Daily Archives: October 14, 2003

Good Plugin; Great Legal Summary

I'll probably be installing the SimpleComments MT plugin soon. Merging Trackbacks & comments seems sensible to me, although I'm slightly concerned about whether it plays nice with the MT-Blacklist plugin.

But I have to admit that what I really love most about Simple Comments is the authors' summary of the MIT License which goes like this:

Like our other freeware, this plugin is released under the open-source MIT License. In plain English, that means you can do whatever you want with the software, including modifying it, selling it, or eating it, but we’re not responsible for anything that goes wrong.

Posted in Movable Type | Leave a comment

It’s When, Where AND How You Say It

Thanks to rc3, I found Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka, and its observations on “registers of conversations”. Which explains why rc3 is a good thing to read — it taps into pools I don't. Except that now I guess I'll be reading Danny O'Brien too…

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Posted in Blogs | 1 Comment

A Noble Attempt to Build Public Discourse Encounters a Major Obstacle: Fred Barnes

Monday evening I attended the U. Miami edition of The People Speak: America Debates its Role in the World which was a marquee edition of the 1000 or so related events being held around the country this fortnight.

The run-up to the meeting was not auspicious. Neither in some ways—mostly relating to the presence of Fred Barnes—was the meeting.

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Posted in Politics: US | 4 Comments

DKos Moves to Scoop

Daily Kos, the lively left-leaning political news and commentary site, is leaving Movable Type and switching to Scoop, which is the sort of community-building software I wrote about in the final section of my Habermas paper.

It's been suggested that blogs shouldn't have comments but that they should instead link to each other to make conversations more visible. The dKos move represents the radical counter to that view.

In the end, users will decide what they like best; in the interim there's plenty of room for both approaches, plus some arbitrage.

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