Blog Entries
Blog entries, here and from elsewhere.
Is the blogosphere good?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/10/2005 - 10:52Yesterday, friends came over to dinner and I introduced their daughter to MOOs. To quote the Wikipedia definition, “MOO is short for MUD object oriented and is a type of MUD text-based virtual reality system”. I am a big fan of MOOs, and it was the geek term that I used most often to glaze over the faces of my interlocutors before I started talking about blogs.
A lot has been written about MOOs. My Tiny Life, by Julian Dibbell, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, by Janet H. Murray, and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,
by Sherry Turkle each provide an interesting glimpse into MOOs. A friend of mine, Prof. David Jacobson teaches a college course on Social Relations in Cyberspace that goes into MOOs, as do many other professors, and has had many articles published in scholarly journals about the topic.
Tsunami Relief
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/09/2005 - 12:19For the past week or so, I've been meaning to write my thoughts about Tsunami relief, but I haven't gotten to it. This morning, I read a post in Michele's blog about tsunami relief that I encourage everyone to go check out. A donor has offered to donate a dollar to Oxfam for each comment posted.
Normally, I don't like these sort of things. It sounds a little bit too much like, 'If you send this email to that person Microsoft will give you $100', or the story of the boy that received 100,000 get well cards, and his family continues to receive them five years after the boy died.
What is the blogosphere? (Updated 01/08 9:30 PM EST)
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/08/2005 - 11:23In a comment to Sigmund, Carl and Alfred’s blog entry about male and female bloggers, Isabella commented that the blogosphere seemed, at least from her perspective as a woman, like high school.
This fits well with some thoughts that have been mulling over in my head over the past twenty-four hours. Yesterday afternoon I had a wonderful discussion with my daughter Mairead about parallels between France around the time of the French revolution and what is going on in the United States today.
Week in Review
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/08/2005 - 10:02It has been a rough week, Kim’s grandfather’s funeral, problems with one of my hosting services, getting a new website up and the hard disk on my laptop crashing. I’ve written about Kim’s grandfather’s funeral in several entries. I haven’t written about the website I’ve been working on. DemSpeak is based on CivicSpace, like so many of the sites I’ve been working on.
One of the advantages of CivicSpace is that you can enable many people to be contributors, or even administrators. A problem that this can create is that worse than being a site developed by committee, it can become a site developed by a committee of sorcerer’s apprentices, and as you approach launch, it can become a committee of panicking sorcerer’s apprentices. Despite all the panic and hard work, the site has turned out very well.
Tuesday update
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/04/2005 - 09:30Grieving Aldon writes web software ponders the internet as a news medium, thinks about tsunami relief, and considers run for State Democratic Chair.
I hope that some of the people randomly and briefly surfing this weblog through Blog Explosion will find the lead interesting enough to click on a link or two, and maybe even spend more than 30 seconds here.
