Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:18 AM

Went book browsing in Harvard Square last night. Bought several books, including Sallets, Humbles & Shrewsbery Cakes: A collection of Elizabethan recipes adapted for the modern kitchen, which I found on remainder.

For fans of Harry Potter, one of the recipes is for Buttered Beere. I don't know why, but somehow I thought that was something Rowling made up, and I envisioned something like cream soda, but more of a butterscotch taste. But, apparently, it was a real beverage.

Here's the original recipe:

Take three pintes of Beere, put five yolkes of Egges to it, straine them together, and set it in a pewter pot to the fyre, and put to it halfe a pound of Sugar, one penniworth of Nutmegs beaten, one penniworth of Cloves beaten, and a halfepenniworth of Ginger beaten, and when it is all in, take another pewter pot and brewe them together, and set it to the fire againe, and when it is readie to boyle, take it from the fire, and put a dish of sweet butter into it, and brewe them together out of one pot into an other

And here's the author's attempt at a modern equivalent:

3 pints beer
3 tablespoons sugar
¹/₈ teaspoon each nutmeg and cloves
pinch of ginger
2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Pour the beer into a saucepan. Add all the ingredients except the butter and simmer for about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and drop in the butter. Allow the butter to melt and serve immediately. Good for parties or on cold, wintery evenings.

Serves 4

I normally don't like beers (and I notice she's not terribly specific about what kind of beer to use!) but I'd be very curious to try this. And of course, the simmering would reduce the alcoholic content, making it more reasonable as a kids drink. Maybe we'll make a batch for Halloween or something...

Anyway, cool book. As I've read elsewhere, most of the dishes are prepared in ways that sound sweet -- even the dishes we'd consider savories, such as meats and stews. The most common spices are ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon (never spelled the same way twice). Ian commented that while he likes those flavors, wouldn't it get boring after a while for everything to have those tastes. But even he found some recipes we may attempt.

As I said at the start, this was in the remainders shelves in the basement of Harvard Book Store for about $7. If anybody else is interested, I think they had two or three more copies.

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:18 PM

Well, I had planned to avoid blogging during this transition, but then I saw something that I couldn't not respond to.

At last night's Thursday meeting Betsy Devine said she picked her candidate by research on the Web. Had one predicted that you could do that, a year ago, someone would have called that wild optimism.

Source: Dave Winer's Thoughts from Thursday meeting

Oh, come on!

Project Vote Smart was founded in 1992, and I'd been using their online information to evaluate candidates since before 1998.

Researching candidates on the web wasn't wild optimism in 2002, it was an old and well-established hat. Let's not go overboard here.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:10 AM

Yes, yes, LiveJournal syndication is being flaky. It's only updating once a day; I know. I've filed a request on it.

However. It looks like I'll be switching hosts again over the weekend. I know that some of you have had problems accessing my site before, whether you couldn't reach it at all, could only reach it by refreshing the browser several times, mail was bouncing, or whatever.

If you experience such problems now or in the near future (after we make the switchover), please let me know. Even if you can't reach osmond-riba.org, you should be able to post comments and can inform me that way.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:44 PM

CNN writes:

He also thanked the news media for their role in his quest for the statehouse.

"Please do me a favor: Stay with me the next three years, OK? Because you are absolutely essential for me to get my message out there," he said. "I really appreciate your being part of my campaign."

First seen on South Knox Bubba [via BT!]

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:45 PM

At 1:15 PM today: "I'll grab lunch after I take this call"

Said call lasted over seventy minutes and remains unresolved.

<sigh>

I'm running away from my computer now to eat, since I've heard the weather was supposed to be nice today and I'd like a chance to enjoy it...

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:25 PM

Wow, I've just plugged the body text from this week's entries into this utility. Since Sunday, I've written over 6,500 words. And remember, I spent a day-and-a-half offline for Yom Kippur.

If I can keep up this pace for NaNoWriMo, I'll be golden!

Seriously, I am aware that blogging and fiction-writing are different (though related) beasties, that I do quote a great deal from other sources (though not as much this week with all the BloggerCon analysis), and so on. Still, it feels impressive.
I do wonder whether this plethora of prose is overloading readers and if I should try to slow down so folks actually have time to read and digest my points. (Blaise Pascal: "I have written you a long letter because I did not have time to write a short one.") But I think that is a question for a separate meta- post.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:11 PM

I concluded my previous entry with this L.A. Times quote:

[Two sources at American Media] pointed out that Schwarzenegger was not the first to get the kid-glove treatment. "We took a pass on Jeb Bush [when the Florida governor held a press conference to quell rumors about his alleged infidelity] also," said one of the longtime employees.

And I was wondering whether the tabloids are a further example of the Mighty Wurlitzer of coordinated right-wing media.

With further digging, I just found Political Money Line which claims to have a database of FEC filings for purposes of finding who has donated to whom. And I conducted searches on pecker, dav (David Pecker, head of American Media) and weider, jo (for Joe Weider, Arnie's friend and mentor).

For both men, the majority of their contributions (in numbers and dollar amounts) have been to Democratic candidates.

So, this doesn't appear to be a situation like Diebold's.

Still, I'd be very interested to see who else American Media has given a pass on, and whether there's any pattern to it. Because even when it's merely a case of tabloids, this remains an example of how consolidation damages the diversity of news coverage.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:40 AM

Some people have argued that last weekend's revelations about Arnold Schwarzenegger's persistent history of harassing women counted as an October surprise. But that term is used when a news media sits upon a story for months and springs it just before the election. The California recall election was so compressed (Schwarzenegger only announced he was in the race on August 7), that any serious and thorough investigation of the existing charges couldn't come out much sooner. And I did write back then:

Regarding the California election, Skeptical Notion writes about how jealously (and judiciously!) Arnold Schwarzenegger has prevented the press from prying into his personal life. Morat's wondering what scandals he's been hushing up. Tom Spencer suggests " Schwarzenegger's past regarding womanizing makes Bill Clinton look like a choirboy."

So, the rumors already existed; it was just up to the press to investigate them. But what happened? Interlacing several recent news stories sheds some light on how the system failed:

L.A. Times:

One of the less ennobling secrets of the mainstream media in recent years is its reliance on the tabloid press to launder seedy but irresistible stories about celebrities and politicians. Once the story is baptized in the tabloids, it's not long before it's fodder for TV talking heads and late-night comics. Then, more often than not, it's regarded as fair game for the elite media.

...

So there was a reasonable expectation that the tabloids would be having a field day with candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger.

New York Daily News:

Arnold's former bodybuilding mentor, Joe Weider, says he's fixed it so The Terminator has nothing to fear from the dreaded tabs.
Earlier this year, American Media Inc., which brings you The National Enquirer, the Star and the Globe, bought Weider Publications, which includes Men's Fitness, Shape, Flex and Muscle & Fitness.

San Jose Mercury News:

[S]ince the actor has entered the race, Schwarzenegger has been virtually absent from the pages of American Media's top-selling tabloids. The Enquirer and Star have run no negative stories on the actor or even reprinted their scandalous allegations about Schwarzenegger's affairs and mistreatment of women in the entertainment industry.

L.A. Times:

Two sources at American Media confirmed that it was no accident that the tabloids had been Arnold-free, pointing to the Weider sale as an explanation.

Mercury News:

American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer and Star tabloids, has produced a 120-page glossy magazine called "Arnold, the American Dream." The $4.95 magazine is crammed with flattering photographs and auspiciously hit the streets as Schwarzenegger heads into the final lap of his campaign for governor in the Oct. 7 recall election.

...

While the publication comes across as a slick advertisement for Schwarzenegger's campaign, political-reform experts said it doesn't qualify as an independent expenditure supporting the actor because it's for sale.

L.A. Times:

[O]ne cover line reads: "Camelot's Future." To complete the coronation, the News of the World ran an "exclusive": "Alien backs Arnold for governor!"

In other words, the tabloids purposely went easy on Shwarzenegger.

By the way, get a load of this pair of contradictory statements from the L.A. Times article:

Though some Democrats have begun whispering about the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, the motives and agenda behind the Schwarzenegger tabloid blackout appear to be more about commerce than politics.

followed, three paragraphs later by:

[Two sources at American Media] pointed out that Schwarzenegger was not the first to get the kid-glove treatment. "We took a pass on Jeb Bush [when the Florida governor held a press conference to quell rumors about his alleged infidelity] also," said one of the longtime employees.

So, yeah, it's not a right-wing thing, except the only other people we went easy on were Republicans...

Add this to the litany of reasons media consolidation is bad for democracy.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:49 PM

Grover Norquist on NPR's Fresh Air, October 2nd:

"[T]he morality that says it's okay to do something to a group because they're a small percentage of the population is the morality that says that the Holocaust is okay because they didn't target everybody. "It's just a small percentage, what are you worried about? It's not you. It's not you. It's them." And arguing that it's okay to loot some group because it's them, or kill some group because it's them -- and because it's a small number -- has no place in a democratic society that treats people equally. The government's going to do something to or for us; it should treat us all equally.
...
The challenge there, when people use that rhetoric -- in addition to the fact that I think it's immoral to separate the society -- but when South Africa divided society by race, that was wrong. When East Germany divided them by income and class, that was wrong. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Dividing people so when you can mug them one at a time is a bad thing to do. Whether you do on racial grounds, religious grounds, whether you work on Saturdays or not grounds, economic grounds."

I think this should be quoted back whenever Republicans lobby for legislation targetting any minority, such as the GOP's plans to fight against equal rights for gays during the anniversary of Matthew Shepard's murder.

More seriously and sadly, Grover Norquest isn't making this analogy as part of the fight against real-world discrimination. The odious analogy he's trying to make is between the estate tax and the Holocaust, suggesting that requiring wealthy people to pay their fair share of taxes equates to genocide -- but that's so repulsive that it's not worth the dignity of a response.

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:29 PM

Just some random stuff that's been crossing my screen the last day or two.

• My husband's often talked about a Cubs v. Red Sox World Series as portending the end of the world, as neither party could win. Aside from the usual jokes of asteroid strikes, he imagines the announcer next May: "This would be the opening day, but instead we bring you inning 95,171 of Game 7, with the score still tied zero to zero..."
  • At any rate, I was quite amused when Sunday's Boston Globe had an article on how it's possible for a Cubs-Red Sox game to end with both teams losing.
  • I'm even more amused to read the New York Times (which, to be fair, we should acknowledge has a financial stake in our team) is rooting for the Red Sox over the Yankees in this week's playoffs.
  At any rate, I'm rooting for a Red Sox v. Cubs World Series, especially since finding out that the last time the Sox won the series, in 1918, it was against the Cubs...
• Great quote by Cup O' Joe:
  Let's see: the independent counsel was created because of Republican abuse of power, it was disbanded because the Republicans abused it when they had the chance to use it themselves, and it is being resurrected because Republicans are once more abusing power. Does anyone see a pattern here?
  [Seen on The Sideshow]
• South Knox Bubba has some serious words on Arnold's election:
  We really ought to have more focus on civics in public education. We've raised a Pepsi generation of apathetic, uninformed voters. We've become consumers of bad government "product" instead of producers of good government.
• And RJ offers some less serious comments.
• Digby has lots of excellent essays (as usual):
  If anyone thinks, after watching this debacle of an election here in California, that we can win without using every single resourse at our disposal --- and that includes establishment Democrats with experience and access to money and power --- then we are fools.
  The lesson isn't that we aren't liberal enough. And, it's not that we are too liberal. It's that we are naive about the modern political landscape. That's what we need to change.
• And how fascinating and unsurprising. The California GOP wants to change the recall process, to "raise the bar" and improve "fairness." Funny how they didn't have any problems before they won the election. [via Hesiod]
• TalkLeft points out how Bush's comments on the leakers are designed to have a chilling effect on investigators. Dan Drezner is also unhappy with such remarks, while Jack O'Toole tries to imagine the reaction if Bush expressed such doubt when confronted with another crime:
  "I don't know if we're going to find out who killed all those Americans in New York and Washington," Bush said. "I don't have any idea. I'd like to. I want to know the truth."
  But, Bush said, "International terrorism is a large thing, and there's a lot of terrorists."
  And Agonist found a lengthy article on "the intelligence community feeling enraged, bitter and betrayed."
  Meanwhile, Scott McClellan still can't explain why the White House counsel got to preview and select which documents were sent to the Justice Department
• Oh yeah, and Agonist also has simple details on what is so wrong with Diebold's touchscreen voting machines along with a timeline of who knew what when.
• Finally, Michael Farrelly on the librarian action figure:
  Besides, they already made a hip sexy librarian action figure. Giles, the librarian from Buffy the Vampire slayer. He comes dressed in a dashing vest and shirt and wields an occult tome as well as a medieval axe.
  Now that's an action figure I can identify with.
  Too true; and that's also the librarian action figure I have. Not to mention others I've named in the past.

A few more meta-blogging thoughts on my mind, but I'll save them for a later post, I think. Relax? Who can relax when there are so many fascinating things going on in the world?

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:45 PM

Still trying to assemble a blogroll. To their credit, blogrolling.com makes it really easy. I'm particularly fond of the ability to sort by most recently updated. Unfortunately, not all blogs notify weblogs.com upon updating, meaning I've got a chronological list of recently updated blogs, followed by an alphabetical list at the bottom of those who have never updated.

A quick technical tip on how to make your blog auto-ping weblogs.com:

• For LiveJournal users with paid memberships, edit your personal information, just below the checkbox to "Block Robots/Spiders" you should have an option to ping weblogs.com
• For Blogger users, you get to benefit from what was once an exclusively Blogger Pro feature. Edit your blog, go to Settings, Publishing, and its the bottommost option.
• And to do it manually, bookmark this page

It's just a nifty convenience, but if your site can do it automatically, it may be useful to boosting readership and notice.

Of course, now I have to clean up and organize my blogroll to make it useful to anybody beyond myself. Plus, I haven't updated it since BloggerCon and have lots more links to add from the people I met there who I want to continue reading, and there are a few outdated ones I may drop.

But, for posterity or curiousity, here's an alphabetical list of my initial pre-BloggerCon blogroll. Enjoy:

A Skeptical Blog Aaron Is Not Amused Adventures of an InfoMage in Training Alas, a blog Altercation Amitai Etzioni Notes Angry Bear Arts & Letters Daily Avedon's other weblog Back In Iraq 2.0 Baghdad Burning Balkinization BillMaher Billmon Blog of a Bookslut blogdriverswaltz.com Body and Soul Boston Common Brad Delong Burnt Orange Report Business Daily Review Busy, Busy, Busy CalPundit Cheshyre's Friends Civic Dialogues commons-blog Cooped Up corrente Counterspin Central Crooked Timber Daily Kos Demagogue Democratic Veteran different strings DNC: Kicking Ass Donkey Rising Drug WarRant Ed Brill Electrolite Eschaton Estimated Prophet Fables of the reconstruction Fanatical Apathy Hasidic Rebel How Appealing How to Save the World Hub Blog Hullabaloo In the mind of Laquidara Interesting Times IsThatLegal? It's Still The Economy, Stupid JustOneMinute Kathryn Cramer Late Night Thoughts... Lawrence Lessig LiberalOasis librarian.net Library Stuff Long story; short pier. Mac-a-ro-nies Magpie Making Light Mark A. R. Kleiman Mathemagenic Matt Rolls a Hoover Matthew Yglesias Media Log Mitch Kapor Modulator MonitorTan NathanNewman.org Neil Gaiman news from me Nobody Knows Anything Notes on the Atrocities Obscure Store Off the Kuff Oliver Willis Open Stacks Orcinus Out Of Ambit P&F: Weblog Pacific Views PATRIOTWATCH Pen-Elayne on the Web Peter David Priorities & Frivolities Prometheus 6 Ray Ozzie's Weblog RuminateThis Rush Limbaughtomy SciTech Daily Review SCOTUSBlog Scripting News Seeing The Forest Silflay Hraka Sisyphus Shrugged Skeptical Notion South Knox Bubba Steve Gilliard's News Blog Suburban Guerrilla Synthesis & Synchronicity t a c i t u s Talking Points Memo TalkLeft TAPPED TBOGG The Agonist The American Mind The Chimes at Midnight The Good Reverend The Hamster The Head Heeb The Leaky Cauldron The Left Coaster The Liquid List The Mahablog The Poison Kitchen The Poor Man The Progressive Yankee The Rittenhouse Review the road to surfdom The Shifted Librarian The Sideshow The Voice Unheard The Volokh Conspiracy Thinking It Through thinking while typing: This is Not a Blog This Modern World To The Barricades! uggabugga Unqualified Offerings VodkaPundit Wallybrane's Martian Adventures Wampum Warblogging.com Weekend Pundit Where is Raed ? Will Shetterly www.lifeandliberty.info planning board Xiphias Gladius' Journal Yet Another Web Log Zizka

My blogroll as a sidebar
Blogroll Me!

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:54 AM

Out of context and possibly unfair, but funny. And no wonder Powell has always seemed so confident. 8) [via BT!]

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:25 AM

Wow. Quoting from Christopher Allbritton's Back In Iraq 2.0:

Harvard University's Nieman Foundation, which administers the prestigious Nieman Fellowship, has published the September issue of the Nieman Reports, looking at the intersection between blogging and journalism. The entire issue is available as a .pdf file for download.

Actually, you can read it as one 110-page PDF or, through links in the Table of Contents, each article is available as an individual PDF file. It includes articles by several BloggerCon presenters, as well as many other notables. If you liked the journalism panels at BloggerCon and want to read more on the subject, this might be a good starting place. [via BT!]

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:10 AM

• When I leave in the morning and say "Bye bye, love!" he replies "Bye bye, happiness!"
• Because on the morning of Yom Kippur he apologized to me for taking the T home from work three days earlier without realizing that I was waiting for him in the car.
• Because the reason he apologized in this manner was because he was leading the children's Yom Kippur program and though he had said "I'm sorry" that evening, he wanted to make sure I was okay before he used it as an example for the kids.
• For writing such eloquent explanations of his political philosophies, such as this (on Israel) and this (on liberalism)

[More to come...]

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:15 AM

Finally found time to read it after a hectic day of BloggerCon blogging.

This is one of those rare moments when laziness can be an asset. Fate is conspiring to rejuvenate you, and all you have to do is make sure you don't get in the way. I suggest, therefore, that you follow the advice of the Zen master who said, "Don't just do something, sit there!" I mean it, Cancerian. Empty yourself of ambitions. Burn your to-do list. Tell your monkey mind you're taking a sabbatical from its obsessive leaping and shrieking. Feel absolutely no guilt as you practice the art of making yourself a tabula rasa.

http://www.freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/cancer.html

I think I'm actually going to find this incredibly difficult as my mind is still racing with the possibilities of the weekend, plus other tasks both overdue and in preparation for future plans (NaNoWriMo) and with memories of High Holiday sermons preaching against procrastination...

As I just told Ian, as he walked over and asked what I was typing, "There's just so much I want to do that (frantic handwaving) aaaah!"

I think I'm going to go to bed now. Hopefully tomorrow will be a calmer day.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:54 PM

I don't know how scientific it is, but I'm seeing loads of links today to this demographic survey of who is blogging. And here are LiveJournal's stats, a site which I'd love to conduct a research study about. And here's an updated chart from Pew Internet Research to show what a narrow slice of the American populace we're talking about.

For amusement's sake, here are Wendy Koslow's BloggerCon demographics.

And, although I originally intended this to be a short standalone post, this actually works as a segue into further thoughts from BloggerCon.

I'm going to skip over most of the Weblogs in Education panel, aside from sharing a couple great quotes, whose speakers (alas) remain unknown:

• "Is it the panel's opinion that everyone should know how to weblog as a life skill, or is it something like singing that not everyone should do in public?"
• Si Adam prefaced a question by saying he's probably the youngest person in attendance (still in HS) and probably has the blog with the lowest hitcount. Someone from the back of the room hollered "Not any more!" which made everyone laugh and is probably now true.

I was also pleased by Kaye Trammell's comment that there hasn't been enough research on blogging, and she's hoping to rectify some of that in her dissertation (Yay!) I also found out that Amy Wohl, sitting three seats to my right, teaches a class at U.Penn on the commercialization of new media. I already know I'm a geek, but it sounds fascinating to me. One of the big disappointments of the panel was that Jenny Levine, the Shifted Librarian, didn't get more to say.

For lunch, I ended up sitting with what seemed to be a table of academics. I apologize in advance for being horrible at remembering names; fortunately, I had nametags and the blogroll to help me out. And feel free to comment and correct any errors if I got things wrong. I shared a table with: a woman who mentioned researching privacy and weblogs, Joe Jones of the Graham for President blog, Don Lloyd Cook of the University of New Mexico, two professors from Bentley College, Elin Sjursen, and I think there was one more person who I'm blanking on completely.

I'll confess, I initially hoped to sit with some of the big-name guest bloggers, befriend them, solicit links to boost my hitcount... But, I had a marvelous time at this table, getting into spirited and thought-provoking discussion on a wide range of issues.

• As at the mixer, I was asked what my blog was about and gave a similar vague answer. One of the Bentley professors mentioned the feminist notion that the personal is the political, and wondered whether women bloggers might have more trouble separating the two than men. I tend to be skeptical of such gender-based arguments, but setting aside LiveJournal, which encourages much more personal blogging, and focusing on the political bloggers I read, I can think of few male political bloggers who talk about family issues regularly (PLA) and few female political bloggers who don't talk about family issues regularly (TalkLeft). Of course, this is a biased sample from my imperfect memory, but it might be something to consider further at some later time.
• She also pointed out to me later in the day how many of the audience members who stood up and spoke out on practical objections to some of the more fanciful utopian suggestions were female. And also how often these issues were dismissed by the (mostly male) panelists. That was something I noticed as well as the day went on. [Added slightly later]
• The other Bentley professor, in the marketing department, asked me who I thought my audience was. An interesting thought, and though I have some ideas, it's not one I've really addressed in an organized fashion. May be something to consider further at a later, less-cluttered time.
• To the woman researching privacy in blogging, I may have a couple interesting examples from my circle of friends; contact me if you're interested.
• A lot of talk on blogs in education. One audience question during the panel asked about the digital divide and was rather quickly dismissed in favor of further success stories. The first Bentley professor commented that she noticed the tone so stifled her other critical comments. So we talked about some of the potential pitfalls of blogging in the school that ought to be addressed. These included

   cheating:

  the Internet is already requiring an increasing amount of professors' time and effort to track down plagiarism in student papers

   distraction:

  something I noticed both from the other attendees at the conference, and from when I used my own (standalone) laptop to take notes in class as opposed to writing on paper

   ergonomics:

  many of my friends in their 20s and 30s have RSinjuries, and we grew up before computers were so prevalent for younger children. Kids are using keyboards heavily before they learn to type; they're being given adult-sized keyboards instead of ones geared for smaller hands; I'm pretty sure schools haven't the budgets for properly adjustable chairs and desks. I worry about what effect this might have upon growing bodies

   skills not being learned:

  I worry about the use of calculators in math classes; During Q&A, Halley made a comment about her son's time being wasted learning handwriting (something I hoped was a joke) (rather amusing that now that penmanship has become a dying art, handheld computers are finally developing handwriting recognition -- and having difficulties because penmanship has so atrophied); And, I've long wondered about computing's effect upon memory...

• There was a lot more to the lunch, things that I found myself arguing passionately about, but they're now slipping my memory. It's late, I'm tired...

Oh, one other quip I was proud of at the con. During the panel on Cluetrain, Jim Moore... well, let me quote Heath's transcription: "Hotmail and Yahoo, most of their traffic comes from the third world. Go to Ghana, and you'll see 100-200 Internet cafes. Imagine those people blogging." I said quietly, "yeah, and they've all got a business deal to sell you" and was pleased to hear everybody around me (including Instapundit crack up). Small pleasures...

And by now, I've probably blogged so much about BloggerCon that few others are even reading it any more, and my chances of garnering further links to my blog by virtue of linking to others is probably nil. I think I've probably covered most of what I've wanted to say.

Smartest thing I did for BloggerCon: brought along a stack of business cards with my web address (albeit my homepage rather than directly to the blog) to pass around as chatting, to make it easier for others to remember me.
Biggest regret: Not throwing all the feeds from the blogroll into an aggregator beforehand to capture all the comments made by attendees -- since Feedster and Localfeeds only show the most recent posts, meaning I've missed the entries posted during the con unless I want to go back through the blogroll and read everybody's archives. Annoying.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:11 PM

Okay, do you see the problem with this image that I do?

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:12 PM

Given the location of my seat at BloggerCon, I am amused by this post.

[And, might I add, I am getting particularly annoyed with the number of blog comment systems that require a "valid" e-mail address in order to submit a comment -- and will often delete the contents of all fields if you fail to do so. Fortunately, I generally Ctrl+A Ctrl+C to copy my comments to the clipboard before submitting. But still, it's a nuisance. My comments box does ask for email, but (a) it's not required, and (b) the template hides it so only I can see what's entered. And that's my gripe for the evening.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:20 PM

Yes, I'll probably be going on in this vein for a while; I'm still working topically rather than chronologically, though.

Unfortunately, my notes from Computers in Society (Social Informatics) aren't readily available, but over the semester, we looked at the introduction of many past communication technologies. During the early years of each, they were heralded as a way of increasing communication and education for the unserved and/or isolated populations. And in the end, they became just another mass media entertaining the lowest common denominator.

Adam Curry seemed to dismiss my comments, saying there is limited bandwidth for radio and TV, but no such limits on the Internet.

But (a) as far as radio & TV are concerned, that's talking about today. TV was more expensive and thus centralized, but when radio first started, transmitting equipment was relatively cheap and radio was going to be a way to connect rural farms to one another. There was room for lots of small mom&pop community radio stations. And nowadays, it's mostly Clear Channel. What does that portend predictively for the blogosphere?

And (b) regarding the freedom of the Internet, who controls access? Outside of college students, how many people reading this get their home access via the phone company, cable company or AOL/Time-Warner? There are only a handful of companies providing fast internet connections for individuals and small businesses. And if you fall afoul of any of them, they can make it hellish to obtain an alternate feed. [Speaking from personal experience here, though I'm withholding details for now.]

What happens when they decide to start restricting by content? How accessible will the blogosphere remain?

Jeff Jarvis pooh-poohed this as alarmist and asked if I had any examples (before I was shushed for speaking out of turn). But after the panel, I asked him to post something neo-Nazi and be seen in France or Germany. He said that was Europe and he was talking America, but how can we talk about breaking down global barriers while ignoring the practical, actual experiences of other countries?

At another point during this panel, Adam Curry complained that all the discussion remained very US-centric. He pointed out that the issues we were discussing -- Valerie Plame, the presidential election, many of these aspects of the Iraq war -- were entirely Americentric. European bloggers were concerned with the fact that a bunch of unelected officials in Brussels were in the process of forming a "United States of Europe" and how will Americans deal with the fact that there may soon be another superpower with a larger first world population and unified currency...

Two reactions to this: First, mine, which is that I've heard almost nothing on this, which again makes the much-vaunted ability of the blogosphere to enhance dialog feel more like an echo-chamber, only showing us what we want to hear. Second was Christopher Lydon's response, which was something about how to "deprovincialize the American (somethingorother) about blogging." Which made me cringe for reinforcing exactly the kind of ethnocentric response that a few of us audience members during that panel were trying to challenge.

But I digress from my original point. [Yes, I did have a point in all this.] This all reminded me of another comment of my husband's to counter the Kool-Aid at BloggerCon:

Everything that's being said today about weblogs, I was hearing about Usenet five to ten years ago. And none of it has panned out.

Look at Usenet now. What could be commercialized has been, spam is clogging much of the rest, and outside Google Groups, most ISPs haven't made Usenet feeds readily available to customers. Those who knew about Usenet before could and continue to post to it, but how easy or likely is it for newcomers to discover it serendipitously, as I did fifteen years ago?

And, what's to stop the blogosphere from following the same path to irrelevance?

Don't get me wrong; I still use and love Usenet, but it's hardly the global phenomenon people thought it could be when the perpetual September began. Communities seem to be getting smaller and more specialized; instead of reading shared newsgroups, everybody's got their own personal forum, fragmenting the conversation. I used to work closely with IBM's CommunityBuilders, and a large part of it was working out how to corporatize and monetize communities. Why discuss widgets in the general widget newsgroup when you can associate only with other Brand-X-widget-users on Brand-X's site? You may get more specialized support and assistance from other users, but think what's being lost...

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:45 PM

This post by TriNetre and its responses got me thinking (a dangerous pastime, I know).
I've actually got three questions:

1. How much did you pay to attend BloggerCon? [If you consider this question too personal, skip it.]
2. Was BloggerCon worth what you paid?
3. How much do you think BloggerCon is worth? [Or, how much would you spend to attend a relatively-similar BloggerCon II?]

Just to start the ball rolling, here are my answers:

1. I won one of the "scholarships" and live locally, so paid nothing beyond my barbill at the party in the Hong Kong.
2. Yes, I think so. I appreciated the chance to meet other bloggers (and it was good egoboo to be recognized for my writing). It was definitely thought-provoking, given the number of posts I'm still itching to write about the weekend.
   Given my initial expectations for this weekend, here's how it measured up:

     chance for solitary bloggers to get together and chat

   succeeded 100% in that, but again it's not something that I'd necessarily pay for, given the existence of meetups and the Thursday evening meetings

     educational how-to

   maybe if I attended more of the panels on Day 2 which seemed to cover those aspects, but I didn't notice any of that in Day 1's pay sessions. 0%

     educational, but on a more theoretical level

   that seemed to be where much of this was geared towards. But, while it was interesting, the format and attendance list worked against such goals. A lot of frustration as many people didn't get enough time to speak while others were monopolizing the conversation. And many fascinating points were mentioned tangentially that could've been a focal point for hours of discussion (such the notion of ethics in blogging and re-editing posts which was an aside by somebody on the journalism panel and never mentioned again). 50-66%

     celebrity guests

   met several people who I've been reading for ages and wanted to meet. But my innate shyness often kept me from approaching some of these luminaries for more than a brief "hi". I had fascinating discussions with everybody I did talk with, but during the mixers, I found myself hovering around the fringes of the room too often looking for places to butt in. Something to keep in mind for future events, some of us blog because we're more confident expressing our ideas in writing than verbally and dealing with large groups of strangers can be hard. [After I spoke up in the first panel, I noticed my hands were shaking -- and didn't stop for another five minutes; and that's with me writing down advance notes on what I wanted to say. I felt I was far less coherent when I spoke out in the panel after-lunch, because I didn't have anything prepared. And yes, I do identify with early Mike Doonesbury.] Again, 50-66%

   So, my hopes for this weekend weren't the highest, but they were met. I worried when I met the guy who flew in from Hamburg Germany to attend; I really hope he got what he wanted out of it.
3. I'd be willing to pay up to $100 for the experience.

Any other takers on this informal survey?

[Boy, I'm all over the map in BloggerCon postings. I still haven't finished writing about the content of the weekend yet and I'm already trying to draw conclusions?]

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:08 PM

BTW, as a semi-nonsequitor to all the BloggerCon talk, here are all the tools I've found to track who else is linking to me. Some are better than others, and a few are outdated or useless. [Then again, I have a thing for having comprehensive lists and using personal selectivity.] To use them for your own site, you'll have to modify the URL (change whatever says osmond-riba.org to your own URL) and possibly register on that site:

DNS Report (for site stats) Alexa (too broad to be useful) All Consuming (books) Blogdex BlogMatrix Blogosphere Ecosystem Blogging Ecosystem Blogrolling (who's blogrolled me) BlogShares BlogStreet BlogTree (too much work for me to populate it)

DayPop citations Daypop Blogstats Organica (outdated) Popdex syndic8 (feed info) Technorati Google AllTheWeb Google AdSense

Anyway, hope y'all find these as useful as I have. If you know of others I haven't listed, please let me know. Unfortunately, I don't believe Blogger supports TrackBack. I'd also be interested to know which tools you like best or least. [I'm rather partial towards watching my progress up the Blogosphere Ecosystem, even though I know it's not comprehensive, and am psyched to finally be warm-blooded!]

Aside from that, work is keeping me busy, so I'm posting less than I had hoped.

Added slightly later: I forgot to mention Feedster, which searches RSS feeds, but I haven't found an effective way of keeping my own posts from clogging up the search results. I haven't been able to get the "Filter out" option to exclude them. Technical advice on that would be welcome.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:30 AM

I initially intended to attend two of the morning panels and then head home. I was particularly interested in author Halley Suitt's discussion of the HBS case study A Blogger in Their Midst interested me, because of how I handled the issue when I was hired. Fortunately, I shared some of this with Halley on the walk to the reception the first evening.

Because, when the second day dawned, I woke up feeling ill and decided to skip BloggerCon entirely to focus on recuperation.

But I had commented the night before on how I wished being_homeless could've been there as a counterpoint to some of the utopianism on display. Well, she showed up for Day 2, so flip-flopping once again, my husband and I drove down to see her in person.

We didn't actually go into any of the panels, though I did peek in the door to get a glimpse of Volokh. Basically, we just ended up having a fascinating conversation in the hallway outside the con proper. Professor Don Lloyd Cook of University of New Mexico was filming interviews of whomever he could catch, trying to get a broader cross-section of opinion. I kinda wish I could rescind mine -- or at least modify it. My head was still fuzzy from my cold, I believe I express myself better written than verbally, and I was still in a contrary mood to the unrealistic exuberance expressed the day before.

Anyway, we did have a fascinating discussion. I'm uncomfortable revealing other people's personal details in my blog without permission, but homeless bloggers have reported being helped in certain ways by blogging. And so were Patrick Delaney's inner city schoolkids. But that doesn't make blogging itself a universal panacea.
As is so often the case, Ian managed to make the point clearly and succinctly summing up the basic fallacy at the heart of these over-optimistic opinions (paraphrasing slightly):

It's the idea that, because on a micro scale, someone who is disenfranchised has a platform, it automatically means that, on a macro scale, The Disenfranchised as a group have Platforms. The idea that, just because something gives one person a voice, it will give all the voiceless a voice. And things just don't work that way.

It boils down to a matter of scalability. Plus the notion that just because something works for one person it will work for everyone. And neither is necessarily the case.

I only heard glimpses of a conversation Ian was having with somebody whose name I didn't catch. He was a skeptic and wondered how much of the support for Howard Dean was about Dean himself, and how much was the Dean campaign. If a campaign hires a really charismatic blogger, will that rub off onto the candidate?

It's an interesting question. Personally, I thought Howard Dean tapped into the same wave that John McCain caught in 2000. But, come to think of it, when the Presidential candidate selector quiz was all the meme, most of my friends (including myself) ranked closer to Kucinich than Dean in terms of actual stated policies. And during Saturday's panel on Weblogs in Presidential Politics, an Edwards supporter spoke ruefully of how lame he found Edwards' blog -- is that hurting Edwards as a candidate? But this is a digression that might be better served by another post getting into detail on that panel...

At any rate, we hung out in the hallway from about 1:30 til shortly after 3 pm. There were many more people I wished I could've met and chatted with, but hopefully we'll have other opportunities in the future.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:16 AM

You know, when I looked around at all the laptops at BloggerCon Day 1, and was hearing all the technical back-and-forth to get networks working ("somebody's network is projecting and shutting everybody else out; you have to turn of such-and-such") I was concerned that BloggerCon would be an ideal host for viruses. [For example, I use a hardware firewall, not a software one, which was yet another reason I didn't shlep my laptop along.] Little did I know that the virus most likely to be spread would be a bacterial one.

I'm feeling better now (four bowls of homemade chicken soup as my pre-fast dinner, and skipping Kol Nidre services to sleep things off were a definite help), but I heard from others at BloggerCon who also caught the sniffles on Day 1...

Anyway, I'm a couple days behind in blogging about BloggerCon; I'm hoping to fill the day with lots of little snippets of interesting things seen and heard over the two days, but Murphy has taught me the folly of making predictive statements about this blog. I've still got eight pages of notes, plus further unwritten thoughts, plus loads and loads and loads of other posts to read, refresh my memory with and respond to... And of course, current events won't stop happening just because I want to focus on something else. We shall see...

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:54 PM

Heading over now for the 1:30 PM panels...

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:05 AM

I didn't go to Day 2 of BloggerCon; I woke up this morning feeling as if I'm coming down with a cold, so I'm drinking a lot of echinacea tea and trying to make myself feel better. <snif>.

I wish I could be there to see folks further, continue conversations, (possibly deal with the aftermath of my last post), and say a more proper farewell. Oh well. I hope everyone else there has a good time and those who travelled have safe trips home. I enjoyed meeting you all.

I just noticed they're webcasting the panels on Presidential Politics and Law (Volokh), so at least I can watch those from home.