In response to tireless lobbying from James Farrell, I’ve reintroduced Live Comment Preview. In limited tests works fine for me using Safari, and I hope it doesn’t break anyone’s user interface. Please advise if it causes any problems.

In a fairly standard example of thread-jacking/topic drift, my challenge to nominate disinterested scientists sceptical of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis veered rapidly off-track, turning quickly to the shortcomings of Hassan al-Turabi (a Sudanese politician, it appears). I’m posting this as a separate thread for the discussion beginning with this comment by Michael Burgess who observed, in response to Dave Ricardo,

While I don’t know what to think on the greenhouse issue, I do find it somewhat ironic that many of those who are usually so post-modern in their outlook (there is no objective truth etc and following Thomas Kuhn this applies as much in the physical sciences as it does in the social sciences etc) suddenly get very absolutist when it suits them.

I do think that before making such a claim, MB might reasonably have searched the site using the facility provided. He would have found many references to both left-wing and right-wing varieties of postmodernism, among which this is, I think the kindest (and it’s not very kind).

Anyway, as of now, I’m going to delete any further off-topic comments and side debates in the sceptics thread, and request that any discussion of Turabi and similar be directed here.

Both literally and metaphorically in today’s AFR (subscription required). There’s a frontpage story about a defamation action taken by a car dealer against the creator of a “dealerxsucks.com” site. The inside continuation of the story shares the page with a piece about Technorati and its woes, and the likelihood that one of the big search companies will make a takeover. And further on there’s a 1.5 page feature article lamenting the boringness of corporate blogs.

As I said in my Festival of Ideas piece, it’s striking that innovation is now flowing from the household sector (bloggers typing stuff in their spare room/study/lounge) to the business and government sectors rather than vice versa.

Comment spam seems to be resurgent at present, disappointingly since the nofollow tag ought to make it pointless. I deleted a whole bunch of the usual stuff today, at least the fraction that got through the Textdrive outer defences and my moderation rules. But there were a few I couldn’t make much sense of, like this one

I can’t work out what gives here. The spurious poster links back to msn.com, presumably not the source of this spam. Can anyone explain this to me.

Nicholas Gruen kindly alerted me to a security hole affecting all WordPress blogs, and Tim Lambert’s post reminds me that I should spread the word about the need to upgrade to version 1.5.1.3. My experience and Flute’s commenting at Tim’s is that it’s a very simple job (10 minutes or so) and if you’re starting at 1.5 there should be some additional stability benefits

… a club with one member.

The winner of the impromptu contest is my old friend Jim Birch. People naturally tried for a risqué analogy and that would have been my first thought, but none of them quite worked. Jim’s entry is simple but hits the nail on the head, I think.

For some reason, comments have stopped working. I (and presumably other readers) can post them but they don’t appear. I’m looking into this. Meanwhile, a prize for the best completion of the analogy

“A blog without comments is like …”

Update Comments appear to be back, so you can post your entries now

Further update I’ve now worked out what I was doing wrong. Blocking the IP number of some spammers caused all comments to disappear. Death to spammers!

Comments should now be working again, and I’ll try to avoid further interruptions

I just got a letter on impressive looking letterhead, from Domain Registry of America, offering to renew my domain name “johnquiggin.info” at fairly exorbitant rates. I don’t actually have this domain: out of a frivolous desire to be a dotcommer, I chose “johnquiggin.com”, rather than the more appropriate “johnquiggin.net” when I got my own domain from Dotster.

This looked like an Internet version of the old subscription invoice scam, and sure enough, it was. I was happy to find that one practitioner of this scam has been nailed in Canada

These guys give what looks like a physical address at 189 Queen St., Suite 209, Melbourne, so I’ve written to Consumer Affairs in Victoria, suggesting a visit.

I was going to respond to this piece by Margaret Simons about bloggers and journalists but, as often happens, Tim Dunlop has written exactly what I would have said, only better. This used to happen with such frequency that we coined the term ‘blogtwins’ and perhaps now that Tim is returning to Australia, the pattern will re-emerge.

Meanwhile the US Supreme Court has declined to hear a case in which journalists have appealed against a ruling that they should either reveal anonymous sources or go to jail. A noteworthy feature of the NY Times treatment of the story is the presentation of the issue in terms of whether journalists are entitled to special protection not available to bloggers. At the end of the story Rodney A. Smolla, dean of the University of Richmond School of Law is quoted as follows

The federal judiciary, from the Supreme Court down, has grown very skeptical of any claim that the institutional press is deserving of First Amendment protection over and above those of ordinary citizens … The rise of the Internet and blogger culture may have contributed to that. It makes it more difficult to draw lines between the traditional professional press and those who disseminate information from their home computers.

The failure of journalists to establish a special exemption raises the more general question of whether and when people should be compelled to reveal details of their private conversations. If constitutional limits are to be imposed on such questioning, it may be better to derive them from the right to privacy in general rather than the specific claims of the press. Alternatively, and perhaps preferably, it might be better for the legislature to provide a public interest exemption of some kind.

* And nowadays everyone does