Category: Internet Culture and Technology

What is a blog, really?

Janice P. talked to me about blogging for an article for a McMaster publication and we got talking about guilt and blogging. Like the journals I used to keep and the research note books I kept up until I started this blog, I feel guilty if I don’t post on a regular basis (lets say once a week.)

On her blog she comments on guilt and blog death. (Hi JP!)

I wonder if the blog hasn’t reopened all our worries around journals and immortalizing everyday thoughts. Someone must have written on this.
Continue reading Blogging and Janice’s blog

Spam is a page of essays on Spam by Paul Graham that are well thought out and reflect the complexity of the problem. I like his comparison of solutions.

dodgeit – free. receive-only. email. no set up. rss. This is like the skiprock idea, but better. You can get your e-mail as an RSS feed.

The CyberFrontier and America at the Turn of the 21st Century is an article on First Monday that deals with the adaptation of Turner’s ideas about the “frontier” as important to American identity to the Internet. It is interesting how the myth of the frontier played out in ideology for the net.

In an article by Fred von Lohmann, the attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the issue of all the RIAA suits against individuals who are file swapping is discussed. Lohmann, inRIAA’s college lawsuits a wrong answer | CNET News.com, argues that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 makes people guilty until proven innocent because organizations can get subpoenas automatically by “merely making allegations of infringement.” (In other words, the federal court issues them automatically without review of a judge or a lawsuit being filed.) Universities are responding to these subpoenas that they don’t know who is responsible for the IP address, since they are assigned dynamically. Thus universities can’t help the RIAA – one wonders if universities are setting up their systems so they cannot know who used the offending IP address to frustrate the RIAA.
Continue reading RIAA and P2P Music

Mark Poster – University of California, Irvine has a book out on _What’s the Matter with the Internet_.
Continue reading Poster and the Matter with the Internet

Matt Kirschenbaumn has a blog at http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/blog/. Neat stuff.

He also references are report that John Maeda and Katherine Hayles participating on Beyond Productivity.
Continue reading Blogs and Humanities Computikng

Dave Winer (of Userland) has written a piece on What makes a weblog a weblog?
Continue reading What is a Weblog?

konspire2b, described here in a slashdot post,A Blog With Unlimited Bandwidth (Beta 1.2), is a peer to peer blog with possibilities for distributed archiving.
Continue reading konspire2b