infobong.com

campaigns and initiatives

Despite my suspicions over Google's "don't be evil" maxim, I decided to sign up with their new analytics service because spammers have so overloaded my site, it's hard for me to see legitimate traffic at all. My referrers logs are full of spoofed spam URLs and most of my visits are connections to comments.cgi from spam bots. I'm hoping that Google Analytics will give me a better picture of my traffic. When you sign in with the project, you need to paste some code into the head section of each Web page, which I hope only counts traffic that actually loads HTML pages.

I've checked in with Google analytics a few times over the past few days to see my first report, and each time it tells me my data will be ready in 12 hours. Unless Google has redefined "hours," this message is wrong and quite irritating to see over and over again without explanation. OK Google, why didn't it update during the last 12-hour period? Because I've gotten legitimate comments over the past few days, I know my blog has been getting at least some traffic.

limitation articles content

The Talent Show has a great post ridiculing the newly-launched right-leaning media business Open Source Media or OSM™, which collections contributions from bloggers, primarily from the conservative/authoritarian side of the political spectrum. I understand why people might want to use the "open source" metaphor to describe certain modes of media production, but The Talent Show makes a great point about OSM™'s name, saying "Yes, the trademark symbol is part of the abbreviation to remind people that they're not that 'open source'."

A few weeks back, I presented a paper at a grad student conference explaining for communication/humanities types why the open-source label isn't quite appropriate for talking about media projects. I explained the difference between human-readable and machine-readable code, asserting that "I hope media and politics are all human-readable." I do think "open source" is a useful metaphor, but I hear far too many people use the term without a firm understanding of what it signifies.

protective outer shell

A fellow doctoral student in my department is conducting a survey of bloggers. I thought I'd give them a hand and post the survey here. (If you want, post it on your own blog, so they have a larger informant size.) I don't know who the student is, but some of the questions like, "To what extent do you show your softer, more sensitive side in your blog?" seem out of context considering the kinds of research usually done in the ol' RTF department. (Of course, I marked "always" on that question.) Two informants will be selected for a $25 gift card, which would more than cover the new Black Hole compilation I've been lusting after.

loved ones or report flooding

It must be the online equivalent of "sweeps week" because two prominent news sites are running weeklong feature. Slate.com is celebrating "college week" this week. One article asks semi-famous folks "What was the most influential book you read in college?" Neal Pollack has a particularly interesting response. While it's tempting to brown-nose one of my current professors and say The Classical Hollywood Cinema, I think I'll go with Don DeLillo's White Noise, which will probably make Chuck happy. Runners-up would include Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man which is disqualified since I was assigned it as many as five times in high school and college, and the other film book I can name off the top of my head, Spike, Mike, Slackers, and Dykes by John Pierson, who teaches producing in my department.

CNet's news.com.com is also running a weeklong feature called "Taking Back the Web," which discusses the growing popularity of tools that allow ordinary folks to publish on the Web. Today's installment is on Wikis, and, of course, it emphasizes Wikipedia, the Wiki with the highest profile.

dead, dying, and otherwise

My dad pointed me to this blog, "Lost Tulsa," which documents abandoned and demolished structures in my hometown. While its interest to me is apparent, movie buffs may enjoy shots of the Camelot Hotel, which was featured in the 1982 S.E. Hinton adaptation Tex. After being shot, Matt Dillon's character calls from a payphone on the opposite side of Peoria Ave and uses the hotel as a landmark to guide emergency services.

The blog also reminds me that's it's been a while since I've lived in T-Town. I didn't know that Bartlett Square and the downtown pedestrian mall had been removed over the summer, reopening traffic on Main Street. I have fond memories of that space as a child, as well as hanging out there with college friends before we were drinking age.

Finally, since I've blogged about Casa Bonita before, I thought I would point to the post on Casa Bonita, which relates that the venerable Mexican restaurant has closed for remodeling. The blog says it will reopen with better food. Anything could be better than their previous menu.

secrecy and lack of oversight

Via Atrios, here's a good application of blogs to track current events. The topical blog Reconstruction Watch posts on the federal government efforts to rebuild New Orleans. It's tone is critical of the Bush Adminstration. I've seen a few more topical blogs like these emerge in the past few weeks, and they seem like a great idea, ad hoc media for a well-defined topic, rather than writing on an Indymedia site or a more general-purpose blog. It would be interesting if, like some IMCs, they attempted to produce a print product for affected audiences.

This reminds me, however, that I should monitor the New Orleans IMC for oppositional reconstruction news. The Austin IMC recently had an interesting feature on Common Ground, a collective aiding evacuees return to the 9th Ward.

long live the new flesh

This semester, I'm TAing a class on the history of HBO, so when I saw the news that David Cronenberg has inked a deal to direct an HBO series adaptation of Dead Ringers, I emailed the news to the instructor. She asked, "who in their right mind would want to see a creepy Cronenberg Dead Ringers show? " adding, "That sounds like the worst idea for a series ever—maybe like if the Fisher brothers were into necrophilia on 'Six Feet Under'." I haven't watched "Six Feet Under," but I otherwise agree. Part of my objection is that Dead Ringers is hardly my favorite Cronenberg flick. In response, I thought of adaptations Cronenberg should do for the network.

• "eXistenz: The Series" Like "The Twilight Zone" or "Tales from the Crypt," this wouldn't be a serial. Instead, each week would find new characters dropped into the world of the game. Characters could re-appear in the game world, but plenty would die off.
• "Bleeding Kansas", a sitcom based on William S. Burrough's later life in Lawrence. It would feature a goofy Mugwump mailman, and, of course, those lovable little typewriters from Naked Lunch.
• "Black Hole" I saw on the Fantagraphics blog that Alexandre Aja will be directing a movie version of Charles Burns comic book series "Black Hole." This is all wrong, it should be an HBO original series and Cronenberg should direct. I think audience would be ready for a serial about 1970s teenagers in the northwest, struggling to come to terms with a disfiguring "bug."
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consumer generated media

Jon Lebkowsky quotes a post from David Kline discussing the emerging relationship between participatory online media, citizens, and global capital.

My first thought reading this is "Great," and my second thought is "That's really great!" Finally it occurred to me that the authors aren't celebrating resistance to corporate power, but are thinking of ways that businesses can adapt to a changing information world.

I believe that corporate America is the fundamental organizing power in the Western world today, exerting more power than government or religion. It's strange that people who might identify as libertarian are often more concerned with governmental power than business power. Perhaps this is what distinguishes libertarians from anarchists. Much of my research focuses on how participatory media creates opportunities for citizens to resist corporate power, so it's a little strange to see folks looking for ways for business to reassert its power in the culture.

bone-simple for me

Paul at MediaGeek has migrated his blog from Movable Type to WordPress, which gets me to thinking I should migrate as well. I haven't been happy with the design of this site for quite a while, and, after helping people install WordPress, I've realized that it's a far better blogging platform than MT. I haven't updated the sidebar or fixed minor little problems for quite some time, thinking that I'll eventually get around to redoing the whole site. However, this blog has long been a diversion, rather than a project, and I frankly don't have time to start a new project. To get this blog where I want it, I need to do several things.

• Find a new hosting company. (My current host is so cheap, it's hard for me to sign up for more expensive plans.)
• Install WordPress. (This is much easier than Movable Type)
• Develop new site design. (I've come up with a few ideas in Photoshop, which were all quickly abandoned.)
• Create a WordPress template. (I'm not PHP-literate, so I find this part more difficult than working with MT)
• Migrate my existing blog over to WordPress.
• Fix any weirdnesses from the migration

Taken all together, this just seems daunting, particularly when I have plenty of schoolwork to do. It would be easier if I started from scratch, rather than migrating the existing blog. I've got over 700 entries posted over the last three years, and I'm reluctant to throw out this work. Although some of the early entries are pretty puerile, I often search the blog to find old entries or re-visit links.

But keeping the old stuff introduces problems. I worry about the number of dead links that would arise from the change in platform. There are ways around this through software, or I could do like Paul, and keep the old MT-generated HTML, but I would like to have all of the entries on the same system.

Perhaps I should plan on migrating over the winter holiday, when my time is a little less structured. This still seems like a lot of work.

Paul says, "Moveable Type was unfortunately also getting a little creaky for me in terms of problems with comment spam and trackback spam." I feel the same way. Keeping this blog clean of spam has become a round-the-clock job. I find myself cleaning spam in class, or waking up in the middle of the night to run MT-Blacklist. Because the scripts will keep posting spam until I blacklist them, If I don't check on my blog for several hours, I will have hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks to clean out. Since it's constant, I forget how much time I spent working on the blog, even if posts are only occassional. If moving to WordPress will reduce the amount of time I spend monitoring spam, it will be less work in the long run.

to the old school

Last night I watched the premiere of "The Boondocks" animated series on The Cartoon Network. (A BitTorrent link is here.) I'm sure its very difficult to adapt a beloved comic strip to television. As the "Dilbert" show proved, simply adapting a three-panel narrative to a 20 minute TV show has to be a challenge, but I think a greater difficulty is expanding characters with sound and motion without jarring readers' senses of the characters.

Most of my observations about the show probably relate to this challenge of adding context to the characters. Reading the comic strip, I imagine Huey with a more mature-sounding than the Michael Jackson-sounding voice of the TV show, and Riley sounding more overtly angry. It also seems like it would be Riley, not Huey, stalking a banker with a laser sight, and I do think this is deviating from the characters in the comic strip.

Reading the comic strip, I also imagine Woodcrest as a working class suburb (like Sand Springs outside Tulsa or Delaware County, Pa), and I imagine the Freemans living in a slightly dilapidated ranch, rather than a McMansion with granite countertops. Perhaps this is my own work as a reader filling in the gaps, but, if I were going to write a paper about the series, I'd go back to the comic to look for cues about Woodcrest and the house.

I was taking notes while watching the show last night, but I unfortunately didn't take notes of the bumpers, which are edited out of the file available through BitTorrent. The bumpers were silent and featured white text on a black screen, which I think is a marker for the "Adult Swim" programming. The text suggested that Cartoon Network offered programming that was more political and confrontational than other TV outlets. The "Boondocks" pilot didn't strike me as particularly political but I wondered if this was Viacom's effort to attract young left-leaning viewers from Comedy Central, which it once co-owned with Time-Warner.

I was a little disappointed with the first episode, but there were some funny moments in the show. In an early scene, Robert suggests that white people are particularly enamored with gourmet cheese, but Huey retorts, "Granddad, you can’t tame the whole white supremacist power structure with cheese!" In the next scene, Riley says, "I know about white people, too. Like when they talk, they say the whole word," drawing out "whole word." These are the kinds of observations of racial difference viewers expect from Aaron McGruder, and the second joke wouldn't work in the funny papers. Like many TV series, "The Boondocks" needs time to hit its stride. Hopefully, Cartoon Network will give it the chance to hit that stride.

nonsense in november

I just got back from voting early in this year's election. Of course I voted against Proposition 2, which would create a constitutional amendment making gay marriage double-plus unlegal, and I voted against the other amendments, which were mostly handouts for various corporate interests in the state. I'm not sure why these belong in the constitution, except that they couldn't pass in the legislature, so big business had to hold a referendum.

As offended as I am by the prospect of codifying bigotry in the state constitution, Prop 2 wasn't what I found shocking at the polls this afternoon. Before you're able to begin voting, voters have to enter a four-digit security code, presumably as a guard against voter fraud. I spun the wheel around, and my numbers came up in 72 point Comic Sans, quite probably the ugliest typeface the world has ever seen. Texas voters should be banning Comic Sans, not gay marriage! A comic-book typeface hardly seems appropriate for a voting machine, unless the interface designers were subtly suggesting the Texas electoral system is a joke.

make yourself confortable

Watching the news I saw the latest commercial for Mucinex, a guaifenesin pill for loosening up phlegm. In the commercial, a newlywed Mr. Mucus and his bride make house in the lungs of an unsuspecting man. I'm recovering from the flu, and occasionally hacking up lung butter is disgusting enough without being presented with images of anthropomorphized, animated mucus.

A few years ago, Rob Walker wrote a column for Slate.com complaining about "Digger the Dermatophyte" in Lamisil commercials. In the commercials, Digger lifts up the toenail of a victim and proceeds to tear up the underlying tissue. Walker's reaction is understandably negative and visceral, but I never found the Lamisil commercials particularly offensive. In contrast, the Mucinex commercials with their bouncing blobs is appalling. Thank goodness for the Internets, where I can get my news without being ambushed with CGI phlegm.

restrore the constitution

Today's "Diesel Sweeties" comic is typically tasteless, but its Wikipedia gag makes it worth posting here.

I am way overdue in posting this Onion story detailing a new versioning system for the U.S. constitution. Despite the flaws revealed in the article, this project would obviate discussions of judicial "Originalism."

controlled by record producers

The other day bOINGbOING posted a link to this TV clip of The Boxtops lip-synching their 1967 hit "The Letter." Alex Chilton and the rest of the band are clearly unexcited about the promotional appearance and do a lousy job of matching their motions to the record. To throw out some B.S. theorizing, the creators of a media text have become trapped in their own creation - they are pnly on TV to complement the record, rather than perform as musicians. They seem aware of their subservient status to the fixed text.

Watching this nearly 40 years later, it's hard to ignore the textiness of this clip. I watch it on the Web in a low-res video file, which was captured from an analog tape. The clip includes a substantial flaw in the tape - the video breaks up and the audio slows down then returns to "good" video - calling attention to the analog medium. (I presume this is an nth-generation dub from an master tape that had been trading among a fan community.) Finally, in the source material itself, the band is only there to act out the music on the single - the TV show is replaying another text.

In addition to all of these layers of mediation, Chilton's status as a cult figure adds another layer of meaning that would have been unavailable to a viewer in 1967. My mom would recognize "The Letter" on the radio, but she would have no knowledge of Alex Chilton or of Big Star. (She might recognize "In the Street" as the theme song of "That 70s Show.") Regardless, Chilton's cult status is certainly responsible for the presence of this clip on the Web - for this tape to circulate, it requires dedicated fans to care to make dubs of the tape and keep them. Treating the Web-video as a text in itself, it's as fan-generated as it is a product of the entertainment business.