infobong.com

I know this seems bizarre, but my hosting provider moved this site to a new server yesterday afternoon, and used a two-week-old backup to replace my files. I learned this last night when I logged on and an inbox full of trackback spam. I was like, "What? I deleted MovableType over a week ago." Because of the age of their backup, MovableType is back in full effect, and I'm missing a few blog entries from my WordPress blog. I'd just go in and delete MT again and rewrite my .htaccess file, but I can't log in via FTP. This is pretty frustrating, so bear with me as I migrate from MT to WordPress a second time.

It's been pretty quiet on this page, and it's not just because I've been outside. I'm moving over to WordPress, and I should be done by the weekend. If you check this site with an RSS reader, the new RSS feed should be http://www.infobong.com/wp-rss.php and the new Atom feed should be http://www.infobong.com/wp-atom.php

If you want to see what I've been up to, you can check the infobong.com skunkworks at http://www.infobong.com/wordpress.

Alice has a nice post about spending time away from the Internet, which is what I've been up to for the past few weeks. I've been checking email daily and following a few favorite blogs, but I've been making an effort to use the 'net in goal-directed ways, rather than mindlessly clicking through links. OK, now I'm going to go outside...

Alice has a nice post about spending time away from the Internet, which is what I've been up to for the past few weeks. I've been checking email daily and following a few favorite blogs, but I've been making an effort to use the 'net in goal-directed ways, rather than mindlessly clicking through links. OK, now I'm going to go outside...

I've been back in Austin for a few days, but I've been pretending that I'm still out of town: avoiding school, not calling people, and, of course, not blogging. I'm going to direct my bloggy energy toward migrating this site to WordPress and designing a new template, so this site will probably be silent for another week or two. I'm leaving comments off until I've migrated, so email me if you have something to say.

For a quick recap of the holidays, it's really dry and hot in Texas and Oklahoma. I'm sure most readers have seen the news reports of the wildfires raging across tornado alley. I suspect they received a lot of coverage because it's a slow time for news, but it's a little frightening. On Thursday, I could see huge plumes of smoke when I was 50 miles outside of Oklahoma City. I spent the night in Norman, and I felt pretty sick the next two days - I suspect that all of the smoke set off my allergies. It seemed strange that the temperature hit 85F on New Year's Day. Of course it's Texas where people expect hot weather, but it was a record high. Yesterday, I went hiking down in the Barton Creek Greenbelt. The creek was completely dry and so was all of the surrounding brush. I found it a little frightening, since the whole place was a giant tinderbox. A stray match or cigarette would have quickly set the whole park ablaze.

A late night blog search revealed another blog devoted to an impossibly parochial topic. Darren Rovell's Gatorade Blog is a blog about Gatorade. I've only looked at a few posts, but it seems that the blog is only about Gatorade, ignoring the larger domain of sports drinks. Rovell is apparently a business reporter who has recently published a book about Gatorade and uses the blog to promote his product.

One post does make sense to me. When I lived in Philadelphia, I got in the habit of drinking Gatorade. I often thought that lemon-lime Gatorade would taste good with gin. Because you can only buy liquor from state-owned stores in Pennsylvania, liquor is quite expensive in Philly, so I never tested the idea. This post informs me that the concoction is known by the delightful name of "green crap." I think I'll stick with Mike's Hard Lemonade for when I want my booze with some citrus-flavored sugar water.

Steev says that Riot Porn demonstrates "There's a blog for everything." I actually find Riot Porn kind of interesting, so Darren Rovell's Gatorade Blog is a better example of a very targeted blog.

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.

Today I'm guest lecturing in a couple of media literacy classes on blogs and blogging. I pointed to Robot Wisdom as an example of an early Web log. The class was intrigued by the statement "I am a guacamole of knowledge..." a pullquote from a post on Overheard at Work. I told the class if the instructor asks for a response paper, "Start your paper with 'Chris McConnell is a a guacamole of knowledge'."

Update: I was shocked - shocked! - that none of the students in the UTeach class were MySpace users. Or maybe some were users but wouldn't fess up to it. In the second class, which is composed of RTF majors and grad students, I wound up showing my profile on the screen to use as an example.

Reporters Without Borders just released a "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents," which looks like a wonderful primer for people interested in blog culture and starting a blog. I like the title; I'd rather be a "cyberdissident," than a "blogger." The pamphlet offers advice on starting a blog, strategies for issues like maintaining anonymity and avoiding censorship, and personal profiles of bloggers from around the world. Reporters Without Borders says the books is available in bookstores for €10, but you can download the whole thing as a .pdf.

Occasionally people ask me about starting a blog or general questions about blogging, and I might start pointing people to this publication. I think you need to understand the operational issues of blogging before you can understand how blogs function socially, so this will be useful for potential blog researchers and bloggers. A fellow grad student asked today if I could guest lecture on blogs in a media literacy class for non-majors, and I think I'll hand out the "Language of Blogging" on pages 8 and nine. It has a nice overview of blog jargon, which can sound repetitive and self-referential to people new to blogs.

Jon Lebkowsky lists some of the findings of the comScore blog study, which "sponsored in part by Six Apart and Gawker media." Some of the findings, like "Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households," agree with my qualitative sense of blogspace. But one finding caught my eye. "Political blogs were the most popular, followed by "hipster" lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women." I'm not surprised that political blogs and tech blogs top the list, but I wondered how my blog fits into the blog ecosystem.

In comScore's ontology, I suppose infobong.com would definitely fit in the far-too-loose "personal" category. They list Kottke.org as a personal blog, which deals as much with technology as it does pictures of cats.

Since no one reads this site, I wondered what category I should join to increase my traffic. "Blogs authored by women" is probably out for the time being, and, while this blog contains a fair amount of political content, I think the Internet is supersaturated with political blogs. The "hipster" lifestyle blog seems most doable with the current direction of this blog. I could provide scenesters with valuable tips on grilling cactus and shoe-shopping in Tulsa. When I was in college, I did fantasize about becoming "The slacker Martha Stewart."

When I started this blog, I had a conscious media/tech editorial direction, hoping to make this a destination for finding information about Internet media from left-leaning perspective. That effort fizzled pretty fast. I've often consciously thought of this site as a 'zine, an exercise in self-publishing for the sake of self-publishing and a place to share with others my concerns. On that level, it seems to be fairly successful. Like a 'zine I tend to publish when the spirit moves, and I try to address issues that haven't been blogged extensively.

Cameron Marlowe offers a good caveat to the blog research report released today from an outfit called comScore today. Saying, "It this is a marketing survey, and as such should be carefully scrutinized before drawing any conclusions," he decribes some of the for-profit marketing company's methodological weaknesses.

When I used to write for computer industry magazines, I frequently relied on research reports from private research groups like IDC and Gartner to get a sense of the computer market. I was pretty aware that these surveys didn't necessarily contain false data, but the research companies were out to make computer companies happy. These companies make money by either selling research reports to corporate managers who want to understand trends in the market or doing company-sponsored research. A good chunk of the private analysts were former computer industry journalists, and the analyst work seemed to operate as a "shadow academy," giving respected opinions that often influenced the direction of business. The company I worked for launched few ill-fated media properties based on the predictions of these analyst firms. I haven't heard of comScore before, but it seems to be trying to gain a reputation in this business-analysis world.

In a soon-to-expire column, Paul Krugman describes how private-sector think tanks have emerged as a force that can counter claims academics have made in good faith with research that intentionally pushes a neo-liberal or conservative agenda. While I don't think that analyst firms like IDC are quite as cynical as many think tanks, I do wonder if think tanks evolved out of these private research firms as much as they did out of the academy.

If someone hasn't already done it, it would be interesting to do a history of private research firms to see the economic and cultural forces that led to their emergence. David Noble's America By Design is a pretty interesting history of private companies cultivated United States universities as vocational schools for white-collar engineers and as independent research firms to advance their business interests. If corporate America has done so much to shape universities, why would research firms emerge?

Cameron Marlow, the creator of Blogdex, is collecting data for his dissertation at M.I.T. He has a short survey online about bloggers and blogging, and you should help him do his research and take the survey. The survey is geared for people who blog and only takes about five minutes.

Although I am in no way a quantitative sort of guy, I often find taking survey interesting. In this case, it was interesting to be reminded I have family members that are truck drivers or other blue-collar workers, and really how few people I've met online.

Maybe David or Prentiss can help me out with this little dispute in my "Interactive Multimedia Research" class. We're discussing ""Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis 'From the Bottom Up'" by S.C. Herring, et al. The paper (and the student presenting on the paper) uses political blogs such as Instapundit as examples of "A-List" blogs. I objected to this use of "A-List," since I associate it with first-generation tech bloggers like Kottke, Doc Searls, or BoingBoing. I am wrong in my understanding of how "A-List" is used colloquially?

The paper cites Rebecca Blood for the use of the term "A-list" but hedges it's bets in a footnote, saying, "In this paper, we use 'A-list' as an operational shorthand to refer to the most popular blogs as determined by number of inbound links," which would apply to the Instapundits, but would probably ignore a lot of bloggers I would consider "A-List Bloggers." If highly-linked blogs are the focus of the paper, she could have used another, less loaded term like "supernodal blog."

To make this a true "blogblogbloggyblog" post, I believe this is the first time I've actually posted to my blog while sitting in class.

I apparently need Bloggy, the blogging robot, because I have a whole backlog of things to blog.

I think I'll put the other items in separate entries, but, first I'll remark on the Boy Scout leader who pleaded guilt on child pornography charges. One of the tacit reasons the Boy Scouts of America used to justify its ban on queer Scout leaders is the presumed threat of pedophilia. When this was a national debate, I didn't think the ban would do a damn bit of difference, and this is apparent proof. The ban is about homophobia, pure and simple, not child porn or moral values. If it was about values, how did this creep get to be a national director of the scout's Youth Protection Program? I'm not angry enough to send my Eagle Scout badge back to headquarters in protest, but I'm certainly angry enough to write them a letter about this hypocrisy.

Oh, and Googleloop is a blogging 'bot of a different sort.

As someone who requires his students to blog, I find this story about a high school principal who says blogging is not educational a little troubling. I could understand if he thought students were misusing the technology and disrupting learning by spread gossip and whatnot, but, instead, he cites generalized anxieties about Internet use. He told the Rutland Herald, "As soon as someone has a name and a general geographic location, it can take an Internet predator 20 minutes to find their address and directions to their house." Obviously, I think that any project that makes writing fun for students and gives them practice using technology to make media is educational.

Re-reading the story (which I first saw on bOINGbOING), it could be the case that the principal only banned MySpace.com, so this could be more of an issue about digital literacy - how and when to share personal information - rather than the full spectrum of blogging. I get the impression that the reporter might have a limited understanding of blogging and the MySpace site. Also, I share the principal's concern about sharing information online. Many of my students use a site called The Face Book, which is a social networking application designed for college students. In the site specifically set up for UT-Austin, many students list their phone numbers and physical campus addresses, which concerns me, since it seems like an invitiation to stalking. However, the principal should have chosen his words more carefully before declaring blogging uneducational.

It's late, and I have better thing to be doing, but I have to post a link to a silly blog entry about "the dearth of academic bloggers." The post doesn't really cite any evidence that academics blog at a lower rate than other professions, but it does cite a comment on another post with an interesting line of reasoning:

So academics are still fighting for a Soviet-style command economy, and therefore avoid grassroots media projects like blogs? Maybe in the sciences academics are still drawn to positivist notions like "perfect, complete knowledge," but hasn't this guy heard of what's popularly known as "postmodernism"?

I still don't buy the assertion that the academy is resistant to blogs. Juan Cole and Larry Lessig are high-profile academic bloggers, and there's even an upcoming conference on the academy and social software like blogs. If anything, it's a generation gap driving the lack of professors blogging. Off the top of my head, I can think of grad students in Anthropology, Information Studies, Rhetoric and Composition, and, um, Media Studies with relatively active blogs, so once we chase down that tenure-track job, perhaps the academy will be rife with blogging professors.

A student pointed me to this "Daily Show" segment on bloggers. You've probably seen it posted on a number of blogs already, but watch it if you haven't already. It's hilarious, and its pretty insightful, suggesting people who care about the news now may be more drawn to blogs than the cable news channels.

I think I may show this clip in class tomorrow; I'm planning to show the opening sequence of The Triumph of the Will to talk about fascist media use, and it seems like Colbert's admission that his name is really "Ted Hitler" might make for a lightweight seque. Its funny how easy it can be to shock my lower-division students. I was explaining Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" to looks of disbelief. When I showed them an image of the piece, they burst out in laughter. I later got on a tangent about "Guernica," so I showed this image of Colin Powell after his address to the UN on the eve of our invasion of Iraq. Again, I had my pupils surprised. Does anyone know where I can find a larger version of that image?

Using Bloglines, I've aggregated my students' blogs into a single public magic blog thingy, so I can keep track of 40 student blogs, and so the students can check out what their peers have to say about the readings and the class discussion. I think my favorite blog title has to be "Super Happy RTF 319 Blogging FunShine!"

For today, I'm having my students read Rebecca Blood's "Weblogs: A History and Perspective," which I like quite a bit, if you haven't read it. It touches on some facets of blogging that I find interesting, namely the 'zine-y aspects of blogging and its potential for dialog with corporate media. One of these days, I'll get back to blogging myself.

I've put up a blog for the class I'm teaching this semester. This will be quite an experiment; I'm asking the students to keep individual blogs instead of using the Blackboard courseware, and I'll be keeping a blog for the class as well. I hope the students enjoy the project, and I won't turn them off from blogs forever.

Today's New York Times Magazine features a story on blogging, dating, and privacy issues. Perhaps it provides insights to non-blogging readers, but much of the discussion like, "Discussing your dates in detail on your blog might hurt someone's feelings," seems like common sense, but it surprises me how much personal material some people share on their blog. I do worry that some people might read a story like this and assume that all bloggers share juicy gossip and messy details on their blogs.

The piece is illustrated with a series of isometric pixel drawings. I think the isometric pixel art of eBoy is amazing, Diesel Sweeties' use is amusing and effective, but, now that its used in the Gray Lady, its probably over. Regardless, I was delighted when I ran across these toys, "The Cubes," which take cues from pixel art, and mock the conformity and blandnesss of cubicle life. As a former cube-dweller, I can say that I often felt if I was crammed - physically and culturally - into a a little box. I was probably Jim, the cube-dwelling rebel, on this page. Thankfully, I never had a goatee.

In my Historiography term paper, I quipped that "blog" sounds like "an obscure Scandinavian liquor," but apparently the truth is stranger fiction. According to Jill, "å blogge (Norwegian for “to blog") is also perfectly good (though somewhat rare) Norwegian for piercing a fish with a sharp instrument until blood runs from it." This seems like a good addition to my Norwegian vocabulary, which, until now, consisted of "Jeg Kan," the title of a Norwegian children's book I had as a kid.

It seems like whenever someone posts a "I'm too busy to blog" comment, its followed by a flurry of blog posts. I'm sure I'm not the first person to articulate it, but for now lets call it "McConnell's first crass generalization of blogging," which can join "McConnell's axiom of software documentation," which is "As the number of open-source projects approach infinity, the amount of useful documentation approaches zero."

Anyway, I finally upgraded this blog to MT 3.1 (actually, 3.121) in the hope that it will rebuild my index page, and reflect the new entries.

Update:Its still not working, and lord knows I have better things to be doing right now. Its also worth noting that as soon as I upgraded MT and deprecated my MT-Blacklist installation, I started to get a bunch of blog spam. Those bots never stop, do they?

Update 2: I got help fixing it via the MT support forums, but I still don't understand what caused the problem in the first place.

I guess my blog is doing a good job of keepin' Austin weird, since the last entry I posted is not appearing on the main page. I rebuilt the index page, but its still not showing up, even though there is an individual entry archive for the post, its appearing in my RSS feeds, and posted to the Austin Bloggers site. I wonder if a test post will do the trick...

I'm tied up with end-of-semester projects, and its time for one of those routine, "I'm too busy to blog" posts. Of course, when I realized a few months back that this blog is lame, I decided to blog only when the spirit moves me. As an interesting aside, Google apparently thinks this is the lamest blog on the Internet, as its the top result for "this blog is lame."

Update (11/28): I can't figure out why, but my index page is not adding new entries, like the ones here, here, and here.

OK, Jenny has this post about a woman selling a grilled cheese sandwich which she believes bears an image of the Virgin Mary. I contend that it looks more like Marlene Dietrich, but I'm not getting any props, so I thought I would do a side-by-side comparison.

Unheimlich, isn't it?

This weekend, I tried to upgrade to reBlog 1.0 and managed to funkdafy the existing installation powering ReBong. I can't seem to get it work, so no new ReBongage until I learn some elementary PHP administration skills. All of the old content is still there, but I'm unable to access its server-side RSS reader, reFeed. Maybe someone can help me at tomorrow's Austin Bloggers meetup. It looks like they're now pointing to the old 0.9b version of reBlog on the site, now, so maybe I'm not the only one having trouble with the "gold" version.

Here's an annotated bibliography of academic writing on scrapbooks, which, believe it or not, something I'm interested in. Buy me a beer sometime, and I give you my blog-as-scrapbook spiel...

Has anyone else been receiving mysterious blog spam that uses personal names and links to URLs with the form firstnamelastname.com? I click on the URLs to ensure they are indeed blog spam, but I'm getting 404 errors. Since some of the comments say, "I just found your site through Blogspot," or, simply, "nice site" on ancient entries, I assume its spam, but I'm confused about what the spammer is trying to accomplish? Are they thinking I won't despam the comment and upload a spammy site down the road? Or are they simply incompetent spammers?

This image purports to be "what it looks like to cancel your Friendster account because they fired an employee for blogging." But it also seems to be what it looks like to have so many tabs open in Firefox you don't know what pages you're looking at anymore.

On a related note, I was at the South Lamar Goodwill yesterday, and found a black T-Shirt with the Friendster logo printed in gray. I was a little excited by the find, but I wondered, "Is this worth $1.99?" and "Is Friendster funny yet?"

Inspired by Eyebeam's reBlog, I downloaded the reBlog software and set up my own. Rebong has been up for about a week, but I wanted to futz around with the templates before it went "live." I guess its as close to fit-for-public-consumption as it will ever be. I do think it looks cool when I hold down the PgDn key, but I'm obviously easily entertained. The page is basically a repository for all the items I would like to blog, but would never get around to writing about.

I thought the PowerLung Sport Trainer was a little strange, but not strange enough to blog. After I emailed the link to someone, I thought I should blog it after all.

It's pretty amazing that bloggers were invited to cover the Democratic National Convention, but its perhaps unsurprising that the convention hasn't started yet, and its already ignited a "blogblogbloggyblog" moment.

I saw this post and decided to create a new category for this blog, "blogblogbloggyblog." The post is a reprint of another post which quotes the entirety of a third post and points to two more posts on the same topic, a movie that remixes TV footage in order to critique a network that was the result of right-wing critiques of the mainstream media. I didn't think of my "meta-media" category was strong enough for this kind of data bricolage. I've been aware of blogs for a while and have blogged myself for three, but I suddenly ask myself, who are these people who spend their free time recyling information and why do they do it?

I've got a fat stack of wax sitting out, and in an effort to duplicate the runaway success of "The CDs on My Desk Right Now," I've created another Listmainia! List, "The LPs Atop My Crates Right Now." This list gives readers a snapshot of my musical diet by enumerating the LPs sitting atop my crates at this very moment. I mostly buy used music, so, yes, my taste is about twenty years out of date.

Following Edith's lead, I decided to publish the RSS feeds that I read to a public profile on Bloglines.com. Be forewarned that this list is pretty unedited, and many of the feeds are updated infrequently. While some readers may regard this as more navel-gazing, this may introduce you to some new, interesting blogs and news sites.

I'm still really happy with the the RSS Reader Panel plugin for Mozilla Firefox, but Bloglines will give me the ability to check my feeds when I'm stuck in a place without wireless, and it has greater granularity than Kinja, so I'm not swamped with a gazillion bOINGbOING posts when I log on.

I decided to create an Amazon.com Listmania! list, "The CDs on My Desk Right Now." The purpose of this project is to give readers a sense of my musical taste and parody the pedestrian lists Amazon publishes on it site, by documenting the CDs sitting on my desk right now.

Amazon asked me to give myself a title that would indicate my qualifications for making a list. I couldn't think of a better qualification for a navel-gazing exercize like this than "blogger." If you're hungry for more navel-gazing, you can check out my Amazon Wishlist.

I'm sitting in on a panel at SXSWi entitled "Blogging, Journalism and Politics," and the discussion is starting to sound something like this:

As fascinated as I am with blogs, I think I've heard too much about blogs in the past few days.

Since I'm blogging about not blogging, I might as well mention that I'll be speaking on a panel discussion titled "Blogs, Blogs, Blogs" on Friday as part of the Transparencies technology and culture conference. Although its tempting to fill up 15 minutes about not blogging, I frankly don't think that will cut the mustard. If you're in Austin, and you wanna check it out (its free), the panel is at 1PM in the Chicano Culture Room of the Texas Union.

I've gotta say I was a little chagrined when I saw the titles of the other papers at the conference. For some time I've felt a little dorky using titles, where I saw something cutesy, insert a colon, and then actually describe the paper. For example, I titled a paper something like, "Geek Your Mind: Weblogs and Personal Publishing Online." Its fun to come up with those titles, but it just seems so... presumptuous.

Then I read this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education criticizing the colon-title format, and I vowed to concoct descriptive, concise, and, most of all, colon-less titles. I was pressed for time when I needed to come up with a title for my blog presentation for Transparencies, and I discovered it is surprisingly difficult to come up with a simple title for a paper. I racked my brain for a few hours, finally coming up with "Social Aspects of Weblogs." However, the other panelists at the conference seem comfortable with the long colonic titles, and now I feel small and puny with my four-word title.