Category Archives: Blogging

Splommentary irritations

Susan shows how PR agents have cottoned on to the value of blogs and linking, and started leaving not quite subtle enough product plugs in comment fields. To he it looks like Ms. Rosenberg is nothing more than a manual version of the botnets that every day leaves 4000 comments into my blog filter, most of them either gibberish or "Good site. Thanks." I want to preserve the ability to have people comment without signing in, but that requires tuning spam filters and doing a quick scan through the 4000 pieces of crap looking for false positives.

The answer to spam messages and comments is, in the long run, not filtering, but following the money and boycotting the companies that pays for them. I have had to turn off Track-Backs, a very useful feature, from my blog, because of spambots. That means I have not direct knowledge of who links to me, something I would like to know. (Yes, I can find this out in Technorati or Google, but I have better things to do.)

As for manual comment creeps, Chris Anderson solved his problem (300 emails per day, many of them from PR folks who didn’t bother to check that he would actually be interested) by blocking them all and publishing his block-file. An action that resulted in furious discussion and, eventually, an admission that Wired was kind of doing the same thing, with paper inserts in their magazines.

The thing is, I don’t mind product plugs. I love Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools (get the RSS feed, about one per day) and Amazon’s sometimes-brilliant recommendations. And if someone posts a note about an interesting piece of software that addresses something I have complained about, that’s great.

The Rosenberg approach is different, in that it attempts to write something pertinent to the blog post and then turn the conversation over onto the product plugged. If this person had been a real PR person, he or she would have found blog posts where MS Office is the relevant answer. That they are few and far between, does not mean that they do not exist – and if she could have found them, she would be a real PR person. Instead, her illiteracy and bad judgment is displayed for all to see.

It is to be hoped that Microsoft realizes the bad judgment they have displayed in hiring her and activate their filtering procedure.

Fighting spam again

Comments are turned off until further notice. Comment spam storm. I am implementing comment challenges, and cursing the cancer of spam that threatens the freedom of the Internet at drains away badly needed productivity…..

Update later in the day: Opened again. Will try with a little tuning of keywords first….

How free is the Internet?

Semi-liveblogged notes from a seminar at the Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, arranged by the  Norwegian Board of Technology. I ran out of battery towards the end, and had to leave before the final session. (On the plus side, the Nobel center has free and available wifi, which I deem a Very Good Thing indeed):

Introduction: Bente Erichsen, head of the Nobel Peace Center: Parvin Ardalan, one of the founders of the One Million Signatures initiative to protest discrimination against women, could not come as her passport has been confiscated by the Iranian government and she is not allowed to leave Iran. Ingvild Myhre, Chairman Norwegian Board of Technology: Increase in state-sponsored censorship on the Internet.

Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet Law at Oxford and founder of the Berkman Center:

Filtering the Internet is hard compared to most other networks, because of the "best-effort" routing, otherwise known as "send-and-pray". Impossible to filter in the cloud, but at the point of the ISP you can filter. Examples include geographical filtering (movie releases, newspaper articles in the US about British law cases, Google.de removing neo-nazi material from the index, videos about various things at Google Video made unavailable by the uploaders (check-box solution)). In China, Google states that due to local law, some search results are withheld. ChillingEffects.com now gets the letters that Google receives with take-down notices. Microsoft implemented a filtering of their msn blogging system to satisfy the authorities (though it leaks like a sieve). This "check-box" form of filtering at the source is likely to increase. This not need to be measurable at the net itself: In Singapore, your expressions can cause you to lose our house to a defamation suit.

Much harder to measure surveillance than blockages. China has experimented with various measures. For a while, Google.com was redirected to a Chinese University search engine. Blocking access to content is a "parking ticket" offense, Various sites are blocked (drugs, pornography, religion, some political issues.) Saudi Arabia has a pretty clear filtering policy, quite open about it, not much fervor.

Filtering at the device. Access is shifting from PC to cell phone and other locked devices, and many of these new endpoints are controlled by vendors and thus open to pressure.

Many technology companies are at the horn of a dilemma here – witness Google’s dilemma going into China. Sullivan principles offers a middle way (started out with apartheid in South Africa), now written into American law (at precisely the time Sullivan repudiated them.) Are there ways to work with the government to concede to some of the restrictions while doing the ethical thing?

Many other services: Livecastr allows direct filming from cell phone, LiveLeaks, WikiLeaks, psiphon – allowing people to see Internet the way you see it. Automatic translation now at the point where it allows chatting between two speakers.

Jimbo Wales: Can Wikipedia promote free speech?

Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers in many languages. Now the 9th most popular website on the web. 12th most popular in Iran. How global? Follows Internet penetration, basically – large in English, only 15,000 articles in Hindi despite 280 mm speakers of Hindi.

Wikipedia in China: First block June 2-21, 2004, then September 23-27, 2004, then from October 19 2005 until now. Lately, BBC and Wikipedia in English has been unblocked, unclear why, probably Olympics. Wikipedia in Chinese has more than 170,000 articles, 12th largest of all Wikipedia. More Chinese speakers outside of China than there are Dutch people anywhere. Mistake to think of this as written outside China – the firewall is porous and of the 87 administrators, 29 are from mainland China.

Censorship in China is discreet and done at an industrial level, the aim is not at individuals. Most youngsters know how to get to Wikipedia. If you set up a mirror you will be shut down, but the Chinese authorities have avoided having sad stories about people being arrested for reading Wikipedia.

Core point: Wikipedia is free access. You can copy, modify, redistribute, redistribute modified versions, and you can do this commercially or non-commercially. Baidu redistributes Wikipedia (except the pages they censor) in China (though they put "all rights reserved" on it).

Quality? German Wikipedia compared to Brockhaus, in43 out of 50 articles, Wikipedia was the winner. Not an archive, not a dump, not a textbook. Not a place to testify about human rights abuses, but the place to document human rights abuses in a neutral way. Want to be an encyclopedia, access to knowledge should not be censored, therefore Wikipedia does not take the middle ground and refuses all kinds of censorship. Jim thinks Google does a huge mistake, but theirs is a considered decision and they are sincerely trying. As customers, we should put pressure on Google. Force Google to tell us what they are doing in China to change the policies they now have to abide by.

Every single person on the planet? Available in many languages, but many of them do not have many articles. Showed a video of Desanjo, the father of the Swahili Wikipedia, wrote day an night, recruited people, now 7000 articles. Have now started the Wikipedia Academy in Africa, will start many of them.

How do you design a space where people can engage in conversations? Make it open – like a restaurant that people want to be in.

Discussion: 

(I didn’t catch all of this discussion, partially because I participated in it. Notes a bit jumbled, will edit later.)

How powerful is Wikipedia? JW: More powerful than we like, especially a problem with bios of living people. We have the flag "The neutrality of this article is disputed", which I wish some newspapers would adopt.

Can you have a neutral point of view on human rights? JW: You can represent something in a neutral way, representing the different views. For instance, you can be neutral on abortion, saying that according to the Catholic church, this is a sin.

Things going in the right direction? Zittrain: Hard to say, social innovations such as Wikipedia tend to overcome attempts at censorship?

(My question, which was only partially answered.)What are the power implications over time for Google and Wikipedia. Both are on the ascendant now, profitable and popular, but does there need to be a different contribution model for a more stable wikipedia, and what happens when google no longer is running at a huge profit?

Mark Kriger: What worries you about the Internet five years out, at the edge of chaos? Zittrain: At the edge of chaos is suburbia: The tame, controlled online lives where things are OK, there is no reason that one bad apple can spoil everything. Jim Wales is now working on Wikisearch, more transparent about the search ranking. You don’t have a lot of investment in your use of Google, it is easy to switch, but that is not the case with many of the other services that are out there. Some regulatory interventions would be good about giving people the right to leave and easily take their information with them.

Citing Elie Wiesel: The opposite of good is not evil but indiffernence. Do not see the Internet as a shopping mall, keep it moving.

Part II: Ce
nsorship on the Net

In the absence of Parvin Ardalan, a movie from Iran about the million signatures movement was shown. It calls for equal rights for women in terms of judicial protection, divorce, inheritance and so on. A number of women have been arrested for collecting signatures. Parvin Ardalan was one of the organizers of this movement, and she has been arrested for this and has received a 2 year suspended prison sentence. She could not come, but the actor Camilla Belsvik delivered the speech for her:

  • Internet censored in Iran, but remain the most active medium for discussion of women’s issues. It has given women power, which has upset the power balance in families and between wives and husbands, and given them a mean of entering the public sphere.
  • On the Internet, women can connect and find a place for expression about their private lives. Especially for young women, using blogs, this has been especially important. They can talk about their romantic and family relationships, power structures, violence and sexuality.  This was a revolutionary development for them.
  • Some women have attained public identities even though they write anonymously.
  • Internet came to Iran during the reconstruction area in the 1990s and became more available during the reform years starting 1997. Women’s activism has been there, but in small groups. The reform period allowed more freedom of expression, but press permissions for women were few, especially for secular women. The reform period ended, and many were shut down. Many publications then turned to the Internet, as did NGOs were women were active.
  • Issues of feminism and sexuality are taken more seriously online. Gradually, filtering and blocking has become more severe. In 2004, the Ministry of Information technology ordered the words "women" and "gender" to be filtered, with the excuse of blocking pornography.
  • A large problem is self-censorship on politically and culturally sensitive issues. Women’s rights is politically as well as culturally sensitive.
  • There is a lack of laws, meaning that much of the censorship is arbitrary and haphazard. It is normally left to the judge to decide, since there are no clear laws on what is permitted and what is not.
  • The One Millon Signatures campaign was launched in august 2006. It aims to collect one million signatures on a petition to the Iranian government asking for equal rights for women in Iran. It has done much to focus the efforts on women’s rights in Iran.
  • The changeforequality web site has been blocked more than ten times, but each time a new domain name is registered and it continues publishing. Four of the activists have been arrested, but the struggle will continue. The action can serve as a model for movements in repressed societies everywhere.

Zittrain: Comments on censorship in Iran. (dicsussion with Helge Tennøe)

Pervasive censorship in Iran, web sites have to be licensed, many topics are not allowed, such as atheism. ISPs can be held responsible for criminal content. Very precise censorship, the ISP is responsible. The government is not monolithic, there are struggles inside the government, first they were excited about broadband, then you need a license to have anything faster than 128 Kbps.

Why do they have Internet in Iran at all? Very few states explicitly rejects modernity – Cuba and North Korea are some of the very few. Most states want the economic effects of the Internet. It is rather haphazardly enforced, though. Iran filters more stuff than China, but China tries harder to filter the relatively few things they filter.

The US government has actually contracted with Anonymizer, to provide circumvention software for Iranians, and for Iranians only. Rather primitive, and filtered, of all things, for pornography (the stop word "ass" means that usembassy.state.gov was filtered)

Radio Tibet – a radio in exile

Øystein Alme – started broadcasting in 1996, the Chinese have been jamming. Still the program is getting into Tibet. Øystein got involved as a backpacker many years ago, came back home and started reading up on Tibet, started Voice of Tibet. Now has fifteen employees, one in Norway, the rest is in Pakistan and India. Main channel into Tibet is shortwave radio, in China it is the Internet. Have spent a lot of time studying how to avoid Chinese jamming of frequencies, which are reserved for Voice of Tibet.

China is a repressive state, where the party dominates despite only having 6% of the population as members. (If you strip off those who are members because they need the membership to get a promotion in their job, not many remain). China has signed up to the articles on Human Rights, but break their promises with impunity.

Internet use in China is growing dramatically. China’s Internet police number 50,000, censoring made possible with foreign technology companies such as Google. One journalist, Shi Tao, got ten years for an article criticizing the government – and he was found thanks to information provided by Yahoo.

But the Internet is also the hope for change – with it we would not have the images from Tibet, for instance.

Discussion: Zittrain, Alme

Alme: Companies such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others should join forces and together resist the policies of the government.

The Chinese government also use the Internet proactively, to push their point of view.

Zittrain: These companies could also offer business reasons for privacy, for instance offering encrypted accounts for business conversations.

Movie from Iran: a recording studio with bombs going off outside. During the Israeli siege of Lebanon, hit by 15000 missiles, a country of 4 million people under siege that we hear very little about. Zena el Khalil is an artist currently based in Beirut. Her blog from Beirut during the siege of Lebanon in 2006 was followed by a number of people as well as newspapers, who found it a valuable addition to official sources.

She talked about how her blog and others both changed the world’s perspective on the war and documented it: Lebanon is lacking in history since so much of it is rewritten by the warring parties. She also documented how Israeli attacks on a power plant created an ecological disaster, as oil spread as far north as Syria and even Turkey.

Testing Windows Live Writer

This is a test post (testing Windows Live Writer at the behest of Paul Kedrosky).

Testing Norwegian characters: æøå ÆØÅ

Testing special characters: {[]} $#&%"@

Incidentally, Windows Live Writer (an off-line Blog editor) is a pretty nifty product: Standards-based, simple to use. One especially useful feature is that it fixes a persistent problem with AJAX-based editors: That the text entered since the last save disappears if you happen to refresh the page or commit any other fumble-fingered unfortunality. Of course, off-line blogging is also useful in itself, for those long plane rides, but if I only needed that, I could just use Evernote, which stores text in a format where links and simple formatting makes it over into Movable Type’s AJAX-based editor screen.

Keyboards, again

Yesterday I spent three hours trying to get a long Javascript to work – before I realized that my old keyboard was dropping characters. This is not a problem when you write text (automated, or, for that matter, manual spell checking will take care of it) but subtly introduced misses in source code is a real productivity slowdown.

So, up to the IT department, which obliged with a spare Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 they had lying around – and this post is dedicated to keyboard testing. 

This is going to take some getting used to – the middle hump is much higher than anything else I have tried. It is kind of irritating not to be able to reach the Ctrl key easily (have to lift my ams). But it does encourage a much more upright posture, which I assume is good. No more slouching,  thanks to Redmond.

That being said, I have about 5 different keyboards, and I think the best one is whatever I am using at the moment, until my wrists start to hurt and I will have to switch to a different one.

I like this one, though. For the moment.

Incidentally, if you really are up for a long-winded discussion, ask any technologically interested author about what kind of keyboard he or she is using…..

Obama as a normal person

Marc Andreesen spent an hour and a half with Barack Obama and reflects on the experience. Very interesting.

Consequential

Reynolds is a London ambulance driver who blogs – he has a book out called "Blood, Sweat and Tea" and I have learned a lot about basic health care by reading his blog.

Sometimes, he writes things that are just very, very sad.

Scalzi on writing as a living

John Scalzi, successful sci-fi writer, gives his perspective on how to think about writing and money. Strike “writing” and replace it with any other kind of independent work, such as speaking, consulting or development, and it is still excellent advice.

Come to think of it, most academics I know fall firmly in the “dont’ quit your day job” category – with the exception that most of them do the extra bit in order to afford being an academic…..

Oh well, perhaps it is time to write that book. On salaried time, mind you.

Adcancerous

According to this website, the highest paying adwords are:

  • mesothelioma treatment options
  • mesothelioma risk
  • personal injury lawyer michigan
  • michigan personal injury attorney
  • student loans consolidation
  • car accident attorney los angeles
  • mesothelioma survival rate
  • treatment of mesothelioma
  • online car insurance quotes
  • arizona dui lawyer
  • mesothelioma article
  • new york mesothelioma

In fact, the word "mesothelioma", a kind of cancer often caused by asbestos (which means you have a potentially lucrative lawsuit in your near future) dominates the list. Other popular words are "insurance", "lawyer", "attorney" and "quotes". Anyone doubting the economic impact of litigation on the American economy?

(And yes, it will be interesting to see what this posting does to my Adsense account. My hypothesis: Nothing at all.) 

AdSensical

I have started fiddling with Adsense ads, in the beginning only on individual postings. This is mostly an experiment (justified by my participation in the iAD project) but I am also curious to see how many people visit this blog (checking traffic figures, I had a spike of 67,000 unique visitors last October, though I have no clue why) and what the practical implications of Adsense really are.

Adsense is funny in the sense that it generates ads based on content – a task which is made difficult by this blog’s apparent eclecticism. My wife has a blog dedicated to quilting and other fabric-oriented art forms, and her ads are relevant and interesting, both to her and others. I write about less specialized themes, and then the ads become rather generic. And, of course, if I should write about degree mills, guess what kind of ads show up.

Oh well, riches will eventually follow, I am sure…. 

Fry in the morning

A piece of really good news to start the day: Stephen Fry, one of the worlds smarter and funnier specimens and certainly one of my favorite authors, has a blog! One entry so far, on gadgets (that may have cured me of coveting the Nokia E90, but there is that keyboard….), but given his legendary productivity at the keyboard and virtuosity with a sentence, there will be more, and it will be good.

(Via Nat Torkington).

I hate spammers

That’s it. I cleaned up the comment spam this morning (looking through about 1000 spam comments from the holding bin to find 1 real comment, publishing that, then inadvertently pushing "Publish" rather than "Delete" for the rest. Result: About 1000 spam comments published, which have to be semi-manually excised.

Captchas, here I come.

I hate spammers. As Norwegian boat-owners say: Jeg HATER måker (I HATE seagulls). Seagulls, at least, spread their excrement as a result of doing something useful. Spammers are lower than that.

I HATE spammers. Violently. 

The Mile High Blogging Club

I am writing this from an SAS flight between Copenhagen and Beijing, somewhere over Siberia. Boeing’s Connexion service is available (though this is an Airbus A340) and since it is free for now, I just had to try it.

I don’t know about you, but I think it is pretty damn fascinating that you can read and send email messages 10000 feet up in the air somewhere east of the Ural mountains. The response time isn’t that bad either, and the sorry excuse I have for a mail server actually sends the messages from up here, as opposed to from the Copenhagen SAS lounge, where I spent a few hours delivering i talk via videoconference.

Anyway, I am on my way to Beijing to teach at the Ericsson China Academy, four days on IT management (with a translator, since only half the class understands English.) Wish me luck. I’ll need it.

Blogging a mile high. I just can’t get over it…. 

Why professors should blog

Dan Cohen has an excellent article on this topic – which, if nothing else, is a pretty good argument for blogging in general and RSS feeding in particular.

Go for it. Nothing is as eternal (and as findable) as something written in silicon. Thanks to RSS, Google, and good ol’ Gordon Moore’s law, which pretty soon will lead to a situation where we are all working off the same (virtual) machine.

Irritating "Good site" spam

For some reason I have gotten a lot of irritating comment spam the last couple of weeks. The comments are all on the form "Good site. Thanks!", tend to hit a few old posts, and somehow manage to slip through Movable Type’s pretty good spam filter. I have tried upping the strictness of the spam filter, but that has resultet in some legitimate comments disappearing into the spam holding pen.

What to do?

Testing Windows Live Writer

This is a test of Windows Live Writer, inspired by this review by Om Malik. Installed fine with Movable Type 3.2, we’ll se how things turn out. The idea is that you can write blog entries locally, and then upload them to the blog.

One good side I can see right away – backup. I keep forgetting to back up my blogs. This way, there would be natural duplication. Another good aspect is the interface, though in my experience most programs that are supposed to generate HTML code tend to insert lots og spurious stuff and make the code unreadable and impossible to edit manually.

I suppose what I really want is a sparse and syntactically correct WYSIWYG HTML editor to edit my regular web pages, for instance those that go with courses. With offline page management.

Oh well. Put that in there with the wish for the PIM that makes me effective, not just efficient….

Dog bites man

Random acts of reality, an excellent blog written by a London ambulance driver, has a post discussing a hostage situation that never made the papers. In it, he reacts to a commenter who accuses the police of looking for people to shoot, and how the incident he is talking about never made the papers:

‘Let’s hope they don’t gun down an innocent brown-skinned young man this time.’

A somewhat snide remark. The police don’t go around looking to shoot people, despite what the media may lead you to believe. Whenever I’ve been involved with armed police I’ve been impressed by the pure professionalism that they show. They are anything but looking for brown-skinned people to shoot.

People who make such pronouncements don’t understand how confused a scene can get, with differing intelligence, hearsay, rumour and lines of communication suffering from Chinese whispers.

Well now some ten hours after your post, and I can’t find anything on the Beeb web site. I’m keeping the conspiracy theories at bay by acknowledging that I’m probably not looking for the right thing…

Related to the above comment, this is an example of how the media works. The operation went off without a hitch – no one was shot, there were no interesting pictures of irate kidnappers. The only injury was someone who had been punched in the mouth.

In 2002 the armed police were called out 2,490 times in London alone.

How many times was this reported in the media?

It’s only a story if someone gets shot.

This is why the public have an imbalanced view that the police enjoy shooting people. You never hear of all the lives that have been saved because of their attendance.

The reason why blogs such as mine are so popular is because they tell you the stories that aren’t interesting enough for mainstream media to dedicate time to. We humanise the jobs that are often just ‘nameless men in uniforms’. Perhaps we need an armed police blog…

I think we do. We need blogs from hospitals, from hospices, from the inner sanctums of bureaucracies, from refugee camps and military bases. Information want out, and direct from the source is best. I am looking forward to it.

Dragonspeak

Dragon NaturallySpeakingThis is a test using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to dictate a blog entry.

Language recognition technology has been seen as promising as long as I can remember.  When I started studying in the United States in 1990, one of my fellow students came from IBM, where she had worked with language recognition technology for 12 years.  Six years later, I purchased my first language recognition system myself, IBM’s ViaVoice.  It cost the whopping sum of $ 89, and you had to pause between words when you dictated.  I used it for a few weeks, but the slow pace of dictation and the frequent errors, partially a result of not having enough computer, was frustrating.

Now, 10 years later, I read about Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Kevin Kelly’s blog Cool Tools. Apparently, language recognition has progress, thanks to more powerful computers and better software.

I have now fiddled with Dragoan NaturallySpeaking for about an hour, and I must say some progress has been made.  You can now speak rapidly and fluently, and there is an autopunctuation feature, which inserts commas and periods as best as it can.  It kind of works.  I could see myself using this for instance to record speeches I give on telephone conferences, or to dictate blog entries and essays if my carpal tunnel syndrome flares up again, a friend of mine has used language recognition technology to meet into the computer long reams of text and data without having to type them.  

Nevertheless, the technology still has a way to go before it can do it very hard task of taking dictation.  Correcting errors is rather cumbersome, you have to select words, and then laboriously tell the computer what you want to do with them.  Also, the system has problems interpreting what I say occasionally.  For instance, I tried to say laboriously, and it came out labor asleep.  Hopefully, dictation will do for my diction what Graffiti did for my handwriting — train me to make the computer recognize it.

Whether this works or not remains to be seen.  I will report back when I have learned how to insert a Colón cola call on….

Thoughtful Scoble

Robert Scoble has an interesting "exit interview" with his readers as he is leaving Microsoft. Very interesting. One key phrase on blogging in general and how information moves: "All you need to do is tell 15 bloggers something and if it rings true it’ll get repeated around the world. That’s what gets executives fired."

I am just waiting for blogs from, say, inside General Motors or some of the large airline or media companies talking about their struggles to stay afloat. Not to mention the blogging-induced Enron, whoever that will be.

Scoble leaving Microsoft

scoble banner

Robert Scoble is to leave Microsoft to join a startup, for higher pay and a stock option upside.

I think this was very smart timing – the role of "humanizer" is great in a transitional period, but how much upside was left in this relationship? Scoble has co-written a book, become popular, and in the short run his departure seems a loss to Microsoft. In the long run, however, it is hard to see how his blogging at some point might not force a confrontation, either with corporate management or with his audience. If Microsoft had wanted to keep him, they could offer higher pay – but that would mean that his status would change from "regular employee talking about his work" to "semi-official spokesman with good salary" and undermine his legitimacy.

As it is, Scoble has parlayed his fame and skill into a new role to build – I, for one, look forward to his video interviews. Microsoft has gained a better image and can now figure out how to evolve their Channel 9 and other interactions with their developer network and general public, unencumbered by a dominant and ungovernable gatekeeper who would have experienced increasing difficulty in maintaining a very precarious balance. It will be interesting to see whether a new Scoble will show up (thus indicating that semi-corporate blogging is possible) in Microsoft or any other company, or whether it will turn out that he was a once-in-a-lifetime exception.

Hugh Macleod, as usual, has the right comment.