ADV: Spam Spam & E-Mail5/2/2000; 11:16:30 PM Feb 23, 2000: I can't believe it; I just recieved my first spam marked ADV:, in accordence with the new Colorado law. Wow.Of course, it was addressed "Dear Golf Club Express Member" or some such... and I don't do golf, and I've never told anything that I do. *sigh*

Microsoft's ActiveX Too Active? Misc.5/2/2000; 11:14:29 PM Feb 23, 2000: Microsoft says it will fix its ActiveX installation program after a Spanish Web developer discovered that it modifies users' computers without asking for their permission."Why do so many companies think that as soon as you run their installation program, they can do anything they want to your computer? Why does Real Player install 7 icons and take over the treatment of 10-15 file types, without ever asking? Does this violate any concievable rights we may have?

Michigan town votes down library Net filtering
Censorship
5/2/2000; 11:13:20 PM Feb 23, 2000: "Unofficial results showed that residents here voted 4,379 to 3,626 against the proposal, which would have cut off funding to the library unless the filters were installed."

Wow, cool! I have to admit I fully expected it to pass with flying colors. The town in question is probably the most conservative city in Michigan, providing balance to our Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan and everything liberal.

News, Views and a Silicon Valley Diary
Privacy from Companies
5/2/2000; 11:10:06 PM Feb 23, 2000: "I've been making it a point lately to test the privacy features of Web sites and other kinds of interactions I have with businesses. I do this both because I want to guard my own privacy, and to collect data for this journal.

"The latest news is, I'm not surprised to say, the usual dismal stuff."

Grim Reaper's Age Guesser Humor/Amusing5/2/2000; 11:08:51 PM Feb 23, 2000: via array, via pith and vinegar, via Bradlands.Actually, I'm not terribly impressed. If you examine the weights it gives, then it draws the vast majority of the information from the two tell-tale questions. If I had been less honest about my facial complexion, it would have been horribly, horribly wrong. Derive what you can from that statement. OK, OK, I admit it, I just wanted a "via" chain of 3. Anyone care to go further?

More Thoughts on ETP as Community Internet/Weblog Culture5/2/2000; 11:07:05 PM Feb 22, 2000: On Deciding... Better: "And there's respect and politeness here. I don't know how we get along without alcohol as social lubricant."I'll take a shot at that. Weblog community-links along which negative energy flows tend to break themselves. Rather then leaving two antagonists in a more conventional community, neither of whom will leave and neither of whom will back down, the link between the two will simply sever... possibly with a great deal of noise and smoke, but sever it will. *Shazam*, no more contact, yet the meta-community remains more-or-less intact, and is even better off for having less negative energy flowing through it. Weblog community-links along which positive energy flows will tend to reinforce themselves; we see this in the list of links to other weblogs which seem almost redundent because the 'blogger links to them so often anyhow. It's not redundency, it's a sign of the strength of the bond between the two community-units.This implies that to be fair I need to create my own list of blogs-I-like. I'll get to that sometime, I guess.This might explain the difficulty in getting a decent discussion going in these communities; those likely to post are likely to already have their own weblog, and do it there instead.Expect me to mumble some more about communities in the future. I like what I see here; a bunch of people, communicating, a system that encourages polite behavior (or you are ignored, even more so then on the Usenet). New dynamics at work! Not totally new, of course, but new nevertheless. I like this. I don't just want iRights to explore the wrong ways of doing business, like Boundary Breakers, I want to explore the right ways too, which is hard to do when you just read the news .I used to think weblogs were over-rated, even avoided the term, because I agree with those who say that this is not a fundamentally new type of web site, and they are nothing to get excited about. The community that may form from a large number of people using them, however, may just be something to get excited about.

EditThisPage.com: We ARE a Community
Internet/Weblog Culture
5/2/2000; 11:03:17 PM Feb 22, 2000: "Is Edit.This.Page.com a community? Or are we just a collection of individuals--men and women isolated on lonely islands (or weblogs)?" A good wrap up to today's "conversation".

Carpe Diem Commentary Internet/Weblog Culture5/2/2000; 11:01:40 PM Feb 22, 2000: "Jeremy compares the Reality Check experiment with the EditThisPage.com community. That's interesting, but I'm not sure the comparison is valid." I agree... the comparision isn't valid, esp. in the technical sense of the term. Some of the ideas can be applied, though."As a community of webloggers, are we participating in a great dialogue or are we each just engaging in self-gratification with our monologues?" Yes. Both. It is the mixture that is interesting. I choose to respond to David. I could have ignored him, and it would seem I never saw it; at least, you'd never be able to prove otherwise. Small communities can form around specific weblogs (even 'communities' of one), keeping some of the small feel, yet interacting within a larger community, gaining some of the benefits of the larger community.The study I brought up because it challenges some of the assumptions of the necessities for good community. It helps to be identified (as we are), it's good to stay small. In a sense, ETP retains that advantage by spontaneously connecting communities as necessary, just as today, Carpe Diem and On Deciding... Better, yet today we form a larger community via those connections. That is what I found interesting. Benefits of small communities, as the study outlines, yet together, we form a large one.From the study: "In fact, the chaos of the bulletin board and the chat room can have a profoundly negative effect upon the overall quality of conversation, a new study concludes. But when the talk moves into a less freewheeling environment, the level of the debate seems to improve." ETP shares characteristics of both, and I don't know of any other similar situations, except for other weblogs communities (inasmuch as you can even draw a line).From On Deciding... Better: "ETP on the other hand is a community where each individual has full autonomy and each person's node is fully owned by that person. Our nodes then have shifting interactions in which you have to listen to a variety of sites to participate in the conversation." How should we find these sites, I wonder? We should answer that question if this community is to develop... as things now, we naturally form cliques, where Q checks T's site daily, and misses P's insightful comment ompletely, having never checked P's site.Here's a thought... I'll work on this when I get time if nobody else beats me to it. How about a Javascriptlet that takes a link and automatically runs a search for other pages mentioning that link using the Weblogs.com search feature? It's not a perfect solution, but it might be a start. Esp. since you could easily include this in your own page.Here's an example of what I mean: Everybody Who's Talking About This Article (As you'll see, there's at least one unrelated link from somebody simply mirroring Wired's feed... we need something better I think.)Update on April 2, 2000: This thought train was a clear precursor to the linkback program.

Resurrecting a Dying Art Internet/Weblog Culture5/2/2000; 10:57:47 PM Feb 22, 2000: "In fact, the chaos of the bulletin board and the chat room can have a profoundly negative effect upon the overall quality of conversation, a new study concludes. But when the talk moves into a less freewheeling environment, the level of the debate seems to improve. . . Unlike the dissonant interaction of public bulletin boards and chats, Reality Check tried to create online spaces where the participants have a sense of ownership and belonging."Sound familiar? This describes the ETP community to a T. We each have our own space. We are not anonymous. Quality runs high among those who actually try. If you find ETP an interesting community effort, you should read that whole article; it has a lot that is relevent. ETP is a distributed community, and that may be something fairly new. "Distributed community"... now there's a phrase that needs explaining.