06.24.02
Posted in Blogging at 3:39 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
A number of other interesting, thoughtful responses to Tim Rutten’s Los Angeles Times piece comparing bloggers to nineteenth century pamphleteers, in a less than favorable light. Thanks to Ken Layne I found Rand Simberg’s pithy take—he too takes an interest in the pamphleteers. And you’ve got the noteworthy blogs of Mickey Kaus, Rutten’s primary target, Matt Welch, and the Instapundit, Professor Glen Reynolds, who points out how idiotic the Registration scheme at L. A. Times is.
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06.23.02
Posted in Blogging at 9:33 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Doc Searls points to this journalistic gem from Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times. You need to register to experience the full joy of Rutten’s “To Err Is Human, but to Think Out Loud,” but the meat of his assertion is this bit:
bloggers are basically a narcissistic throwback to an easily recognizable American type, the 19th century cranks who turned out mountains of self-published pamphlets.
The cranks had all sorts of idiosyncratic preoccupations—single tax schemes, silver-backed currency, vegetarianism and the metaphysical benefits of healthy bowels, for example.
I pontificated earlier about journalists not knowing their own history. Clearly, some of them don’t really know nineteenth century literature either. Let’s take a closer look at those nineteenth century pamphleteers, shall we?
There’s that crank Thoreau, with his nutty pamphlet “On Civil Disobedience,” or that goofy Twain guy writing about the abuses of King Leopold in the Congo (1905 is twentieth century, technically, but still . . .), or that goofy Victorian Thomas Carlyle. Aside from scholarly obsessions with nineteenth century pamphlets as primary source documents about the lives and thoughts of everyday cranks as well as the hundreds of household names who were engineers, theologians, artists, poets, essayists, abolitionists and feminists, it’s important to realize that pamphlets were published because they were popular. People, all kinds of people, read and wrote them. Sure, there were “cranks,” but the vast majority of authors were quite serious, and were perceived that way. The pamphlets were written often enough by “names” to have inspired one of the most successful and expensive literary forgery operations ever, largely executed by one Thomas J. Wise.
As a put-down, comparing bloggers to nineteenth century pamphleteers is less than effective, since so much of the intellectual life of the era was carried out via pamphlets, their publication in turn encouraged by the extensive correspondence between the authors, ultimately leading to several “schools” like the Transcendentalists in New England and the Tractarians in England. Both groups were strongly influenced by Milton, an avid pampleteer in the seventeenth century (writing, among other pamplets, Areopagitica on the freeedom of the press). Bloggers could do far worse in their search for a literary ancestor.
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Posted in Pedagogy and Scholarship at 3:56 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
There are a number of useful ways to incorporate news aggregators into teaching. There are lots of classes in English, Social Science, Communication Studies and Journalism departments that ask students to read newspapers and journals on and off the web and then write about both the content and the larger issues. News aggregators are a valuable research tool, and should be included in any discussion about how to use other online research tools like search engines and databases.
In the case of NewsIsFree in particular, news aggregators are especially good at providing fresh interesting, and timely content, in languages other than English. Students (or teachers) can use an aggregator to automatically fetch and display content that interests students, content that is current in the language they are studying. There are hundreds of sources in almost any language, ranging from periodicals to web blogs, that offer students an opportunity to read content written in a variety of styles. It’s a great way to get students to read in a language that they are struggling with, and to expose them to the language as it’s used by real people. Tie news reading/blog reading to blogging (using any number of blog tools) about what they’ve read, using the language they are studying, and you’ve got a fabulous combination, particularly since there’s a very good chance that students will read each other’s blogs, and comment on them.
I wish that academic scholarly journals used the web and RSS for publication so that scholars could subscribe to a feed containing the non-article material, the necrologie, table of contents, lists of forthcoming books, conference calendars, the things that have a “timliness” value. It’s a much better way of keeping up to date than waiting for your university library to receive an expensive bound journal, catalog it, and then make it available for circulation. So far I’ve not found any humanities journals that have a “news” page with a subscribable feed.
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Posted in Blogging, Software at 3:30 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
NewsIsFree may be freely used for personal and non-profit purposes, as their terms of service statement explains. The site allows you to customize your pages on their server much as you would pages on Yahoo or some other portal. After logging in, you choose the sources you wish to “subscribe” to using the built in links to the “News Center” on the right side, opting to browse the sources either by Category or by Name, or you can Search for specific topics or sites.
Select the sources you want to subscribe to by clicking the check boxes. At the top of the list is an “Add” button and a drop down menu which lets you choose an extant page (by default you have two, “New Sources” and “Random News”) or create a new page (you’ll probably want a new one).You can then name your page, and decide on the layout you want for the news items you’ve subscribed to. You can also customize the order and layout in which your pages are presented though preference settings via the My Account link at the top of the page, if you change your mind.
One of the really nifty options at Newsisfree is the support for sources in 26 languages, including languages like Danish, Persian, Arabic, Russian, and Estonian, as well as the usual Western European and Japanese you’d expect. You should opt out of any languages you don’t want to be included. My Mail lets you choose any of your customized pages to be emailed to you automatically. There’s even a My Blogs page that lets you post from NewIsFree to your own blogs, using the Blogger API; this works with Radio, Moveable Type and Blogger, among others.
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Posted in Blogging, Software at 3:11 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
In his piece on news aggregators, Dave Winer defines them as:
software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page.
News aggregators, like Yahoo and other web portals, use RSS or other similar web services that “wrap” HTML data in a way that allows content providers like web sites and blogs to publish their html data in a “feed.”
UserLand’s Radio includes an aggregator in the application’s tool suite. Radio’s aggregator is very easy to use, and it’s geared to easily finding, reading, linking and posting commentary about the news items to your Radio-driven web log. The way the aggregator fits seamlessly with the blogging tools makes Radio extremely powerful, for all failures in terms of ease of use.
There are other news aggregators out there. I’ve looked at some of the ones available on the Mac, or that are browser based, rather than using a browser in tandem with an external application. There are some Windows aggregators reviewed here.
AmphetaDesk written in Perl by Morbus Iff, is a free open source cross-platform (Mac OS 9 and earlier, Mac OS X, Windows, Linux) customizable aggregator that fetches the news you’ve indicated you want and presents the individual items in a web page. It’s very simple to set up on Mac OS X, and the number of sources or “channels” you can subscribe to is enormous. There’s a nifty Cocoa-based outline “skin” for AmphetaDesk from l. m. orchard.
Brent Simmons has written a nifty Cocoa application, MacNewsWire, that aggregates the Mac news sources from his Macintosh News aggregator web page. I don’t think he could make it any simpler to use than it is. It’s got one of the most OS-Xish, intelligent, logical interfaces I’ve ever seen. It “just works.”
PostalCode offers Pineapple. Pineapple, currently at version 0.3.1, is a shareware ($14.95 now, $20.00 upon release) beta application for Mac OS X. Pineapple fetches the headlines from web sites that syndicate their content using rss, sorts out the articles you haven’t read and presents them to you in an easy-to-browse format in your web browser. It’s a little tedious to set up, relying as it does on dragging-and-dropping included XML files for the sites you wish to “subscribe” to onto a window in Pineapple, but it’s not difficult, and it allows you to have multiple “sets” of subscriptions. It includes clever features like “feed packs” and a scratch pad that make it very useful for people who read and then write about what they’ve read. Granted, Pineapple is a “work in progress,” but it strikes me as both useful and worth following closely.
NewsIsFree is web-based, so all you need is a browser. If you’re not a commercial user or site, you can create a free account that will let you browse headlines from thousands of sources in many different languages, search for the latest news, create custom pages with your own choice of news sources, arrange them in boxes or scroll lists, send headlines to others by email, or post headlines to your weblog or read them in your news aggregator (Radio and AmphetaDesk are both supported, as is Blogger) via syndication. Similar commercial services are offered by NewsKnowledge. Unfortunately, there isn’t much built in help, though the FAQ is a helpful start. At the same time, I suspect that this is largely a labor of love, and it’s worth keeping in mind that it is a free service. There’s a lot of potential for NewsIsFree, so I want to devote a later entry and more time to it.
Moreover.com is another web-based aggregator, also free for non-profit, personal, higher educational institutional use, as their terms of service stipulate. If you belong in their not-for-profit category, you can create a free “feed” here. Moreover works slightly differently in that you use their on-site “wizard” to select your sources either via a keyword search or by using their categories, then you select a template for display (the template is customizable), then Moreover sends you code you add to your site. When you incorporate the code then send you (you can also copy it from a web page) a script runs that fetches data from Moreover’s database, and sticks it in your web page using the template you selected. You’ll have to go through the Wizard again if you lose the email, so be sure to keep it. There’s a web developer’s help page for Moreover here,that explains how to customize the code they send, and how to incorporate more than one “Category” into your “feed.” Another Help page offers assistance for those using WYSIWYG editors. You can see the Moreover page I created using Archaeology as the keyword for my category and the plainest template here.
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06.18.02
Posted in Security at 7:59 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
As this Wired story reveals, Earthlink allows tech support representatives to see users’ passwords. This is just wrong, not to mention unprofessional, and begging for various nasty kinds of law suits, or worse.
Sure, users forgetting their passwords is one of the top three support issues, maybe even the top one, but you never give anyone access to a user’s password unless there’s a court order, especially if you are an ISP. If a user contacts tech support and needs a password, then tech support should simply reset the password to a seven or eight digit random combination of numbers, letters, and punctuation marks, and give the user the information over the phone (after verifying the user’s right to the information). Then, tech support should send followup email telling the user that the password was requested, and including instructions to reset the “new” password, with some advice about storing and selecting passwords.
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Posted in Pointy-Haired Bosses at 9:20 am by Lisa Spangenberg
In response to a comment by John Udell What if being non-communicative weren’t an option?, itself part of an extended conversation spurred by a Fortune article on Esther Dyson about institutional information sharing, or “knowledge management” if you want to be jargonish, Dorothy Salo, of Caveat Lector, blogs:
Wanker management believes that the company has One Voice; that voice comes down from On High and must neither be contradicted nor amplified nor qualified—and it must particularly never admit a mistake. Wanker management believes that smart workers exist basically to feed knowledge upward so that it can be properly incorporated into the One Voice—at which point, of course, any trace of the worker originating the knowledge is extinguished.
Salo has accurately described a phenomonen that seems heart-rendingly common in IT organizations, where the life blood of the organization is information, and systems of hardware and software rely on living intelligent actively engaged people to share information and work collaboratively. Information is such cases must be shared if the organization is to thrive. All too often management subdivides the organization into cells, deliberately destroying lines of communication, and even forbidding information sharing so that all information flows in one direction, up the hierarchichal org chart, and never circulates naturally throughout the organization.
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06.17.02
Posted in Tutorial at 7:17 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Aside from the fact that Mozilla is free, fast, limber, and polite, I really like the Tab features. You can open a Tab window using Command-T on a Mac (for you poor Windows users, remember to use Control instead) then go to a site, then open a new Tab, and go to another site, for however many sites you’d like to be able to toggle between. The Tabs allow you to “layer” the sites in a single window.
Once you have your Tabs set the way you want, you can, if you wish, save a group of Tabs as a single Bookmark, and then simply click the Bookmark to open up the Tabs with their associated sites the way you set it up previously.
Here’s how to save several Tabs in a single Window as a “grouped” Bookmark.
- Create a Mozilla window with Tabs and web sites you wish to save as a single Bookmark.
- Create and Save the Bookmark by using Command-Shif-d or choosing File Bookmark from the Bookmark menu. You will be asked to name the Bookmark, and choose a location in your Bookmarks to save the Book mark. Be sure to check the small box next to File As Group. (Hint: choose your Toolbar folder if you want the Bookmark to be saved there.)
- Click your newly created and saved Bookmark to open the Tabbed window and load the web sites.
- Use the newly created bookmark to test your Tabs.
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Posted in Software at 12:11 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Yes, it’s out, and yes I’ve downloaded it from Version Tracker (look to the left for the link) and installed it, which has served to remind me why I like Mozilla so much better.
Once I installed I.E. I discovered that it had, without my consent, changed my Internet Preferences, switching my Default Browser setting from Mozilla to I.E., and it also changed my Home page setting, from a custom page on my drive, to MSN. That’s rude, nasty and typical of Microsoft. It is not acceptable to change a user’s settings or preferences without asking first.
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06.13.02
Posted in Blogging at 9:07 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
First, I stumbled across this nifty post by John S. Jacobs Anderson, wherein he declares what is and is not, a web log.
Second, thanks to Blog Roots, I learned that the Oxford English Dictionary has drafted an entry for blog. I also learned Peter Merholz coined blog.
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