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Walk beside me
I'm little embarassed both that it has taken me this long and that I've done it at all, but I've just gone and joined Friendster! If we're, you know, "friends," I'm hoping that you might consider making that public. As it stands, fifteen minutes into this experiment, my "My Friends" list is absolutely empty. UPDATE: Thanks, Ellen.
No blogging but goats
Alas, no posting today, as a couple work projects and a one slightly mullet-esque haircut kept me busy. I've put up a video of New Jersey farm goats as a peace offering. If you've never heard goats make their "baa" noise in real life, I think you might be amazed. I sure was. It's totally ridiculous.
Park Slope, USA
I just logged on to Movielink, the site put together by major movie studios like MGM, Universal as a "for-fee" movie download service to compete with "for-free" BitTorrent and the like. The plan was to download "The Sacrifice Rule," a movie that I stumbled upon when looking through the registration directory for SXSW -- one of the brothers who made the film is going to be there. My credit card was out and I was ready to pay for it. Instead, I get this error message:
Thanks for your interest in Movielink, the leading movie download service. We want you to enjoy our powerful movie experience, but it is presently unavailable to users outside of the United States. And I'm in Brooklyn. Sweet, nice service.
SXSW
It's official! I'm all booked and registered for my first ever South by Southwest Interactive, March 10-14. I'm so very excited about this, as it combines three of my favorite things -- geeky pursuits, warmish weather, and what I hear is super tex-mex food. If you're going to be at SXSW, we don't know each other but you think we might get along, consider getting in touch, and perhaps we can share margaritas or the like at some point during the festival.
Also, I'm open to any and all advice about what else to do while I'm in Austin, besides this. That's so already on the list. I've been hearing about those crazy bats since I was a kid.
Choice and networks
I want to unpack some of the comments that came in responding to my post last week on MyDD about abortion. I had intended the post simply as a starting point for a discussion around the idea of making a better case for a liberal/progressive understanding of reproductive choice and many of the comments were, I thought, challenging and thought-provoking. A couple, in my estimation, perhaps over-read what I wrote as a criticism of women who get abortions, but I suspect that in large part that's my own fault. There were a few, though I think a minority, who seemed sympathetic to the idea that, as one commenter put it, the whole exercise amounted to "another round of tedious hand-wringing" that was not worthwhile because "Democrats are not losing elections" on the issue. I strongly disagree with that idea for a whole bunch of reasons. Most of them I'll have to save for another time.
But here's something that points to just one of them. The day after that post, I was reading Alberto-Laszlo Barabasi's book Linked on networks and connectivity and came across this passage on pro-choice and anti-choice websites. We might not want to talk about abortion, but the anti-choice folks sure do:
Lada Adamic, from Stanford University, recently investigated communities discovered by searching for the phrases "abortion--pro choice" and "abortion--pro life." The pro-life query resulted in a core of forty one-documents in which you could get from each page to the other ones. In contrast, the pro-choice movement was fragmented into many disconnected sites.
Such differences in the structure of competing communities have important consequences for their ability to market and organize themselves for a common cause. As Adamic notes, a campaign against the partial birth abortion bill launched from the middle of the pro-life cluster could easily reach other pro-life sites, since there are many links between them. Furthermore, due to the links on the pro-choice sites, the visitors of pro-choice sites would also learn about it. However, one would need to advertise at several disconnected pro-choice Websites to achieve an equally efficient campaign against the bill. Therefore, not only does the pro-life community have a better presence on the Web, it is also better organized -- its sites are more aware of each other. (emphasis added)
We might not want to "hand-wring" over abortion, fine and good. But while we're sitting around not discussing it amongst ourselves, the anti-choice folks are one weaving together one big old talky-talky network.
Turn and face the strain
Inspired by the redesign of TPM Cafe, big, big changes over here at nancyscola.com.
The first change is has to do with the overall structure of the site. I've instituted a new layout that combines short "link" posts (like the entries below on Brokeback Mountain and the NSA hearings) with these longer entries. The inspiration for this model is, of course, Jason Kottke, though folks like ThinkProgress are using it now as well. I tried it out in the past, but found that I wasn't updating the site frequently enough to have a two-kinda-posts system make sense. Now that I'm blogging more regularly, I'm hoping it will be an easy way to just highlight ideas and news that I find interesting or relevant. We'll see whether it works for this site. If not, it's out the door. Trial and error, that's how we make progress.
The second is that I've started to highlight the category tags -- like "Technology" or "Democrats" -- of these longer posts by placing them in blue boxes next to the comments. Conventional wisdom says that successful blogs have a tight focus. In my head, there's a strongly unifying theme to this site that has to do with culture and connectivity and the like; I'm hoping that theme will become clearer over time. But until that happens, I think that highlighting the general idea of each post will help serve as road signs along the journey.
And the third is that I've made the font a teeny bit smaller on these main posts. I've been writing longer posts than I thought I would, and I think the smaller font makes them more readable. There's no real reason for me to tell you that, other than that I like for things to come in threes.
Democratic lawyers
As the NSA hearings are getting underway, Noah Feldman's overview from yesterday's NY Times magazine makes me really hope tha t we have great Democratic legal minds thinking through all of the legalities of this thing. We don't, and we risk getting caught off-guard by a White House that has.
My take on the abortion debate
I've just posted some thoughts over on MyDD on how progressives talk about abortion, inspired by Katha Pollitt and William Saletan's really interesting "Is abortion bad?" Slate debate from this week. I hope you'll check it out.
UPDATE: We've been front-paged. Nice!
Shared culture
High on the list of things that I worry about regularly is that kids today, in the age of iPods and Tivo, are growing up without sharing cultural experiences with their peers. For me, the TV shows we all watched and the music we all listened to defines so much of what it was to grow up in northern New Jersey in the 1980's and 90's. (For whatever reason, two cultural touchstones pop into my head every time I worry about this: (1) the radio station Z100; and (2) a song they played over and over every December called "Dominic the Italian Christmas Donkey".)
The Christian Science Monitor is similarly worried, on a national scale, and has put together a list of ten still widely-shared cultural experiences. Some make a lot of sense, like the Super Bowl and Harry Potter. But number 10 suprised me -- U2. I have to wonder if they made it on just because of their music or because Bono seems to be here and there and everywhere these days. Still, they rock, so no harm in that. (via Jason Kottke)
An experiment in links
Quite often in my Internets travels, I come across blog posts, articles, and
other online stuff that I find supremely interesting but aren't worth writing
up a whole dang post about. Still, I care about you and want to share this material
with you in some way. (I'm compassionate like that, as evidenced by my rather
extraordinary score of 56 on this scientific-ish online
empathy test. I found the test via Matt
Yglesias, who scored a significantly below-average 14. I'm not sure what to do with that.) To that end,
I'm going to try occasionally pulling together those links and posting them
for your enjoyment. Yup, I know it's been done elsewhere online, but it's new
to me. Here's our first attempt:
- Dan "citizen media" Gillmor himself points to
this Mercury News three-year investigation of the Santa Clara county court
system as evidence of why "We
Still Need Big Media."
- Stirling Newberry says that Daily Kos has jumped the shark (a phrase that
I could happily live the rest of my life never hearing again) and has devolved into a "screamsphere."
He's never going back there, he says.
- The Nation has a piece by Jeff Faux called "The
Party of Davos" that sketches out the idea of a governing global elite,
separated from the rest of us schmucks by class. I'm sympathetic to the idea,
but Faux doesn't really bring the steak to the party, if you know what I'm
saying.
And there we have it.
Making sense of the President
Via Kevin Drum, PZ Myers offers an explanation of the absolutely strangest moment of last night's speech, Bush's talk about "animal-human hybirds." Apparently, scientists really are injecting mice and such with people genes, creating "chimeras" that are used to research disorders like Down Syndrome. Myers writes:
Creating chimeras is legitimate and useful scientific research; it's really happening. Of course, it isn't with the intent of creating monstrous half-animal/half-human slaves or something evil like that, and scientists are well aware (or should be well aware) of the ethical concerns, and it's the topic of ongoing debate. If you guessed that this is an issue that religious conservatives have on their radar screen, bingo.
It's somewhat amazing to me that we live in a time when the President of the United States uses an incredibly loaded phrase during a State of the Union address only a small minority of the American population could reasonably be expected to understand. He really is quite the uniter, isn't he?
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