Recently, Debbie and I took the kids on the "old house" tour of the Main Line, to show the boys where we grew up. First stop on the tour was my old house on Summit Grove Avenue in Bryn Mawr.
It wasn't there.
There was just a parking lot where my old house had been. Which was worse, in a way, than if someone had torn it down to build a new house. Or an office. Or, well, anything.
So I can understand how many must be feeling on hearing the news that GeoCities is shutting down, after all these years. (Since 1995!). Like so many websites, Ishbadiddle got its start on GeoCities -- you can still check out the old site while you get the chance.
I used to say that blogging was what really democratized the web. First there was desktop publishing, which was going to make it possible for anyone to create professional-looking media. But there was no distribution for citizen media, and unless your zine was in Factsheet 5 no one other than your friends would ever read it. The web was supposed to solve the distribution problem, but changing a site was even harder than desktop publishing -- meaning that most people just had a never-updated GeoCities page with pictures of their cats. Blogging changed that.
I suppose with the new social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) we're back to the distribution question -- how do you get people to read what you say?
So good-bye, GeoCities, and thanks for giving Ishbadiddle its start. Sorry you're going to become a parking lot. Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
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LA Times Op-Ed writer Michael Skube writes anti-blog opinion piece. Of course, bloggers react. Then Jay Rosen totallly p0wns him.
Over the weekend I read Bit Literacy, another how-to-get-things-done book. More on it later as I start to figure out what to implement, what works, etc. The author's central tenet, though, is "Let the bits go." A good chunk of the book is therefore given over to your media diet. What are you going to read / watch / listen to? What's OK to let go?
Internet-wise, outside of email and writing / maintaining this blog, the mainstay of my media diet is RSS feeds. (One of the things I thought Hurst could have said more about was the use of a good feed reader as a way to stay on your media diet, since it discourages surfing, but he thinks that RSS is for "techies" only.) Over a year ago I put a stake in the ground and said that my limit was 99 feeds. Today, I've moved the goal posts (in a good way) and cut back to 43 feeds. (Link goes to my list of feeds on bloglines, so if you need to check if you're still in there go ahead.) Why 43? In honor of 43 Folders, the lifehack site, which is named for the 43 folders in a Getting Things Done "tickler file" I talked about here.
Cutting down to 43 wasn't easy. I got rid of nearly all my music blogs. I currently have more music than I have time to actually listen to. And yet I found myself constantly downloading more singles, tagging them, rating them to see if I wanted to keep them, filing them, etc. The signal-to-work ratio was getting pretty low, and from a time management standpoint I've eliminated a big distraction right there.
Onward and upward!
I don't know why, but I find food pr0n far more interesting than real estate pr0n. Part of it has to do with the fact that the food pr0n I view is produced by amateurs, real people cooking up real food. Earlier I posted about Lunch in a Box, from there I found this collection of tupperware bento lunches . They are fun to look at and probably more fun to eat, but at the same time they still come across as the talented chef next door making lunch. Mmmm .... lunch.
Everyday life in Iraq captured in a series of video shorts about the lives of 20-somethings. It's called Hometown Baghdad.
Hometown Baghdad was shot by an all-Iraqi crew and tells the stories of three young people trying to survive in Baghdad.
I've recently gotten hooked on this lunch blog called Lunch in a Box: Building a Better Bento. The author packs these amazing little lunches for herself and her toddler in next to no time each day. She also explains how she does it, including full disclosure of the secrets of prep for speed and hygiene.
I'm tremendously impressed as somebody who can barely drag a tupperware box in 3 times a week. But the real reason I read it is that I can enjoy it without feeling guilty about my own habits at all, it's just pretty and non-judgmental. Oh, and I loved her rant against lunchables.
Hey, Ishbadiddle is in an article on neighborhood blogs in the latest Park Slope Reader, available in fine stores everywhere. Well, not everywhere, but here. PDF version here in case the Community Bookstore is too far away.
The full uncut "interview" is below the fold. Some of it will look familiar.
Continue reading "Park Slope Reader" »
Here are some amazing photos of a man in Liberia who is "blogging" sans blog:
In Monrovia, Liberia a unique form of journalism exists where the news is written out daily on a chalk board for everyone to read as they pass by on the busy main street. Alfred J. Sirleaf first established his chalk board news, " Daily Talk" on May 14th 2000 during the Charles Taylor regime. The innovative journalist saw a need for "straight to the point" reporting that was free and accessible to all. His provocative style of reporting the truth led him to seriously fear for this life and resulted in the Daily Talk being destroyed twice before he finally fled into "exile" in Ghana. As peace returned so did the Daily Talk and today it is one of the most read News Sources in the capital with thousands everyday taking the time to stop as they walk or drive by to get the breaking news. [Source]
Chris Rabb is helping fight the new unholy alliance between Fox News and the Congressional Black Caucus. One look at this video and it's easy to say why.
I guess Big Ink wasn't really what we thought it was. Sorry about that, Curtis.
Anyone who remembers the MySpace + Hotlinking + Goatse post from January will understand the basic mechanism here: McCain campaign sets up MySpace page. McCain's staffer uses someone else's template, and hotlinks the images from the designer's template. Designer changes the image. Hilarity ensues.
Via Mark.
A couple of our favorite blogs, which were sadly dormant, are now re-broadcasting: F Train and Colin's own Big Ink. Good to see you both back on line.
We've had folks hotlink images from TK's server before. Basically, hotlinking is where, instead of hosting an image on your own server, you just grab it from someone else's. This is considered rude, since your server gets hit every time they load their page. (I once got in a pissing match with another blogger about her hotlinking my image, but backed off when I realized that I was acting like an ass about it.) Now, for low-trafficked sites, this isn't usually a big deal, cost-wise. Sometimes a polite email will do the trick. Or you can swap the image, so that what they're linking to isn't what they originally wanted. For instance, some folks persisted in hotlinking the Flying Spaghetti Monster button I made, so I replaced this:
with this:
Some people are still using the WWJD version. Really.
So Jason Scott found that he was getting lots of hits on one image. Lots and lots and lots of hits. From Myspace.
So, he used the nuclear option -- he replaced it with Goatse. If you have to ask what Goaste is, you don't want to know. Really. The link will take you the Wikipedia page which describes it, if you must, but it's enough to know that it's a really really really offensive moving image. Somehow I myself have avoided seeing the damn thing, but I know enough to laugh heartily at the idea of hundreds of MySpacers suddenly seeing it. Scott's article is worth reading for his take on the MySpace phenonemon as the new AOL.
Story via Waxy.
A long list on Gawker. Good comments too. Via Gadgetopia.
The situation in Darfur is complex and confusing. The government in Khartoum uses that to its advantage, hiding it's actions in the fog, much in the same way the Khmer Rouge and other genocidal actors did in times past.
One way to follow events, surprisingly enough, is in Jan Pronk's blog. Pronk is the UN special envoy to the Sudan and he's very outspoken for a man in such a position. The government has just kicked him out of the country for comments that he made in the blog, so I don't know how useful it will be from here on in, but I plan to go back and read his last year of posts. I can't believe I had no idea such a thing existed!
Rebecca Blood has an interesting piece on "How Social Media Works." How an extremely informative forum post from a gate agent on how First Class upgrades really work is not only extremely valuable to the company but also how it's spread to other readers. What's interesting is the role of Google et al. in this process:
One or two other bloggers may have picked up the link from Rafe, and one or two may pick it up from me, and their (likely smaller) audiences have also generated a small percentage of click-throughs. Some readers may email it to their friends. Incrementally, the word about this site, and this specific forum, will spread.Also note that sometime yesterday, Google and Yahoo! and many others indexed my site, and Rafe's site, and from now on I'll receive visits from people who are on the Web searching for information on upgrades. The vast majority of my site traffic is not to my blog—it's to archived posts and essays, and the lists of resources I've put together on various subjects. That traffic comes primarily from search engines. People referred by search engines are (I would judge) highly likely to click through links, because they are actively looking for information on a specific topic.
Ishbadiddle also ends up getting most of its hits from search engines (lots of people looking for "Post Secrets" and, recently, image searches for "Justice League anime"). In the former case, the searchers have not only found something specific, they've created their own community -- 1254 comments and counting. In a way the search engines break down the conversation model of blogs by turning each post into a "node" that is independent of the overall blog. I wonder if any of the Secret-posters are reading the rest of Ish?
I recently saw this link: Making your blog popular through content
Um, is there another way to make your blog popular other than through your content? See my comments there for more discussion.
Wow, the amount of chartjunk here is incredible. But it's pretty chartjunk: International Networks Archive \\ Remapping Our World.
Speaking of chartjunk, have you been reading the Junk Charts blog? Great stuff for all us infographics fans.
Last Saturday, at EFNY, Richard and I were talking about avoiding the news. The news is so bad lately, we agreed, that it was time to just stop reading it altogether. If there's anyone I would put toward the bottom of the list of people who would stop reading the news, it's former political operative Richard. That he came to the same decision as I did helped me come to terms with it.
I decided several weeks ago, actually, that it was time to wean myself of current events. I've stopped reading the New York Times -- the front section, at any rate. I've stopped reading political blogs. So long, Eschaton. It's not to say that I'm going to completely insulate myself from the world. I will of course keep reading Big Ink and Ennis' posts on Sepia Mutiny and all our friends' blogs many of which cover politics. And certainly, my fellow Ishers are free to post about politics and the news here. I am just no longer taking responsibility for what goes on in the world.
It's a strange thing to think about. Political involvement has been part of my identity for a good twenty years. Ever since I started a political journal in high school I have considered it my civic duty to be ever informed on current events. But hey, guess what? I'm not a politician. I'm not a journalist. I don't have to always know what's going on or have an answer for everything.
Phew. That's a world off my shoulders.
Who knows? Maybe someday the news will be safe again. For now, though, for the sake of my mental health, I'm a recovering news junkie.
Footnote: The title for this post is of course lifted from The Illuminatus! Trilogy where the phrase recurs reFnordpeatedly. I read it my freshman year of college, before the interwebs, so I was forced to use a dictionary (gasp!) to figure out what it meant! Immanentize, to make immanent, therefore to realize or bring about. The eschaton, of course, meaning the end of the world. (Atrios took the name Eschaton from the Wargames-meets-tennis game described in Infinite Jest.) So "don't immanentize the eschaton!" = "don't hasten the world's end!"
Well, sort of. According to Wikipedia, the phrase actually comes from the Gnostics, by way of William F. Buckley (really!) and basically means "don't try and bring about heaven on earth" or "stop being such a goddamn idealist." Although the Dispensationalist Christians do use the phrase in the sense that I thought it meant. So I wasn't completely wrong. Darn, does this mean I have to read Illuminatus! again?
