Saturday, August 05, 2006

Movies: Jason Calacanis, Yochai Benkler, Brewster Kahle. 

Apparently my computer hacked itself somehow when I signed onto my hotel's Internet service. It reprogrammed the page linked into the Home button. Okay, I've seen that before, so I went to the browser prefs page to reprogram it, but when I click the button it still goes to its page. And when I type the address in manually it goes to its page. Okay, so I reprogrammed the Home button to take me to scripting.com instead of www.scripting.com, and that worked. But now, even when I'm on the Harvard wifi network when I go to www.scripting.com it takes me to its damned page. I guess there must be an invisible pref that got changed. Aside from the question of why Firefox lets a website do that, how do I get my browser to go to the right place when I type in the address of my site? (Postscript: Th0m thinks its a DNS cache that needs flushing.) 

Kahle mentioned a television archive for the week after 9/11/01, but I'm not able to find it. Does anyone know where it is?? 

Jamie Parks, the guy who drove from Austin with his girlfriend made it to Cambridge.  

Rasterweb is waiting for his lifetime achievement award. I think you have to quit blogging before you get one. Amazingly, this site has never won an award. Must be a piece of shit.  

Amyloo is looking for examples of OPML usage for live blogging, instant outlining, technography and publication content storage. 

I want to use my Blackberry as a modem for my Mac. Is it possible? (Postscript: Apparently not.) 

About the s-word 

Okay I was called a sexist by Liz Henry and Chris Boese echoed it and added a few other insults to the mix. Both of them claim it's just humor, but it's not funny.

I think we're in a transition period, out of the 20th century when men had to shut up on gender issues, to a different place, where there is some tolerance for men having opinions about gender. At least in principle, the people who came to BlogHer said they wanted to hear from men. But, put into practice it's actually really hard to hear men say things on this subject.

A simple case of men talking about gender, pointing out male-bashing. It's not proactive, it's not even very imaginative. A woman (and sometimes a man, to impress a woman) says something negative about the male gender. I've tried to object, to point out the male-bash, and been told to lighten up, it's just a joke, or be strong, be a man. In other words, shut the fuck up. Your opinion is worth even less if you're white. And something I've only been learning in the last few years, if you're old, white and male, you're worth less than shit. (You can see the ageist BS in Chris Boese's post, although she said nothing about my whiteness, perhaps because she is also white?)

So, ironically, all these people who tell us to shut up have one thing in common, they're fighting for freedom, but don't see the contradiction that freedom has to be inclusive. If you fight for your freedom by supressing someone else's, well, the math just doesn't work. Freedom isn't exclusive, it has to be inclusive.

That's why BlogHer was so revolutionary, not a word I use lightly. Over and over I was told how glad people were that I came. When I asked why, they said something that made a lot of sense. They were flattered that I was interested in what they had to say.

I needed reassurance that my presence was welcome, after a lifetime of being told to shut up. Gradually, if the door stays open, something great is going to happen. There are always some who are scared of change, and I think that's what Liz and Chris are doing. There are others who aren't scared, or are willing to go through their fear, who want to see what's on the other side. I'm one of those people. I'm tired of living with other people's fear, and am willing to go through my own.

If I am a sexist, I'll own that. But there's not much point in calling someone a sexist, there's very little chance they're going to hear it. So little chance that it seems when someone uses that word they must be talking over my head, to someone else, trying to say "Let's stop this fucker before anyone listens to him." That's the bad kind of fear, the fear that stops motion. I've seen it happen with men, all the time. We do that to each other to keep progress from happening. Now we're seeing it happen with women too. My guess is, it's for the same purpose.

Why RSS should be decentralized 

Steve Rubel reports that China is blocking RSS hosted by Feedburner.

5/21/06: "It's absolutely essential that the user own the domain that their feed is hosted at, so that, in case of emergency, they can switch to a different hosting service. If they don't own the domain, it doesn't matter how many promises the vendor makes, or how well-intentioned they are, an act of god could result in a blackout of a huge portion of the RSS network." Or an act of government.

It would be possible for the Chinese to block RSS even if it were totally decentralized, but it would be expensive, they'd have to actually look at the payload and see if it contained RSS. But when all the feeds come from one domain, it's easy and cheap, as easy as blocking CNN. That's why we should decentralize as much as possible, and every move to centralize has costs, because it makes it easier for censors.