a thaumaturgical compendium

I’m not blogging, primarily, because I haven’t had two minutes free in the last week. I owe about 20,000 words to various editors, I have two papers that need refereed, I have a dissertation proposal and two dissertation chapters that need read, I have to help assemble a small grant proposal, I am trying to get spam under control on the school blogging server (and I’ve taken down my own wiki on this site to mitigate the 1.5 gigs of transfer from spammers), and this is all just stuff that needs to be done now, and is on top of the regular stuff: preps for two new courses, managing the process for the graduate program, the redesign for the school website, and working with my advisees on various projects. And since some of these people read my blog, accept my apologies, and know that as soon as I finish this entry, I’ll be working on (or toward) your project.

So, I haven’t had time to breathe, let alone blog. What blogging time budget I do have is dedicated to the blog for the porn class. Also, things I might have otherwise blogged have increasingly ended up in del.icio.us (the social bookmarking site), where I’ve ended up putting 500 bookmarks over the last month or so. A lot of these have to do with teaching, and some with research, and as I use the service, I am seeing opportunities for using it more. Yes, I considered including the feed here, but really, I’m trying to keep this blog sparse and have as little junk as possible. It’s easy enough to skip on over to the del.icio.us page, if a reader is interested.

Instead, when I have a spare moment, I hope to explore the Python wrapper for the del.icio.us API, to see how to extend things a bit. For example, I’d like a local cache of my bookmarks. Someone has already put together a script that sends caches to gMail, but I actually want to keep a local cache. I want, five years down the road, to know that I can get at a page I was interested in, but for whatever reason didn’t make the Internet Archive’s crawl. I was considering something that linked del.icio.us with furl, but I want more than this combination can offer. I am thinking of a script that can, when run periodically (e.g., daily):

• Pull down the link list from del.icio.us
• Spider each of these pages, and update a current cache
• Highlight for me any changes (or 404s)
• Maintain a history of cached pages, including images

It’s actually not that hard a project. All of the pieces are easily scavanged from existing software. I am just a slow programmer, and don’t have the time. And, for a number of reasons (related as much to teaching and research as it is to entertainment), I want to build a PVR first.

Nofollow is an interesting case of elitism and monoculture actually helping the system at large. Adoption of the nofollow link attribute (introduced by Google and a host of others in order to combat link spam) only makes sense if the benefit to spammers is reduced nearly to nil. That requires all or most blogs to implement nofollow.

There is a tipping point here of course. Once Wordpress, Moveable Type, Blogger, Livejournal, and Xanga adopt, it may (or may not) be the case that spammers focus on blogs not hosted by these services. But given that the cost of hiring a spammer is so low, a handful of adopters are not enough. It’s like a prisoner’s dilemma, with very low payoffs all the way around.

Of course, some of the FUD surrounding the nofollow plan has already been raised. The nonofollow page (via Amidasu), for example, suggests 12 reasons not to use nofollow. I don’t think the guy who started this is a spammer. He is the author of Das Blog-Buch, and seems to think this is all a conspiracy so that Google can diminish the influence of blogs. The reasons he lists (with my response):

1. nofollow does not prevent comment spam

Nofollow aims to reduce or remove the prime (but not sole) motivation for comment spam. It remains to be seen whether or not it can be prevented.

2. nofollow is semantically incorrect

rel is allowed by HTML 4.01. I’m not sure what he means here.

3. nofollow harms the connections between web sites

No, it helps the connections between websites by making them more than simply binary. In the end, people may be more willing to allow outside linking if they know it won’t add to a page’s standing in Google.

4. nofollow is not useful for humans, just for search engines using PageRank or similar a technique

Huh? Humans use PageRank, via Google. It is therefore useful for humans.

5. nofollow could be used to shut web sites out

No, it only makes it less likely that a web site will receive a high index on Google by spamming comments (or commenting frequently in a non-spammy way). How often you comment on others’ blogs shouldn’t affect how high you show up on Google.

6. nofollow discriminates legitimate users as spammers

Legitimate users are interested in leaving a comment and engaging in discourse, not inflating their PageRank.

7. nofollow heists commentators’ earned attention

No, it just doesn’t amplify it through Google et al.

8. nofollow will not stop comment spam

Running a bit thin here? You already tried that one.

9. nofollow could be used to further discriminate weblogs

Indeed. It allows us to discriminate between those who have links created by others and those who have tried to game Google.

10. nofollow prevents the Web from being a web

Huh? It doesn’t do anything to hyperlinks. It just allows the search engines to parse them in a more meaningful way. It improves the web by moving beyond binary hyperlinks.

11. nofollow eliminates the dissemination of free speech

I’m not sure if this is any sillier than the previous. You can say anything you want. Whether others choose to pay attention to you is another matter.

12. nofollow was developed in privacy with only search engines companies taking part in the discussion

First of all, that’s not true. Reps from the major blogging platforms were also involved. Second, so what? They have provided a useful tool that interfaces with their search engine.

Google and Amazon have developed their APIs in private as well, because they interface with their services. Likewise, nofollow is a way of interfacing with Google and others, and it makes sense that they would be the ones to develop it.

Unless someone makes money in spamming or search engine optimization, I don’t understand why they would object to nofollow. On the other hand, if enough people buy the FUD, it won’t work. There needs to be near universal adoption before the cost to spammers will even register.

So you’ve read all about the proposed solution for keeping spam comments un-indexed by Google et al, and being a Boy Scout, you want to prepare your WordPress blog now.

To that end, I am happy to provide to you my first Wordpress plugin. It is kinda dumb, but I think it works.

Download the plugin here: DOWNLOAD

(By clicking this link you agree never to sue me and to buy me a decent beer if you ever meet me in a good beer-producing country.)

Unzip it and place it in your plugins directory (it’s inside “wp-content”).

On your Wordpress administration menu, go to the Plugins tab and activate the NoFollow plugin.

Now, maybe, it works. I’m not sure if it continues to work if you are running, say version 1.5b of WordPress, but, ya know, it’s late, and I have to teach tomorrow.

Thanks to the Baltimore Sun, I have effectively demonstrated the best way to become a target of those who claim that the professoriate is left-leaning.

“This is do-it-yourself media,” says Alex Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at the University at Buffalo in New York. “People are doing this for fun. They’re not looking for any kind of profit. They have day jobs. But they’re willing to make time to do this. Even Marx said this was the one thing people had a natural interest in doing – producing things for themselves, being creative.”

There is something plain thrilling about seeing a photograph of another planet. It makes imagining stepping onto that surface all the easier. There are so many important things we could be spending this money on instead of space exploration, but it is really hard to remember that when you see pictures like this one recently beamed back from Titan.

Right now, the recent success of Space Ship 1 makes the commercialization of at least orbital space seem almost inevitable. Mind you: that means manned commercialization of orbital space—commercialization of orbital space via machine is a fait accompli.

One wonders what this means. How long will it be before Pepsi puts billboards on the moon? Will the first permanent station off the home planet be a Comfort Inn? Does space exploration require that we allow a massive land-grab on the moon, Mars, and Titan? Capitalism only works when there is authoritative support of property. How long before the “ownership society” catches on to this? Is it time for some creative adverse possession?

Sorry the postings have flagged a bit recently. Been desperately trying to get my stuff done before the semester came barreling in like an overloaded semi. Too late.

Anyway, the blog for the cyberporn course is up, with little more than a syllabus thus far. I’ll probably crosspost here as well. Unlike last semester, the material doesn’t necessary make sense to integrate with my “regular” blog for the 360 students in the course. If you want to follow along with the course, though, we should have <24 hour turnaround on the lecture videos.

Spent a bit of time soul searching over the break, trying to decide what to “do” as far as career goes. No grand pronouncements, but if you are an avid reader, you may see some shifts as my time commitments shift over the course of the year.

In the continuing watch of who has sold out their blogs, I am saddened to note that Fafnir and Giblets have been on the take for some time.