FSP 1.1

Going offline

FSP 1.1 returned 2004 November as Stylized Facts featuring better
control against comment spam. Curse blog comment spam.

Meanwhile, check out Stylized Facts.

Note to the literate: comments are disabled but trackbacks are allowed.
Update 2005 Feb 01: trackback is now turned off, too.

blog coment spam

Comment spam is raging here on FSP these days.
There are from 1-5 legitimate comments a day, but now
over 500 total comments.

Up to now, I just reviewed the 'last five comments' on
Moveable Type's administrator interface, and any comment
with a suspicion-raising author name I look at and
depending on the comment's actual content, I likely delete it.

But moderating 600 comments a day is out of the question.
Time to look for a new strategy before turning comments off.

Here's a typical view of the administrator view today:

See also Invasion of the Spambots, by Sam Williams [Salon].

Kerry 2004, paid for by Howard Dean

	Purposeful web sites are making a mistake by inserting googleads.
	While acceptable for your web site to agree to have a sponsor, and for you to use links, text, images, and all the other modern conveniences to promote your sponsor, the googleads are bound to diminish your site.
	If you must add dross links to 'related' sites, just choose and add your own links or join a webring. Or if it's the coin you seek, get a sponsor that matches your taste.
	Allowing Google (or Overture/Yahoo or whoever) to randomly stuff your pages based on word association is doomed to lead to rivals' text and links splattered about your page.
And some readers just plain dislike being force-fed adverts, arguing that 'contextual advertising' is spam.

Click to see screenshot of context.

Keep score of the delegate count, and Slate's campaign field guide.
Slate on the pragmatism of electing electable candidates.

Extended entries whilst blogging

MT, which FSP uses, and other blogware have an extended entry
mode which segments a post into a main and an extended portion
(aka extension).

My advice:
If the post really works as one message, put it all together
in the main body and skip the extension feature.

But if the post works as

* a long essay and an executive summary of said essay,
put the essay in the extension and the summary in the main post.

* as a short post with an appendix,
put the short post in the main and the appendix in the extension.

I tend to use the extended posts' extension sections as appendices
to show that the short quotes in the main section were representatative
and in context.

For copyright reasons I may someday separate out the extensions into
a private date reserve while keeping all the main blog entries
completely public.

(Extended like this. Jane Galt somewhat disagrees.)

About Page Two

Page Two is a feature here at FSP which provides a category of meta data,
to explain what the recurring links in FSP are. Presently, the recurring
links are presented in the LINKS section in the leftmost column, towards
the bottom.

Rather than just throw up a list of unexplained links with an implicit
click here, FSP gives you a reason to click.

Or better, Page Two gives you context, and you decide if you're
further interested.

SF Blogrings

FSP's Bay Arean blog archives.

is nicely done;
compare to (sorry -- MT puts in too many blank lines before tables)
<< Bay Area Blogs >>

Popdex

Popdex is my current favourite Cool site of the day tool.
for example, it found these parodies of A-list bloggers.

My Popdex Game Profile
Linkwhoring: PopdexMetapop

Second Superpower

Faithful blogging spectator GEOFFREY NUNBERG reports that Google is
the Second Superpower, or rather the Second Superpower is the
Internet Community itself which posts the links and words for
Google to crawl.

Incidently, I met Prof. Nunberg at a BAYCHI dinner event when he first
spoke about blogging (almost two years ago) and he really does speak
in that lecturious voice he uses on NPR.

Dating with Google

The thrilling and sometimes perilous world of blogging: NYT.
Further proof blogging has gone mainstream.

Once (about 1993), people were noteworthy because they had web pages.
Later (1997), notewothy people began to have web pages. I estimate
the equivalent transition in blogging also has taken about four years, 1999-2003.

See also bloggers play the field.

Fury Index

Update 2003 May 14: complete index.

What will google do to this index ? (My gift to Kevin.)

Why ? Because mousovering to see where an url leads in uninstructive for a
javascript:void(0); link, and clicking on such a link often hijacks
an existing browser window. And because most crawlers don't follow
Javascript new window poping links.

Exercise: To compare two sets of comments, open two comment windows
on fury.com at once.

Why blog ?

Blogging provides a public post-it note about something. An observation,
a quotation, a picture, an idea.

Posting a link is a vote in support of the linked-to resource, whose rank
will be increased by google, blogdex, etc.

Many a blog entry serves also as a public vote to support a particular
noted improvement. For instance, if I write, Office atria should sport
three-way mirrors --watching them, watching you, watching them.,
random people googling for atria will encounter my idea.

Most of the posts here are on the topics of

1. economics, especially pricing mechanisms;
   
2. information architecture, user centereed design, and usability; or
   
3. urbanity and transportation and physical architecture.
   

Q.Is it unusual to mix economics and urbanism ?
A.No, see for example Emanuel Tobier of the Wagner Graduate School of
Public Service of New York University or Jane Jacobs (neither of whom has
a blog (heh)).

Blogging furthers the revolution of do-it-yourself media criticism. Another
advantage to the Internet is that stories with a local bent in news magazines like
Newsweek and Time can be fact-checked against the version offered by
bloggers and by local newspapers, which are usually available online, and which
also usually have a more nuanced approach to the story.

And like Matt Welch said, the New Journalism of the 1960s
was built on a foundation of exposing boring conventional newspapers
for sucking up to power, lulling readers to sleep, and missing the truth.

I am also testing the notion that I can write great works by writing only
fifteen minutes per day. I have a few ideas for books
on information architecture, urban design and transit,
and applied economics, and want to see if

* I have sufficient illustrated examples and anecdotes to
support such a longer work; and

* If my inclination to write will be improved and my direction
in writing will be better focussed by starting with a review
and reflecting on the accumulated base of blog entries.

Good: fastmail, technorati, strip door

In praise of clean cut fast web sites with useful content and services.

Today's praise goes to technorati.com's web-watch services, url watching,
link watching, blogdex-like and more.

fastmail.fm is a web based e-mail service with more features and no
obtrusive adverts. Once again, Yahoo! is toast.

And in meatspace, Source Equipment's strip door is praised for being
safe: can see oncoming traffic; and
efficient: keeps heated air or chilled air inside.

Staged Pictures

When I upload images in MT, I choose between

* immediately creating a new entry using that image; and

* having MT show me the HTML for the image I just uploaded,
and copying that HTML to the clipboard. Then, I hope I don't
get distracted and copy and paste something else before I
need to retieve the HTML code.

There's no way to re-generate the HTML for an already uploaded
image.

I'd like a third option, to add picture to library where MT would
build an index of all uploaded images (whether uploaded via MT,
or otherwise placed in the image-archive director).

This new feature would display the list of images and beside each would be:

* a link to the HTML to copy and paste into an entry to use that image

* a list of and links to entries using that image (think of this as a categories
feature where each image is automatically its own category).

This feature would also generate a list of images not used
in any entry. Orphan images.

Since MT already has a thumbnail generator, this feature could optionally
include thumbnails in the lists of images it generates.

Note: I've refered to images here because that's how I've been
using MT: upload an image, and let Mt generate a thumbnail and the HTML code
with correct width, etc, for the image. The current MT feature is actually
UPLOAD FILE, but I haven't explored what it does if I upload a sound or
movie file.

Blogger meetup

Blogger Meetup day was last week. I was in Clayton, MO.
There I met James Durbin, another recent import from CA. I saw quite a few people with laptops, but didn't pester them all to see if they were STL.bloggers present for Meetup.
Next time I will bring a meetup flag or other icon.

Blogathon

Less annoying than Public Television pledge drives,
it's Blogathon (not now or ever an Olympic ).

Major General Domo

Why can't mailing lists with web archives generate a footer,

'link to this message' ?

Clay

Clay Shirkey on LiveJournal

Blog Lessons: User Patterns on LiveJournal

Clay Shirky
Track: Business

Date: Thursday, May 16, Time: 4:45pm - 5:30pm
Location: Winchester

Weblogs are "Small Worlds" models of human connectivity.

Like the famous "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon", the weblog
world is populated with highly clustered but overlapping
groups. A study of LiveJournal, a diary-format weblog,
shows that the average pair of users in a group of 250,000
can be connected in four hops or less, and that this
degree of connectivity relies on a small but fantastically
connected core of users who serve as 'human routers'.

The way their behavior affects the system as a whole
has interesting implications for weblog design and use
patterns.

The session covers the background on the Small Worlds
model of connectivity, followed by a presentation of
specific results from the LiveJournal study, and speculation
about the effects of such clustering on the design of
weblogs, and social software.

And Communities, Audiences, and Scale.

Communities are different than audiences in fundamental
human ways, not merely technological ones. You cannot
simply transform an audience into a community with technology,
because they assume very different relationships between
the sender and receiver of messages.

Greymatter ESC

Never hit ESC after typing in a long post in Greymatter

It clears the text entry window, without offering any undo possibility.
Makes me wish for an incremental save utility.

blogging code

B2 d++ t+ k- s u+ f- i- o+ x+ e-- l c+
is my blog code.

Update 2003 Jan. 23: Also known as Blogger Code.

[++] the web is no longer an art

greymatter::messages::archive::categories

I need to find a way to organize and make browsable the archives by category.

Sequential by date is rarely the optimal grouping form. -dc