly 2 million page views. (While I also use the counter for a couple of other minor sites, those are very low traffic, so most of that is this blog.) These days, Flickr also has traffic stats. The photos you see on this site are mostly hosted on my Flickr account, which now registers over a million page views (comprising views to photos, photostream, sets, and collections) since I opened the account in September of 2004. (. . . plus another half-million and change views of photos in Typepad photo albums which are not clocked by Sitemeter.)
Over the past year, my blog seems to have averaged about 12,000 visits and 18,000 page views a month.
In case you are wondering, yes, I do know that the previous post posted twice and there seems to be nothing I can do to delete the ghost second version.
This morning, when I was posting, there was a Typepad service glitch during which time I was getting error messages for pretty much everything I was trying to do. The post I was writing initially posted 3 times. I deleted the two extras, and both are gone from my internal database, but there is a ghost version of one of the extras hanging around on Typepad's servers. I've had customer service requests in since this morning.
Annoying.
I spent today's blogging time writing posts for Tor.com. Watch for them over there. (They aren't posted yet.)
I've been having a terrific summer so far, mostly without regular consultation of the Internet. Every once in a while I poke my head in to Computerland and say "God, what a mess," and I go back outside to plant pretty flowers in the mountains or sip coffee while watching the sun rise over the lake.
I knew far in advance that this summer was going to be among the worst of times to be on-line because we are in the midst of a presidential election. Last time around, blogs proved that they could be key players in the outcome of the election, and so this time it was pretty clear that in addition to the usual Internet nasties, there would be people out there stirring up trouble in the blogosphere who were being paid to cause trouble, to take down bloggers perceived to be supporting of one candidate or another, people paid to say what they were saying, and meetings around conference tables in which promoting particular political agendas in the blogosphere would be discussed. And there would be all kinds of unnecessary grief as a result. As I put it to some of my friends back in February in a conversation at Boskone, this would be an election in which people's lives would get destroyed because of their blogs. I made a conscious decision to opt out.
Things are playing out a little differently than I expected, inasmuch as I've followed the goings on, but the on-line world is full of unnecessary awfulness this summer. It seems like every time I'm on-line for more than just to check my email, I end up spending time trying to parse some blogwar or other to see if this is something I need to be involved with. The answer is inevitably "NO", and soon I will learn not to try to parse them at all. But I am still having a hard time coming to grips with what a brain-sucking parasite one's computer can be.
For the past two years, I have been fairly reticent about what has been going on in my life because I have been cyberstalked by a woman who is obsessed with me. She watches me so closely that in May she ridiculed my new author photo within two hours of my posting it. She picks Internet fights and then theorizes on-line that I must somehow be involved with the resulting blog wars she involves herself in. She has about ten blogs and tries to make herself look like a crowd. A week or so ago, on a single day, she wrote about five posts mentioning me in various paranoid nutty contexts. She also began developing conspiracies theories about people I am photographed with. One author whom my husband publishes and who is a friend of mine, but whom I haven't seen much of since he moved to the West Coast a decade or so ago, was a major figure in her fantasy life and conspiracy theories four a couple of months earlier this year. She also took out after one of my kids, but backed off after I contacted her ISP and law enforcement. Unsurprisingly, she is front and center in one of this summer's many political blogwars and apparently blames me.
Having given myself some breathing space, I realize that inasmuch as I have any desire to be on-line, I would like to be able to talk about what fun I've been having. Last fall, we bought a house overlooking Lake Champlain in the Adirondacks. I have been spending a lot of time up there.
The house came with two failing retaining walls, which we have just replaced with amazing dry-laid stone walls made of beautiful boulders studded with garnet. The yard was completely restructured as part of this process, and so I have been planting a yard from scratch which is a fascinating process. I've been learning about soil PH and soil structure. I've been mail-ordering beneficial fungi from fungi.com and moss for the shadiest of our walls from Moss Acres. We planted special grass seed. I've most recently put in some raised beds and planted rose bushes. I've been getting up with the sun and working on the yard for an hour or two before anyone else gets up. I feel so wholesome and healthy.
The town where our house is is a very friendly place, and if I want conversation , all I need to do is walk out the door. People will stop and talk. It is tremendously socially nurturing. I wish the blogosphere could go back to being more like my small-town front porch. But I think I'll have to wait until after the election for that. In the meantime, peace be with you.
There are no two ways about this one: a blog attacking the reputation of a 13-year-old girl who killed herself after a neighborhood online romance scam at least partly instigated by a neighbor girl's mom. In the past 48 hours -- after prosecutor's declined to prosecute the MySpace-savvy neighbor mom, Lori Drew -- the persona on the World's Most Loathsome Blog identified itself as Lori Drew.
I will not pass judgement on whether the blogger really is Lori Drew, but I will pass judgement on the ISP, Blogspot aka Blogger aka "don't be evil" Google: THERE IS NO EXCUSE WHATSOEVER for Blogspot not to pull the plug. The blog is under investigation by the local cops and the real Lori Drew claims she has nothing to do with it. If she has nothing do do with it, then it is a violation of the Terms of Service. QED.
If we don't believe Lori Drew because of her past history of sockpuppetry (at least as alleged by the media to have been told by Lori Drew to the cops), then she is harassing the surviving members of Megan Meier's family, which has got to be one of the most egregious ToS violations I have ever heard of. QED.
There are no other possibilities.
I link to THE WORLD'S MOST LOATHSOME BLOG so that you can all click on the FLAG BLOG tag in order to flag it for "objectionable content."
Either way you cut it, what's on that blog isn't covered by Free Speech. It's criminal.
Reading my spam this morning, followed a link to a site for a commercially organized blogging "expo" that claims the event will be jam-packed with famous bloggers and will teach me all kinds of important blogging tricks (monetization, for example). I was looking for their guest list, which the site promises to reveal but which is nowhere in evidence. (However, the preliminary program, which I did manage to find, lists Glenn Reynolds and Arianna Huffington.)
Instead, I found something else to amuse. My favorite bit of their website is shown in the screenshot below:
This seems the most reality-based thing I saw there.
Lately, I've been really hammered with comment spam -- spam submitted as comments in my blog. Typepad is probably still filtering out a lot, but a lot more is getting through.
This morning, I discovered that enough was leaking through for Gmail to decide that incoming comment notifications from Typepad were spam, so there were ten or twelve real comments, some of them from my friends, and some serious and interesting comments from people I don't know, languishing in my account, waiting to be approved. (I've got Comment Approval turned on.)
Sorry folks. I'll try to watch more carefully (and try to persuade Gmail not to dump the Typepad notifications).
I've been following with some puzzlement the strange tale of millionaire businessman and art collector Stuart Pivar's lawsuit against science blogger PZ Myers claiming "Assault, Libel, and Slander" over Myers' negative review of Pivar's foray into evolutionary theory, a book entitled Lifecode:The Theory of Biological Self Organization, the only book published by one "Ryland Press, Inc."
I first read about the lawsuit on Making Light, but it has also been written up on Scientific American's blog, where Myers comments,
Huh. I'd heard some noise from Pivar threatening to sue, but this is the first I've heard of any formal action being taken. Since I'm a defendant (one who hasn't been notified of his status!) I suppose I should just shut up at this point and let justice run its course.
Since I'm a blogger, though, I can't completely shut up. I will just say that this is Pivar's attempt to squash a negative review of his book, which I posted here. Nothing in the review was motivated by personal malice, and I actually am inclined to favor structuralist arguments in evolution ... but I'm afraid my honest assessment of Pivar's work is that it does not support his conclusions. I still stand by my review, and now I'm a bit disturbed that someone would think criticism of a scientific hypothesis must be defended by silencing its critics.
One of the very first things I was ever told when my first book came out was never to respond to negative reviews. I have not entirely resisted the temptation, but have (I think) managed to limit myself to polite notes making what I felt were factual corrections. My first reaction, when reading about this lawsuit on Making Light was how much it reminded my of the Monty Python skit containing the line, He used sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire.
Of course, life is stranger than fiction; stranger, even, than Monty Python. I've spent most of the day reading for our Year's Best volumes, but spent a few minutes looking further into the discussion of the lawsuit, and found some really odd stuff.
Pivar, it seems, is used to being noticed and making waves, though in very different circles than biology or blogging. According to The New York Times (2004) he has a "long-running feud" with the New York Academy of Art which he helped found and where he alledges that "organized crime" has taken over.
In 2006, he alleged that Sotheby's showed negligence to its stockholders in relation a refund given a Japanese collector for a statue for which Pivar had obtained a 1 million dollar appraisal.
But the most interesting material relates to his friendship with Andy Warhol, which he wrote about for the Sotheby's Andy Warhol Collection 1988 auction catalog. The Warhol-Pivar relationship merited a really startling passage in an essay published by Artnet entitled "What Art Says about Money" by Charlie Finch:
That is the call of money, the fear of art as exchange value. Conversely, Claude Monet, the original Andy, would crank out his haystacks, take a small number to Marseilles, telling his buyers, "There are only a few, buy them while you can." Then he'd float another dozen stacks back in Paris.
This is more than making a living, or refusing to: It is the love call of currency at its most fetishistic. Steve Rubell famously showered Andy Warhol with buckets of bills at Andy's birthday bash. No artist was more the victim, and yet exploiter, of money lust than Warhol, wandering the souks of Soho with Stuart Pivar buying up everything in sight then dumping the unopened packages in his closets at night, full of unsatisfied shame. The pull of mammon was murderous even on someone so intelligent. For money is a form of behavior, abstract, hidden and irrational.
Here's more on the Andy and Stuart social scene from accounts by Heli Vaaranen, a Finnish model:
What united Stuart and Andy was that they appreciated success, and only it. If someone tried to get started with his or her career, Stuart and Andy were certainly the wrong persons to try to use. Stuart Pivar had a very exclusive taste in his social life. For instance, he used to arrange classical concerts once a week in his home, in which artists like members of the New York Philharmonic performed. Only the best was good enough for Stuart.
Both Andy and Stuart selected the company they associated with. Very carefully. Andy used to say that 'It's great to buy friends'. Vaaranen agrees that Andy's famous friends were bought with his fame.
In the past few days, there are any number of people who have called Pivar an idiot for filing this lawsuit. That seems to me too easy an assessment.
The truth seems to be much more novelistic in a Jamesian sort of way: Pivar strikes me as a feisty, confident man, a fighter, who has honed his tactics in intellectually and aesthetically complex circles, who is unable to understand why his visual sophistication is not taking him where he wants to go, and why money can't take him the rest of the way if visual sophistication isn't enough. (I hope for the sake of everyone involved that he is a quick learner.)
I have stripped the design of this blog down. I haven't decided whether to keep it spare or whether to dress it up again afterwards.
What I am preparing for is an attempt to shift to essay writing, to what I've been calling longer wavelength ideas. So I've been drafting an essay as part of this experiment. Since there is wide-spread incomprehension regarding what I had to say on one particular panel at Readercon, I've decided to start there. And it is indeed an experience very different from blogging, writing for three hours one day, and five the next, and not being done and this not being a problem. Essays are like that.
I'm 2,500 words into an essay that I'm rather pleased with so far; I think it's going to be twice as long. Wide-spread incomprehension at what I think is prefectly clear is usually a sign that I'm onto a good project. If what I'm saying is so hard to understand, then this is an opportunity to upset conventional wisdom.
One of the things I've been writing about is the roots of Internet pseudonymity in the Futurian movement, and James Tiptree, ahead of her time in many ways, as a transitional figure. I need to lay hands and eyes on D. West's essay, "Performance," on fannish personae, which may take time. (Anyone with an electronic copy is invited to send it!)
While I've been traveling about, I've been thinking about blog design and the future of this site.
(We were in Seattle for the SF Hall of Fame inductions and the Locus Awards. We converged with much of the rest of my family at Apollocon in Houston. Then we made a quick trip to upstate New York. We couldn't stay long because we had reservations at a Massachusetts beach motel. Now we're in Burlington, MA at Readercon, one of our favorite conventions.)
Every once in a while I get into a blog redesign frame of mind For example, on April 6, 2006, I wrote:
Every once in a while, I get in a mood and I want to radically reconfigure what my blog is and does at the information architecture level: the mood I described previously as "being tired of writing on a roll of paper towels."
But up until now it's pretty hard to make blog software behave differently in any really meaningful way. Yes, I can tinker with CSS, but the ease of writing in the standard blog format is a strong current to swim against, so despite possibilities offered by CSS, I have tended to fall into the path of least resistance and so despite my several attempts at a major overhaul, things haven't changed that much. However, Typepad recently introduced a feature called Type Pages which may allow for changing habits.
This evening I will be on a panel on online criticism and reviewing:
9:00 pm ME F&SF Reviewing in the Blogosphere.
John Clute, Kathryn Cramer, Jim Freund (M), Ernest Lilley, Tom Purdom, Gordon Van Gelder.
A guide to what's online, and a discussion of the ways in which online reviewing differs from the print variety. What are the good and bad aspects of the more personal and informal tone of much online criticism?
On the panel, I will once again take the position that the big difference in quality between online and print reviewing is that people tend to spend a lot less time composing reviews and essays for online publication than they do for print venues. I find that blog software pushes me in the direction of shorter composition time, so the redesign I have in mind is a format for longer wavelength thoughts. I think this can be accomplished through the Type Pages interface.
Such messing about -- as well as the composition of actual essays -- will have to wait until I'm home and unpacked. But meanwhile I'm thinking about it.
I have looked around for blogs doing interesting things with Type Pages, and haven't yet found any really good examples. Anyone seen good examples of what can be done?
News source for the wit and wisdom of Jeff VanderMeer about his own work: www.jeffvandermeer.com. He will also continue his blog at www.vanderworld.blogspot.com.
(I haven't forgotten you. I'm just spending all my free moments helping my son with an elaborate school project.)
Following the right-wing group assault on Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan for having the audacity to take jobs on a Democratic presidential campaign and Michelle Malkin's video proving that Malkin is descended from a screech owl, do we think, maybe, people will stop asking where all the women political bloggers are?
Nah. I doubt it.
By the way, screech owls are descended from dinosaurs you know.
PS: Can someone explain to me why William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious & Civil Liberties is getting paid over $300,000 a year to use a 501C3 corporation to harass Amanda Marcotte and Melissa Ewan?
(His employment history does not seem to justify this level of compensation.)
UPDATE: See also Melissa's tale in the Guardian. And do read the comments for the Republican Rape Machine you have and orifice so we can fill it; you were begging for it girl mob psychology.
See also Jesus General. (Just why does loyalty to Catholicism make men think about what they could do to women bloggers with their penises? I missed that part of the Bible. If her blog offend thee, send her lewd sexual suggestions via email.)
I have recently added the following blogs to my blogroll:
Check them out.
I take my inspiration from this page in Google Zeitgeit. These are from my Sitemeter logs. Found art, I guess:
Where does the easter bunny live? What to do with left over roast beef? What is happening to the filipino airport screeners now? Why is standardized testing bad? Why do people have different opinions about henry the 8ths daugther elizabeth the 1st? Who was hippachus? Who is talent rock? Who is rebuilding new orleans? Which is the only type of radiation that might penetrate the walls of a house? Where does a bunny live? Where did the levees break in new orleans? Where can I see pictures of mississippi before and after hurricane katrina? Where are sonics gloves? When did the levys break? What's the easiest way to poison someone? What were you thinking about? What was the dose of po-210 given to alexander? What type of treatment did rosemary kennedy get? What to do with leftover rob roast? What things happen after a hurricane occurs? What really happened to the levees? What kind of tree are you? What is the importance of journalists covering war criminal trials? What is blackwater security? What happens if a security guard leaves his post early? What happened to kramer? What does islam say about earthquake? What does a fake yu-gi-oh card looks like? What do the government do for the citizens before and after a hurricane? What caused the levy to break in hurricane katrina? What area of the world is the dog stinkhorn in? What are the bad effect of making a reseach methodology without following a plan? What are ten reasources and what do they import and export to and from Greece? What are some customs of guam? What are juxtapositions?
And the How Tos . . .
How to tell if a yu-gi-oh! god card is fake. How to tell if a yu-gi-oh card is fake. How to spot fake yu gi oh cards. How to memorize the first 20 elements of the periodic table. How to make totem poles from paper. How to make fake yugioh cards on the computer. How to make betting pool charts. How to make a pyramid out of legos. How to make a part. How to make a mary & joseph costume. How to make polonium 210. How to kill pseudocolus fusiformis. How to get a continental airlines buddy pass. How to fix a television. How to be a private military contractor. How russia custom officers compute duties for cars. How psychopath would take revenge from his lover. How many security contractors have died in Iraq? How many people lived in New Orleans before hurricane katrina. How many people died as result of hurricane rita? How hurricane katrina effected new orleans.
And the How Dos . . .
How do you get to the Haunted House without being a Guardian for battleon? How do you get milk from a female breast? How do you fix a television? How can u poison someone with polonium?
And the Doeses . . .
Does the easter bunny have msn? Does boeing 727f need a flight engineer? Does apple warranty cover water damage?
And finally, a Christmas question . . .
Did you have problems putting together the little tikes climb and slide castle?
(Later, if I get around to it, I'll provide links to where the answers to these questions, such as they are, can be found.)
Further to the subject of the Creative Commons release of Peter Watts's novel Blindsight:
Cory Doctorow. Kathryn Cramer. John Scalzi. Three people with exponentially higher lemming quotients than I shall ever enjoy, each choosing to pimp Blindsight in the wake of its CC release. Something about that combination worked: Amazon numbers (which tanked the day of liberation) have since rebounded and are now comparable to what they were in the heady days of Just-Released The number of feeds, blogs, and other sites mentioning the book have skyrocketed. Several of the posts I've seen are illustrated with one or another of the alternate covers. A few claim to have stayed up all night, reading the entire novel directly off their monitors. I've been getting e-mail from as far as Russia and South America, replete with screen shots and reports of typos that snuck through the editing of the pdf and the html versions. Thank you all. I'll get on those ASAP.
Of course, the down side of all this attention is that the light attracts people even more curmudgeonly than I: I've picked up a couple of really excoriating 1-star reader reviews on Amazon amongst all the 5-star raves (nothing in between, interestingly) and while I'm the first to admit that Blindsight has its flaws, I also think that anyone who claims it is entirely without merit has probably got some other issues going on. One of those guys seems to give one-star reviews to virtually everything he reads he's basically the antiKlausner, and if we accept Harriet Klausner's unflagging enthusiasm, then I guess we can't complain about someone who tilts the other way, for whatever reason. Think of it as bringing a teensy part of the universe back into balance.
More glowing reviews from professional outlets too, including one from the Vancouver Province (which surprises me, since the last time I looked at that particular tabloid the headline story was about a headless ghost reportedly haunting Gastown I didn't know those guys even reviewed actual books ) I've added excerpts to the blurbs page (and have even relented on "Hobbit"'s review, since aliased or not it does seem to hail from a fairly high-profile and respectable online sf source).
The experiment continues. And my mood is somewhat improved.
We've been frantically finishing both the Year's Best SF 12 and The Year's Best Fantasy 6 (yes, I know it's only December), plus our wonderful cat is dying: two weeks following surgery to remove tumors, she's developed some blood clots, one of which went to a hind leg, and today she seems to be losing use of her back legs.
So I completely missed the whole Easton Jordan/Michelle Malkin fuss, which culminated in Jordon graciously offering to fly Malkin and friend to Iraq. A quick review of the situation (between episodes of waiting on the cat hand and foot) is quite entertaining. Apparently, Wingnuttia thought Easton Jordan was a stuffed trophy on their club house wall. How dare he launch a blog, let alone a blog in collaboration with Robert Young Pelton.
My favorite entry into the wingnut strutting was this guy Curt at Say Anything (apparently living up to the name of the blog). Curt doesn't seem to get out much.
What has become even more curious to me is that a assistant (sic) of Eason Jordan, Robert Young Pelton, has been making the rounds of the blogs commenting on various Jamil Hussein posts. He is basically trying to dismiss many of our worries that this is a media stunt of some kind. But in one comment at Blackfive he made this assertion:
Hi guys, Robert Young Pelton just to clarify. The offer is genuine, nothing strange or unusual. We go to Iraq all the time so we figured if Michelle wants to see for herself why not. More importantly this is not a military embed. The iraqi in question is not part of any US project. His stated location is currently a no go zone for the US military so she will have to arrange her own security.
So Robert, or RYP as he likes to call himself in the comments, is trying to assert that the US Military cannot go into the Yarmouk district. That make sense to anybody? Since when has the US Military not been able to go into ANY area of Iraq? Oh, but the AP sure could.......
If it were me, I'd take Pelton absolutely literally: Either pick up the phone and call a private military company for a security detail or cancel the trip. Pelton actually goes places and reports back, and people rely on and trust their lives to his info.
I would recomend that Mr. Curt read the section in Pelton's Three Worlds Gone Mad concerning the trip to Chechnya before taking Pelton's comments as a slight to our military.
Until very recently, I thought all blogs had traffic patterns rather like mine: that there was a certain baseline level of traffic punctuated by huge spikes. For non-ego related reasons I happened to compare my traffic with that of some other sites, and discovered that my traffic pattern seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Given my baseline readership, I seem to have the largest volatility in blog traffic I can find. I think I know why my traffic behaves that way. I just don't understand why everyone elses's doesn't.
The closest match I can find for my traffic patterns is Making Light. (And I think this is attributable to a shared blogging philosophy.) But Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden start with a much higher baseline readership and still don't have traffic spikes as high as mine. Is anyone measuring this sort of thing?
(Click on the graphic to play with the Alexa graph tool.)
Why does my traffic behave this way? Partly because I take the idea of the blogger as public intellectual seriously, and partly because I am interested in the problem of how to re-envision the data served up to us by the news media, and that on occasion, I have been very successful at that.
UPDATE: Here's a link to a page on the mathematics of volatility in the stock market. The difference between stock volatility and blog traffic volatility is that blog traffic mainly moves up from a baseline and then returns to traffic of a similar order of maginatude, whereas stock volatility can go in either direction, through the roof or through the floor.
SO I DECIDED TO PIT MY SPIKES AGAINST SOME STIFFER COMPETITION: I went to the Truth Laid Bear's Blog Ecosystem and pitted my spikes against those of some of the Ecosystem's top ranked sites: "Higer Being" 8. Stop The ACLU (2728 blogs linking in); and "Mortal Humans" 13. Mudville Gazette (1948 blogs linking in); 21. BLACKFIVE (1537 blogs linking in); and 23. the evangelical outpost (1375 blogs linking in). (The Truth Laid Bear is a bit confused about me, but here I am at #4008.)
So. Look at this:
Guess what? I still win. OK. So this is great for my sense of self importance in the world and all that, but what the heck is going on here? Am I unique, or am I representative of a specific type of blogger?
Mommy Forever left me. She took the kids too. They’re spending three days at the outlaws, who live 50 miles to the north. It’s really quiet here. Too quiet. And boring. So boring that I scrubbed the shower tiles, mowed the lawn, raked the leaves, did three loads of laundry, picked up the toys the kids left all over the place, and washed the pile of dishes sitting in the sink. That was first day.
November 20th: My Wife Hacked My Blog
. . . You can’t convince me my wife had nothing to do with it. She pretends she barely knows how to use a computer, but now I know better. She’s a closet hacker. I think she’s even writing a book about it, If I Hacked It (not to be confused with O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It book).
There are some things the web reader was not meant to know!
My friend Angus has just started a blog devoted to the topic of coping with his small daughter's leukemia while living in an island country off Africa.
This blog relates our experience of living with a small child, our daughter, with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia - we hope it will provide comfort and information to others in similar situations to our own as well as being both therapeutic for ourselves and a record of what will be surely a profound and sometimes traumatic few years for us.
This is Year's Best season for us, and so I've been reading lots of short fiction, which ought to give me a lot to say in this space, but instead leaves me sort of stunned. If you have a favorite science fiction or fantasy short story published in 2006, now is the time to tell me about it.
One thing I found out about this weekend is Rudy Rucker's podcast of his fine story, "Chu and the Nants" published in Asimov's. I told David about it and he was pleased I liked it because it is part of Rudy's next novel, Postsingular, which David is publishing at Tor in a year. Meanwhile, Rudy's new novel, Mathematicians in Love, just came out. Put it on your Christmas list.
On a not entirely unrelated topic, I have been surveying the Nerdosphere for worthy math and computation-related blogs, and have noticed the interesting phenomenon that there is a new generation of math and physics grad students who blog. Most of these are very low traffic sites that would raise hardly a blip on the Technorati rankings, but seem to me indicative of an interesting technological shift.
Historically, physicists were among the first to have web sites (my father had the second in the State of Washington), however scientists have been a bit slower to embrace blogs than they were the web as such. When I've had more time to survey them, I may provide more targeted links.
Here are some blogs that caught my attention while I was surfing for math and math-related blogs:
Further to the subject of data, I've had a look at David Sifry's much discussed State of the Blogosphere post. The part I found most interesting is the discussion of splogs and how Technorati deals with them.
. . . some of the new blogs in our index are Spam blogs or 'splogs'. The good news is Technorati has gotten much better at preventing these kinds of blogs from getting into our indexes in the first place, which may be a factor in the slight slowing in the average of new blogs created each day.
The spikes in red on the chart above shows the increased activity that occurs when spammers create massive numbers of fake blogs and try to get them into our indexes. As the chart shows, we’ve done a much better job over the last quarter at nearly eliminating those red spikes. While last quarter I reported about 8% of new blogs that get past our filters and make it into the index are splogs, I’m happy to report that that number is now more like 4%. As always, we’ll continue to be hyper-focused on making sure that new attacks are spotted and eliminated as quickly as possible.
This relates to something I have been worrying a bit about lately, which is astroturf blogs in quantity founded for an unpleasant and possibly illegal, though not commercial, purpose. I won't link to the example of the phenomenon I have in mind, because that would give them traffic.
If, for example, sometime in the near future, a cult were to order its members to all found blogs to attack a particular individual or institution, how would search engines like Technorati or Google react? Would this be seen as covered by freedom of expression, or would it be seen as analogous to to the founding of many erection-enhancement pill blogs? How will this be dealt with? Could offending an organization with fanatical members ruin your reputation on the web permanently? Or is this something that people like Dave Sifry will have to start monitoring?
And, if it were happening now, and you were to know about it, what would you be able to do about it?
And what if you were a target? What would you do?
Write to Dave Sifry? Call the FBI? Hire an attorney? Hire a publicist? How relevant and enforceable are, for example, the cyberstalking laws?
Food for thought.
Richard Chichakli, who showed up in my comment section a few years ago to tell me that my opinions on Viktor Bout were "less than informed," is back in comment-section-land. He's shown up to tell off Alex Harrowell of the Yorkshire Ranter. And then he comes back a second time to make sure Alex knows he'd got a private plane:
Do you know for a fact that I, Richard chichakli, have a a private jet? or would you like to recall the lie you stated by saying (operators of Richard Chichakli's private BAC111 3C-QRF)
I wish that you stick to your green party, cause you are not doing well here, nor you will be immune from liability.
(Or is he denying that he has a private plane? Hard to tell.)
Why he feels the need to lobby bloggers to get the FBI to let up on him, I'm not sure. Must be because we bloggers have Power and Influence, I guess.
Back in March, I came close to appearing in The New Yorker's Talk of the Town. Now the article, concerning my adventures blogging Top Cat Marine Security and their $55 million contract with the transitional government of Somalia, has appeared on Silence of the City, a new website that publishes items rejected from the Talk of the Town. I'm told the piece went through 3 or 4 rounds of editing before it was ultimately rejected.
Well, I suppose it is in the end just a tale of the adventures of a suburban woman in her dining room. I'll have you know I can get in really a lot of trouble in this dining room! (Somewhere in the background someone is muttering, Well, OK. So she did Silence of the City. But can she do Silence of the Lambs?)
As the world spirals into chaos amidst wars and bombing plots, I am trying to shift my focus from intrigues involving private military firms and other strange little companies, back to the larger scale issue of how to best manage information harvested from the Internet, and how to transform what one harvests into the most easily visualized format (this, using Google Earth and other tools), since we think better about what we can visualize.
This morning in a waiting room, I learned from (I think) Time magazine that we liberal bloggers have shirked the subject of the Israel-Lebanon war, and they were all ready to steer me to places that would explain why we'd turned tail. Well, gee. Just short of a month ago I did my part to try to portray in a map the destabilizing properties of Hezbollah's new weapons. And later did some other related graphics. This though I am not fascinated by war or the military or war-blogging. It being summer, I traveled for a while on a family vacation.
I look at the global situation now, and I see a dystopian world that was foreshadowed by the menacing rhetoric underlying Iran's military maneuvers a few months ago: the new Hezbollah arsenal and accompanying acctacks on Israel and the airline bombing plots were what was supposed to result from us putting a stop to Iran's nuclear program. Except we didn't put a stop to it. Not really. And the scenario is unfolding anyway. I made my contributions to war-blogging this one, but is this really a job for bloggers at all? Did my knowing this, recognizing this, as it unfolded save anyone's life? I doubt it.
So I'm going to try to shift focus to the tools that help people pick up the pieces and move on. If I can think of something to do to help in the meanwhile, I'll do it. But marveling at the wounded world so easily tips over into voyeurism; and I have no desire for a vicarious ride through Hell.
My adventures of the past year have taught me a lot about what good can be done with information and community available on the Internet. And for me, that seems the right direction to go.
An interesting phenomenon I've noticed in my referrer logs is that just three readers, identity unknown, seem to make up about a tenth of a percent of my total traffic on the typical day:
Frequent visits from these IP#s go back at least six weeks. Could these loyal readers be bots of some kind? Maybe. Some activity from them suggests not.
Are you are one of these very loyal readers? If so, please step forward and introduce yourself!
I did something dumb and may have lost a few posts. Regular blogging to resume soon.
Night before last, I was asked by a good friend to do a quick Google Earth favor. Yesterday morning, I finished a draft of the graphic. I was asked if the graphic could be given to "Bill" to post (i.e. Bill Roggio of the Counterterrorism Blog). Sure, I said. And a little while later, I tossed it up on Flickr as an afterthought. Then I decided to blog the pic myself: Being a goddess of Google Earth, I have a different constituency than Bill does.
This evening, Flickr reports that the graphic has been viewed 20,363 times. I'm a bit bewildered by this, since it was created to help with a discussion among a very small group of people. Sure it was topical and was picked up by BoingBoing, but I've done topical stuff in Google Earth before and had it picked up by BoingBoing and other major blogs. And this one is running at about 20 times the popularity of the next runner up in my Flickr account. And the Hezbollah bombing range graphic is now about 5 times as popular as my previous Greatest Hit, a scan of some fake Yu-Gi-Oh! cards from my son's card collection.
The way the graphic is supposed to be used is at full rez in coordination with the list of missiles and their ranges that appears in the upper right. There are also distance markers for the concentric circles that you can't read except at full rez. I suspect that the majority of my viewers are not looking at it full rez, and most probably pay no attention to the list of missiles.
When the graphic was thrown out there to the public, I was expecting its general assumptions to be questioned. Those circles are deliberately fuzzy to keep people from getting the idea that they represent a greater degree of precision than they do. Instead, what has been mostly questioned are my politics and my decision to orient the map from Lebanon looking south.
A number of people have remarked that I (or someone) should do a graphic of what Israel can do to Lebanon. Here's the reason I'm not going to: that Israel maybe's got the bomb and could maybe transform Beirut into a green glass plain is not new information. Hezbollah's new-found bombing range into Israel is new information, and very important new information. Now, I don't think this would be a politic moment to explicate my opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of Israel as a nation state. But in the past, blogger Gary Farber has been quite articulate on the subject of my failure to appreciate Israel. So this graphic isn't about whether I value Israeli lives over Lebanese. One of the general tenets of my personal politics is that if it shouldn't happen here, it shouldn't happen there, and this certainly holds true for members of the general public having bombs dropped on their heads.
Now, about the orientation of the map: I am tempted to speculate that there may be a class of persons out there who keep their heads permanently oriented due north. However, that would be unfair: somewhere around here, we have a t-shirt bearing the slogan, "Australia: No longer down under," showing the standard Mercator projection of the world upside down. So I do understand. But stilll . . . .
First of all, this graphic was created to facilitate a small group discussion. And there was some conversation about how to orient it. I tried a number of things, but what seemed most appropriate was to orient it from roughly the geographic point of view of those launching missiles, so that those things easiest to hit were biggest and closest, and so that the most speculative targets were smaller and further away. Also, I opted for an angled view, taking advantage of Google Earth's simulation of 3-D reality rather than a flat-on top-down view, to give a sense of verisimilitude. Apparently, I succeeded.
But it bears mentioning that even maps generally perceived to be "properly oriented" may involve distortion. Check out the rather good New York Times map. Can you tell me what the distortion is? I know because I used a piece of it as a Google Earth overlay.
All this having been said, I'm glad so many people have found my map worth looking at. Flickr now reports it's been viewed 20,512 times. At bottom my project, and the project of this blog, is to explore and improve methodology. And I hope in all those visitors, someone got new ideas of how to better use GIS-based visualization. Because exploring the possibilities of visualization is what I think I'm on about. And guess I must be doing something right.
Lately there has been some discussion of who really runs the liberal blogosphere. And so on this 4th of July, I thought I would shed some light on the matter. I am the true blogger "Kingpin." I am the Secret Master, sitting at the center of my electronic web.
Here I am for instance in an Elitist New England Setting, text messaging Soooper Friends and the New York Times that while my beach motel parking lot is a little small, the beach nearby would be a perfectly fine place to land The Black Helicopter.
Here I am emailing subtle suggestions (Marching Orders) to my Elite Tiger Team of attack bloggers, ordering up blog posts around the world:
And here I am in one of my many disguises:
And here I am calling the shots:
So now you know: Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos, and all the rest of them are merely my tendrils.
For God sakes, David Brooks, check you facts, next time! You call yourself a journalist? Sheeesh.
The rocket scientists over at Xeni Sucks seem to be expanding their list of bloggers to stalk -- apparently they got bored when Xeni went to Tibet and wasn't available for their stalking pleasure -- and I seem to have made the cut. Not a good idea, guys.
How about y'all get a life instead?
Continue reading "Why Is the Blogosphere So Much Like High School?" »
I have been retained by Wolfram Research to run the Wolfram Science Conference Blog for NKS2006 which started this morning. I will be crossposting some of all of what I post there.
This is my first conference post made this morning. —KC
Good morning. I'm blogging live from my well-appointed hotel room at the Fairmont in Washington, DC. NKS2006 starts this morning with the all-day NKS mini-course by the Wolfram Science staff, plus a reception this evening, where art inspired by NKS will be on display.
I got here yesterday and have been taking the hotel services for a test drive in advance. The Fairmont found me a very nice babysitter named Hazel whom I will be using for the duration of the conference. Also, they told me how to get a nearby rental car which I used to take the kids on an excursion to Chesapeake Bay yesterday. I have also pretested the hotel bar and the Juniper restaurant: pleasantly quiet, good food and drink priced as you would expect for a hotel like this.
My sister and her husband came over yesterday evening with their kids: I'm told the hotel pool is very nice, though lacking much of a shallow end for small children and that their pizza ordered from room service arrived about when room service said it would (within about 35 minutes).
A bit after 9, I encountered Stephen Wolfram in the elevator who said he expected we would all have a lot of fun this weekend.
While it may look like I've been slacking off and letting my blog go to seed, actually, I've been working very hard back here on the other side of the monitor.
Important announcement: I will be doing a separate blog for the Wolfram Research NKS 2006 Conference, held in Washington, DC June 15th - 18th. (For the uninitiated, NKS stands for New Kind of Science, named for Stephen Wolfram's book.) It is a paid blogging gig, funded by Wolfram Research. URL to be announced. But I expect that it will be way cool, given the subject matter. WATCH THIS SPACE for further info.
On another subject, i gave a long interview to a reporter from the financial press on the subject of digital cartography this morning. There was a lot to say. By the end of the interview I was quite exhausted.
Anyway, I've got a lot of oranges in the air right now, and expect shortly to resume giving you a taste of them from time to time. Just now they are flying a little too fast. Lots of good stuff going on. More later.
Experiencing technical difficulties. (My G5 is at TekServe in Manhattan.) Regular blogging to resume shortly.
I have a backlog of things that need blogging, but just at the moment have gotten preoccupied with building a better info-mousetrap.
Because of his background, and his willingness to be a vocal supporter of Valerie Plame, Larry Johnson of NO QUARTER, is a magnet for wingnut trolls. (His Wikipedia entry is a battleground.)
He has an interesting post, The Firing of Mary McCarthy: She used to be his boss.
Regardless of what he wrote however, because of who he is and who she is, predictably the trolls show up. What he does with them, I find really interesting (and very funny).
Of course, the most famous of troll management tactics is Teresa Nielsen Hayden's disemvoweling. He doesn't use than one. (Nor do I, actually.) He has some other good ones.
I chuckled the whole way through reading that comment section. I especially admire his willigness to break the frame and respond to them (nail them/warn them) inside their own comments. And an expressed willingness to delete and ban are other important elements. But the overal Gestalt is what I admire most about his comment section management style.
I'm not sure what language this is in. Maybe Czech? But I love the bit which is in English:
Bizardná odpoveď pre PISS (personal internet schizophrenic slave)
. . . and I would really like to know the context. Can someone help?
I love the concept. How much do they cost? Where can I get one? (On second thought, I'll take a dozen.)
A "literary agent" who took exception to the blog Making Light mentioning that she had made someone's list of the 20 worst literary agents, seems to have tried to get some of the blog's authors fired. Go read Making Light to find out how you can help.
You might also want to visit the following pages:
(For those wondering why I've posted so little this week, I've been busy working on something else. And also I've been having the worst allergy problems I've had in about 4 years. When the pollen count drops, I expect I'll return to my usual volume of posts.)
(Graphic via pollen.com)
Every once in a while, I get in a mood and I want to radically reconfigure what my blog is and does at the information architecture level: the mood I described previously as "being tired of writing on a roll of paper towels."
Well, I'm in that mood again. Yes, I have a Typepad Pro account, and yes, in principle I can customize my CSS, but I stopped doing that some time back because I found that customized CSS in Typepad made me a whole lot less fleet of foot in making sudden changes to response to the flow of readerly traffic. If you use customized CSS, then you have to tinker with your customized CSS every time you want to make a change, rather than using the Typepad GUI.) When there are sudden changes of circumstance -- such as for a few hours having the best site on the planet concerning the NOLA levee breaks -- I down want to mess around with CSS. Those are precisely the times when I don't want to touch the code and instead want to focus on content. So instead, I do a lot of fancy things with Typelists and Flickr badges.
So whenever I'm in this mood, I google "blog design" and discover once again that what you are supposed to do when you design your blog is make a splashy graphic for the top of your page and figure out clever ways to make your sidebar items visually distinctive. And you are supposed to remove all excess information from your page (the same thing the clutter busting books recommend you do with your living room). But both at home and in my blog, I inhabit an irretrievably information-bearing space. So I am looking for the best ways to stuff in more info, not strip it down.
So although I am perfectly capable of making a lovely visually distinctive splash-graphic that would express the inner self I want you to know, I just don't have room for that kind of thing.
First of all, after several years of not, I finally made myself put up pix of my book covers. I am terrible about remembering to do self-promotional stuff. If I just put the book covers up, and a million-odd page views flow by, presumably I've done that job relatively painlessly, and I can get down to telling you what I'm on about today.
Secondly, most of my readers each day don't come in by the front door (only about 20%). So whatever messages I want to get across will be lost of the other 75% of my readers if they aren't on every page. So I work my sidebars very hard. I'm constantly creating new sidebar Typelists, and adjusting them, and turning them on and off. Today I want you to know how to donate to Pakistan earthquake relief finds, tomorrow, I want you to know all the best lines from the Kenya corruption scandals, and the day after that I may want to share my immense link farm having to do with military the Iranian military maneuvers.
One of the things the articles on blog design tell you to do is find your niche topic and stick to it, since readers want things made simple for them. I'm not going to do that, and so I need a blog design that will just deal with the fact that my interests change from day to day.
And these compete for space with my immense blogroll, various Flickr photo-feeds on subjects I'm watching, and my vast collection of tags. I've really heavily gotten into using tags lately. (A day or so I went looking for an easy way to do a tagcloud in Typepad and failed. The easy automated tagcloud thingie didn't like my RSS feed. I'm not sure it would have done what I had in mind anyway. I had been through this exercise before, it turns out.)
Whenever I'm in this mood, I find myself trying things I tried last time I felt like this. One thing I tried today that didn't work last time I tried it was making feeds to add to a blog out of RSS feeds from Connotea searches. Last time I tried this, it didn't work. This time it did. I don't know why. (The feed in question is added to password protected blog in my site for my own use for note-taking.)
One thing I did learn from spinning my wheels on this yet again (and puttering around in Connotea) is that there is a word for part of what I do with my blog. In addition to being a means of publication, it is also what's called a sensor web. While certainly my blog serves to give you information, one of its primary purposes is for me to be able to suck information in. I talked about this in my interview with Carol Pinchefsky:
Cramer says, "After a year or so, I began to understand that by blogging, I was actually receiving a lot more info than I was putting out. By this point, I regard my blog as rather like my tongue. Sure I can use it to talk with, but more fundamentally it is a sensory organ."
Who knew that NASA already has a Sensor Web Applied Research Planning Group? So. Here I am in Pleasantville reinventing the wheel, I guess. Here is how they define the term:
Sensor Web Definition
A system composed of multiple science instrument/processor platforms that are interconnected by means of a communications fabric for the purpose of collecting measurements and processing data for Earth or Space Science objectives.Sensor Web Concept
The following illustration depicts the principle Sensor Web concepts. Note that some platforms are shown having science instruments whereas others do not have instruments. An example of a platform with no instruments is a computer system that executes a numerical meteorological forecast model and that provides its results to one or more other platforms.
And they have this nifty graphic to illustrate:
Unlike NASA, I don't have millions of dollars of equipment with which to take data. But the model looks very familiar to me. The "Communications Fabric" is the combination of my email accounts and my comment sections; the "Data Synthesis/Fusion" is blogging in combination with consultation with others, and my primary end user is me, but you get to share.
So can someone out there help design the sensor web blog? That's what this is, and I know it is not optimally designed. (And yes, I'll keep banging away at it, whenever I get in this mood.)
This post started as a remark on a weird little news story that I happened across this morning and evolved into something more serious and substantial, raising the issue of whether the Guam Zoning Board is taking the US Military's ban on facilitating human trafficking at all seriously.
One of the things I love about blogging strange goings on in far-flung places is that when you start following their news-feeds you encounter the most bizarre stuff. This morning's special is a zoning proposal in Guam that I know is never, ever, going to come to my neighborhood. From Pacific Magazine: GUAM: Red Light District Plan Still On
Tourism officials and executives from the hotel and restaurant sectors in Guam are moving ahead with plans to rezone the Tumon tourist district and establish a “red light district” that would group all adult entertainment outlets in one area.
Bart Jackson, Guam Hotel and Restaurants Association chairman, said yesterday that the organization is moving ahead with its plan to rid Tumon of adult entertainment businesses that may destroy the island’s image as a family destination.
“Right now, we are moving forward. We have been researching legislation in other jurisdictions like Los Angeles, New York, St. Paul, and Philadelphia, which have all launched this kind of rezoning legislation in their locales,” Jackson said. . . .
The government of Guam is considering the establishment of a red light district to ensure that adult-oriented establishments are not mixed with the predominantly family-oriented establishments catering to the island’s visitors. The establishment of a red light district that would host the island’s massage parlors, strip joints, and other adult entertainment fare was already discussed by a joint task force composed of representatives from the Guam Visitors Bureau, Department of Public Health and Social Services, Guam Police Department, and Department of Revenue and Taxation.
Hmm. Love the justification of comparing this proposal with zoning in large American cities, but based on the superficial details available in the article, this sounds like it has more in common with zoning in San Francisco in the 1870s than with that of twenty-first century NYC.
Guam's problem is not the kind of problems with adult entertainment establishment encountered by big cities. Why might there be some kind of plausible need for this rezoning? Well, I gather the US Military is considering explaining their presence there by a lot. From the Washington Times: Guam seen as pivotal U.S. base
ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, Guam -- The U.S. Pacific Command is moving forward with plans to recast the posture of its military forces in the western Pacific and Asia with the new pivot point to be a robust base on the island of Guam.
"Look at a map," said the command's leader, Adm. William J. Fallon, as he flew toward Guam after a weeklong trek through Southeast Asia. He pointed to the relatively short distances from Guam to South Korea; the Taiwan Strait, across which China and Taiwan confront each other; and Southeast Asia, the frontier of terror in Asia.
U.S. officers often talk about the "tyranny of distance" in the Pacific Command's area of operations, which runs from the west coast of North America to the east coast of Africa. Guam, when it is fully operational, will provide a base for land, naval and air forces closer to targets than for forces on the U.S. mainland or Hawaii. Guam was a major air base during the war in Vietnam.
The fly in this ointment is as of January 30th, 2004, "U.S. troops, government civilians and defense contractors worldwide now are expressly forbidden from involvement with people illegally trafficked across borders, most often for illicit sex." From the Navy Times in 2004:
Wolfowitz orders moves to halt human trafficking
By William H. McMichael
Times staff writer
U.S. troops, government civilians and defense contractors worldwide now are expressly forbidden from involvement with people illegally trafficked across borders, most often for illicit sex.The decree comes in a Jan. 30 memo from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz stating that trafficking in persons “will not be facilitated in any way by the activities of our service members, civilian employees, indirect hires or DoD contract personnel.”
Trafficking involves criminal efforts to lure or kidnap people, usually young women, across borders, entrapping them and forcing them into prostitution. It is practiced in many countries, including the United States.
Trafficking in persons “is a violation of human rights; it is cruel and demeaning; it is linked to organized crime; it undermines our peacekeeping efforts; and it is incompatible with military core values,” Wolfowitz said.
The memo, sparked by a national security directive signed by President Bush on Feb. 25, 2003, that mandated a “zero tolerance” for trafficking, was sent to all military service secretaries, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, combatant commanders and Defense Department inspectors and legal specialists. Pentagon officials confirmed Feb. 12 that it carries the “full weight and authority” of a directive.
There is a much more detailed discussion of the meaning of this policy in Keith J. Allred's article Human Trafficking: Breaking the Military Link.
In another remarkable innovation, on 15 September 2004 the Department of Defense's Joint Service Committee on Military Justice proposed several changes to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), a federal criminal code that applies to active duty military personnel worldwide, at all hours of the day, regardless of their deployment status.23 Under the UCMJ, U.S. military personnel can be tried for military offenses such as disrespect and failure to obey orders, as well as the more traditional criminal offenses.24 Among the proposals was a suggested new criminal offense of "patronizing a prostitute," intended to completely eliminate U.S. forces from the equation of demand for paid sexual services anywhere worldwide. Under the proposed legislation, patronizing a prostitute would become a crime for all military personnel after 1 July 2005.25 The new offense would punish the soldier-customer even if the sex act is consensual and prostitution is legal in the country where the act occurs.26
SO. What, then, is going to happen in Guam if the US Military expands its presence and the proposed Red-Light rezoning takes place? Will US military personnel etc. be strictly forbidden from setting foot there? Will the rules on not facilitating human trafficking be enforced? Or not? How is this going to work?
Perhaps those in charge of making the prohibition on facilitating human trafficking ought to have a little talk with the Guam zoning board before Guam sets up their little Red Light theme park, yes?
(Thanks GW!)
I bought a book this morning for Secure Computing's SmartFilter censor Tomo Foote-Lennox and videotaped the experience. I was Googling his name to see if my posts mentioning him had been indexed by Google, and I made an interesting discovery.
I noticed that there was a link to a review he'd posted on Amazon and I decided to learn a little more about his tastes, which are apparently very interesting. As it turned out, he'd only ever reviewed that one item.
But he did have a Wish List, which I did have a look at. While it contained only two items, I decided to grant one of his two wishes and buy him a copy of The Mistress Manual: The Good Girl's Guide to Female Dominance, which he had listed. I decided I would buy it for him, and I would videotape myself fulfilling his wish, and then I would blog it.
My sexual quirk is that I am turned on by intellectual excitement; specifically, I find ferreting out weird facts and then acting upon them sexully exciting. One of Tomo Foote-Lennox's many quirks seems to be masochism. And so the act of publicly fulfilling this wish for him is an odd species of Internet sexual act: a moment is which he and I -- who otherwise would be quite incompatible -- have a strange moment of resonance. I very much enjoyed blowing nineteen bucks to publicly buy him the book he said he wanted; I hope he enjoys receiving it just as much. I made sure Amazon wrapped his present.
I tried uploading the video to YouTube, but it isn't uploading. So probably I need to go back and re-edit to make it shorter. I'll let you know when it's up.
Shifting back into my usual social persona, I want to say that the problem with a fetishist playing censor for millions of people is that the fetsishist's gaze is a sexualizing one, and so much material which is not inherently smut will look dirty to someone viewing the world through that lens. I had an unsatisfactory correspondence with Tomo on the subject of what material about breastfeeding would make it through their censorship. Many things I could do in the lunchroom of my son's elementary school or in broad daylight on the streets of NYC would not have made it. I find this unacceptable, and I attribute part of the problem to the point of view (and arrogance) Tomo brings to the issue.
UPDATE: This Domini person thinks I've been bad, very bad. He thinks that I should have called Tomo to ask — "hey Tomo, do you want me to buy you the Mistress Manual?" — rather than turning a loaded credit card on him. (When Tomo responds to my most recent email message to him, maybe I'll ask. But I don't think he's speaking to me right now.) I gotta say that the credit card purchase, Amazon order # 102-9375069-1924901, is leaving an awfully nice paper trail to Maple Grove, Minnestota. (Hmm, has Domini go a problem with my lifestyle as a dominant female blogger?)
If you've been wondering how to find out what SmartFilter thinks of your site and the sites you regularly read, here's how to find out what their censors think of you and your reading habits: the SmartFilterWhere URL Checker:
I love the stock-art lady wit the curls in their graphic. What is she finding so fascinating on the screen? Has she perhaps found something they missed in their attempts to sanitize the web?
Carol Pinchefsky's article SF writers who blog has just come out on the Intergalactic Medicine Show site. I am featured prominently.
John McDaid's Boskone trip report has a good write up of the blogging panel I moderated. I was hoping someone would do that, since it was a panel I was proud to have moderated. I thought it went really well: Boskone trip report: Doctorow rips IP a new a-hole, Cramer is the Eye in the Sky
It's always a pleasure to hear Cory Doctorow testify, and he was in great form this weekend for his special guest speech. He excels at expressing intellectual property issues with an sf-writer's eye for the telling moment. Discussing the corporate desire to plug the problem of analog to digital conversion (or, as he puts it, the 'a hole') he imagines a future camcorder that respects IP: a parent is videoing their child's first steps. Child walks in front of the TV, and the image goes black. Yes, the proposals are that dire, and without folks like the EFF out there fighting, this is the future we may well end up with.
Also wonderful was a panel on blogging with Cory, Kathryn Cramer, and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Teresa warned that as the military-industrial complex increasingly takes blogging seriously, we can expect to see more "astroturf," or faux-grassroots sentiment being seeded into the blogosphere. And Kathryn provided a case in point of why blogging is worrisome to powers that be: she's increasingly using tools like Google Earth and Flickr to monitor hotspots, and finding that people gravitate to the site and feed her info not seen in the mainstream media. (She also just made the cover of Nature in a piece on mapping for the masses.)
FURTHER TO THE SUBJECT OF "INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY," see Teresa's new post, What perpetual copyright means to me:
It is right that what’s new and unique in a writer’s work be recognized as peculiarly their own. That’s fine. But copyright is not a statement of inalienable natural right. It’s a social convention, intended to reward (and thus encourage) writers and publishers to produce more books. To pervert it into a claim of perpetual ownership, especially when that claim is being forwarded by large entertainment conglomerates, is the moral equivalent of driving a fence around the commons.
In the comments of that post, Charlie Stross makes a point that I think cannot be made often enough:
The semantic framing of the whole debate fascinates me.
Pet peeve: "pirates" and "piracy". It's a pretty extreme label to pin on a practice which is, on the small scale, about equal to shoplifting, and on a large commercial scale roughly equivalent to any other form of forgery (watches, scent, designer handbags, whatever). But it's an example of how the folks who pin the label on the donkey get to define the debate. Piracy, after all, is a Serious crime, and deserves draconian sentencing (twenty years! life!) ... which is a whole lot harder to argue for in the case of shoplifting. And indeed, the next time the MPAA or RIAA accuse one of their profit centers -- excuse me, infringers -- of shoplifting, it'll be the first.
If people who copy DVDs for their friends are pirates, what then shall we call the entertainment executives who insisted our electronic rights must belong to them even when they had no viable plans for developing these rights in a way that would benefit us? I know who the pirates are.
MEANWHILE, Octavia Butler has died suddenly and unexpectedly. I last Octavia at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, where she was attending the ceremony to induct Philip K. Dick into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. I think I took her picture sitting on a bench next to Charlie Brown of LOCUS. I did not know her well, though I encountered her socially from time to time and although I know her work.
This is hard for me to think about. I keep bouncing off it to think about somethng else. The manner of her death -- a fall, bleeding in the brain, maybe a stroke -- reminds me of what I'm afraid of. David's mother died of a stroke in November; and I still haven't entirely come down from the ceiling from David's emergency angioplasty a few years ago. My incomprehension in the face of the suddenness of it remind me also of my reaction to the death of SF editor Jenna Felice in early 2001.
(I shot the photo with Cory's camera.)
My husband, David Hartwell, was awarded the Skylark last night.
The Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction (the Skylark) is presented annually by NESFA to some person, who in the opinion of the membership, has contributed significantly to science fiction, both through work in the field and by exemplifying the personal qualities which made the late "Doc" Smith well-loved by those who knew him.
And here's a nice shot Cory took of my hand, and of my eyes, both taken through the magnifying glass on the award.
Oh, yeh, I should probably also show David actually receiving the award:
As should be obvious, this was an event of deep seriousness.
This is part of an ongoing series on blog methodology.
First, a little more on what I'm up to. I've had a really amazing past four of five months, during which my blogging has undergone some transformations, and I'm preparing to try to bring together what I think I've learned. But first I'm casting around for what other people have articulated along these lines.
On Day One, I searched around for what people had to say about blog methodology. (Wrong question.) On Day Two, I looked at what people said a blog is for. (What en extraordinarily fine navel I have here! Um. Another wrong question.)
In the comments of the second post, though, a reader gave me a list of links to blog manifestos. (And, yes, I should have thought to google blog manifestos myself.) I'm going to go through the list he provided in the order of appearance, and may tack on a few more at the end.
First on his list was Andrew Sullivan's 2002 piece, Why online weblogs are one future for journalism. I had read it before, quite a while back. I don't really think of what I do in this space as journalism, though it is some related creature, and I have received occasional mentoring from real journalists when they thought I was onto something really good. I had filtered out the whole blogging-is-the-future-of-journalism trajectory. But the reader comment caused me to revisit the Sullivan essay, where I do indeed find a highly relevant passage:
I remember trying to fathom some of the complexities of the Florida election nightmare when I got an email from a Florida politics professor explaining every detail imaginable. If I'd been simply reporting the story in the traditional way, I'd have never found this font of information. As it was, I found myself scooping major news outlets on arcane electoral details about chads and voting machines. Peer-to-peer journalism, I realized, had a huge advantage over old-style journalism. It could marshal the knowledge and resources of thousands, rather than the certitudes of the few.
My personal shorthand for this phenomenon is build it and they will come. If I find some really good questions to ask, high class help tends to show up to help find the answers. This is a key piece of my personal blog methodology.
Scoble's Corporate Weblog Manifesto (2003): Heaps of good advice that generalizes nicely from the corporate blog to many other kinds of blogging; but also not exactly what I'm after. (But read it anyway.)
A Norwegian blog manifesto (2004): This seems to have been written as a launching point for a group effort, trying to generalize from what could be learned from American blogs to the Norweigian context. It is interesting for the articulated vision:
What is our goal? A broad, open public sphere that includes amateur online media. A place where all issues are discussed freely, where all views are represented, where for every large media there are ten smaller ones scrutinizing it and keeping it in check. A place where the border between professional punditry and amateur punditry, professional reporting and amateur reporting, is blurred, where it matters more whether you are right than whether you're being paid and have a diploma on your wall.
. . .
This is not a media revolution. There will be no eternal land of milk and honey on the other side, just a more open media community. It will be way short of perfection, but better able to investigate and discuss political issues. These are realistic and moderate goals.
This generated a discussion of whether the involvement of amateurs improves the media.
The Libertarian Blog Manifesto by Russ Stein (2002), for the most part, isn't a manifesto. It is more an expression of enthusiasm for the medium of the blog. But it does have a passage worth quoting:
And blogs are where the power is. Seriously! The future belongs to those who prevail in the political debates on the web. Right now the political ideas that will govern the future are being sharpened & polished on the world's computer networks. And the right basically owns the web. Where in the world wide web is the left? Where are the people who staff the government agencies, the diversity and affirmative action theorists, the Marxists, teachers, socialists, commies, mural painters, greens, tax grabbers, democracy and human rights activists, and the defenders of the ruling establishment? They are no-where! They are fat, happy, stupid, complacent, computer illiterates with nothing but clichés and conventional wisdom to add to the debate, if they could even log on. They do nothing as we busily mock and de-legitimize them on the web.
This passage is an interesting mixed bag: an idealistic statement about the web as a venue for ideas combined with the rhetoric of a mean-spirited intellectual land-grab. The political landscape of the web has changed a bit since then.
Chris Pirillo's 2002 The Blogger's Manifesto is not so much a manifesto as a set of instructions to readers on how he wants them to regard his blogging; it is a literary descendant of the FAQ.
The Blogging Manifesto (2003) from the Aardvark Speaks mostly avoids the real issue of the purpose of blogging and the political implications of the act.
The Poor Man provides his own summary of his sort-of-manifesto, Blog Dogme 2003:
I am laying out the following blogging manifesto/art statement, a list of "do nots" - a Blogma, if you will - which will hopefully improve the quality, enjoyability, and purity of the reading and writing experience.
I'm going to skip the Audioblogging Manifesto, though you might want to listen to it.
And finally, there is Rebecca Blood's 2002 essay Weblog Ethics. Its key passage is:
Let me propose a radical notion: The weblog's greatest strength — its uncensored, unmediated, uncontrolled voice — is also its greatest weakness. News outlets may be ultimately beholden to advertising interests, and reporters may have a strong incentive for remaining on good terms with their sources in order to remain in the loop; but because they are businesses with salaries to pay, advertisers to please, and audiences to attract and hold, professional news organizations have a vested interest in upholding certain standards so that readers keep subscribing and advertisers keep buying. Weblogs, with only minor costs and little hope of significant financial gain, have no such incentives.
It is a widely influential essay. I agree with most of what she has to say but completely disagree with her fourth point: "Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry." The commercial publishing industry has a whole infrastructure devoted to making this possible with print publishing. To pretend that a person with a blog can perform up to this standard without recourse to rewriting, correction, and deletion if foolish, seems to me. But, other than that, a good piece. But it is more a guide to what she feels are best practices, rather then an examination of what this is all for.
I'm sure there have been more manifestos since, but the general impression I'm getting is that while exploring manifestos comes a bit closer to what I'm seeking regarding an explication of blogging methodology, the form of the manifesto also falls short and does not give me what I am looking for.
What shall I try tomorrow?
Yesterday, I tried googling "blog methodology," and was dissatisfied with what I found. Today, I tried approaching the "blog methodology" question from a different angle. Instead I tried searching on "what is a blog for." The following are a selection of what I found out there on the Interweb, in order of Google ranking:
Um. OK. Many of these have truth to them and some are funny. But. I mean, sure, I confess that I've used my blog for some of the purposes on the list. (My personal list of trivial answers to the question would have to include, " . . . if not to give words away for free that I might otherwise get paid for?".)
I was hoping for more.
OK. I'm by nature overly intellectual and overly theory-oriented. But I'm thinking maybe blogging needs a manifesto.
In 1995, Paul Williams, father of rock criticism and former executor of the Philip K. Dick Estate, suffered a traumatic brain injury in a bicycle accident, leading to early onset of dementia, and a steady decline to the point where he now requires full-time care. The burden on his immediate family has been immense.
Please donate to assist in Paul's continued care and medical attention.
Comments are moderated. I blog under my real name. You should comment under yours. Identify yourself when commenting by writing your name in the Name box. Pseudonymous & anonymous comments will not be published.
FURTHER READING:Copyright © Kathryn Cramer.
Recent Comments