there is no spoon

Saturday, July 27, 2002

Hello. If you're visiting here through Dave Winer's link to David Watson's response to one of my questions: Hi, and welcome.
Please check out Illusions of Freedom, part 1, the first half of an investigative paper I recently completed on the political efficacy of blogs. The paper generally argues that blogs will not make much difference to the real world, but I have to say that I'm still highly ambivalent about that, and I hope I'm wrong. At any rate, this first half is just the introduction and a section talking about what blogs are and what they do -- that's what might be interesting. If anyone is interested, I'll clean up the second (and I'm sure more controversial) half and post it soon, as well.
6:52:56 PM

Monday, July 15, 2002

I'm not being a very good blogwhore, but I'm linking to Photojunkie, as requested, so maybe someday I can be a whore, too.
8:26:36 AM

Tuesday, July 9, 2002

David Watson has posted a helpful reply to my question of how he moved his posts from Radio to Movable Type. Thanks David! Now I just have to find the time to try out those scripts. I wonder if the recent MT upgrade to using SQL databases will change anything?
11:02:27 PM

Monday, June 24, 2002

I just tried out this macro that automatically puts the top 10 Google search results at the end of every post, based on a search for the post's title. It's neat, but perhaps a little excessive. Plus, to be really useful you'd have to concentrate on making your titles informative and on-topic, and what fun is that? However, posts should now say what category they were posted to, for what it's worth.
10:06:45 PM

Wednesday, June 5, 2002

Scripting News pointed to this academic who blogs. She gives several good pedagogical reasons for using blogs to teach writing. Some of these I've considered, others are fresh ideas for me. I'll be teaching a summer class beginning next week; between now and then I'll give more thought to how I might use blogs to teach "business and technical writing," but at this point I'm still thinking it might be more trouble than it's worth. (Battery dying, must run...)
8:26:51 AM

David Watson pointed me to this page with instructions for adding a comment count to your comment links in Radio. I've been trying to figure this out for some time -- thanks David! If you use Radio and you see people with cool features on their pages that you'd like to implement in your own blog, check this list, which appears to be a central location for all of Dave Winer's new Radio features announcements.
I'm still contemplating a move to Moveable Type, but I dunno... If Radio would send me email every time someone made a comment about a post, I might be even less likely to switch. Does anyone know how to make Radio do that?
8:15:53 AM

Tuesday, June 4, 2002

Good morning. For those of you who might be finding this site via Jenny Levine's The Shifted Librarian (thanks for the link) or from various Weblog Neighborhood lists (thanks to Adam Wendt for the subscription) -- welcome! And speaking of the neighborhood, the most recent harvest for there is no spoon makes me wonder what it all means. I look forward to hearing more about what we might do with these lists. Meanwhile, a few quick links/comments from the aggregator:
I haven't had a chance to fully read The Rise of the Creative Class, but it looks like a good way to help decide where you'd like to move in the next few years. Boston beckons.
Chris Nelson offers some interesting comments about the inherent bias of weblogs. But doesn't this assume it's possible for some medium to communicate without bias? If such a medium exists, I've never heard of it. As far as I'm concerned, one of the major problems with traditional media is that it pretends to be "objective" and unbiased when it is inherently anything but. In this sense, blogs seem a step in the right direction bececause they don't pretend to be what they're obviously not (at least in this regard).
Mac Net Journal thinks this is a good way to make the RIAA mad: Turn Your LPs or Cassettes into CDs. I've been wanting to do this for some time, which is why I bought Toast Titanium. (Now carbonized for OS X.) Toast's CD Spin Doctor is supposed to digitize tapes and LPs, plus Toast comes with the required Y-audio cable to hook your Mac to your analog audio equipment. However, the MacWorld article mentions several other software options that might be worth a look.
9:03:25 AM