Category: Radio Free Blogistan

  • Blogging as open email

    I have half a mind to turn my well known public email address xian@pobox.com into an entirely open channel, which is to say that anyone who corresponds with that public address will have to be notified that what I write in response is not secret and is in fact subject to my posting it online…

  • Wanted: Despamming intern

    Because spammers subsist on donkey-anus jerky, cleansing the nightly sputum out of the comment system of my nanopublishing network node (it’s an empire I tell you, a veritable Conblogulated Edison of small-press samizdat and closely observed ephemeral minutia) is starting to take at least half an hour each morning. I could adopt best practices, make…

  • Wanted: PHP Nuke expert

    I’ve heard about an interesting work lead for someone who knows how to hack PHP, especially if they are a good communicator. If this sounds like you or if you know someone who fits the bill, drop me a note and I’ll hook that person up with the lead. At the request of the source,…

  • Paging Dean Allen

    If you integrate Textpattern* with VoodooPad, I will babysit your soufflés. *which is already secretly a brilliant flexible database interface that uses the “list” metaphor that anyone with fingers can get…

  • Radio Free Wikistan

    I’ve caught the wiki bug at last. I’ve been puttering around on various wikis for a few years now and I saw the pros and cons but it finally took Flying Meat’s VoodooPad desktop wiki-like thing for Mac OS X to really turn my head around. Now I can’t see how I ever lived without…

  • Almost nanofamous

    I was playing around with some of the implementations of Steven Johnson’s “googleshare” concept (What’s xian’s googleshare of ‘blogistan’, ‘mediajunkie’, ‘nanofame’) and I found I had to exclude a word (starts with nanot–) to avoid references to a nanotech research site called NanoFAME and get a more meaningful measurement. The good news is that xian’s…

  • Kinja is alpha testing

    I spy in my referrer logs with my little eye an incoming link from alpha. kinja. com/ user/ nick. You may recall that Kinja (née Lafayette) is Gawker Media’s “blog of all blogs” projects headed up by Meg Hourihan. They must be getting close to having something useful to decloak. I wonder who they will…

  • Manic jag

    This week has been a trip. For example, last night the Dean rally at the hotel was so packed (it was like a Dead show in about six different ways – someone please remind me to explain this at another time) that I ended up retreating to the hallway and playing with my camera and…

  • Wanted: Bayesianly faceted weblog

    Categories and the rest of the presentation and grouping issues that come up with heavy microcontent streams are a metacrap problem. It’s (always) too complicated. Let the computer figure out when I’m jotting in my writer’s journal, when I’m commenting on something I experienced, when I’m discussing work or politics or my new book or…

  • Nanopub metaconsciousness

    Jason Calacanis is annoyed with Duncan Riley at Weblog Hype The Blog Herald for stiffing Weblogsinc Network (WIN) in his news coverage, particularly during this recent wave of news about the nanopublishing war between Calacanis’s WIN and Denton’s Gawker Media.

  • Curious about the Well?

    Let me take a cue from Bruce Umbaugh and extend this invitation to our readers here: Friends are invited to join The WELL: The WELL, one of the most cherished and original online social gathering places, has engaged, informed, enraged and transformed people from around the globe since 1985. On April 1 our community –…

  • Need help installing Scoop

    So close, and yet so far. The install.pl script for Scoop is pretty dang amazing. Here’s what apachectl says when I ask it to do configtest: PerlSetVar takes two arguments, Perl config var and value Whuzza? UPDATE: OK, that was dumb. If I’d followed the instructions I could have avoided the above error. Thanks to…

  • Halley Suitt, Worthwhile blogmistress

    I missed this announcement until I saw a link to it from Susan Mernit’s Navigating the Info Jungle (that’s what I get for catching a cold and catching up on most blogs in one- or two-week chunks): Halley Suitt of the marvelous Halley’s Comment blog is involved in starting a new work-positive magazine called Worthwhile…

  • MediaMorphosis conference blog and feedpaper

    The American Press Institute has something called the Media Center and this entity is currently hosting a conference called MediaMorphosis. Susan Mernit is running a conference blog for the conference called morph and the conference’s home page also includes a link to a custom Feedster Mediamorphosis Conference Feedpaper on-the-fly aggregration of any references to the…

  • Wishlist as manifesto

    In anticipation of BloggerCon, Dave Winer recently put out a general call for suggestions about the next generation of blogging software, from the user’s perspectives. What features would we like to see? what’s missing? what do we need? what’s next? Shimon Rura and Lisa Williams have taken a first cut at sifting through the suggestions…

  • Posting photos from flickr

    Tom Coates is a cutie Originally uploaded by Stewart. Posted by xian from The still-in-beta flickr YASNS has recently added a blog bridge that enables you to post anyone’s photos to just about any kind of weblog (it speaks Atom, too). You don’t get to edit the boilerplate stuff (the stuff that appears above what…

  • PhoneCom scheduled for Boston, 1876

    Jeneane Sessum and RageBoy are having a little fun at the expense of the second annual BloggerCon (which, full disclosure, I’d love to attend if I could get myself to Boston then, but I’ve already got one trip to Boston in the works this year – for the Democratic convention – so it’s not going…

  • Blogging's cardinal sins

    Recently, a commenter noted that the links here at RFB are hard to see for some people, meaning they’re less accessible than they should be. (The commenter kindly directed us to Dive into Accessibility.) I value feedback like that and will tackle it if need be, but since we will be rolling out a new…

  • Open thread

    We never have an open thread here on RFB. I shy away from generic-titled link-remaindering and so I’ve never liked the way “Open Thread” looks in my RSS reader. I realize that this has to do with the weak integration of blog and discussion board ways as discussed recently, but not in an easy way…

  • Jimmy Carter is blogging from Africa

    The Carter Center’s website is publishing journal or weblog-style reports by Jimmy Carter from the field. He is currently in Africa. It’s not blogging in the sense that it’s not automatica and direct and easy, but their using the terminology themselves, so I think that counts. First ex-Presidential blogger? [via Seb’s Open Research (via Geodog)]

  • Standing on the verge of nonprofit blogging

    One of the more popular (commented-on, linked-to) posts here in the last year or so was my somewhat sketchy Weblog strategies for nonprofits entry. At some point I was talking to CompuMentor about some kind of panel discussion on the subject in SF but I haven’t heard anything about it lately and I’ve been kind…