It’s the Gillmor Group now, but the gang is the same.
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That’s all it took. I approved one spammer I didn’t know was a spammer and now I’ve got to flag as spam a growing pile of comments to this blog. I just killed three a few minutes ago. There will be a dozen before the day is out. I’m sure the number will continue to grow
The same thing happened with the VRM mail list. There are so many bogus requests to post to that list that I can’t keep up with them. I suppose there is some irony in that.
Spam killed my old podcast blog. Never did much podcasting anyway. Spam also paralyzed IT Garage. I haven’t posted there since July.
My mail is buried in spam too, but I hope to fix that soon, along with other problems at searls.com. Meanwhile, I’ll give thanks for that which isn’t spam in the world. The percentage seems to be decreasing.
I was interviewed by Aaron Strout yesterday, about many things. The podcast is up.
Just got into Chicago, and now I’m sitting in seat 4F, at the window, camera at my side, while the rest of the passengeriat boards the 737.
Beautiful view of Toronto, Hamilton, Southern Ontario, Lake Huron and Central Michigan after clearing the clouds in Central New York. Got some pix I’ll put up later.
Can’t get to my point, Have to turn this off. durn.
Okay, we’re en route to Atlanta, and permission has just been granted to use laptops and other “approved electronic devices”. These do not include “all electronic devices including two way radios using cellular wi-fi technology”. The technical among you will know that the last phrase was not written by a technical expert.
Anyway, my point, two paragraphs up, was that these prohibitions, while serious in one way, are silly in others. I’d bet that most of the open laptops on this plane have wi-fi on by default, putting out whatever little signal that involves. I have my wi-fi turned off, which spares the battery in any case.
More to my point about silliness, for the first time ever I was told by a flight attendant to turn off my camera, presumably because it is an “electronic device”. I can only assume, because I didn’t ask. Her pissy and reproachful tone made it clear that asking questions would not be helpful. So I complied. Meanwhile we crossed the north shore of Chicago, with brilliant fall colors and many scenes I would like to have shot, but alas. Not big as deals go, but still annoying. The risk to the aircraft caused by my shooting pictures out the window is exactly zero. The benefits to the airline exceed that, though perhaps not by much.
I’ll check when I get to the hotel, but I’ll bet that about half of the 17,000 or so pictures I’ve put up on Flickr were shot out of plane windows. (Later… 4303 are labeled “aerial”.) A lot are blah, but more than a few are pretty darn good. Including many shot on approach or take-off.
And now I’m in Atlanta, at Apachecon, working.
Just paid one of my too-infrequent visits to Steve Urquhart’s blog, and found that the dude used to be a boxer. A sample:
| After the 3 rounds, the judges scored the fight 2-1 for Broadhead. One of the judges put me up for the night. He told me, “You know, I had one round for each of you, going into the third. And the third round was very close. But, in good conscience, I just couldn’t give the fight to someone covered with so much of his own blood.” |
I dunno if that was before or after Steve became an attorney. I know it predated Steve’s current tour of duty in the Utah House of Representatives, and founding the excellent Politicopia.
Dean Peters of HealYourChurch Website has embarked on a blognotated (that’s annotated by blog) sojourn to Jordan. His trip is wiki’d, and will be YouTubed along the way as well. His interests are historical, architectural, cultural and culinary as well as churchy. Dean’s blog is a good one and I’m sure his trip will be well worth following.
Been following the Alum Rock #earthquake via Twitter. Not surprisingly, the USGS (United States Geological Survey) front page has no news about it, even on its newsroom page, where the most recent item is a promo for a podcast recorded Monday. But the USGS in fact has lots of stuff.
Here’s a map showing all the quakes, including this one, in the last hour/day and week:
Here’s the same data and graphics on a map of faults in the Bay Area.
Here’s the report for this earthquake, with lots of links to other pages, including shaking intensity maps.
ABAG, the Association of Bay Area Governments, has long had very helpful maps showing what earthquakes could do to you, where you live, depending on where the quake is located. I haven’t looked at it in years, but just did and found it is “best viewed with Internet Explorer”. Feh. The “static maps” work better anyway. Here’s one that shows what an earthquake on the North Hayward Fault can do to Oakland and Berkeley:
There’s much more I could point to, but it’s 4:49am here in London, where I need to give a talk in several hours that will upstage everything else until afterwards. Hope everybody’s okay.
That headline occurred to me as I was reading Jay Rosen’s Formula for Online News Success at MediaShift Idea Lab (via Ben Tesch), right after following the latest from Nate Ritter on the San Diego fire situation (tag: sandiegofire), including his Twitter feed, which demonstrates Twitter as a kind of live news router. (As do Chris Messina’s Twitter hashtags.) The Union-Tribune is now also flowing news at sosdfireblog.blogspot.com. Found that via Nate, along with Cat Dirt Sez, another San Diego fire blogger. Also Brian Auer. And Califorinia Fire Followers Set Twitter Ablaze, by Michael Calore..
And thus the Live Web emerges.
[Later…] 4:32am PDST: This post shows up on a Google Blogsearch search for sandiegofire (sorted either by date or by relevance), but not yet on Technorati or on Google (where the top/lucky result is the http://s.technorati.com/sandiegofire).
[Later again…] Here’s the right Technorati search, to include all authority levels. (My blog doesn’t have high authority, at least not yet. And my search default was set for high authority when I did the search the first time, above. So my post in fact was indexed quickly and I just missed it the first time.)
Pulling the Plug: A Technical Review of the Internet Shutdown in Burba (here’s the .pdf) has just been released by the Open Net Initiative, and the most important story it tells is about how the story is told. The summary:
| Burmese netizens, operating in a constrained and challenging space in a country with especially low Internet penetration rates, have demonstrated that the tools of information technology can have a strong impact on the global coverage of events as they are unfolding, and sometimes on the events themselves. The events in Burma also provide a chilling example of the limitations of the Internet, access to which was ultimately vulnerable to the unilateral choices of a repressive regime. However, even the vast majority of Burmese without access to or knowledge of the Internet may have benefited from the enduring achievement of a small band of citizen bloggers and journalists — the uploading of vital, relevant information to the Internet was broadcast back in via television and radio and spread through personal networks and communities throughout the country. |
Read the whole thing.