Category: Random

With regard to the people who are slamming my comments on ‘the power of the incoming link’ [1 & 2] – could I just clarify that I was not talking about Stephen Den Beste… The theory – that the non-specific warblogger that I’ve referred to recently was Mr Den Beste – was first taken up I think by Flit and has now spread to a number of other sites, including Instapundit and Bitchpundit. Each of these sites has its own particularly charming stance on what I’ve said. But it’s all based on a false assumption, I’m afraid, because I wasn’t talking about him at all… As such I’m going to take Flit’s statement at face value and accept that the misunderstanding was not intentional and accept his pre-emptive apology…

There are a few things that I clearly still have to clarify… I’m talking about individuals having a different way to campaign for what they believe in – whatever ‘what they believe in’ might be. The fact that I’m left-of-centre clearly informs the things that I feel strongly about – the things that I’m prepared to campaign for. But essentially all I’m looking for is a way for a community of individuals to have more influence – more, but equal influence – on each other because I think that there have to be campaigning techniques that operate in addition to argument or debate… If you’re not convinced by the techniques I suggested, then that’s ok… I’m not trying to present a fait accompli…

One of the things that people have talked about is how I’m trying to restrict people’s freedom of expression so that only people who agree with my particular brand of politics can be heard. This is simply, bluntly, once and for all, just wrong. I believe that everyone should be able to stand up for what they believe in – I’m just suggesting a way in which people can do that. The approach I’ve suggested might be hideously flawed, but it doesn’t stop the individual concerned writing what they want on their site, nor does it stop anyone else linking to them. So i can’t see how it interferes with their freedom of speech at all, or how it isolates them. All it does it give some people a public way to register their protest without writing about it (and thus in a way promoting it) on their own sites.

I’ve had a lot of feedback on some of this stuff, and it’s been fairly mixed – the more sober stuff has been the most interesting – some people view it as a useful and poweful kind of protest, others think of it as against the idea of the web as a discursive space, and others think that such a view gives legal credibility to people who want to control incoming links to their commercial sites. Some of these I agree with – some of them I don’t… I’ve been less thrilled with the responses from people whose level of argument has been to criticise my teeth though or who describe anything they don’t agree with as “Saudi-Arabian-style”. My favourite one of these comments though has been the one that describes me as having, “a serious inferiority complex when it comes to learning from [my] moral and intellectual superiors.” I quite liked that one…

I’ve had issues with the levels of surveillance that are appearing in the UK for quite a while now. When I lived in Hampstead I remember remarking that there was no point between my front door and my desk at work where I was not on at least one camera. Every so often someone decides to celebrate the terrifying amount of cameras around us all and hey normally do that with a poster telling us all how safe we are now that we’re continually examined. Just recently a new poster started appearing around London, and frankly it’s terrifying beyond measure. It looks like the cover of a 1950s alien-invasion novel, and drips with the sentiments of 1984’s Big Brother posters. But it’s difficult to know what to complain about – the poster itself is more than a little distasteful, but at least it’s triggering a little alarm from liberal parts of the country. Without it we’d probably accept this stuff without a second thought…

An excerpt from an e-mail I sent yesterday – partially adapted for publishing on plasticbag.org– explaining why I think we need a campaigning or protest tool in excess of the simple publishing of opinions – perhaps along the lines of my proposed inbound link strategy…

Basically, I’m trying to work out if there is some kind of direct action or demonstration that one can do within the blogosphere other than simply express one’s opinions. I’m looking for another approach because of this double-bind: if you link to a person with extreme views in order to debunk them, then to an extent you’re actually promoting them – you’re sending traffic to them, you’re giving their views a certain legitimacy. But if you don’t link to them, and you don’t publically talk about them, then aren’t you like the man who lets evil flourish through his inaction? What’s the right thing to do?

I’m certainly not trying to set up rules of governance of the internet or regulate it – I’m just suggesting that if free speech is the only political tool at our disposal, then we’ll inevitably end up with people having to shout more and more loudly in order to be heard at all. The ambient volume therefore just escalates and drowns out more nuanced, less absolutist or dogmatic attitudes. It should be possible to express ones dissent (or horror) with some kind of silence, sit-in or direct action – something maybe a bit like the Beatles returning their MBE’s to Buckingham Palace…

Obviously this is not to say that the specific tactics I suggested are necessarily appropriate or the right way to go, but I think the motivation behind the idea is a good one, and I’d be interested in anyone else’s suggestions…

First things first – here’s a quick (rough) timeline of what happened from my perspective:

• 3.30pm Phil Gyford notices that something has gone wrong with the listing of plasticbag.org posts on Haddock blogs. My assumption? Something has gone wrong with haddock blogs…
• 3.40pm A quick glance at my RSS feed revealed that each and every link attribute on my RSS feed now read as ‘hacx0red’. My assumption? Someone has hacked into my server…
• 3.45pm In still logged into my Blogger account so I go and check the settings. There’s something very wrong going on – my password, my e-mail address and the URL for my site have been replaced with the word ‘hacx0red’. My assumption? Someone has hacked into my Blogger account…
  • Screenshot One
  • Screenshot Two
  • Screenshot Three

• 3.50pm Beacuse I’m nervous about logging out, I try logging in with a different user name in a different browser. This does not work. My assumption? The world’s gone freakin’ craaaazy…
• 3.53pm I start telling people that I think Blogger’s been hacked. People freak out.
• 4.00pm The UK’s weblogger mailing list becomes full of nervous people, and the information starts going out. Various people try to work out how to get in contact with Ev. We finally manage to get the word to Anil Dash who sends the word on further…
• 4.10pm Danny O’Brien and Phil Gyford are getting the word out to Scripting.com.

So where does this leave us? It leaves us nervous, I think. It leaves us with less faith than before that it’s safe to leave the collective writings of years in the hands of a centralised service like Blogger. What would be lost if 700,000 people lost days, weeks, months or years of writing at the same time? Significantly I think if there was an import / export facility to Blogger that would allow people to keep their own back-ups, then this would be less of an issue. In the meantime, I’m afraid I have to confess that while I’m very impressed by the speed of Blogger’s reaction, I’m not overly impressed by the stuff that they’ve written about the experience. I think it’s important that someone explains to us why we should not be worried by this hack on an archive of content that – after all – was created and belongs to each of us…

Further reading: Slashdot.org, Anil Dash, Quicktopic thread, Blogger Status.

October 26 I’ve had it with Linux! Regime Change has failed! Let’s think inside the box, people! It’s time to put the pedal to the paradigm! Join a sleeper cell, then quit and turn everyone in! Got war? Is our children learning? Mark my words, so you can find them later!” That’s right… I am Jenny McTagarthy, Girl Pirate! (You may have missed how big is my fan-base and a crush on Jenny…)

I’m looking for people to try out a new community project that I’ve been developing at work. It’s a completely new way of organising message-boards and I think potentially it’s quite exciting. If you wish to participate or are interested, then e-mail me at tom@plasticbag.org – it’s going to be of most interest to people who live in the UK…

So I was reading a post at Meg’s site called You – yes you – at the back: you may not talk in class. Best post title ever. Anyway… That’s not the point. I had a comment to make about it, so I went and started to write it, and then next thing you know it’s about a year and a half long and still incomplete. So like a fairly large seedling, I decided to transplant it to my site, intially for the normal part of the site, but then – you know what – it got even larger, so now it’s stuffed like an embarrassing piece of furniture in the attic of my site:

Who’s afraid of community participation?
The most interesting aspect about discussing “UK weblogging culture” is how uncomfortable people seem to be with the concept of being part of a “community” at all. Perhaps more fascinating still are the assumptions of what participating in a community involves…

Taken by young Jamie Cronin, this screen-cap from earlier today will forever preserve the day when the train from London-South Wales was delayed by a large inflatable hamburger on the line…

This is going to get old quite quickly I think. Not the cartoons themselves, but the fact that I’m planning to link to the new one each day for as long as they’re about weblogs and weblogging: Doonesbury Oct 22 2002.

So what does it mean when weblogs get into Doonesbury? Are we still radical (if we ever were)? Are we established now? Must the world bow down and worship those (me) who have been weblogging for a very very long time? Is Oprah next? As Murray Lachlan Young once said about fame – “Who’s my guru? Where’s my hamster?”