mediajunk

Beck is the latest high-profile celebrity to have launched a bona fide blog. I've added him to my list of celebrity blogs (RHS of this page), but apparently I'll have to remove William Gibson's blog from that list in a few weeks. In an interview with Karlin Lillington, the SF author claims that maintaining the blog is "stifling his creativity", so he plans to discontinue it at the end of the promotional tour for his current novel. (Will Gibson be the first of many blog "drop-outs"?)

Nevertheless, the blog phenomenon continues to spread, reaching some of the remotest regions on the surface of the planet -- including Mt. Everest! Climber Lorenzo Gariano, currently tackling the great peak, "has been recording every stage of his momentous journey via a satellite phone which beams live audio blogs to a website run by the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute, (KMI), based in Milton Keynes," according to BBC News.

To remind us a) that blogs can be topical and b) the blog format can be used for purposes other than diarying, check out the SARSwatch weblog, which tracks the spread of the virus, along with relevant breaking news.

The SARS site strengthens my hunch that the blog format is more than just a fad, and may turn out to be a killer app of sorts -- perhaps even the "default" format for all web sites.

I recently wrote about RSS Aggregators and how they can be used to show headlines and extracts from recently-updated blogs.

Well, some clever, creative person at brainoff.com has combined such an Aggregator with a map of the gloge to produce a simple but fun real-time "geoblog" -- a real-time, geographical snapshot of international blog-updating.

I'm not explaining this too well, but it will quickly make sense when go see for yourself.

Three different articles about blogging made for good reading today. The first, in the Guardian, tells of how Peter Cox, from Cardiff, managed to get Abbey National bank to resolve a complaint by posting the gripe on his "widely-read" weblog.

Mr. Cox insisted that he resorted to naming-and-shaming the bank only after they had not satisfactorily dealt with his complaint via the phone. The story raises the question of whether blogging offers a way of empowering individual consumers. Conversely, do blogs leave businesses open to being discredited by dishonest and/or anonymous individuals? Perhaps it all depends on whether a blogger is already trusted by his own audience; and the estimated size of that blogger's readership.

Speaking of business, Jimmy Guterman has made some insightful points in his essay for Business 2.0, about where blogs might find rightful roles in corporations, but suggests that blogging might ultimately benefit management (!) -- a way of "eavesdropping on water-cooler discussions".

The Hartford Courant does not, however, see that employee blogs could do anything but damage that newspaper's own identity. In a story that appears in today's Editor&Publisher, we learn how journalist Denis Horgan was given a cease-and-desist order on his personal blog.

Courant editor Brian Toolan explains his decision thus: "Denis Horgan's entire professional profile is a result of his attachment to The Hartford Courant, yet he has unilaterally created for himself a parallel journalistic universe where he'll do commentary on the institutions that the paper has to cover without any editing oversight by the Courant."

It seems the debate about blogging vs. "real" journalism is set to continue...

AOL have begun testing a video component to their instant messaging software. The idea is that users will be able to communicate via bursts of short video messages as well as text.

AOL's move may seem like a big step forward but we've been waiting for desktop videoconferencing ever since the internet came into the public domain, a decade ago. The technologies that were popular back then -- notably CU-SeeMe -- were (and still are) more sophisticated than AOL's current prototype. CU-SeeMe is a videoconferencing application whereby the video stream stays alive for the duration of the call. With AIM's video component, you send video clips as messages; image flow is intermittent, not quite real-time, and user-controlled.

AOL can't transform their IM product into a bona fide videoconferencing one due to US government restrictions, designed to ensure that the company does not gain a monopoly on software products in the huge and still growing IM community.

The restrictions may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Users who send snippets of video rather than a continuous stream are less likely to suffer from the vagaries of bandwidth. And the proposed "press to send" button will give users control over any images they send, a feature with which they may feel more comfortable (no need to worry about who might walk into the room while the cam is on, for example).

As IM's popularity spreads from the US to other parts of the world, and as "always-on" connections become the norm, AIM may yet prove to be the killer app that finally brings videoconferencing to the general public.

I've long believed that the frenzied media baying-for-blood of pedophiles and viewers of child pornography is a witchhunt, arising out of taboos about childhood and adulthood, and our difficulty as a society to deal with an unprecedented torrent in the production, dissemination and consumption of pornography in general -- a phenomenon so wedded to the spread of the internet that web pornography now threatens the print porn industry.

Instead of tackling the meanings and effects of pornography's sudden ubiquity, of our relationship with it (the truth is that we -- men, at least -- enjoy porn), we target the fringes of the phenomenon, directing our venom and vitriol at the "pedophile bastards" who make and use kiddie porn. That way, we draw a line between "us" (normal people) and "them" (insert derogatory expletitive here). We refuse to ask questions such as: why, if child pornography so disgusts us, is "teen" (a deliberate ambiguity, since it refers to an age that spans from 13 to 19) one of the most-used words on "adult" porn sites?

Similar hypocrisies were highlighted here in Ireland recently, when Tim Allen -- husband of celebrity chef, Dorina Allen -- was found guilty of downloading pornographic images of children. Allen was fined and sentenced to 240 hours of community service. As journalist Ronan Mullen pointed out, "the Star [newspaper] carried a front-page headline, You're rich, you're free, but you're still a sick pervert, while on its inside pages it carried ads for sex chat lines."

On the rare occasion that we see the phenomenon of pornography tackled conscientiously in the broadsheet press, the agenda is usually a feminist one, and we are made to feel (wrongly, I believe) that pornography is always demeaning to women, and male consumers are portrayed as addicts. While porn may indeed be addictive (so is sex!), such analysis simply reinforces the notion that pornography is "bad" even though (sssshhh!) it's everywhere. The vicious circle continues; we can't talk about porn, the elephant in the room.

A society can maintain such pretence only for so long, before the cracks begin to show. In Dallas, one big fissure recently opened up when a couple were arrested for creating kiddie porn -- after they left photographs of the mother, Jacqueline Mercado, simulating the act of breastfeeding with her baby son into a one-hour photo lab. The full story appears in the Dallas Observer (from where I got the image, above left, which is presumably a version that's been through a fax machine), and there are a spate of comments on the story from the internet public on Kuro5hin.

In the end, the Mercados had the charges against them dropped. But they still haven't got their kids back from custody...

The May issue of Wired has a nice, short feature on a day in the life of Google -- i.e. on the searches that come in from around the world.

The Google employees who watch these words pour in thick and fast will lately have seen much of the word phooning; indeed, www.phoon.com has been voted the "Check This Out" email virus site of the week by the staff here at Mediajunk.

The picture on the right will make sense after you've been to the phoon site. Maybe.

Many different RSS aggregators are now surfacing, with some free or beta products (such as newzcrawler and blogbrowser) available for download.

"Come again?" I hear you say.

First of all, RSS stands for Rich Site Summary (well, what it stands for is debatable, but that's the version I use). An RSS page can be used for a site that's regularly updated, and it provides a summary of the site's recent entries, or headlines, or whatever.

A lot of news sites have an RSS page, which is a coded summary of that site's headlines, but many blogs use them too -- so, yeah, even mediajunk has an RSS page.

"Okay, I clicked the link, and it takes me to a page of gobbledegook."

The gobbledegook is called XML, and it doesn't matter that neither of us can understand it, so long as aggregator programmes such as newzcrawler can. What aggregators do is take the summaries of various sites, and lump them together to create a new site.

Bloghog is a good example of how a site created by an aggregator looks (although it could use a dab of webpaint!).

In theory, with an aggregator programme, you could add your favourite blogs and create one "all in one" page, that contained the headlines of the latest entries from each.

Call me old-fashioned, but I'm going to stick to adding blogs I like to my "Favourites" folder...

See? You don't even need to have a home in real life to have a home on the web!

Kudos to the students who aren't backing down in the face of a lawsuit by the music "majors", whose representative body is sueing the kids to the tune (sorry) of $150,000 US per song.

In the early days of the net, a quote (attributed to John Gilmore) often bandied around was that "the internet sees censorship as damage, and routes around it." I believe that this still holds true. The music industry may try to call the downloading of music "theft", but that's because it's in their interest to do so. Listen to music isn't theft, and prohibiting someone from downloading songs via the web is censorship -- which, for the time being at least, the internet still impressively resists.

Since Google first made its APIs availabe for any and all developers to use, many quirky new utilities -- based in one way or another on Google -- have surfaced on the web.

One that I've found interesting is Poodle, a tool that spiders any given site and points out "warning" areas that, if improved, could increase the site's ranking with Google. It takes a few minutes to figure out what's going on when Poodle gives results, but eventually you get a feel for it's colour-coded "advice".

Another example of a use of Google technology within a different application is Googlematic, which lets you get Google search results through Instant Messanger programmes, such as AIM.

Some developers have used the Google APIs to create fun sites, such as Googlism. Type your own name in there (or just your surname, if you don't see results) and see what you learn about yourself!

Other spin-off sites/tools are listed on Googuide.

There are a lot of silly articles out there about the "battle" between journalism and blogging, asking whether the latter will displace the former. Blogging and journalism are not in competition; new media is not in competition with old. At most, new media sometimes changes the function of old media, in carving out a new niche for itself (just as television changed the function of radio).

One of the reasons why blogging will never rival journalism became clear this week when noted "warblogger" Sean-Paul Kelley, publisher of The Agonist, was reported by Wired magazine (no less) to have blatantly plagiarized many of his entries.

*****

Newspapers, see, have ethics and standards, a point that the LA Times sought to make when it sacked a photographer for deliberately manipulating an image taken in Iraq.

Isn't it curious that they were so public about the dismissal though, even publishing the original photographs? Hmmm...

Google encourages users to email suggestions; pity they don't publish the better ones. One web consulting company -- with the quirky name 37Signals --believes its suggestion is so good that it decided to post an online demo.

The idea is for Google to propose related searches on entered keywords. I think it's a great concept, and the demo captures it simply and powerfully. 37 bravos!

Danny Sullivan, on his excellent site Search Engine Watch, provides an analysis of the co-adaptive relationship between blogs and search engines.

But his essay misses out on a key insight, one which was teased out by Andrew Orlowski last week in The Register, concerning the power of a small number of A-list bloggers to influence search results for particular phrases. Orlowski has coined this ability to hijack the search results of certain phrases "googlewashing".

In a somewhat muddled article, Orlowski nevertheless chooses a good example -- "second superpower". The first thirty or so Google results for this phrase lead directly or indirectly to a newly created blog by James Moore. How did Moore manage to generate such a high Google ranking with a new blog? He didn't; the A-list bloggers (such as his colleague, Lawrence Lessig) did, because they all linked to him.

I do not suggest (though Orlowski seems to) that A-list bloggers conspire to "googlewash" certain phrases, but I think the phenomenon of search engine results being influenced by a handful of "elite" bloggers is of interest to those (like me) who (sadly) devote time to imagining how the web will evolve.

So, Mediajunk isn't the dullest blog in the world. Yet.

Damn.

Continuing our fine pedigree of bringing you the latest craze in blogland, take a look at Blogshares.com, a pretend stock market based on blogs.

And yes, mediajunk is listed there ... though I wouldn't recommend buying just yet.