Comments temporarily disabled

Because of the unremitting waves of comment spam and the fact that this MT install isn’t particularly well camouflaged, I’ve temporarily disabled the comment script while I catch up on cleaning out all the bogus comments. I’ll then take the steps Phil Ringnalda and others have recommended to make my comment script a little less easy to suss out and misuse.
I’ve got to figure out what the premium would be for me to use MT 3.0 with my 21 or so contributors….

LA Times profiles Craig Newmark

The craigslist phenomenon

noticing gujari girl

Thanks to Gwen, I’ve found gujari girl:

I never thought the first person in Walnut Creek to whom I’d defend Oakland would be an Indian guy from New York!

I’m now two L(G)L behind on photos. If I post mine we’ll have triangulation on a few of the scenes from the other day.

Merc on collaborative authoring

Mike Bazeley at the San Jose Mercury news writes today about authors open texts online for others to edit.
He focuses on J.D.’s experiment posting his chapters for Darknet (blogged here by Pete a few weeks ago), but he and I spoke earlier this week and he mentions me at the end of the article:

Open-source matchmaking

Annalee Newitz interviews Christopher Filkins (also featured in two chapters of POM) about his ideas for an open-source dating network in Wired 12.06: Cracking the Code to Romance.

Liza, let's flip the switch

Let’s update the modules and flip over to your awesome design and then ask readers to beta test it for us on their browsers?
I want to get all the Mediajunkie blogs up to the best possible standards of 2.661 installs, and then think seriously about MT 3.0 vs. WordPress vs. Scoop vs. Drupal.
I’m starting a new job in July. It’s a blogger’s dream job and I’ll give more details about it when I can but it’s somewhat political so I have to play some cards close to the chest.
The cool thing is that early next week (after a lot of sleep) I’ll be done reviewing galleys and my book will be in the can and I’ll have three rules of robotics:
1. Promote the book.
2. Do my new job, unless conflicts with promoting the book.
3. Write full time/blog, unless conflicts with the new job or promoting the book.
The cool thing is that to a large extent 1, 2, and 3 will all be the same thing or will all be about the same thing. My book, the consulting, the blogging will all be proofs of each other’s concepts. It’s hard to explain but I just saw a sample design for the book’s site (the blog will end up in a subdomain) and it looks really good.
Craig Newmark wrote a great foreword! He and Scott Heiferman and Howard Rheingold all gave me very kind quotes for the back cover.
Om Malik (of GigaOm and Business 2.0) wished me well and offered to help publicize the book.
Mike Bazeley and the Merc is apparently writing something about JD and me and others using wikis or blogs to solicit input into books in progress.
I’ve seen almost all the chapters and the fun thing is people could just skim the pull quotes and get a lot out of the book. It really is almost like a symposium with many people contributing their voices to the message.
Why am I talking about The Power of Many? Mainly because I’m nearly done and I’ve been on a semi-hiatus while I wrestled with deadlines and I expect to do a lot more work on my weblogs and community sites in the next few months but I will probably give the POMblog right of first refusal on material that overlap with RFB, just ’cause – the book man. I mean blogs are cool, but wikis are the new blogs, anyway, aren’t they?
So, let’s give RFB that facelist, move it to Scoop, offer a diary feature and the ability for the readership to select the best submissions for inclusion on the home page. What say ye?

Double-filtered uke

Adding my secret special Jerry-shimmeree effect and that basic little uke feel track gets positively cosmic, man!

I, for one, welcome my new consultant overlords

There’s no ink on the contract yet but odds are looking very good that starting in July I’ll be joining a consulting firm as chief mumbledymumbledy officer and work with some clients on projects that combine a lot of my interests today: netroots activism, taking back congress, weblogs and webfeeds and wikis oh my, promoting my book, attending both conventions, continuing to develop PEP, mastering new content management systems and scripting languages, doing visionary strategy work, helping to grow a startup to the sustainability point, and of course doing my own blogging.
Strangest job offer yet. Totally reversed. They came to me. No resume. “We spent a few hours googling you last night.” The blog as resume. Blogger gets dream job. Film at 11.

Insert quip about reverse-engineering USENET here

Laura Lemay isn’t the first person to point out that the blogosphere seems to be gradually reinventing the USENET netnews feature set (feeds == usenet), but it’s fun to read her make these points:

Why am I noting these things? Issues of distributing news in either a one-to-many fashion or peer-to-peer, or of uniquely identifying a single post: this is stuff that the people who did Usenet figured out nearly fifteen years ago.

There are differences in the architecture, though, aren’t there? Yes, netnews was widely distributed, store-and-forward, scaled extremely well (technically, if not socially), but it put forum-conversation style communication at the center of its model, whereas the blog conversations explode or decentralize things even further, encouraging each person to host and support their own words (although there is the problem of stray unindexed comments elsewhere).

Also, blogs and webfeeds rely entirely on HTTP, that great firewall exception.

Most importantly, there’s the whole Pirillo case that RSS solves the email spam problem by being entirely opt-in.

Would it also solve the USENET spam problem by the same virtues, or is there some direct connection between the scaleability of netnews and its openness to spam?

Greater minds than mine (who don’t have overdue galley corrections) will have to ponder this.

Fire on the Mountain, take 2, basic uke feel track

There’s a lot you can do with a simple rhythm and some time. Here’s just a basic feel track on the ukulele. Tomorrow I’ll post a processed version of it, but the plain track is out there for anyone who wants to mess with it or loop it back in any way, etc.:

Fire on the Mountain (basic uke feel track)