When in Rome…

· long story short

When my Bulletin article got written up in Metafilter, I started posting replies in haste without allowing the conversation to unfold naturally.

I’ve spent a lot more time at Reddit in the last few years than at Metafilter, and more time than both on the Well. Along the way, I forgot some of my experience participating in communities when you’re not a regular but you’re not a noob.

Fortunately, it turned out reasonably well and most of the people who offered me advice on how to behave were nice about it:

@replies considered harmful
on metafilter at least. I get taken to school in mefi-tiquette.

Still it’s a good reminder that I’m as prone as anyone to putting my foot in my virtual mouth and need to be a little less quick on the keyboard trigger finger.

Bulletin article Boingboinged

· Information Architecture, long story short, Patterns, Social Design, User Experience

Cory Doctorow picked up on a brief mention from Bruce Sterling in his wired blog pointing to my recent bulletin article. Cory adds

Stupid pitfalls of social media: This American Society for Information Science and Technology paper by Yahoo’s Christian Crumlish has a tidy little cosmology of dumb things that social media does.

Commenters seem inclined to discuss the html rendering of the Bulletin article at the ASIS&T website but a few chimed in to either agree with the observations or suggest that they’re perhaps rather obvious in hindsight.

I wanted to add a comment suggesting that we welcome skepticism and critical feedback and that the wiki is open to editing by anyone, but the sign up procedure for the Boingboing blog involves a password email that I don’t seem to be receiving.

Comparing hosting options

· long story short

There is a very real prospect that the sweet sweet deal the Mediajunkie publishing empire has had these many years with Tiedrich and associates may need to replaces by something inevitably not half so sweet.

What this means is that I may need to find a new host for my multiple and various web experiments. I don’t need things to be up 24/7 as long a I have long-term persistence, but I do like to have free rein (within reason) and unlimited domains (or close to: 10 is not enough, 100 is more than enough).

I’m working on a little comparison spreadsheet. In the budget range I’m looking at there seems to be roughly two tiers. Oddly, the cheaper-tier providers offer more generous limits, so I’m probably missing some important factors.

Advice?

What was the Watergate scandal?

· long story short

Another in my new series of longwinded Aardvark answers made public, in this case answering a question about U.S. history from a 19 year-old in New York State: “What was the watergate scandal?”

Here’s my answer. (How’d I do?*):

watergate.jpg

Watergate is the name of a famous hotel in Washington, D.C. where a lot of political organizations (and individuals) kept offices and apartments. In the 1972 presidential election the Democratic Party, or the campaign of Democrat George McGovern, had an office in the Watergate. This office was robbed in a burglary that turned out to have been planned by undercover operatives working for the campaign of Republican Richard Nixon. This story leaked out bit by bit, mostly in the Washington Post (the movie “All the President’s Men” and the book it was based on, by Post reporters Woodward & Bernstein, tells this story pretty well if you’re interested, btw) and eventually turned out to be a scandal that reached up to the president himself. As with nearly all such poltiical scandals, it was the coverup where the worst crimes were committed. In the end, Nixon resigned (in 1974) rather than face an impeachment hearing. Hope this helps!

(image found using Creative Commons image search at Yahoo! and used with permission)

*I know the comment system seems to be churning here. I’m hacking on the blog so I’ll try to fix that. Reply to me @mediajunkie on twitter to comment.

Why is Dante's poem called the Divine "Comedy"?

· long story short

I got this question from Aardvark and gave a speculative answer

i’m not sure, but it may go back to the greek definitions of comedy and tragedy, which are different from ours today. for the greeks, a comedy is a drama with a happy ending and a tragedy is a drama with an unhappy ending. either can have laughs in the them. there’s more to it that i forget (tragedy involves a hero succumbing to hubris – that is, getting arrogant – and having a downfall, comedy probably had “plot rules” too), but the point is that those terms have changed. …. I think Shakespeare comedies may be the same thing: stories with happy endings and not necessarily the funny ones.

but what’s the real answer?