iRights is dead... long live iRights

2003-12-03

iRights is dead.

The mission of this weblog since Jan. 2000 has been to track the development of rights on the Internet. I've been eclipsed in every significant way by people with more time and perhaps more importantly, more real domain knowlege. LawMeme, Groklaw, Privacy Digest, and many other sites are doing a better job then I can.

With the publication of my Communication Ethics essay, I no longer have very much significant to say in this domain, other then occasional references to the essay. To me, it's a sign of the maturity of the piece that I have felt no great desire to modify it, or encountered a situation that I find the ethics espoused in that essay, but it makes for a rather boring weblog.

I feel constrained by the fact that I have declared a format for the weblog. I find myself making posts on Slashdot that belong here, even though they are not "rights" based. So I'm retooling this weblog to become the standard "generic" weblog, posting what I want, when I want. (It's not like I've ever been 100% on topic, but I've tried.)

Thus, I am making the following changes:

The name of this weblog will now officially be "iRi". This is close enough to the original that current links to the weblog aren't obviously wrong, it honors the heritage of the weblog, it means nothing in particular so it need not constrain me, and I'm incompetent at naming things, so it will have to do. It is pronounced the same as the word "eery".
The tagline, recently changed to "How do we translate 18th century rights into a 21st century framework?", is now changed to "Tagline pending". I feel that I've given a 90% answer to the question, and while I'm sure I'll continue to tweak it, it's no longer worth an entire weblog.
The URL will not change, on the philosophy of not causing dead links, but a redirect will (eventually) be put into place redirecting this site to /iRi instead of /irights.

This weblog will now focus more on my musings (as in my writings; if you like those you'll continue to like my weblog, I hope, I won't just post anything and everything), my development work (about which more in a future post), and more general world topics (reconnecting to the weblog world). If you do not like this, now's your chance to unsubscribe ;-)

Here's to new names, and new beginnings!