Over at Club Troppo, they’re running the Best blog posts of 2007 competition. Selected posts will be republished in Online Opinion. Nominate your favorites here or elsewhere in the Ozblogosphere
Category: Metablogging
Simon Jackman calls the result
There was a lot of speculation about the role of blogs and the Intertubes more generally would have in this election, mostly focusing on the political commentary role of blogs like this one. As it’s turned out, the campaign has been so soporific that neither blogs nor conventional media have had an awful lot to say about it. The stars of the show have been psephological blogs such as Pollbludger, Possum’s Pollytics, Mumble and Bryan Palmer. Showing the borderless nature of the blogosphere, one of the best such sites comes from the other side of the Pacific. Simon Jackman at Stanford has prepared a comprehensive pooled analysis of the polls which is well worth reading.
Gary Kamiya on civilised discussion
For a long time, I’ve insisted on civilised discussion on this blog, to the point of banning coarse language, not because I don’t allow such words to pass my own lips but because I think it tends to encourage flaming and other such behavior. I may not have done a perfect job, particularly as I tend not to follow the kind of long-running interchange between two or three commenters where flames emerge, but I hope the place is a bit less offputting in this respect than a lot of other blogs. It’s nice to get some reinforcement in this view and here is a piece from Gary Kamiya at Salon.
LP attacked by spammers
Mark Bahnisch of Larvatus Prodeo writes:
Hi folks
We’ve had major problems over the last few days with a spam attack of
unprecedented size, which has rendered LP almost unusable due to
constant database errors. We’ll be upgrading and moving to a new host
over the weekend (at which point we’ll disappear altogether for a few
days).
Basically, the increased traffic we’ve had since the election began
(up by about a third on normal) has made us a more attractive target
to spammers.
In the meantime, we’ve found turning comments off keeps the site
working as the spammers posting comments is the cause of too many
database connections open at once – hence the outages. We’ve picked
the new host for greater reliability as well as more bandwidth.
In the meantime, we’ve set up a backup blog – LP in Exile – where
we’ll be crossposting and where comments can be posted:
http://larvatusprodeo.wordpress.com/
We’re also appealing for donations to assist with costs involved in the move:
Half a metaphor
I’m writing a piece (in the form of a debate with Jason Potts) on the Internet and non-market innovation (open source, blogs, wikis and Web 2.0 more generally) and the editors asked us to say something about digital literacy. I’ve never paid much attention to this metaphor, maybe because of excessive exposure to its predecessor, computer literacy.
It strikes me though, that discussion of digital literacy focuses almost entirely on reading (how to navigate the Web, find reliable information and so on). The things I’m talking about are forms of writing.
Thinking about the rise of text literacy, the distinction tends to be blurred a bit, because most (not all) people who learn to read also learn to write. Still, there’s plenty of discussion of the importance of writing to groups (women, working people) traditionally excluded from written culture.
So, I’m surprised at the neglect of this point in relation to digital literacy, especially because the Internet has done so much to break down the asymmetry between a small group of writers and a large group of readers that characterises most communications media. Having said this, I’m sure this point has been made many times before, and I invite readers to write in with good references.
As an aside, “computer literacy” programs in the late 70s and early 80s had, if anything, the opposite problem. Lots of emphasis on how to code in BASIC and very little appreciation of the potential for computers as tools for general use.
Straight to the poolroom
A little flap between Crooked Timber and Andrew Sullivan has led to the unearthing of this gem from 2004, which is going to the testimonials bar as soon as I get a round tuit.
What John Quiggin desires is Orwellian Newspeak, with Mr Quiggin and his friends at Crooked Timber being the Inner Party deciding the rules
False positives
While the changes have improved the performance of the blog in many respects, one problem is that I’m now relying on Akismet to detect spam, which produces lots of false positives. The first-best solution would be lock every spammer on the planet far away from any Internet-connected device. Since that won’t happen, I’m inviting commenters whose comments disappear into Akismet limbo to email me and I will try to extract them (no promises on this, but I’ll do my best).
Changes
In hopes of improving the site’s woeful performance, I’ve made a few changes, including upgrading to WordPress 2.3. I also changed back to the red theme I had a while back. Most significantly, I’ve removed login requirements. I’m hoping that I’ve been inaccessible to spammers long enough to have reduced the flow to a level Akismet can handle. Please advise if problems with loading the page are better, worse or (most likely, I guess) unchanged.
Update 2/10/07 9pm After some ups and downs it looks as if things are working better. Please comment and advise either way
Australian Blogging Conference
I’ll be talking today at the Australian blogging conference, at the Kelvin Grove Campus of QUT. More details here
Downtime
The blog was pretty much out of action over the weekend owing to problems with my antispam software. I’ve fixed the worst of them, but I’ll need to do a bit more, so posting may be light. If there’s anyone reading who’d like to act as technical support for me, I’m very much open to offers.
John Quiggin 