Blogs
Saturday evening links.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/23/2004 - 19:31Last night, I set up The Progressive Blog Alliance Aggregator. You can see recent blog entry from those PBA sites that I've been able to find the RSS feeds for. Currently there are around two dozen sites feeding this aggregator. As a general rule, it updates hourly.
One of the links I found there was Big Boys determined to Keep Their Guy in!. It is about a battle at the Plain Dealer about who they will endorse. There is more on the subject over at Daily Kos
Also, as I was searching , I found a pointer to Wolf packs for truth. I highly recommend this site.
The mathematics of BlogExplosion
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/23/2004 - 09:46Yesterday, I spent a couple hours surfing through BlogExplosioin and I hit an interesting wall.
You have visted all the active sites in rotation.
The rotation is set up so that you can only visit a site once per 24 hours. Please come back later to visit more pages.
This got my thinking. I have earned about 700 credits from surfing sites around 1400, and another 300 mystery credits. In return I’ve had about 1000 visits to my site. I still have a few credits left for people to come to my site, but when those credits are up, my site won’t be in the active rotation. Based on this, there are more credits being used up than are being created, so eventually, unless they make some changes, BlogExplosion will implode with no more sites available.
To a certain extent, I am already seeing this. The number of hits from BlogExplosion have been decreasing steadily over the past few days. Based on this decline, I expect that I’ll be getting traffic from BlogExplosion for about a week more, and then it will dry up altogether.
I am wondering what other people have observed.
A couple interesting websites
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/21/2004 - 20:50A survey of Internet Use for Political Information.
Very much worth checking out.
Book Recommendations
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/21/2004 - 20:07Over on a BlogExplosion blog, Psych Grad Mamma asked for a list of book recommendations. Here is what I came up with:
If you want some very enjoyable fiction that is very close to psychology, I highly recommend Irv Yalom's books,
When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession and
Lying on the Couch : A Novel. Of course, his book Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy is a classic, but that isn't fiction.
The Meta-Mastah Narrative
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/20/2004 - 11:04(Originally published in Greater Democracy)
Roger Hurwitz has provided some wonderful comments to Jock’s insightful commentary on the master narrative. He refers to Lyotard claiming that there are no longer master narratives. He questions if there is a Master, or ‘Mastah’ narrative, is there a slave narrative? He suggests that topology is the topic and suggests that we need to think about the role of self-organization.
Yet perhaps that gets to the crux of what Jock is saying. The master narrative, or perhaps meta-mastah narrative is about how changes in technology are affecting the dynamic between top down organization and bottom up organization. We saw this as a major dynamic in the Democratic presidential primaries. The Kerry campaign and the Bush campaign are both tilted more towards top down organization which is why the dynamic hasn’t been as apparent in the presidential election, but it is still there.
