March 2007 Archives
For those who missed the bad drama in the blogosphere in the last week, there's a good short summary on apophenia. The essentials are as follows:
The brief story is that three prominent bloggers got annoyed at another female blogger for not permitting mean-spirited comments in her blog. They created a site called meankids.org as well as a spin-off. These blogs encouraged people to say terrible things about others and it spun out of control.
And in the end, some statements and images that are easily read as death threats were posted about Kathy Sierra, a prominent tech blogger. She got scared, canceled a presentation, and blogged about it.
Ms. Sierra's post wasn't as clear as it could have been, and as a result two issues have been conflated. First, what we should think about people who make vile personal attacks against others online, or who take a step beyond that and start not one, but two websites devoted to bashing on other people. Second, what we should think about people who posts death threats against others online. Luckily, we all seem to agree on the second.
On the first, though, we are divided. Example A: The Matter of Kathy Sierra on BlogHer. Example B: Hating Hate Speech on BlogHer.
Some folks say that the best response is to ignore it. They condemn Ms. Sierra for overreacting, often pointing out that they too have experienced such incidents and didn't freak out. I don't see how this is relevant. Ms. Sierra is as upset as Ms. Sierra is, and how someone else felt in a different situation is not really relevant. And while I guess it would be an easier world if everyone could weather sexualized insults, threats of violence, and vicious mockery without being hurt or scared, I don't think it is anyone's responsibility to rewire their personality until it functions that way.
Some folks invoke the First Amendment as if that means what these folks did is beyond criticism unless it crossed into illegality. It's not. They have a right to say it, but I have a right to think their behavior sucks and to explain why I feel that way. I don't think it "chills disagreement" to condemn a post like this (really awful, be warned) no matter who it's written about.
(Along with that, I have the responsibility to update my opinion as more information becomes available. In the Kathy Sierra incident, one of the site's creators took down the site, took responsibility, and apologized for how ugly everything had gotten. Ms. Sierra accepted this in an update to her blog post.)
I strongly object to having concerns about the climate created by such speech dismissed unless the speech crosses the line into illegality. I agree with this, also from the post on apophenia:
There's nothing illegal about what the prominent bloggers did, but i think it is unethical at every level. This is not an issue of censorship, but an issue of social responsibility. What does it mean when the most prominent bloggers are encouraging speech that divides, particularly that which divides along the lines of race and gender?
I care about what kind of world we live in, and I care how people's actions (including speech) contribute to that world. Mean, sexist, racist garbage online makes the world worse. Period.
Elisa Camahort, in her post A Day to Think About Your Blogging House Rules, makes these comments:
I do believe that each blogger and site owner should set policies and practices in place that refuse to accommodate or tolerate cyberabuse. I believe each blog or site owner is entitled to draw their own lines and enforce them.
If we've been laissez-faire until now (and we all probably have been at times), then now's the time to take it more seriously and stop the blogosphere from devolving into a racist, misogynistic, homophobic, just-plain-hateful space.
Coincidentally, I started thinking about these issues just the day before the Kathy Sierra post came to my attention. On Heroine Content, we have received so far three comments that have struck me as taking away from the conversation rather than adding to it.
The first (on my review of Tank Girl) said we should stop writing "feminist drivel" and go "save the spotted goat" or something worthwhile. Since I could not find any information online indicating that the spotted goat was imperiled and it was obvious that the commenter was not seriously trying to engage in dialogue, I deleted it.
The second comment disagreed strongly with Grace's assessment of Alien, in an extremely sarcastic fashion. Grace chose to publish it and respond.
The third comment said Grace must not have been paying attention to 300 (link to her review), that she had it all wrong, and that she would end up "stereotyped as a stupid feminist who sees everything as a personal attack because of your sex" if she didn't get with it. I don't mind disagreement, but if someone had spoken to a guest that way at a party at my house, I would have asked them to leave.
While I didn't want to step on Grace's toes and delete the comment, I saw it as exactly the kind of aggression that leads me to avoid reading the comments on feminist blogs, political blogs, current events blogs, and the local newspaper's website. This commenter had raised a substantive issue in her comment (how do you define rape?), but one that could have been raised in umpteen different ways without insulting Grace. I didn't want to have a project that we created as a positive, fun, constructive space to turn hostile. I don't want to put energy into a project that enables people to attack me and each other.
So I told Grace I didn't like the comment, but she should do with it as she saw fit. I still felt bad about it. The next day, I saw the Kathy Sierra post. The comment was still not published, so I asked Grace to hold it while I thought some more and drafted a comment policy for Heroine Content. This is what we agreed on, adapted from several sources:
Heroine Content is a feminist and anti-racist space. Comments, including constructive criticism, are welcome as long as they are respectful. You do not have to agree with all of our ideas in order to comment, but we expect civility. We are not interested in creating yet another space on the internet for people to abuse each other. Please stick to debating and criticizing ideas rather than personal attacks.
All comments are reviewed by the blog's authors before being published, and may be rejected if we don't feel they follow these guidelines. Our blog, our discretion.
And under that policy, the third comment will not be published. I don't feel like it's unfair to apply it retroactively, since grace has responded to the issue raised in another post. The commenter is welcome to respond to under the new guidelines. Unlike the group of bloggers who created two sites to harsh on other bloggers, I'm not likely to start a site with the express purpose of trashing others - but I'm also not willing to accept, condone, or encourage such behavior by allowing it to be published on a site that I administer. I'm not willing to let them use me to publish that kind of content. The comments we've received on Heroine Content have been far from the level of the posts and comments directed at Kathy Sierra, Maryam Scoble, etc. on the "satire" sites that ran so amok. But I'd rather start with and keep a clean slate.
Reasons:
First, often the person asking doesn't really care.
Second, often there is no time to answer, because the so-called greeting occurs when two people are crossing paths. By the time the askee can answer, the asker is long gone. Furthermore, the askee does not then have the opportunity to return the courtesy by asking how the asker is.
Third, given the first reason, if there IS time to answer, it often creates dishonestly. If the askee is doing poorly, a lie must be constructed due to the knowledge that the asker is not interested. No matter how bad life is, the askee has to say "I'm fine." Or, the askee must be ready with a routine answer to the question that mostly evades the question, and the routine answer is often a cliche:
- Hangin' in there.
- Any day above ground is a good day.
- I'll feel better when it's Friday.
I say we stamp out this infernal practice. There are plenty of ways to greet someone without resorting to insincere inquiries.
As soon as I have enough energy to take a shower, I'm gearing up.
I really like the Christian Science Monitor. However, like all papers, sometimes they write a bunch of junk. Make Your Blood Boil? Well, I Should Say! on Blog of the Moderate Left skewers the Monitor's recent article on parents having dance parties with their kids:
Slow down, trollop! A glass of wine? Music? The kids? Why, it’s like the wickedness scene in The Ten Commandments, only far more brazen!
Check out Things that crack me up, #4 on The Gimp Parade, which is one of my favorite top 10 lists ever:
I'd like to change the focus of stranger questions from "How fast can that thing go?" to "What's the biggest thing you've ever run over?"
My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots by Charlie Brooker is a review of a phone that I don't care about in the slightest, and yet I am delighted by the review:
The phone arrived the next day and immediately began elbowing me in the ribs. It seems to have been designed specifically to irritate anyone with a mind.
The Bad Student at Red Stapler will sound familiar to anyone who has experienced the wonder of the attempted upsell from a telephone customer service rep:
She read her script with such conviction and caring that for a moment, I almost believed that paying 79 cents a month for every hundred dollars I charged would solve all my life's problems and make me, for once, truly happy.
Search History is an xchd comic. To avoid spoiling the full effect, I will stop here.
And last but far from least in my heart, EVEN THE ARMADILLOS GOT NECK PROTECTION and THE CLOAK AND DAGGER MAGNUM PACKER from my beloved I'M ON YOUR COMPUTER. No one loves this blog as much as I do, but that shouldn't stop you from reading it.
I am a Six Apart groupie.
By "groupie" I don't mean I make myself available for sex to the employees of the company. That would be weird. I also do not follow them around the country and attend all of their speaking appearances. That would be expensive.
But I love Movable Type. Love it. I love Six Apart (6A) because they made it and support it. I don't even remember how I found out about MT, but when I saw it, I knew I wanted that. I gave the nice 6A people $40 to install it for me, and I have spent the last few happy years making it do what I want. Usually. And when it doesn't, I believe it has a good reason.
Now I'm having a baby. We heard the heartbeat Wednesday morning. It was a respectable 160 bpm techno beat and we're quite pleased with that. Since my family and friends all over the country, I can't imagine not blogging about this kid. Some people make scrapbooks or write diaries. I blog.
However, I don't really want my mom wandering over to this blog on a regular basis. I make it a policy never to blog anything that I would be ashamed for her to see, but I don't always have the same conversations with her that I do with my friends. And she dislikes profanity, so I don't feel like she should be subjected to it, but I'm not willing to refrain in my own space.
I could just set up another MT blog. Easy enough. But despite much experimenting with existing options and then actual development work on C-Man's part, I have yet to find a satisfactory solution for managing photo albums in MT. If I'm going to post 1 or 2 photos at a time, it's fine. But what if I have 10 birthday photos, or 12 from a grandparent visit? I should probably cull and only post the good ones, but I want options.
Enter Vox. My beloved 6A launched Vox last year, as a "don't be afraid of blogging" platform that feels (to me) a lot like Blogger and LiveJournal. Compared to those services, though, it makes managing photos and video easier. Since my digital camera takes movies, I imagine we'll be taking some. Vox also has a lot of cute, easy templates. I have a Vox account so I can comment on other blogs there, so it would be easy to just...be...sucked...in...
Except.
What if Vox doesn't last? What if they change it and I don't like it anymore? What if if I need to move my content, but I can't extract all the data that I've spent so much time entering, editing, and organizing?
This fear is not without basis in reality. Take my experience with Blogger.
I started on Blogger. I grew out of Blogger. I exported to MT, and it was fairly easy, since it was back in the olden days and I had no comments, photos, or categories. When Grace wanted to move from Blogger to MT, I told her it would be easy. I thought it would take about 12 minutes. It took about two weeks, and Cody had to use a bunch of his ninj4 skillz, and I didn't tell Grace how many hours I spent on it or how many nights I stayed up until midnight until it finally came over correctly. She was terribly patient given the difference between my initial estimate and the time it actually took.
During one stage of trying to export her photos, we changed her from blogspot publishing to FTP publishing. It didn't help us get the photos - and it also locked her out of updating her blog. Permanently. Despite repeated pleas to tech support. Despite Blogger's own documentation that stated if you switched, your blogspot domain would eventually be unlocked and you could reclaim it. Eventually, she managed to get them to delete her old blog. So instead of going to the old blog and finding its new home, visitors get a 404.
Blogger (on blogspot) is free, so perhaps you get what you pay for.
Vox is free.
Flickr, the photo sharing site, is free for a basic account, but I think you can also pay them for an upgraded account. As far as I can tell, Flickr kicks ass. It has all the features I could ever want in a photo sharing site, and then some, and they keep adding more. It would take all the thought out of managing photos and albums, and I could easily post to MT. But if Flickr changed, and I didn't like it anymore, could I get my data out? People can comment on photos, could I get those comments out in a usable format?
Another complicating factor: Flickr is owned by Yahoo, a company which in my opinion has historically had the worst online help and the most atrocious customer service of almost any business I've ever encountered. - even when I was paying them money for their services. If I needed help from Flickr, would I be able to get it? I can't believe it given my history with Yahoo.
I almost want someone to argue me out of my paranoia. It would be so EASY to use Vox and/or Flickr. For a baby blog, I don't even think I need that level of control that I want with my other blogs. A pre-made template and an easy interface is probably just fine. I have enough work to do on other web projects.
But it gives me chills to think about going through what Grace and I went through with Blogger, when the content in question is a record of memories of my child's life.
What to do?
Spammers,
You probably already know that I hate you for filling up my mailbox and the junk comment traps on my blogs. But aside from the massive time-suck of cleaning up that mess, I have another, more specific reason to hate you.
You have given me something in common with the Religious Right.
I know, it sounds like a wild accusation. How much can a Democrat-voting, tofu-eating, Equality Texas-donating, and a-bunch-of-other- liberal-stuff-I-can't- think-of-right-now- because-I'm-such-a- liberal-that-it-just- seems-normal-to-me-doing Austinite possibly have in common with the Religious Right?
WE BOTH HATE LOOKING AT YOUR NASTY PORN SPAM EVERY DAY AND WE THINK YOU'RE EVIL!
It's just pitiful, really. Get a job.
With all due respect, and I really mean that,
The Princess
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I know everyone and their Dog will have blogged this, but it just made me laugh so much.
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I think half is half is a good guide.
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I feel like getting some of these just to float in our hot tub. They're so cheery! Or, you could take them tubing on the river and then you might not lose your keys.
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It's all about Morgan Freeman.
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If anyone doesn't already know that Michael Moore is a liar, they need to catch up.
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Kids have smart things to say about marriage, too.
I love the Presenter's Contract in Andy Goodman's newsletter from last fall. If you do any public speaking, check it out. Especially #2.
Writing decent movie reviews is harder than it looks. I have some favorites among the ones I've written so far on Heroine Content. I feel like they're insightful, but also fun to read. Unfortunately, there are also a few that I find as entertaining as chewing on cardboard. When I'm ranting here about The Dog being a pain, it seems relatively easy to whip out a few funny sentences. When confronted with the task of writing a Serious Review that Raises Important Issues, my writing often comes out stiff and flavorless. And it can be hard not to get a little clumsy when you're trying to introduce character names as well as actor names while describing the plot.
However, I don't think I've written a sentence as bad as this one from Richard Schickel's review of Breach in Time Magazine:
Who knew how entertainingly, if sometimes scarily, bent Hanssen — brilliantly played in director Bully Ray's film by Chris Cooper — was?
How many minutes did it take your brain to put that sentence back together in a reasonable order?
For the record, so I can link to this post in the sidebar:
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Every week BabyCenter.com sends me an email telling me all about the baby's alleged state of development this week. It's my fault. I asked them to. I had no idea I would be wretchedly ill for 6 weeks (and counting) and consequently not care one whit about any information related to pregnancy or children. Contemplating the precious miracle of life sucks when you can't even wash your own hair.
The only part I pay attention to (since the advice on nutrition and fitness just makes me want to shake them) is the size they say the baby should be each week. They give you a measurement, and they also give you a comparison.
What the baby has been compared to so far:
- Week 6 = lentil pea
- Week 7 = raspberry
- Week 8 = kidney bean
- Week 9 = grape
- Week 10 = kumquat
- Week 11 = fig
- Week 12 = lime
My questions:
- Isn't a kidney bean smaller than a raspberry?
- Who the hell knows how big a kumquat is, anyway?
I'm just asking.
C-Man: Did you get any more sleep?
The Princess: No.
C-Man: Was it because of The Dog?
The Princess: No.
C-Man: Was it because you're a cut and run Democrat?
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I totally want that new Motorola phone.
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Short, friendly post with some good rules of thumb.
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The risks of drinking are quite serious.
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This is so not for the easily offended.
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This is when I start twitching and having nightmares.
- Purvis
- Zero
- Takeshi
- Charo
- Chablis
- Santana
- Orji
- Mungo
- Narcissus
- Tequila
- Lafayette
- Kleng
See how helpful baby name books are?
And just for the record, though they were not in the book, we have also eliminated Cujo, Ajax, Kojak, Meta, and Spanky McSpankpants.
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I can only hope my children will be this clear-sighted.
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