Month: March 2005

flogging the blogs won’t clear the fog

Posted on by jessamyn

I’ve been thinking about blogs lately as I moved to an entirely software-driven site here. Doing this has made me think more about content, since I don’t have the burden of also having to be the designer this time around. This has, of course, been true even moreso since people read the feeds intead of the web page, but I digress. Even though this is only marginally library related, with all the blogging and journalism hubub going on, it’s worth paying attention to, a progressive view of what blogs bring to journalism, and why it might matter by Sam Smith.

Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, and Frederick Douglass did not have press passes either, nor did anyone give them credentials before they commenced their unlicensed practice of the First Amendment. And where does one go these for such a license anyway? Usually to the government or to a committee comprised of employees of large media corporations whose interest is not in dispensing news but in owning its profits and who hire numerous lobbyists to manipulate the same White House and Congress their ace reporters are covering.

[thanks chris]

classes I wish I could teach at my library

Posted on by jessamyn

Aaron outlines a few classes he wishes he could teach at his library. I have always maintained a similar list in my head, here are some titles.

“Where is all the porn that people are talking about?” Even in an unfiltered environment, good free porn can be hard to find. We’ll discuss how to locate what you’re really looking for and learn all new meanings for the words virus and trojan.

“P2P, it’s not just for music and porn anymore!” With more people joining peer-to-peer networks lately, there’s more to download than ever before. You can get software, television shows and even games. Learn how to effectively search and download whole new media types.

“How to really cover your tracks” While it’s pretty difficult to be truly anonymous on the ‘net, there are a handful of techniques that can boost your anonymity above the threshhold of most average citizens ability to figure out who you are.

other information poor pitfalls

Posted on by jessamyn

Sethf explains one of the pecadillos that I have a hard time putting in to words. His example concerns filtering and just who is responsible for overfiltering. These problems magnify when people believe what they are told by vendors [and other advocates with an agenda] about hardware and software “solutions” to their problems. It’s important to maintain a critical perspective to provide the best service to our patrons. Remember, to them we’re the experts and we shouldn’t outsource that responsibility just because we’re outside of our comfort range with new technologies.

It’s a tale of a typical “censorware shuffle”. The administrators have no idea what blacklists are in place and what’s blacklisted (they probably think censorware “filters pornography”). The service reseller (SonicWall), as a hardware manufacturer, just repackages the censorware blacklists (here, “Cerberian”). The censorware company will say the site fits their category, so it’s the school policy maker’s fault. Everyone’s fingers point to someone else. And the eventual effect of it all is that the government has a free hand to propagandize. While critics – who remember, are sometimes told by net-bubble-blowers that The Uncensorable Internet gives them an equal opportunity to be heard, because you can put up a website – are marginalized from important audiences.

hi – 10mar

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi. I’ve added a techinfo page that details all the little modifications I’ve done to a standard WordPress install to arrive at the site looking like this. Please note there’s a style-switcher for those of you who read the site via its web page. If you find this style too hard to read, or too ugly, you can go to the Look&Feel section and pick a more standard layout. This will set a cookie on your machine so you’ll never have to think about this layout again unless you view it with a different browser. It took all of two minutes to work this out, WordPress has been a delight to use so far.