Hard-Learned Lesson: Don't Try to Censor A Blogger
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Memories fade, but the Internet is forever. Murry N. Gunty found that out the hard way this summer. Well known among Washington financiers, the head of Milestone Capital Management LLC ran afoul of bloggers for an attempt to censor a Web article about a 1992 incident in which he manipulated the...
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I asked for advice in reducing vitriol on this blog, and a couple of readers helpfully identified a source of the problem: me. They and many others didnât like my suggestion to require commenters to use their real name. Tartuffo wrote: âAs someone who has been on the Internet since 1981, from alt.flame to the [...].
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In March 2002, I made a bet with Martin Nisenholtz about the relative importance of weblogs and the New York Times. I was and am a blogger, and Martin worked then, as he does now, for the Times. For the actual terms of the bet, read the piece on the LongNow site, and a story I wrote to announce the bet. A few comments.  1. It seems now is the time to decide who won the bet, if either of us did. 2. The world that I hoped would come about did not. While blogs have broken many stories, they have not, in general, turned into the authoritative sources I hoped they would in 2002. When the blogosphere resembles journalism it's often the tabloid kind.  3. I wouldn't mind losing the bet. That is, I wouldn't mind if the Times fully embraced the web, and I suspect Martin wouldn't mind if blogs rose to the quality of the Times. 4. If the bet had been held a year later, it seems there would be a pretty good chance that Martin would have won the bet because they recently took down the firewall at the Times, allowing search engines to index the full content. In the past, articles would remain visible for a couple of weeks then you'd have to pay money to access them. I believe they have a special deal with Google and other crawlers that allow them to get past the membership wall. For most of 2007 the Times articles were behind the firewall, and were less likely to be pointed to (which is how they rise in rank at Google). 5. It certainly is fun to speculate, but the decision about who won belongs exclusively to the Long Now Foundation. They have to decide who determines what the top stories of 2007 are, and imho they should consult with search experts to determine how to do the queries. Apparently it makes a difference how you do it.  But ultimately it's their decision. 6. Whether Wikipedia has more or less results seems to be a sidebar to the bet, which only talks about blogs and the Times. 7. Another interesting sidebar is rich media. In 2002, before podcasting had taken hold, before YouTube existed, it would have been hard to forsee the story of the South Carolina beauty queen, or the Don't Tase Me Bro guy. Questions about the future are always framed in the context of the past. Did the question Martin and I asked have any value in 2007, or did it just say something about the world of 2002?   Update: Paul Boutin who arranged the bet, apparently in conjunction with Google (I didn't know this) in 2002, weighs in.
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If you've got a blog and a job, beware. The two sometimes don't go together, as many ex-workers are finding out. By Rachel Metz.
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The arrest of Fouad al-Farhan, one of the few bloggers to use his own name, may be an attempt to intimidate others.
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This week you'll learn about the resource needs that business bloggers will want to consider, and how to rally the troops behind a blogging initiative. As many bloggers have learned, blogging is fairly simple - but it's not effortless. By Steve Broback and DL Byron. 0724
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Try not to smile: A top spammer may be sentenced to hard time.
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Target to the blogosphere: youâre irrelevant.
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The most painful kind of generosity are the promises you cannot fulfill. The people who were once so grateful then turn on you, and your self-esteem is sure to take a beating.  Many years ago, in a fit of generosity, Dave Winer offered to host all early-bird adopters of editthispage.com free hosting of their weblogs. This included php.weblogs.com. Well Dave Winer recently announced that he was closing down the weblogs.com and editthispage.com websites. He no longer runs a company that can support these sites and they are a personal and financial strain on him.   I was disappointed, but I had no expectations that Dave would do this in perpetuity.  My momma taught me to keep my expectations low when it comes to free things. After all, Dave and I have never met, and I've only exchanged a couple of emails with him.   I had a feeling that something like this was going to happen because the site has suffering from poor performance this past month. So my contingency plan was to ship the weblog to a commercial hosting service like weblogger if need be. During the weekend, just before the site was cut off, and before any announcement by Dave, I moved my most important open source project to sourceforge, to http://adodb.sourceforge.net/.  Today I got an email from Lawrence, Userland's webmaster:  Subject:   php.weblogs.com  From:      "Lawrence Lee" deleted#userland.com Date:      Wed, June 16, 2004 1:46 am  To:        jlim#natsoft.com Priority:  Normal  Mailer:    Microsoft Office Outlook, Build 11.0.5510   We'll be continuing to host php.weblogs.com, we made special arrangements with Dave to keep it running.  Lawrence   I didn't ask for special treatment, so this is a pleasant surprise. Apparently the people at Userland decided to host this weblog and Dave emailed me, saying he had nothing to do with this decision. Of course I don't expect this offer to be permanent either, and I will deal with that when the time comes. The website's performance is still terrible though, and I have no expectations about this either.  For those who ever wondered what the icon below each post means, it's a graphic emoticon of how i feel. I think the jazz singer Billie Holiday is an appropriate image for this post; her songs are always bitter-sweet. It sure feels like Stormy Weather or Come Rain or Shine.  I would also like to thank those of you who emailed me privately about this issue. RSS seems the best  way to access this web-site at the moment, as it continues to go down at random times.
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When the social discovery site turns members' most trivial actions into unfolding "News Feeds," users rebel, and the company races to quiet their anger. Both sides learn a hard lesson about the illusory nature of online privacy. Commentary by Bruce Schneier.
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Comment is free: Rebecca Front: Being a liberal, loving parent doesn't mean letting your children turn into tyrants.
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MSN Spaces, Microsoft&#39;s new blogging service, has sparked a new game for some of its users: trying to circumvent its censorship controls.
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We take a look at some of the edgiest, most provocative blogs on the Web.
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If you look at the font of all wisdom - no, I don't mean Wikipedia, but Amazon - you will find stacks of books with titles like The Corporate Blogging Book, Blogging for Business, Blog Marketing and the rest.&nbsp; Whatever the title, the basic message is the same: if you're in business, you've got to be blogging.&nbsp; Because if you aren't, you're not "having the conversation" with your customers, which means, in turn, that you're not getting your message out or valuable comments back.  In many ways, an open source project is just like a business.&nbsp;
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Two recent cases have caused journalists and bloggers to fear a government crackdown on freedom of expression.
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I'm going to tell you about one of the biggest trolls of 2007. Now, I'm not talking about someone schooling HuSi or Slashdot. &nbsp; I'm not talking about someone rickrocking the comment boards at Newgrounds. I'm going to tell you about a troll of international scope. &nbsp;
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Blog: Writer is duped for the first time ever by a phishing attack; feels violated and ashamed