Category Archives: Discourse.net

I'm going to be away for most of the period between July 26 and August 6. For the first few days I will be at the Internet Meltdown event, and might blog a little from there if the wifi is working. But after that blogging could be very sparse: I'll be back in Miami but not in my house since the construction will have temporarily taken over. Then I'll be at a Berkman Center conference.

My colleague George Mundstock has heroically volunteered to step into the breach as a guest blogger (starting this week), which should be fun. George is a guy who knows numbers. He's a tax lawyer, and an expert on accounting, but if you met him it would undoubtedly destroy any stereotypes you had of what tax lawyers are like. George is the antithesis of stuffy. He's wickedly funny. He has wildly iconoclastic taste in music. He learned to program on an IBM 1130 and runs Linux (SuSE) at home. And he cares about tax policy. So I've created a new category Law:Tax just for him.

George joined the UM faculty long before I did, and a few years ago his achievements were recognized with the offer of a prestigious chair at the University of Minnesota. Since that's reputed to be a good school, and since his family was from around there, George moved, leaving a very George-sized hole in our faculty. Last year, to our delight, he decided that he wanted to come back—the perfect answer to the vast George-sized hole we had yet to fill. As I was chair of the Promotion and Tenure committee last year, my share of the bureaucracy necessary to rehire him involved me assembling his weighty publications and reading through years of his teaching evaluations. The teaching evaluations were humbling: students love him and apparently love his quirky humor too.

If I had to guess, I'd bet that George's politics are somewhere to the right of mine, but I'm not really sure. I have no idea what party if any he belongs to. He's interesting. He's going to have fun doing this, and I think people who read this blog will find what he has to say as stimulating as we at UM do.

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I misconfigured MT-Blacklist, and it blocked all comments for a day. It's fixed now. Sorry about that.

I need one of these.

Wishlist: the million monkeys at a million typewriters plugin | A Whole Lotta Nothing: I want a MT plugin that will let a select group of my closest, most trusted friends correct typos in text and URLs on my blog posts and republish their changes without my intervention. …

Ideally, I'd like an easy way to say that 4 or 5 people I trust could make edits. And I suppose the edits should be checked before and after, with a certain byte count limit, lest you allow your friends to completely rewrite your post. An email telling me what took place would be nice, but I'd like my friends to go ahead and save their changes, with a way for me to rescue the earlier pre-edit entry just in case.

Actually, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to allow anyone to suggest an edit on the post, sending me an email, with a one-click way to approve or disapprove it. Maybe after a random stranger has properly corrected me half a dozen times, I could elevate their status to having republish rights on the edits so I wouldn't have to approve them anymore.

A plugin like this would basically wiki-ize the weblog world, allowing readers to participate and correct small mistakes.

Yes, please! (spotted via Boing Boing)

Feedburner, the folks who despite being in 'pre-alpha' deployment provide my RDF and XML feeds, have a new gimmick they call a Headline Animator. Basically, they encourage users to put the following into the signature of every email:

Won't work for PINE users like me, but we're a rare breed.

Question: would this be an obnoxious thing to put in emails? Generally I don't like my emails to flicker at me. So I'm leaning against it. But it is sort of tempting.

I read an awful lot of blogs via an aggregator, which means that I only get exposed to the comments if I do some clicking. I know from the feedburner logs that a substantial fraction of the readers of this blog do the same thing. That's certainly fine—that's what the feed is for. But I thought I ought to mention to long-time readers that in the past couple of weeks the comments have heated up, and that overall the discussion on some of the more active threads has been both meaty and (with minor exceptions) breathtakingly respectful. I'm impressed, and you might be too.

So far I have had no need to revise my comments policy although of course I'm always open to suggestions on that or anything else. (The one exception may be “would you add this blog I just found to the blogroll” — I blogroll only the sites I read or scan via the aggregator. I'm certainly happy to hear about new sites, but rarely list them until I decide if I'm going to be a daily reader.)

I should also mention that I have closed the comments on a very small number of ancient posts because they were being repeatedly targeted by comment spammers. They must all be in cahoots.

I am very deeply grateful for all the kind comments and email that people have been sending me in response to my recent blog posts. And the traffic spike — about four times the old volume — is most welcome. Plus it's also fun to have so many new links that, however temporarily, discourse.net has been promoted to a Large Mammal in the Truth Laid Bear EcoSystem (#343 on links, #66 (!!) on traffic).

One thing that I especially appreciate is being linked to by Ken MacLeod, who is just an amazingly wonderful science fiction writer. (Pity it has to be part of MacLeod's elegy for a better nation.) I think MacLeod's The Cassini Division is one of the best science fiction books of its decade (at least), and the whole series of which it forms a part is wonderful…even if I never did quite fit all the parts together…even if he says in one of his prefaces that we weren't supposed to be able to…

OK. Enough of that self-referential guff. Off to do some reading. Next post will be substantive, promise.

Update (6/16): This can't last, but today the stats are #243 for links and #34 for traffic.