a thaumaturgical compendium

My long-suffering spouse finds this song amusing. I don’t get it. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I got a spam email with the following subject today: “Eliminate your weakness and become king!” I didn’t bother reading the rest, but I am sure you know what it is. Selling the same old stuff: inexpensive plans for ascetic living in order to overcome all worldly cravings, followed by an intensive course in courtly manners and free genetic testing that will prove beyond any doubt that you are a rightful heir. You know, the regular. Spammers.

While I already have a family motto, I didn’t have a personal vision statement, until now.

Welcome to those who linked over from the article in the Times. All three of you*. Sorry the place is such a mess.

It’s a nice short article on travel blogging, and why there aren’t more travel blogs. It’s funny that we have gone from “there are all kinds of X blogs” to “why aren’t there more Y blogs?”

• Seriously, isn’t getting your URL in the Gray Lady one of those things people used to consider great press. It wasn’t three (my referrer log shows 265 from the online version), but this didn’t even make it to one of my top traffic days of the month. Not that I, um, obsess over my readership or anything. But compare that to Kevin’s meteoric numbers driven by Digg, and you have to wonder why PR folks are still targeting the “old media.”

Since I am crushed by my lack of hotness rating on Ratemyprofessors.com, I may have to make use of Rate Your Students. Anonymously, of course. Erm… I mean… it wasn’t me? It was all Dr. Cassatta? (via Dan Li)

I’ve had mixed reviews about blogging my classes here: some love it, some obviously find it distracting. I’d like to say that I’d stick completely to research, but my academic life is not so neatly compartmentalized, and I’m not sure the blog should be either. In order to keep things a bit more orderly, I’ll post “highlights” of what I’m writing for the course blog here. Here’s my welcome statement:

Hello, and welcome to Cyberporn and Society. If this is your first visit, you should read over the syllabus. In case you are curious, the chart below shows a breakdown of the majors listed by enrolled students. As you can see, we have a good mix of majors. I hope you will all bring your academic disciplines to bear in our discussions, and I look forward to learning much from you all.

You might consider heading over to facebook to see who else is taking the class.

Week before classes start. Everybody wants everything, now. I’m still working on things that needed to be done in 2005. And so, my blog server dies. No, not this one, the one that I set up for the students. And early next week, 400 students in my class, and many others in other classes are going to need it working. No problem, it was an easy fix: my account ran out of disk space. But it was the last straw. I am (very, slowly) getting out of the blog-server business.

I set up the server initially as a bit of an experiment. Thanks to some funding from the Educational Technology Center on campus, I made the system a bit more robust, and user friendly. I’ve been keeping it up, and updating to new versions, and finally have the spam monkey mostly off our backs. However, the piece of the proposal that was not funded by ETC—a new server—is finally biting us. I figured that some good successes would ensure future funding for servers and support, but that seems unlikely now.

At the same time, some of the reasons I wanted our own system are now less compelling. This is particularly true now that wordpress.com offers free wordpress hosting. For the cyberporn course, this semester, I am pointing students toward weblogs.com, and then aggregating their posts centrally.

Trebor Scholtz is still using the schoolof server for his course, Technologies for Creative Collaborations, and it seems to be doing OK with Christopher Harris’s very popular infomancy blog, as well as several other active blogs. So, I will keep the server around as it is indefinitely. Or, perhaps I should offer some of the more power-users sublets on my webspace so that they can do what they like with it—with some collective work it could be made into something very solid. But then edublogs already provides much in this direction, I guess.

In the meantime, I’ve put together a quick screencast (SWF, ~6 Mb), walking absolute beginners through signing up for a blog at wordpress.com. More to come on this, as I do a quick weekend switch in blogging strategies for the huge cyberporn class. (Textbooks for that class are still AWOL as well. And I always thought of Friday the 13th as an especially lucky day for me.)

I was interviewed for a short article on MySpace for the Buffalo News (thanks to David for the reminder). The moral panic was kept to a minimum, I think.

In the article I suggest that parents should be searching the web for their kids’ social spaces, and that this is not the moral equivalent of reading your kids’ diaries. I enjoy talking to reporters because it sometimes sets me off in directions that I might not otherwise take. While it’s not so helpful to the reporters sometimes, it is helpful to me. One of the things we talked about was the ways in which social software tends to unify identities.

I think most parents feel it is important for kids to have their own spaces. I chatted with a mother who lives and works in a fairly rural area. Her kids can go from their school to her university, cutting through a woods. She thought this was a great way for them to establish their own spaces, and I agree. But the transparent kinds of identity that are often encouraged by blogging and the like seem to be a very different kind of space, even as the pseudonymous nature of many massively multiplayer environments seems to encourage such separate spaces.