but i was distressed to discover

that the original intent

of the expression ‘web logging’

(to log your websurfing

with public annotations)

has gone entirely by the boards

Jorn, by the way, was the first person I saw using the term ‘weblog’.

When software shows up at my door with a beer, watches What not to Wear with me on my sofa, then gets me laid afterward, that will be social software.

Jonas on stage at Webzine 2005, arguing that Social Software really is Community Software.

Oh, and don’t use the term “long tail” around him, unless you’re talking about your pet lemur.

He also asks, if you are talking about the long tail, please be prepared to answer the following:

• What is Zipf?
• Who was Pareto and what did he did?
• What’s the formula describing a Zipf distribution?

Technorati: webzine2005

Jesuits are so cool. That’s the problem with being an agnostic: no Jesuits. …

Americans trust scientists to tell us what time it is, but a lot of them do not trust scientists to tell them how old the Earth is. Go figure.

Link

This fails in the same way domain schemes such as .xxx or .adult fail:

• There can be no universal standard for defining content inappropriate for minors,

• and such a regime would be easily gamed by anyone wanting to use the government to censor content they don’t like.

  The technique is simple, just find a friendly jurisdiction and seek an injunction forcing anyone providing content about birth control, sex education, rape prevention, gay rights, and anything else controversial to wrap it in the aforementioned porn tag.

• Besides, the parental control would be routed around faster than you can say DVD Jon.

Ugh, bad idea Professor, just walk away.

“When the going gets tough, the tough use “print.”

I’ll tell you what will happen if it were an effective TIA. There would immediately be a series of coups inside the Republican Party as the people who owned the KGB survival mechanism were systemically outed and “Trent Lotted”…It would be profoundly destabilizing. Their sexual affairs would be public. They’d be “Lewinskied.” They’d be “Whitewatered.”

I’ve been thinking about TIA since annotating content and the semantic web were hot topics at OSCOM Cambridge. As much as people fear TIA, we want it for ourselves. I’d love a software tool which consumes my email and web trail, then whispers to me, and only me, all the insights and connections it found.

But if we have Personal TIA, then the government will have TIA. No amount of legislating will stop it. Not because folks like Pondexter are bad, but because if there’s a TIA tool, and it’s not used, and there’s another major attack on the US, then the polity will howl and scream: Why didn’t you spy on our conversations, and look through our underwear drawers! But I doubt you’ll stop an Islamic Fascist by looking through Mary Jo Plotnick’s Yahoo Chat logs.

Bush seems sincerely to see the world as a battleground between Good and Evil, St Michael’s angels against the forces of Lucifer. We’re gonna smoke out the Amalekites, send a posse after the Midianites, smite them all and let God deal with their souls. Minds doped up on this kind of cod theology have a hard time distinguishing between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

England may not have a separation of Church and State, but you’ll never see someone unload like that in the American mainstream press. Dawkins makes Katha Pollit sound all sweetness and light.

I would like you to know that idiotarian is not a word. Yes, I recognize that English is a living, evolving language, where additions are made by usage and not by mandate, but understand, neither are they made through sheer repetition. Fisk is not a transitive verb; It’s a surname. It’s no longer amusing to watch you make yourself sound silly.

Avedon Carol weighs in on the debate:

Spinsanity has tried to equate MWO with Limbaugh and Coulter. This is a bad joke; there is simply no equivalence at all. MWO attacks media sources for delivering “fair and balanced news” that is manifestly slanted and false. Rush and Ann are propagators of such falsehoods.

Meanwhile Saturday, the wee hours: There’s a longish debate on the matter in Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s Electrolite. Patrick and Teresa come down on the side of the angels, arguing that using Rush and Ann’s tactics are morally corrosive. The response has been that the Right fights dirty and playing nice doesn’t work.

But accepting the latter means that the audience — the American polity — is either too stupid or jaded to listen to rational argument. If that’s the case, then American Democracy is over and done. If it’s not, then you have reasons or at least faith that Americans care about policy and politics more than who was voted off American Idol this week. I’m telling you that it’s hard me to accept that premise these days.

Patrick quotes Jo Walton on his site: “Peace is an active and complex thing and sometimes fighting is part of what it takes to get it.” And that doesn’t mean “the ends justify the means.” So how do you get angry, busy and making the right things happen? This is a fight, with tangible things at stake: our rights, our prosperity, and how history judges us.