Category: Media

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101 Ways To Save the Internet

Pick up the January ’04 Wired for a nicely done list “101 Ways To Save the Internet“. Excerpts:

2) Dump the DMCA.

4) Appoint Larry Lessig to the Supreme Court.

8) Declare spammers are terrorists.

38) Simplify URLs.

39) Upgrade to IPv6.

45) Verisign must die.

58) Microsoft: Take the blame for your own bugs.

71) Add a recall function for email messages.

73) Google: Add a search for legal MP3 downloads.

82) Safari for Windows.

91) Stop forwarding email jokes.

97) Celebrate diversity (more operating systems, more browsers, more mail clients).

98) Ad a “Skip All Flash Intros” to Macromedia players.

And so on.

Music: R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders :: Persian Rug
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Comment of the Year

Just wanted to say Happy New Year to all birdhouse readers, and to thank you for all of your comments in 2003. You’ve helped keep birdhouse interesting (I hope!) and the debate open. I can’t respond to all comments, but I do read and chew on everything that gets posted.

Comment of the Year (sorry, no prize involved :) goes to Chris Tweney for his notes on the post Dean Gets It. Excerpt:

–by massive public relations efforts – in Manufacturing Consent Chomsky and Herman point out that the Air Force, just one branch of the military, has a PR budget greater than that of all independent activist organizations put together. The “Mighty Wurlitzer” of the right, the talk-radio and fax/email/mail machine, is part of this.

Of course, if I had kept better track, there would be about two dozen Comments of the Year. Thanks everyone. Best wishes for a groovy ’04.

Music: The Coal Porters :: Everybody’s Fault But Mine
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LJ Stats

LiveJournal has posted some recently updated stats, showing that of their 1.5 million registered users, about half are in some way actively posting / blogging on the LJ system. What surprised me most though is that users are 63% female, 36% male, and are overwhelmingly teenagers. Which in part explains why I always felt a bit adrift in the LJ community – it’s comprised primarily of 18-year-old girls. Of course there are tens of thousands of adults there as well, and it was with them that I formed community bonds, so I wasn’t really aware of the demographic skew toward teenagers at the time.

As many limitations as LJ has, it remains the only major blogging service with genuine threaded discussions, and the only service that makes sure that commenters see responses to their comments via email. These two features result in discussion activity that eclipses what you see on any other blogging system.

We’ll see what surprises the long-promised MT Pro has in store. So far… vapor.

Music: Robert Wyatt :: Lullaby For Hamza
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Hate Comments

I regularly delete spam comments from this blog via MT-Blacklist, but have a policy of not removing non-commercial comments no matter how weird or off-topic, and regardless how much I disagree with them.

But this morning I awoke to find “white power” comments scattered across some older (totally out-of-context) posts, linking to a historical revisionist site “debunking the myth” of Martin Luther King. New policy: I leave up everything but commercial messages and hate speech. I guess “no matter how much I disagree” does have a threshold after all.

Music: Cab Calloway :: A Chicken Ain’t Nothin’ But A Bird
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Sopranos, Season 4

Season 4 is out, and Amy and I started the yearly Sopranos binge a bit ago. Love to watch this way, three of four episodes at a time. We can consume an entire season in a week or two. Like learning a language by moving to another country, total immersion. Last night put Miles down and sat by the light of the Christmas tree, wind whipping outside, eggnog and rum, and sucked down the last three episodes of season 4. Heaven.

Music: The Fugs :: Swinburne Stomp
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Elbow Room

SF Chron: Thanksgiving week draws 40 million Americans into theaters — the same number of weekly moviegoers as in 1920, when the U.S. population was 1/3 what it is today. Possible because in 1920, we had no media choices. Radio probably, but no TV. In addition to being almost the sole source of audio-visual entertainment, the movie theater was also where people went for newsreels – the only moving images people got of the world outside.

That aside, it’s a trip just to think of the U.S. — or of the world — with 1/3 of its current population. Imagine any crowded scene, and visually remove 2/3 of the people from it. All those non-existent persons. All that elbow room. You don’t have to go that far back to be weirded out by population trends, either. There were 4 billion people on earth when I was born in the mid-60s. Today, 6 billion+ — the world’s population has expanded by 50% since I’ve been alive. Visualize 8.5 billion, which will be the world population by the time Miles is my age. Try 100 years ahead, or 200.

Music: Wild Tchoupitoulas :: Big Chief Got A Golden Crown
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Amy Goodman on Life During Wartime

Just watched a noontime presentation by “America’s most fiercely independent journalist,” Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. Amy is a host at Pacifica Radio and producer of several documentaries critical of the marriage between establishment politics and establishment journalism. She showed Independent Media In A Time Of War, which I’ll now consider required viewing for anyone who feels the U.S. media gave us anything remotely resembling fair and balanced coverage during the war. Really incredible; I bought a copy to show to friends.

Point: FAIR analyzed 393 TV interviews held on broadcast media during the war, then tallied the proportions of pro-war and anti-war interviewees. Results: 390 pro-war experts, 3 anti-war. Mainstream media falls down completely in its job. There is no discussion, no debate. General Wesley Clarke was on CNN more or less continuously throughout the war. Would a fair and balanced media not give equal time to a peace expert? This is the marriage between military and media. Media’s responsibility goes unfulfilled.

If we can’t rely on our media for information, what have we got? Where do we turn?

Music: Seeds :: Pushin’ Too Hard
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Chinese Language Pack

chinablog.jpgWe’re finally getting The Great Firewall of China off the ground – set to launch later this month. It was up to me to install the Chinese Language Pack for Movable Type on our server. Installation itself was fairly easy. Somewhat more tricky for a non-Chinese speaker is using the back-end in Chinese mode. Only via intimacy with the UI was I able to negotiate my way around. Let’s see… the Rebuild button is second from the bottom, and the Rebuild Category Indexes option is the third item in the picklist. If you switch languages without either knowing the language or having the muscle memory, you won’t be able to get back to the language selector to return to English mode – you’d have to wander around the labyrinth pecking half-random ’til you got it right.

chinablog2.jpg

The key is not just to get menu items to display in Chinese, but to have proper encodings on both the back-end and on your public site. Learned something interesting: If you’re in charset=iso-8859-1 and paste Chinese characters into a form, then save the record and look back at what you just entered, the characters will all be HTML entities (i.e. they’ll render okay for readers, but will be virtually uneditable). The browser does this, not MT. On the other hand, if you’re in charset=UTF-8, the characters are retained properly.

If you set the default encoding to UTF-8 in the MT config file, you’ll affect all blogs under the installation, which is probably not what you want to do. If you just want to affect one blog, leave the config file alone and hard-wire the encoding into the templates for that blog. That covers the public pages. The back-end language is selected per-user, and form encodings are switched automagically.

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MT-Blacklist

I’ve complained about comment spam before, but the problem has really swollen out of all proportion over the past two weeks. Because the phenomenon is relatively new, Movable Type has no simple mechanism for handling it, other than to ban IPs (or entire triplets). Deleting comments and rebuilding posts is cumbersome.

This weekend, one of the J-School’s blogs, bIPlog, got hit hard, and a student spent hours deleting Lolita comments. In the nick of time, Jay Allen released MT-Blacklist, which totally supersedes his previous MTMacro solution. Comes with a database of 450 known evil URLs and ability to post your updated blacklist to a known location for automated sharing. Also modifies the comment emails that MT generates to include an additional “de-spam” link – clicking it lets you delete the comment, rebuild the page, and add the spammer to your blacklist all at once. If you’re running multiple blogs from one installation, you can turn MT-Blacklist on or off for any arbitrary subset of them.

Installing MT-Blacklist on birdhouse and on the J-School today felt triumphant — as if the whole episode had been a battle between good and evil, and evil was winning… until the Megatron DDT Squirtation Assembly arrived to vaporize all the cock-a-roaches.

xian says:

I would like to have Jay Allen’s baby. He is a god.

On the normal spam front, I like this idea: Filter That Fight Back. Short version: create client-side spam filters that purposely follow/spider every link in a spam. Spammer sends out a million emails an hour, they get in return with a million hits an hour. “The branch snaps back in their face.” Punish them with the traffic they’re looking for. Crush them with it. Very Tae Kwon Do.

Music: Can :: Pnoom