links for 2006-02-24
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Does this mean I don’t have to do a human subjects form for my oral history project?
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Wikipedia conference coming to Cambridge Mass.
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new beer co-op in Austin. crazy.
links for 2006-02-23
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UCSB library project to digitally preserve the content of old wax phonograph cylinders. r4d!
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“standing tough against an entrenched “establishment” of thirty-something, tenure-desperate semioticians and lit geeks”
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is this thing on?
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.
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links for 2006-02-21
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Syracuse students disciplined for talking smack about a freshman comp instructor on Facebook.
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simplifyed and steamlined
Any geeky readers probably already know about MailStamps, but it’s a little hack that returns Mail.app to the pre-Tiger interface. I had forgotten how disappointed I was with Mail.app when I upgraded to Tiger and its bland bubble buttons, but I’m glad I have the old icons back.
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links for 2006-02-20
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Lovely NYTimes profile of Daniel Johnson
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Organization to push for greater transparency in the way that user data is collected, stored, and analyzed. It’s a great idea, but seems a little impractical today.
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Follow-up interview on the “How to Care for your Introvert” article from a few years back. I do think that the political overtones - like “extrovert hegemony” - are a little over the top, but still has some insight into the behavior of introverts like me.(tags: geek psychology)
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bar camp comes to Austin. It seems silly that they’re having it at the same time as SXSWi
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profile of David Rees, creator of “Get Your War On”
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links for 2006-02-19
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debunks “all sex is rape” quote attributed to Catharine MacKinnon. Now on to bra-burning and hippies spitting on Vietnam vets…
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Snopes on bra-burning
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A professor didn’t think folksonomy was a real word. I searched for it, and now I’m just being meta.(tags: folksonomy del.icio.us)
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the magic middle
I’ve never been fond of the notion that “power laws” dictate what blogs are read. To be more precise I don’t like the conclusion that most blogs will languish on the far reaches of the “long tail” because network effects lead to a situation where a very small minority of blogs are read by a wide audience and most blogs have only a few readers. This seems to suggest that blogs with a small readership have little influence.
Technorati CEO Dave Sifry debunks that notion in a post about “The Magic Middle,” the blogs that fall in the middle of the blog power curve. Based on his analysis of data about blogs collected by Technorati, he argues that most of the conversation is going on among these blogs. Moreover, this is the area where expert and topical blogs reside. Sitting atop the power curve is meaningless if you’re looking for consistent and targeted information. I’ve long thought this way. A blog about, say, media studies and the Internet, isn’t competing for bOINGbOING’s readers, so why should they be compared in terms of “power”? And why should this be a measure of the blog’s worth?
Sifry defines “the magic middle” as blogs with 20 to 1000 inbound links, which seems like an overly broad definition for a category. (Blogs with 1000 links have to be qualitatively different than blogs with 20 links.) Sadly, Technorati says I only have links from 14 other blogs, so apparently I am still in blog Siberia.
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local and international visiting lecturers
Sweet Sassy Molassy, Mark Cuban is coming to the RTF department! Cuban is a pretty polarizing figure, and I’m not sure what to make of him sometimes, but I do think he has interesting things to say that relate to my research, so I’m excited about the talk. He’ll be here in April as part of the master class series. I knew I’d already missed Mike Judge a few weeks back, but I only now looked at the master class schedule, and John Pierson, who teaches producing in the department, has lined up an impressive list of speakers. Richard Linklater is speaking this week, and Kevin Smith, Chuck Norris, and Ray Harryhausen are also coming.
Studio 4D can get crowded pretty fast, and I’m told Mike Judge’s appearance was totally crazy. The department has set up seating priorities that privileges students in Pierson’s class first, then gives seats to RTF students and faculty, other UT folks, and, finally, the general public.
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links for 2006-02-18
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Dan Gillmor’s take on the media coverage of the Cheney shooting.
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Bruce Sterling sounds off on the Web 2.0 concept.
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Josh Marshall’s take on Cheney’s shooting
