mamamusings: on blogging

you go, girlfriend

Wow. Just…wow.

[S]ome people will one day try to convince you that what I’ve done here is some sort of sickening betrayal of your childhood, and what those people fail to recognize is that I am doing the exact opposite. This is the glorification of your childhood, and even more than that this is a community of women coming together to make each other feel less alone. You are a part of this movement, you and all of the other kids whose mothers are sitting at home right now writing tirelessly about their experiences as mothers, the love and frustration and madness of it all. And I think one day you will look at all of this and pump your fist in the air.

Read the whole thing.

spring has sprung

In April of 2003, six months after I'd started publishing this blog, I posted one of my favorite poems--the one that I think of every April (well, March in Seattle, but April in Rochester) as the weather makes its glorious transformation from the relentless gray of winter to the riotous colors of spring

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

—Robert Frost

I probably could have posted this a few days earlier; the daffodils bloomed on my birthday (Wednesday), and they brighten my mood every time I look at them.

I'm enjoying the weather all the more because I spend so much time every day walking the dog--and letting her romp in the backyard. She can be a handful sometimes, but mostly she's delightful.

oh noes! i missed my blogiversary!

Monday was my five-year blogiversary. Hard to believe it’s been five years. Harder to believe how much my life has changed in those five years.

My blogging output has slowed a lot lately. I think in large part that’s because my offline life is fuller and happier than it’s been at other times. Also, my professional social network now has other ways to maintain and strengthen ties—not the least of which is Twitter, which I find provides me with much of the “what’s happening with me and others” that I used to depend on blogs for.

I do want to start focusing on writing more thoughtful pieces, though. I’ve gotten intellectually lazy in some ways over the past year or two, and I miss engaging in discussion and debate of technology topics. I’ve completely neglected all of the group blogs I’m nominally a part of, too, and those are excellent spaces for that kind of engagement.

Over the next week I should have a reasonable amount of time to spend on thinking and writing, and I’ll make it a priority to have some of that spill over into my blogspaces, in hopes that the next five years of blogging will be as productive personally and professionally as the first five years have been.

i'm better off today...

..than I was four years ago.

Four years ago this week, I was in Camden, Maine, for the PopTech conference. It’s there that I discovered the then relatively new phenomenon of “blogging,” and downloaded MovableType (after following a link to it from Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs site). Upon my return to Rochester—on October 22nd, 2002—I created mamamusings and wrote my first post.

Since then, this blog has brought me so much, personally and professionally.

It’s taken me to Joi Ito’s house in Tokyo, and to a conference podium at the Burj-Al-Arab Hotel in Dubai. It’s helped me find long-lost relatives in Brazil, and provided a living, lasting memorial to my late ex-husband.

It’s allowed me to write about issues that matter deeply to me—like depression and recovery—in a way that I know has helped others.

I’ve made more new friends than I could begin to name here, and made more professional connections in the past four years than in my entire career before the blog.

So happy birthday, mamamusings. And here’s to four more years (at least) of personal and professional growth through blogging.

spam kills (sites)

Saturday morning, I received an email from my hosting company telling me that they had shut down mamamusings.net due to “excessive load” issues, and that I needed to contact the abuse department to get things running again.

The culprit? Comment and trackback spam.

I have it all set to be moderated here, which means you seldom see it, but it’s been increasing at a depressing rate, and it takes a lot of time to clean out the trash sitting in the “unapproved” list every day.

For the time being, they’ve disabled the mt-trackback and mt-comment scripts, so that at least the content of the site is accessible. And I’ll start working on a solution. The easiest option would be to simply restrict commenting to users with TypeKey accounts. I hate to do that, but it may be my best option.

What I may try for the short term is a two-fold approach—renaming the script (so that it’s a little more work for the spambots to find it), and adding a CAPTCHA. Until I get that done, however, you won’t be able to comment here. :(

what was i thinking?

It’s not like I don’t have enough on my plate these days. Despite that, I’ve been made an offer I couldn’t refuse—to join the august list of contributors on TerraNova, the world-class blog on virtual worlds and gaming.

When my colleague Andy Phelps started working on a game design and development program at RIT several years ago, I said I had no interest in being involved. “Games really aren’t my thing,” I said. And from a professional standpoint, that was mostly true. From a personal standpoint, it wasn’t true at all. I’ve always loved computer and video games—from Hunt the Wumpus and Zork in high school through Pikmin and Katmari and World of Warcraft today.

As games have become more social and less solitary, however, they’ve forced my personal and professional interests into a point of intersection. And I can’t pretend any longer that I’m not interested in studying the social aspects of gaming and game development. So the invitation from TerraNova came at a perfect time.

I can’t begin to say how honored and delighted I am that they’re willing to welcome me—a relative neophyte in this field of study—into their ranks. And I’ll do what I can to carve out the time to post there on at least an occasional basis. I’m rather hoping that this will help me to get my blogging groove back, since I’ve not been posting much lately to any of the group blogs I’m associated with.

At any rate, my introduction and inaugural post are up and ready for your perusal.

1001 weblog entries

(This one is actually number 1002!)

I don’t know that I’d quite call myself a modern-day Scheherazade, but it is a lovely image.

Schherazade probably didn’t have to deal with hundreds of comment spams on a daily basis, though, which is what I’m encountering these days. It’s likely I’ll be turning on TypeKey authentication this week, much as I hate to do it. The built-in spam filtering capability of MT can’t keep up with the onslaught from the spammers, and I’m tired of what’s starting to feel like an hourly cleanup job.

research blogging ftw!

Lately it seems hard for me to find the time to blog, or the topics that seem bloggable. But I’m re-inspired by Jill’s announcement of her award for research dissemination via blogging—how exciting! And it reminded me of how valuable this blog has been for me as an academic.

In her post, Jill notes that she wouldn’t have won that award if she’d been blogging pseudonymously, like so many of the women writing great academic blogs. Like Jill, if I couldn’t write about the specifics of my life—the conferences I participate in, the research areas I’m exploring, the people around me—it wouldn’t really feel like my blog. While I recognize the risks inherent in blogging, my experience has been that the rewards greatly outweigh those risks. I wouldn’t be sitting in this office in Redmond if it weren’t for my blog. I wouldn’t be speaking at SXSW, or have travelled to Dubai. I wouldn’t have the worldwide network of friends and colleagues that I’ve acquired over the past 3.5 years. So yeah, it was worth any risks. And I need to remember that, and not neglect this fertile space that—when properly tended—has yielded such a bountiful harvest.

(The “ftw” is short for “for the win,” an expression I’ve acquired since starting to play World of Warcraft.)

yet another thing i owe to my blog...

I’m always a little bit amused by people who still wonder aloud how and why I find the time to blog. I find time the same way most people find time to watch their favorite television shows, or go to movies (neither of which I do very often at all). And I do it because I’ve had extraordinarily personal and professional rewards accrue to me as a direct result of the effort I put into blogging—not the least of which is the visiting researcher position I currently hold here at Microsoft.

But today’s mail brought an unexpected bonus from my blogging, in the form of five copies of the second edition of Edward Tufte’s wonderful essay on Powerpoint. It’s new enough that it doesn’t even seem to be advertised on his site yet. Since the only time I met Dr. Tufte was as a student in one of his workshops more than ten years ago, I can only assume that the “with the compliments of Edward Tufte” card attached to the essays was entirely a result of the posts I’ve made here about Powerpoint, many of which reference the original essay.

A nice bright spot in an otherwise gray day. And a good reminder of the blessings this blog has brought.

switching to dynamic publishing

Ever since I upgraded to Movable Type 3.2, rebuilding has been much slower on my current host. That’s caused two problems, one just annoying and the other more serious. The annoying part is that marking comments as junk (an all-too-frequent need) forces a rebuild, which is painfully slow and often times out on the intranet at work. The serious part is that most incoming trackbacks are failing, probably due to timeout issues.

So tonight I’m going to try switching from static to dynamic publishing—for the non-geek readers out there, it means that most pages on the site won’t be saved as individual static documents, but instead will be generated on-the-fly when you request them.

If the site breaks in the process, don’t panic—it’s all backed up. Worst case I’ll revert back to original settings and live with the problems. Best case it’ll be working perfectly in a few minutes, and trackbacks will start working as they should again.

—

Update: It worked. Only two real problems, which were relatively easy to fix. The first problem was that I use mt-textile and smartypants for text formatting on the blog (the former lets me use things like underscores to create italicized text, or asterixes to generated bulleted ists; the latter handles typographic niceties like em dashes, curly quotes, and true ellipses). Those text processors don’t work properly with dynamic publishing, but I found this post on Movalog with information on how to fix that. The second problem involved the fact that I had some custom PHP code in my templates that used movable type tag variables—apparently since the dynamic templates are PHP based, this causes some problems. There are apparently ways to call the variables, but I didn’t feel like mucking with them, so I just changed the few instances to non-variable code (using http://mamamusings.net/ rather than the BlogURL variable, etc). Not the most elegant fix, but it was expedient, and now it all works. And since I’m planning on a site redesign over the holidays, it wasn’t worth spending too long on the template code.

The good news is that the trackback problem does appear to be fixed—a number of new trackbacks have appeared over the past few days, after a long dry spell that I suspect was technological (especially since I saw several inbound links on other sites that hadn’t registered here). Mission accomplished!

i missed my blogiversary this year...

mamamusings turned three years old on October 23rd. Thanks to Jim McGee (who shares the date, but not the year) for reminding me!

Has it really only been three years? How is that possible?

Starting a blog has been the most influential professional act I’ve ever taken. Because of my blog I’m here at Microsoft, enjoying a dream sabbatical. I’m giving keynotes at conferences like Internet Librarian. I’ve built a professional network that literally spans the globe. I’ve built a network of new friends, also spanning the globe. I’ve been able to leverage this online presence into so many real-world opportunities and connections that I’m embarrassed to list them all here.

Thank you so much to all of you who’ve read this blog, commented on it, linked to it, challenged me on it. You’ve helped to change my life, and my gratitude is boundless.

(And with that, I’m hereby declaring a brief moratorium on meta-blogging posts. When your “on blogging” category is the largest one in your archives, you’re probably doing way too much navel-gazing.)

on being a corporate research blogger

I got an email this morning from a friend who was critical of my recent posts related to Microsoft and Google. The friend said that since starting my sabbatical I’ve seemed to be unfailingly critical of Google and positive about Microsoft in my posts, and that I needed to be more aware of my online voice. There was more, particularly on the issue of whether I was somehow damaging my objectivity as an academic by allowing myself to become so publicly supportive of a company.

Lovely way to start a weekend. But after I got over the hurt feelings, I started thinking about the larger issues underlying my new role as a corporate pawn. (Should my blog have a big caveat at the top that says “I’ve been pwnz0rzed!”?…) While I don’t agree completely with this friend, I can’t dismiss these criticisms out of hand, nor can I assume that view of me isn’t shared by others.

I started out by combing through my blog to find and point out the times when I’ve criticized Microsoft’s products and practices, and acknowledged the ability of companies like Google and Apple to delight consumers in a way that Microsoft consistently fails to do. (In fact, during my keynote speech at Internet Librarian I explicitly told the audience that I thought many—if not most—of Microsoft’s products sucked—and did so while proudly sporting my 17” powerbook.) But that’s not really the point, is it? It’s perception that’s at issue here, and perhaps I need to more be aware of that perception.

There are a lot of great researchers who work for research labs—Microsoft Research and Google Labs and Yahoo Research are full of them, as are the labs at HP and PARC and IBM. Very few of those researchers have blogs, though. Perhaps it’s because it’s so very hard to strike a balance between bias and objectivity when you’re in this in-between world, and talking too much about your day to day life in the belly of the beast exposes more of that tension?

Where I may be erring on the side of transparency, it’s been primarily an attempt to avoid erring on the side of opacity. Once you take a job working for a company—rather than doing grant-funded collaborative research—you change your relationship to that company. Perhaps I was wrong in thinking that I should be up front about my experiences and reactions to working here…but I’d like to think that there’s more good than bad to be gained from my transparency.

My critic felt that my blog posts here undermined my validity as an “objective” academic, but I’m not sure that I agree. If I were presenting my blog as unbiased research, that would be one thing. But research has to stand on its own in terms of methodology and conclusions—and besides that, is there really such thing as an “unbiased” researcher? For me, knowing the biases of the researchers makes the research more credible rather than less, because I don’t feel as though I need to look for hidden motives. Also, my identity as an academic has always been tied up far more in my teaching than in my research (a function of being a professor at a teaching-focused institution)—and I suspect that my students are far more influenced by the Powerbook I carry, my intense dislike for Microsoft products Powerpoint and Windows, and my use of GMail than they are by any blog posts describing how much I like the people I’m working with at Microsoft.

One of my goals for this sabbatical was to give people a sense of what it’s like to be inside a corporation that’s often thought of as “faceless,” and that’s what I’ve been trying to do. The alternative is to be more opaque, to only write about “big ideas,” but that’s never been the way I approached my personal blog.

In terms of my recent negativity about Google—there’s definitely a mix of things going on there. My basic concern about Google’s domination of the search market (particularly in the hearts and minds of kids) predates my employment with Microsoft, and is a concern shared by a number of people in the library profession (as I pointed out in my Internet Librarian notes). In many ways, Google is the new Microsoft—when you get to be the 10,000-pound-gorilla, people start to mistrust your motives. They’re not a scrappy startup anymore, and they shouldn’t continue to be thought of as such. (But even saying that is to acknowledge how negatively Microsoft is perceived, and for good reason—from its market practices to its often-awful products, MS has gotten its bad reputation the old-fashioned way—they’ve earned it.) Google’s not making the same mistakes as Microsoft, but it’s making plenty of its own. Their secrecy surrounding all of their work is to me antithetical to both academic and library approaches. And in the case of book digitization, I though Roy Tennant’s criticisms were spot-on. Microsoft may have made—and be making still—a lot of bad, ham-handed, bad-for-the-consumer moves…but joining the OCA was not one of those, and I would have praised that even if I hadn’t been an employee.

I don’t really want to work someplace that I can’t be passionate about. And I don’t want to pretend that I’m not engaged in and excited about an environment if I’m not. As a researcher, to what extent should the “rules” (oh, geez, i really hate blogging rules) be different for me than they are for a non-research corporate blogger? At the end of the day, however, I do have to wonder if perhaps I’ve been sucked a little too far into the “us against them” mentality that’s so common inside of corporations (universities, of course, suffer from none of that competitiveness [cough, cough]).

The problem for me right now is that I have only two perspectives on this—mine, and the friend who was brave enough to share a critical view with me. That’s not enough to really triangulate with. So…where do you think the balance lies? (I’m going to work really hard to keep from being defensive in the comments, so if you post something and I don’t respond, I assure you it doesn’t mean I didn’t read it; I just want to absorb right now rather than reacting.)

internet librarian 05: karen schneider on blogging ethics

I’ve know Karen Schneider for more years than I’m willing to admit in public, and I’ve never been disappointed in one of her presentations…

She shows off the newly-revamped Librarians’ Internet Index, which looks great. “Websites you can trust.”

After attending the Berkman symposium on web credibility, she started thinking a lot about blogging ethics. Why do ethics matter?

On a “micro” level, your blog represents you and everything you’re connected with, including librarianship. Great quote: “For most readers, you are the last stop between the reader and the truth.” From a utilitarian standpoint, being ethical is a strategic approach. Information has a long half-life. Being ethical is a form of self-preservation…”the blogosphere can be cruel. the biblioblogosphere can be crueler.”

On a “macro” level, “The harder we work to make the world a moral place, the better it is for everyone.” She points out that librarianship is a profession defined by its concern for others—witness librarians’ willingness to go to jail rather than provide information about patrons.

She flashes some “rules of blogging,” but they’re gone before I can look up from my screen. :)

Five things not to say about your blog

1. It’s only a blog
2. So-and-so does it
3. Everyone understood what I meant
4. They can always look up
5. Nobody trusts the web anyway

Key Rules

Be transparent

Talks about the importance of transparency, quotes wikipedia (“An activity is transparent if all information about it is open and freely available.”) and David Weinberger (“For most blogs, we want to know what the writer’s starting point is.”

Lack of transparency can be dangerous… Talks about Jeff Gannon, a “one-man-astoturf” White House correspondent. Turned out to be, among other things, a male hustler. ($1200 a weekend?! wow…) Being transparent is pre-emptive—you take the wind out of the sails of people wanting to dish dirt on you. (Shows a photo of the real Robert Fisk, namesake of the verb “fisking.”)

Cite it (and check your facts!)

Talks about Gorman’s infamous “revenge of the blog people” article. (Aside: the best swag I’m bringing home from this conference is my “One of the Blog People” button.) She notes that he complained about blogs, but never cited the ones he talked about. Link to and name your sources and documentation. Avoid anonymous sources. Always check a secondary source (well, I’d argue that this is true only if you’re asserting that it’s factually true).

“There is nothing more pathetic than a librarian who gets the facts wrong.” (She says that’s worse than a NYT reporter that does the same, and I agree.)

Lots of good tips for how to ensure accuracy, which I’m not going to repeat here.

Be Fair

WHO has defined fairness as “The attitude of being just to all.”

Some good tips: Let a source know when s/he is “on the record.” Don’t present opinions as fact. If you claim be objective, you really have to present opposing sides of an issue. Let your readers comment (within reason). [I don’t know if I agree with the last one…but that debate’s been held in enough places that I see no reason to rehash it here.]

Admit Mistakes
(tuned out for a few minutes here…sorry…mostly about how to acknowledge )

Shows Justinland site, “brother of bridezilla” posts. Why? The unreliable narrator can be interesting and fun. April fool’s is an exception.

All in all a very good, very clear, very useful presentation for library bloggers. Brava!

small successes

During the ten days I spent in Seattle, I was surrounded mostly by people who qualify for the label “technical elite.” And too many of them, I fear, are beginning to forget that their worldview is not exactly representative.

This was particularly obvious when someone (Rael Dornfest?) asked the teen panel at the Social Computing Symposium whether they ever listened to podcasts. Their response? “Huh?” That didn’t surprise me at all, because it’s been clear to me for a while that podcasting has a pretty narrow band of followers and enthusiasts (almost all of whom, so far as I can tell, have lengthy commutes).

But what would probably surprise this group even more is how many people still don’t see blogs as anything more than a fringe phenomenon. I teach in an IT department at a technical university, and most of my students still don’t recognize the potential professional value of blogs.

This quarter I’m trying to change all that by really teaching about blogs and their uses in technical contexts. And based on the midterms I’m finishing grading today (yes, very very very late), I’m making some progress. Take this excerpt, for example, which I found particularly gratifying:

As I mentioned earlier, I am seeing the importance of blogs in the work place. A co-worker and I want to start a blog to make others in our group aware of available upgrades for the software tools we commonly use or any new functions or ideas that one of us may be working on. We may also use it to keep our common procedures in one place. A good example of how this would be of benefit is by providing annotated instructions on how to install or upgrade a piece of software. And, as of [this Monday], a blog will prove especially important for our group; our pointy-haired boss will be splitting us up along application lines (our web apps, client/server apps and mainframe apps) as opposed to what function we provide as a group. So we’ll be working for different mangers, depending on which applications we’re working on. (I will continue to refer to us as a ‘group’ in this paper.)

A weblog will then be a great way for us to communicate because of its interactive nature. It will also be a great tool to “advertise” what our group does. Others will surely want to check out our blog simply from a curiosity standpoint. Then perhaps other groups will have blogs of their own and the proliferation of information flowing between groups will be mind-numbing (right!).

Or this one:

This class for example has exposed me to the opinions and insights of a community of learners, where we all take turns at being lectures and listeners, all from the comfort of my home. Even as I search the web for the answers to the weekly questions I find that many times the freshest perspectives on the subject matter to be in weblogs. Unfortunately it seems like I spend more time sifting through the weblog to find the gem I was looking for. Since working full time and raising a family, it has been difficult for me to travel to campus at least three times a week taking traditional classes. The weblog has been an excellent way for me to learn, while at the same time putting a little extra time back in my day for my family. I was a bit apprehensive about taking a distance-learning course, but I find that I have learned as much from the format of this class as I have from the content on the on-line chats and reading assignments. This class has exposed me to a new method of study I would have never considered.

Maybe they’re just trying to tell me what I want to hear—or maybe I’m actually making some progress. I prefer to believe it’s the latter.

the blogroll is coming back

A couple people have noticed that the Bloglines link now goes to a list of my students’ blogs, and were unhappy about that.

Not to worry; later this week the blogroll is coming back, in an expandable box on the sidebar so that it doesn’t take over the page for people not that interested in the links.

slacker tracking

A former student of mine, now part of the tech corps in SF, has a funny post on his site. He constructed Google and Technorati queries to find all the people who’ve posted something along the lines of “sorry I haven’t been posting more lately”. Heh.

online journalism review article on "blogging for dollars" (semi-sponsored post)

J. D. Lasica has written an interesting article for USC’s Online Journalism Review entitled “The cost of ethics: Influence peddling in the blogosphere.”

My trust in the piece was somewhat marred by JD’s poor fact-checking—I’m a professor, not a lecturer (there’s a big difference…sort of like calling someone a copy editor vs a reporter, or a reporter vs an editor), and more importantly I teach at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) not RPI.

I would have commented on the site with a correction, but commenting on OJR requires not only your name and email, but also your date of birth, which I found a bit intrusive.

Nonetheless, I think JD does a decent job of outlining the issues in the debate.

I have to say that I take Stowe Boyd’s criticism of the Marqui program with a grain of salt. I founded Corante’s Many-to-Many blog on social software, and have been writing for it for nearly two years. I have yet to receive one penny of compensation from Corante for that work. This week, however, I cashed a hefty check from Marqui for the four clearly-marked sponsored posts that I wrote in January.

All in all, I don’t feel at all bad about participating in Marqui’s program. I don’t think it has had any impact on my writing in other areas, nor have I felt that I’ve misled my readers in any way. So it’s hard for me to see where Stowe’s outrage comes from.

It will be interesting to watch where this all goes…

why do academics blog?

I keep getting asked this question by colleagues here at RIT and elsewhere, and I find myself sending them the same links over and over again. So here’s what I give people who ask me this, in an attempt to clarify the value of blogging to those of us in academia. It’s not all about personal confessionals. Really.

My Posts
you may ask yourself “how did i get here?”
blogging risks and benefits

Anders Jacobsen
Why I blog

Crooked Timber
The Academic Contributions of Blogging?
Academics and Blogging (see the comments)
Academic Blogging and Literary Studies
Lit Studies Blogging, Part II: Better breathing through blogging

Seb Paquet
Personal Knowledge Publishing and Its Uses in Research

Jill Walker and Torill Mortensen
Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool (PDF)

Collin Brooke
Blogging @ MEA (Collin’s notes from the panel that I did with Seb Paquet, Alex Halavais, Clay Shirky and Jill Walker)

Also…

University of Minnesota’s edited collection of essays, “Into the Blogosphere”

Feel free to add other favorite links to the wiki page I’ve set up.

"there's something big happening"

I’m taking a break from grading my students’ web pages to read David Weinberger’s ongoing coverage of the Harvard “Votes, Bits, and Bytes” conference. Wish I’d been at the session he wrote about this morning, organized by Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon.

Ethan says that we’re here today to talk about blogs as bridges, borrowing Hoder’s metaphor from yesterday (blogs as windows that give you insight into someone’s world, blogs as cafes where people can talk together, and blogs as bridges). There’s something big happening, Ethan says.

Indeed there is.

Omar from Iraq talks about the importance of blogging as a way of routing around propaganda. Then he talks about how the open comments from around the world on his blog helped his nephew “If I visited America a year and a half ago, I would have felt llike a stranger. This time I feel like I’m with friends, and that is the greatest gift I can think of.”

This is how I feel, as well. From Norway to Australia, France to Japan, Brazil to South Africa…I have friends around the world now that I would never have had without this blog to facilitate connections. I can say without a flicker of doubt that my blog is the one technological tool that has most fundamentally changed my professional life.

happy 2nd blogiversary to me!

It seems appropriate that on the 2nd anniversary of my starting my blog I’m moderating a workshop on social software in academic contexts.

I’m in the middle of dinner at a wonderful workshop at USC, but I wanted to take a moment to wish myself a happy 2nd blogiversary, and to reflect back on two years that have brought astonishing changes in both my personal and my professional lives.

Thank you so much for being a part of this change in my life.

archive changes

I’ve made a minor change in my monthly archive templates, in order to display monthly pages in chronological (rather than the default reverse chronological) order. I’m doing that because I’ve often found myself frustrated when finding a new blog that there’s not a way to easily get caught up on past entries. Sometimes I’d like to be able to read the blog as a forward-moving narrative.

So now when you select my monthly archives, they’ll run from the beginning of the month to the end, rather than the end to the beginning.

If you want to make the same change to your MT templates, go to the Date-Based Archive template and change the <MTEntries> tag to <MTEntries sort_order=”ascend”>

best weblog redesign ever

Anil, you rock.

construction notice

Upgrading from MT 2.65 to MT 3.01D today…there may be temporary wonkiness. Be patient.

Update: I think it’s about done. Two big changes—one is that trackbacks and comments are no longer intertwingled, since SimpleComments doesn’t work with MT3. The other is that commenters must now register with a TypeKey ID. I really hate to do that, but there’s no blacklist tool available for MT3 (yet), and I need a way to halt (or at least slow) the barrage of spam. If/when a version of MT-Blacklist for MT3 is released, I’ll probably remove the registration requirement.

Update 2: Per Karen’s suggestion in the comments, I’ve changed the setup so that anyone can comment. Comments from people who’ve logged in to TypeKey will appear immediately, and comments from those who haven’t will go into a moderation queue for approval. We’ll see if it works.

blog research

I’ve posted a lengthy piece on blog research issues over on Many-to-Many. Y’all read it now, y’hear?

new revisions to movable type licensing

Late Tuesday night, Six Apart announced yet another revision to the pricing structure for Movable Type 3.0 licenses. The prices are lower, the licenses are less restrictive, and the range of options is far less confusing.

There are now four types of licenses—personal, commercial, education, and not-for-profit. Personal users have three options: free for 1 author and 3 weblogs, a basic supported version for $69.95 that supports 5 authors and unlimited weblogs, and an unlimited personal version for $99.95. This ought to address a lot of the concerns that people raised about the pricing structure (though, of course, it won’t change the minds of people who’ve decided that free-as-in-speech software is a better option for them).

As an educator, I’m particularly happy to see that the educational licenses are spelled out clearly, and that an affordable option for a single professor is included in the mix ($39.95 for unlimited use by one teacher). That will make it much easier for me to continue developing and maintaining my MT Courseware package.

What I’d really like to see for educational use is a TypePad-style interface that allows easy blog creation by users at an educational institution. That would make a big difference in terms of institutional adoption.

what happened to the blogroll?

My husband said to me this morning “Your blogroll’s down.”

Well, actually, I removed it. I’ve been using Bloglines recently (although I may switch to NetNewsWire when 2.0 comes out), and I haven’t been maintaining the blogroll. So I removed the lengthy list of sites, and replaced it with a link to my bloglines subscriptions up in the top left corner of the page.

I know that means I’m no longer giving “Google juice” to the sites I read, so I may reconsider when I redesign. In the meantime, if you want to see what I’m reading, you can follow the Bloglines link.

closing comments on older entries

Until I get MT_Blacklist to work again, I’m continuing to close comments on entries older than 21 days. I haven’t found a good way to do this automatically, so I’m using this command in phpMyAdmin to close the comments once a month or so.

UPDATE mt_entry SET entry_allow_comments=2 WHERE entry_allow_comments=1 
AND TO_DAYS(NOW()) - TO_DAYS(entry_created_on) >= 21;

Since I keep losing track of the syntax, I’m putting it here where I can find it again.

how i'm using movable type

Brava to Mena for starting a conversation by asking how people are currently using MovableType. Here’s my answer.

Here on mamamusings, I actually have one blog, with one author, which you’re looking at right now. This site would continue to qualify for a free license.

Misbehaving.net currently runs on TypePad, but we’d been considering a move off of it to a full MT installation because the spam problem has gotten out of control, and because the management of multiple authors there still leaves a lot to be desired—I’d like to be able to let other people in the group have the ability to manage the site without yielding control for all of my TypePad account, for example. We have ten authors on one blog, so that one would probably fall into the personal edition 10/10 category—except for the Google Ads, which bring in all of about $10/month. So right now, it would cost $120. If all the authors kicked in $12, that would probably work out about right. And at $10/head for new authors, we wouldn’t break anybody’s bank.

On lawley.net, there are two blogs, with two authors; one for my son Lane, and one for his best friend Jackson. My hope was to have a few more family members blogging there. Right now it would fall under personal edition, but I’m not sure it’s worth it to me to pay $70 for a tool that the kids use only occasionally.

On a domain that I set up for my kids’ elementary school, I had planned to set up blogs for any teacher who wanted one, so that they could use the blogs as tools for communicating with parents, students, each other, and teachers elsewhere. That plan is on hold pending more information about educational pricing. (And that one’s complicated because the blogs are strictly for teachers at a K-12 school, but I own the server and am not an employee of the school.) In that scenario, I expect we’d have a handful of teachers to begin, with a few more added each month as they saw what their colleagues were doing. I don’t want to have to continually monitor compliance with the license—“do we need another seat today?”—so I really hope there’ll be some kind of flat-rate unlimited use license for organizational contexts. If all the teachers (~30) decided to blog, we’d eventually be looking at ~$850 for the site (before discounts), which would probably be paid out of my pocket. I like my kids’ school, but I don’t have that kind of money to set something up for them.

And finally, on my RIT server, I’ve got eight weblogs. Five of them are from past classes, and they range from a one-author site (with just me as author) to a two-author site (me and a TA), to a 36-author site (with students having authoring privileges. One of them is the class I’m teaching this quarter. One is a research grant blog that has two authors (myself and Alex Halavais). And one is a blog for my current research project that has four authors (myself, my co-PI, and two student employees). I don’t even want to try to figure out what the cost would be under the current licensing, because it’s just too confusing.

Also, on all of those sites I regularly set up “test blogs” when I’m doing redesigns, so that I can test the new templates without messing up the production site. I’m going to assume (yes, I know what happens when you assume) that test blogs like that wouldn’t be included in any counts. But that I have to even think about that is vexing.

market research mistakes

In SixApart’s response to the MT 3.0 feedback fiasco, Mena says:

One of the most valid comments we heard is that the personal licenses do not work well for many people who are currently using Movable Type. This surprised us because in a survey of 2500 people, a whopping 85% of respondents had 5 of fewer weblogs or authors. This help educate our final decisions about the weblog and author limits.

Who was it that thought that surveying 2500 random users of MT would be the best way to gauge user reaction?

You don’t just need to know what the random(user) thinks, you need to know what the opinion makers and change agents think—because since Movable Type users are all publishers, with audiences, those people will have an immediate impact on other users with their public reactions. More importantly, they made the mistake of thinking all blogs are the same. They’re not. My son’s one-author personal blog is qualitatively (not just quantitatively) different from Crooked Timber, which runs on the same software but has fifteen authors. Blogs based on my courseware templates are nothing like journalistic blogs. You need to know the different segments of your audience, and how their response to your ideas varies.

The fact that the response to the new licenses surprised them so much says volumes about how little they understood their users. And what’s astonishing about that to me is that in this industry, there’s really no excuse for not having ongoing conversations with your market, about all aspects of your product or service. There should be no big surprises in a weblog-enabled company.

What I hate about all of this is that I know the people involved, and I know this wasn’t motivated by greed or malice or contempt for their users. I know that. But the whole thing is clearly a consequence of poor communication with users, something that SixApart has been criticized about in the past. (While writing this, I received a trackback ping to my M2M post on the subject from Chuq Von Rospach, who makes some similar points on the communication issue.)

While they may have learned from this (and their quick response yesterday would indicate that they have), it doesn’t really matter much at this point. I’ve been following the ripples from the initial outrage, and the major impact has been for people to be shaken out of the inertia of not wanting to change software packages. The response isn’t “I’ll never pay a cent for software,” it’s “if I’m going to pay for software, I’d better shop around a bit and make sure I’m getting the best bang for my buck.” Or “I don’t like surprises, and I’d rather have a tool where things won’t change so unexpectedly.”

As a result, people who would never have thought seriously about changing programs (myself included) are now downloading and playing around with alternatives. And with people like Shelley Powers and Mark Pilgrim not only leading the way but also providing tips and tutorials on how to follow them, that genie can’t ever be stuffed back into the bottle.

Am I willing to pay for a high-quality software package that does exactly what I want? Of course. But like Jennifer over at ScriptyGoddess, I’m a lot less likely to pay for one that’s still going to require me to do a lot of tweaking to get it to do what I want. And in order to get me to feel good about paying for a new version of something when the older version was free, you’ve really got to make it more, not less attractive. They might have had less backlash if they’d changed the pricing without adding restrictions. Or if they’d added restrictions on commercial licenses and not personal licenses. As it is, they gambled big based on poor research, and lost not only customers, but also good will.

And while I’m grateful for the promise of significant educational discounts, I think the decision not to publish that information publicly is a mistake. If you force people to come after you for the information, you’ll lose some of them—particularly when there are other tools that they can explore instead. The most important users for them to target in education right now aren’t the institutional purchasers—for them, hundreds of dollars (or even thousands, if the software is important) is not an issue. It’s the individual teachers and students who serve as change agents in their organizations. If you put barriers in front of those early adopters, they’ll simply go elsewhere. And the timing of the change was awful in that regard, given that so many competitors are emerging right now with viable alternatives.

I really don’t want to switch away from MovableType—I’ve got a huge amount of time and energy invested in learning its ins and outs. But I’m nervous now, and far more aware of the precarious position that dependence on commercial software puts me in. So while I won’t jump ship just yet, I’m preparing some lifeboats, and testing the waters in them. I don’t want to surprised like this again.

—

Update: Christina Wodtke has an eloquent piece about why she’ll probably move her site off MT. I’m collecting a lot of the “why I’m considering a switch” posts over on del.icio.us, as well. It’s interesting to me to see how people are thinking out loud about their options.

movable type changes

It’s not easy to find much “hard” information on what just happened with MT licensing (SixApart’s web site is far from a masterpiece of information architecture), so I’ve mostly been reading commentary on various blog posts. (I found out about it because of a trackback from scribblingwoman to my MT courseware post.)

It’s not clear to me if the new charges will apply to users of pre 3.0 versions of MT. If so, that means everyone using my courseware for more than one class—including me—is pretty much screwed. And since I’m not willing to pay a licensing fee of $150 to use MT for the handful of family members on lawley.net, this probably will result in my migrating both my personal and my professional weblogs to another platform. (Let me add that I am willing to pay for MT; I’m just not willing to pay that much.)

From what I can see, regardless of how it all shakes out in terms of licenses and wording, this was a major screwup by SixApart in terms of communication and respect for their users. I’m deeply disappointed. And since I genuinely like and respect the Six Apart team—especially Anil and Joi, who I know well and think of as friends—I’m doubly surprised by the clumsiness of this move. As Simon Phipps points out, the response to Mena’s post announcing the changes is a sobering demonstration of the power of trackback to make unhappy customers’ voices heard. I imagine that a lot of companies will take this as a cautionary lesson about the negative impact of corporate blogs and the conversations they foster. I’m also disappointed by the company’s failure to quickly respond to the outcry from their user community—the longer they stay silent on this, the more likely it is that they’ll lose formerly committed users to competitive products.

Meanwhile, however, courseware users need not panic…I’ll probably spend some time next month looking at WordPress and TextPattern (which seem to come highly recommended by bloggers whose viewpoints I trust) to see if I can create one or more new versions of my courseware on those platforms (I can’t imagine it would be that difficult to migrate the courseware).

I’ll also add a Creative Commons license to the courseware templates and documentation, so that if anyone else wants to shift them elsewhere, they can.

—

Update: I’ve heard from Anil that there will be a very reasonable educational license provided, and that details will be announced soon. Once that happens, I’ll write more about the future of MT courseware and my educational use of the product. I know Six Apart is committed to encouraging educational uses of their products, so I’m hoping that the educational license(s) they announce will be fair and appropriate.

you may ask yourself "how did i get here?"

One of the questions I’ve been asked a lot lately, mostly by full-time academics, was how/why I started blogging. It’s not a quick and easy answer, but I’ve been asked it enough now that it’s probably worth having it here in a public and somewhat permanent form.

My blogging epiphany came about at the Pop!Tech conference in October of 2002. That was the first conference I’d been to with ubiquitous WiFi and a critical mass of people with laptops taking advantage of it, and I was intrigued. What were people doing with their computers, beyond taking notes and checking email? (Turned out that Simson Garfinkel was pulling POP passwords out of the ether, but that’s another story.)

When Dan Gillmor spoke, however, he related an incident that really struck me. Here’s Howard Rheingold’s account of it:

I wasn’t at all familiar with the term “blog” or with the amazing growth of blogging tools and sites, but I was totally intrigued by the feedback loop that Dan had described. And then I realized that everything I was hearing at Pop!Tech was also being blogged by people in the room. (In retrospect, I’d seen this mentioned on the Pop!Tech web site before the conference, but it hadn’t registered as being important to me then.) I started reading the blogs of the people in the room—David Weinberger, Dan Gillmor, Ernie the Attorney. And as I started reading their mediated versions of what I was seeing live, I found that my appreciation and understanding of what I was hearing was deepened and extended. They had different context and knowledge to bring to the topic, links to related sites, personal experiences.

It was a transformative moment for me, particularly when combined with Linda Stone’s brilliant discussion of what she calls “Continuous Partial Attention“—a kind of scanning of multiple open information channels that she was increasingly observing in her students as an adjunct professor. This is not the same thing as multitasking—instead, it’s a constant monitoring, looking for content that makes it worth switching to a focus. (It reminds me of the process that directors of live television events go through…watching a bank of monitors showing different camera angles, deciding which one to bring up as the focal point at any given point in time.)

By the time the conference was over, I was determined to go home and try this technology out on my own. I’d noticed the MovableType link on a number of the sites I’d visited, and I liked the idea of a package I could install and play with on my own server. So upon my return, I downloaded and installed MT into my RIT account, and wrote my first post. (I chose the title mamamusings on a whim, not realizing it would become inextricably linked with me and my online identity; after a year or so of posting to the blog, I finally registered the domain name and transfered my blog off of the RIT system.)

Then I started reading—voraciously. I jumped from blog to blog, soaking up the content and context, thinking about how the medium could be used in my research, in my teaching, in my personal life. I felt very much like Alice down the rabbit hole—it was exhilarating and overwhelming. Along the way, I stumbled upon Joi Ito’s weblog, and noticed he’d posted about a scary “Aspartame is poison” email he’d received. I didn’t know Joi at all, but I commented on his site, and then wrote my own response to his post on my site—my first exposure to trackback technology, since my post automatically “pinged” Joi’s site to tell him that I’d mentioned his post. Much to my delight, this resulted in him visiting my site and commenting on that post—as well as on another post.

Suddenly my experiment in blogging had gone from a monologic to a dialogic form—not only could I “scribble on the walls” of other people’s sites, the walls were talking back. It didn’t take me long to realize how powerful these tools could be in the classroom, so I started making plans to use blogs (MT, specifically) as a context for teaching my upcoming web design class. That first quarter I started with a class blog on which all students had posting privileges, along with having each student create their own blog for posting their in-class exercises and thoughts on the reading. I used that model in my web design class, as well as in my xml class.

In the web design class, the individual student blogs turned out to be an excellent tool for teaching concepts like CSS and CGI. And in both classes, the dialog was greatly enhanced by the appearance in our comments by authors of books and articles we were reading. But the multiple authors on one class blog approach didn’t work well in either class, so I discarded that approach. Instead, over the summer I rethought the role of the course blog, and developed the first version of the MT-courseware I’ve been working on.

I wasn’t just thinking about blogs in my classes, though—I was also thinking a lot about how blogs could help me to make connections in the context of doing research. I felt very isolated at RIT, which is a teaching institution that has only recently started prioritizing research as a faculty activity. It’s very hard to do research if you don’t have a critical mass of people to work with—senior colleagues with research experience in your field, graduate students interested in working in your area. I had neither—so weblogs provided me with a way to build an “invisible college” that could help me develop research-related connections, support, and visibility. Alex Halavais and I experimented with using a blog to record our NSF grant proposal process, which was helpful in many ways (even though we didn’t get funded).

Along with the external links and relationships I was forming, I was also getting a chance to write regularly for the first time since I’d been a graduate student. Having a regular outlet for “thinking out loud” turned out to be extremely valuable to me. I’m a classic “talk it out” extrovert in terms of thought processes, and the blog community I was becoming a part of provided a wonderful context for doing just that. The combination of the informality of lightweight publishing and the immediate distributed peer review and feedback on ideas that blogs encourage was just the right balance for me.

This for me is really the power of weblogs for academics—and often for students, as well. It’s not about weblogs replacing journals, or becoming mass media outlets, or creating a huge personal audience. It’s about finding and maintaining a community of like-minded thinkers—inside and outside of academia—who can be part of an ongoing conversation. As Anil points out, it’s not about popularity, or being at the top of the power law curve. It’s about being part of a community, part of an ongoing conversation.

books and bully pulpits

Lane’s had his blog for a few months now, but he didn’t use it for much until we came on this trip to Asia. It’s become a powerful tool for him to communicate with his class back in the US; he writes about his experiences on the trip, they read about it in school, and then the teacher has them do research so that they can ask him questions about his experiences. (Major props to his teacher, who’s enthusiastically embraced this process and incorporated it into the classroom.) Lane has found he enjoys writing for an audience (who among us doesn’t?), and it’s wonderful to be able to see the dialog unfolding.

It appears, however, that now that he’s started, Lane has really begun to grasp the power of personal online publishing. He’s been pondering some political issues lately—specifically, the motivation behind book banning and censorship. He’s got at least one friend whose parents have forbidden Harry Potter books, and this frustrates him.

A few days ago, he asked: “How much does it cost to write a letter to the newspaper and have them publish it?”

“You can’t buy that,” I replied. “They have to like what you wrote enough to publish it.”

He thought for a bit. “But I could publish it for free on my blog, right?” I stifled a grin. “Why, yes. You could. But be careful how you write it, since I know that the people you’re talking about are probably reading your blog. Before you post it, let me look it over.”

So he wrote. And I read. And I didn’t change a thing, aside from a few typos. I’m awfully proud of him, for both his ideas and his writing.

outside in

There have been a lot of transitions for me during the past 18 months. When I started blogging, I had no connections to any of the “names” in this medium. I was an isolated academic in Rochester, NY. Any ‘fame’ I’d accrued professionally was limited to the library field. I was headed down a professional dead-end, not having published or presented in far too long, teaching one web design class after another without a larger context into which to place the material.

When I discovered blogging, it was an amazing, exciting thing for me. It pulled together my grad school interests in what was then called