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Death threats, misogyny, and Kos embarrassing himself

April 12, 2007 /

Remember the story about the blogger who received misogynistic death threats a couple weeks ago? Kos has chimed in with a post I hope he finds utterly embarrassing. He says “Most of the time, said ‘death threats’ don’t even exist — evidenced by the fact that the crying bloggers and journalists always fail to produce said “death threats.'” Actually, Kos, Kathy Sierra did provide the death threats.

“fuck off you boring slut… i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob”

“the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size.”

There were also Photoshopped images of her head in a noose, among other images which are no long available. Someone in the comments on her post described it:

In the pic she’s being gagged/suffocated like in a horror movie, and at first glance it looks like her head is being split open (before you see it’s panties–and I’m not the only one to do a double-take). Does that not look deeply wrong to you?

This is a bit different from “AIDS will be killing more and more of you liberals every year.” It’s personal, and someone took the time to create detailed Photoshopped images of her.

That said, I’m not sure a blogger code of conduct will solve these sorts of problems. But Kos should have gotten the facts straight before he started shooting his mouth about how Sierra was just a whiney blogger who needs to grow some thicker skin. To quote Adam Greenfield, “If you don’t get why even sophomoric Photoshoppings have to be taken seriously as same in the context of a continued campaign of harrassment and intimidation, then I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

Update: Here’s a more eloquent post about this subject from Bruce Godfrey.

Update 2: FWIW, Daily Kos contributing editor MissLaura gets it right:

Bloggers tend to talk a lot about thick skin, and to pride ourselves on it. But I think maybe we’ve kind of elevated this to a form of machismo – because you have to have a thick skin to deal with the legitimate critiques you face as a blogger, somehow it’s become A Thing that you also have to accept the illegitimate personal ones as well.

Celebrity, misogyny, machismo, the anonymity of online discourse. There are a lot of possible explanations for this crap, and probably each is relevant at certain moments. What do you think, not just about what explains it but about what to do about it? How much do we tolerate? When do we get to point the finger and say ‘this is not merely dislike of someone else but misogyny’?

Update 3: Kos issues a “clarification” (aka non-apology).

Blogging where speech isn’t free

March 13, 2007 /

Ethan Zuckerman:

My friend Jon Lebkowsky put together a really excellent group for our panel at SXSW. The panel focused on the challenges of blogging in countries where there’s no reasonable expectation of freedom of speech. On stage, we had Shava Nerad from Tor, Rob Faris from the Open Net Initiative, Shahed Amanullah of altmuslim.com, and Jasmina Tešanovi?, a Serbian journalist and blogger – a great range of speakers from experts on technical constraints on speech to people who’ve written and spoken from very difficult countries.

Rob Faris opens by suggesting that the cyberutopian fantasies of the Internet as an open, special place beyond national boundaries, is being dismissed as a fantasy. At least two dozen countries are filtering in the Internet and there are others ONI is watching closely – there’s a concentration of countries that filter the Internet in the Middle East and in East Asia. In many cases, filtering doesn’t just block sex or drug content, but prevents people from accessing political content. Filtering is messy and incomplete – Rob suggests we take a moment and have some sympathy for the poor censors, who are taking on an impossible task, as it’s very difficult to block any content without collateral damage. (His tongue is firmly in cheek.)

Full Story: …My Heart’s in Accra.

Why blog?

October 20, 2006 /

When I first started this blog, I wrote a post called “What is This Journal For?”” I tossed around a few ideas – mainly the “outboard brain” idea from Cory Doctorow, which remains the operative metaphor for this blog. But I never really found a satisfactory answer, and concluded: I’m still not sure what this journal is for.”

Since that time I’ve added at least one major function: making money.  Actually, when I started my longest running blog Technoccult, money was a motivator.  That was just around the time of the dot com crash, and the idea that a hobby site could make money from advertising still seemed valid.  The idea quickly fizzled, and for years I ran Technoccult, and later this blog, without ads or any intention of ever making money off of them. Even if I never made another cent off my blogs, I’d keep doing them.

So, if the blog doesn’t have a particular function, then why blog Perhaps it has something in common with the reasons I write in general.

Peter David had this to say about writers:

I also write novels, and if I tell a stranger this– on an airplane, for example– it almost always gets the same response. The person will say, “Oh, you know, I’ve always wanted to write a novel,” or “I know someone who’s working on one and is looking for a publisher.” Impressed? Very rarely.

Tell people you’re an artist, they’ll want you to do them a sketch of Spider-Man. Tell them you’re a writer, and they’ll say, “That’s nice.” What are they supposed to say? “Ooooh, ooooh, write me a paragraph! Bang me out a word balloon!”

I hear this over and over again. “I have an idea I’ve been wanting to do.” “I have a book I’ve always wanted to write.” But they’re too busy. Too busy earning a real living in a real world. “Something always comes up and I never have the time.”

So a writer, by implication, is someone who has nothing better to do. Being a writer is something frivolous, something that the ordinary person could do in his or her spare time while making a genuine living. Try to explain to these people that writing is something you do because it’s impossible not to, and you get blank stares.

This has always resonated with me. I’m not a disciplined writer. I don’t write every day. I’ve had some articles published here and there, but I’m far from being a professional writer. Sometimes I think about quitting writing forever. Sometimes I’ll go months without writing. But somehow it always creeps back in, something will creep into my head and I’ll have to write it down. It may be a few paragraphs or a few pages, but every so often it happens and I can’t really help it.

I suppose, ultimately, the same is true of blogging. There are a number of reasons to blog, but probably an equal number of reasons not to.  Sometimes I think about shutting ’em all down, selling my domain names, and finding a more productive hobby. I did sell one of my blogs, but I don’t have any intention of giving up any of the others, and even if I did, I’d probably just keep blogging somewhere else. The truth is, I blog because I just can’t help it.

Are blogs less reliable than standard news media? Maybe not.

May 10, 2006 /

From John Shirley’s blog… I’m quoting the whole thing because he doesn’t have permalinks:

A guest blog by JB

One interesting thing I just realized is that the traditional press claims that *they* expertly edit and winnow the news for us, and that blogs don’t provide that service, so they are full of noise, you can’t trust them.

I find it’s the opposite. I come to C&L or RawStory or wherever, *because* I know I am going to get a certain type of story and that they won’t miss anything important in the type of stories that each particular blog covers. I’m just not going to take the time to watch
CSPAN, but if something good happens on it, I *know* I will see it on Crooksandliars.com.

So quite opposite to what the op ed people say, quality blogs provide me with a *value added* that I don’t get from the undifferentiated mishmash of local/national/international news I get from the newspaper.

Newspapers are still stuck in the paradigm of international section, national section, local section, sports section, entertainment section, etc., where as blogs are in effect “tagged” — I go to one blog for right-winger hyporcrites caught on tape, another for media criticism,
another for stories about civil liberties issues, etc.

Adam’s take on “micropatronage”

April 10, 2006 /

Adam compares Jason Kottke’s micropatronage scheme with Josh Ellis’s:

In the year of his micropatronage experiment, Jason Kottke offered content that appeared little different than what he had been offering for nothing, expanding on it greatly neither in subject nor depth.

[…]

Furthermore, especially given the five-figure amount at stake, any description of the experiment’s results that did not start and end with a positive effusion of gratitude was bound to read as petulant to some part of the patronage.

[…]

I’m surely going to remember both the way that Ellis framed his request for support and what he offered his supporters in return, because I think that they amount to something close to best practices.

I have to say I agree. I’m very excited that things worked out for Josh, and I hope that they continue to work out. I dig the idea of the street performer protocol I was excited when Kottke got the funding to do his project, but was disappointed with the results. I think this project by project model that Josh has worked out could be the beginning of great things to come.

Community page ranking system

August 5, 2005 /

Mary Hodder on BlogHer. A few words about BlogHer, and this interesting bit:

After 45 minutes of intense anger and frustration from many audience speakers in the room toward Technorati link counts and top 100, I suggested we create a community based algorithm, based on more complex social relationships than links. It’s something I’ve been working on for few months, trying to frame, about what this problem is and how we might solve it. But it’s a complex issue and I’m also busy. So it’s taken a while. However, my blog post is almost done, and I do plan to put it up in the next day or so.

I look forward to seeing how she proposes to do this. I’m also curious about how useful an “open” algorithm will be. Part of why Google is so secretive about their ranking system is that they’re afraid people will cheat the system if they know how it works. Many have talked about creating an open source alternative to Google, but as far as I know nothing like this exists yet. I’m rooting for transparent algorithms, I’d love to see them take off, but I’m a bit skeptical. It does seem that perhaps search algorithms is the one place where secrecy is best.

Of course, Technorati’s system is pretty open: they just count links. At the very least, Hodder’s system should be more nuanced. A more complex rating system should be harder to scam, no?

Invisible College 2

July 6, 2005 /

I’m not sure who’s behind it, but the late D.W. Cooper’s blog has been ressurected.

Invisible College 2

Disinfo on Key 23

October 19, 2004 /

From today’s Disinfo newsletter:

Key 23 is a new site on magick and related subcultures that features commentary from Jason Louv, Klint Finley and other Disinfo staff and alumni. I’ve had fun checking out their explorations of the chaos tradition and newer ideas. Jason (and Klint) have brought a regenerative perspective to the site, with their interest in magick. My own energies these days are closer to the Digital Eco-Sense study (by Chris Ryan) featured today: creative solutions on how the ‘sustainability agenda’ can inform technology research and development. My hope is that those inspired by Louv and Finley will take this creativity beyond ‘magick’ or ‘subcultures’ into their own lives and new domains. Expect to see new ideas and strange loops in the future.

From my e-mail response to Alex Burns:

Shamanism is about acquiring insight to help the village… A lot of people these days fancy themselves shamans, but do nothing to help the global village in which we all live. Beyond the idea of crafting spells to help the planet, I hope all of us modern mages and shamans will look to higher planes for creativity and ideas that we can share with the activist community and help to put into action. It’s not all about hockus pockus, but flashes of practical insight that can be transfered to the real world.

Movable Type style sheets

June 8, 2004 /

Movable Style is a collection of style sheets that work with the default Movable Type templates and can be simply dropped into Movable Type to change the look.

Memory Hole Blog

April 6, 2004 /

If any of you have been sleeping for the last month, like I apparently was, you might not have noticed that Russ Kick’s The Memory Hole now has a Moveable Type blog called The Memory Blog.

From the looks of things, this new blog will be consistently updated, unlike the original one; and it even contains the standard Moveable Type RSS feed for anyone that wants to syndicate it.

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