A variety of recent events, leading to the need to read comments threads at other blogs more than I usually do, have reminded me of the contribution made to this blog by commenters[1], regular and occasional. On almost any issue, I can count on getting incisive comments, both critical and supportive. And even though some of us get bad-tempered from time to time, the tone of debate has remained civilised and constructive. I’ve been pulled up from time to time by my commenters when I’ve lost my own temper, or tried out arguments that seemed clever to me, but turned out to be too-clever. Equally, I’ve been pleased to see, in recent disputes, that commenters who rarely agree with my position on the issues have supported my view of what constitutes legitimate debate as opposed to misrepresentation.

If you’ve been reading for a while, and thinking about posting a comment, why don’t you try it now? Anonymity is assured if you want it, and you won’t get an aggressively hostile response unless you deliberately set out to provoke it.

Anyway, thanks again to all the commenters who make such a big contribution to this blog, and thanks also to all my readers!

fn1. “Commenters” or “Commentators”? I’m not sure.

Although parenthood pushed him into blogging hiatus eighteen months ago, David Morgan has had time to attempt become a millionaire. He faced the $500 000 question last night, on the length of Mercury’s rotation, picked the right answer (88 days), but wisely decided not to risk the $250 000 he already had.

Congratulations on his success!

In another manifestation of the mysterious BlogGeist, my thought processes watching the show were almost exactly parallel to David’s. I had the same guess, and a similar calculation that the expected utility[1] of backing my judgement would be less than that of the certain quarter-mill.

fn1. Rank-dependent, for those who care about exactitude in these things.

Following complaints by readers, which I shared, I emailed my contact at the ABC about the fact that the sound from ABC programs is available only in RealPlayer. As I said in my email

The sound version of the talk is available on the ABC Website only in RealPlayer format. RealPlayer is a real pain – it’s hard to download the player without being harassed about paying for it and it seems to need upgrades every other week. If the site is going to have a single choice it should be Quicktime, but a better option would be to offer all three major formats. I can’t believe that this would be a huge effort compared to the cost of producing the content in the first place, including the time contributed by the ‘talent’.

Having complained about websites before, I expected, at best, an autogenerated reply. I was very surprised therefore, to get an immediate phone call from Paul Bolger of the ABC who explained the situation. Quicktime is ruled out because it can’t be operated in a way that stops downloading, which is problematic for the ABC because their programs typically contain copyrighted music (yet another thing wrong with copyright, IMO, but I digress). The initial choice of RealPlayer over WindowsMedia was based in part on the commendable desire not to extend Microsoft’s monopoly any further, but it’s likely that WMV format will be made avaiable sometime soon.

Meanwhile, there are more exotic possibilities such as MP3 (the problem again being the need to excise music content) and Icecast, a format derived from Ogg Vorbis an open free format of which I was vaguely aware, but have never used.

If anyone has any other suggestions, I’ll be glad to pass them on. In the meantime, I can only say that if this kind of responsiveness was par for the course, consumers would be a lot happier.[1]

fn1. The snarky economist at the back of my brain points out that, if this kind of responsiveness was par for the course, we’d all pay more. But I’m not convinced that the cutback in customer service symbolised by the rise of the call centre and automated phone response systems is economically efficient. First, I think there’s an externality effect. It’s hard (or at least I find it hard) to keep track of which companies and institutions are particularly bad and which are just having a bad day, so the general effect is to increase general dissatisfaction rather than dissatisfaction with a particular company. By contrast, I find it easy to remember and react (maybe overreact) to bad service on the premises. A second point is that you mostly call when you’re having problems, so the company has an incentive to get rid of you. In effect, by cutting back on consumer service after the event, it’s reneging on an implied term in the sale of contract, but you can only detect this if you already regret entering the contract in the first place. The cost for the company is that people with minor problems, who’d be grateful for having them fixed and would be a source of repeat business, are also annoyed by their bad treatment.

My blogtwin, Tim Dunlop will be writing a roundup of what’s happening in the blogworld for Margo Kingston’s Sydney Morning Herald Web Diary (which is already sort-of a blog, but also sort-of not – I can’t quite classify it). The name for Tim’s piece isn’t quite settled yet, but Tim’s leaning towards Blog Jam, which I also like. First appearance scheduled for next Wednesday.

My long-threatened change of hosts has finally come to pass. This is an occasion for lots of thanks. First, to Rob Corr who helped me make the move from Blogger to Movable Type, set me up on mentalspace and gave lots of technical support along the way. Second to everyone associated with mentalspace.ranters.net – I’ve enjoyed your company. And last but not least to Brad Choate, author, among many other things, of the marvellous Textile plugin for MT, who’s now doing my hosting, and guided me carefully through the process of transferring the blog.

In the process, I’ve managed to recover a large number of posts lost in the great database disaster . There’s still a gap of a couple of months (maybe I was hanging out with GWB in the Air Force Reserve), but I have hopes of restoring the entire blog in due course.

Please update bookmarks, links and so on.

The votes are in (53 of them, anyway) and the result is a resounding endorsement of the status quo. From the Australian daytime voting, it looked as if we might have to go to preferences, but a late surge from Western hemisphere voters produced an outright majority in favour of keeping “John Quiggin” as the name for this blog. The runner-up was “Quog” which was my least-favoured choice and attracted some negative comments from others.

This was interesting and I might try it again some time, just for fun.

In the Monday Message Board before last, I asked for suggestions for a possible name for this blog. When I started blogging, I didn’t really think too much about this. I knew I didn’t want to run a pseudonymous blog (disclaimer: some of my best friends are pseudonymous bloggers, or might be) so I just used my own name for the blog as well as when I signed my posts. But now I think a name for the blog might be a good idea. In addition, I’m interested in testing out polling plugins.

When I thought about it, my own idea for a name was “Honest disagreement”. It lacks the irony that most blognames seem to display, but it does give an idea of the kind of forum I hope to provide. Of the many suggestions by commenters, the two I liked best were “QED” and “Quog”. And of course, there’s the option, favored by at least some, of sticking to the existing name.

So, here’s my poll. The usual caveats apply. The results do not represent a scientific sample of anything and I am not bound to pay any attention to them if I don’t feel like it.

You must turn on JavaScript to view the PulsePoll. For tech support: co-laboratory

There’s been a good deal of debate on this blog about whether it’s appropriate to look at the motives of people who are making particular arguments (for example Lomborg and the environment), or whether you should take them at face value and respond to the arguments directly. Much the same debate has been taking place among US econobloggers, including Brad de Long and Arnold Kling. You can get started with Brad here.

My view is that motives matter. It’s very difficult to conduct a reasoned discussion with someone if you know they will lie, or distort the truth, whenever they get away with it. Hence, it’s important to distinguish between honest disagreement and propaganda and necessary to respond differently to one than to the other.

Update This post from Tim Lambert illustrates the point perfectly. It concerns an article by well-known pro-gun academic John Lott purporting to prove the correctness of some claims made by rightwing windbag Rush Limbaugh about media coverage of black quarterbacks in the NFL. As Lambert says

Even if all the data is correct and his regressions have been correctly calculated his analysis is not in the slightest bit persuasive. The reason is that his behaviour in the coding errors case suggests that he just keeps trying different models and just cherry picks the one that gives the result he wants. Would Lott want to get a result that supports Limbaugh? Well, check out this Mary Rosh posting:

You have got to download this paper. Lott has done an amazing piece here. Fits in perfectly with Rush Limbaughâs program today.

Tim’s site has more on the Lott/Rosh saga and the bizarre parallels with the case of antigun researcher Michael Bellisles. Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber has more on this (warning: Turn irony detectors on full before reading this post). Finally, for more on the problem of cherry-picking, aka “data mining”, read here, here and here. To spell it out, statistical results from someone you can trust to play by the rules are worth discussing, those from someone known to engage in data-mining/cherry-picking are not.

As you can see from the sidebar, my comments boxes have been extensively spammed, I assume by some sort of spambot. This could really be a threat to blogging – is anyone aware of countermeasures?

Meanwhile, please post lots of comments on different topics, to push this lowlife off my page and save me the trouble of deleting him manually.

On the Monday Message Board, Gianna asks “Are blogs chatrooms”, and observes:

my view is that perhaps blogs with comment facilities could be seen as chatrooms, though it puts the blogger more in the role of moderator than writer, i guess. but blogs without comment facilities are a bit of a stretch.

A closely related question came up on Tim Lambert’s blog, in reference to the increasingly-ludicrous John Lott, who refers to USENet discussion groups (arguably, the predecessors of blogs) as “Internet chat rooms”.

Obviously a blog isn’t a chatroom, and the presence of a comments facility doesn’t make it so. Political blogs like this one are intended as competition for mass media such as newspapers opinion-oriented magazines like Quadrant or The New Republic and the Op-Ed pages of newspapers, and have had at least some success in this role. If adding a comments facility to an online newspaper Op-Ed page makes a chatroom, then the New York Times is a chatroom.

What then, makes a chatroom a chatroom? To answer this, it’s best to go back to the original, Internet Relay Chat, which provided the most basic version. The distinguishing feature of IRC was that it provided a screen which refreshed automatically when ever anyone who was logged in typed something (more precisely, when they hit the “Return” key). This gives rise to the “room” metaphor – everyone “in the room” (that is, logged in) can “hear” everything said there. The subsequent developments of chatrooms (lists of who’s in the room, avatars, “getting a room” and so on) all follow from this.

Although I’m confident in the correctness of the above analysis, I should say that my total time spent in chatrooms would not amount to more than about three hours over the last fifteen years. I find them unutterably boring. I can see that they would provide an excellent venue for anonymous assignations, but attempting any discussion is like trying to hold a seminar in a crowded discotheque.

UpdateKen Parish picks me up on the sloppy statement in the original that blogs compete with newspapers. As he says (and as I’ve said in the past) blogs have a symbiotic/parasitic relationship with the news media. I’ve edited the post accordingly.