June 29, 2005
*At least that's the Cameron I think they're referring to, but we are talking about MIT geeks. It could be something obscure.
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01:04 PM
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June 16, 2005
Now for the observation.
Ahem.
Terri's autopsy report came out today. Terri's battle really brought out some of the worst behavior I've ever seen in the blogosphere. If Rathergate was the high point, this was most definitely the low. Perhaps it was simply meant to be that way, to show us the glaring failures of this new medium we're so very fond of proclaiming is the new information revolution. I don't know. I don't read entrails for a living, so I couldn't tell you for certain: this is just my gut feeling. Anyway, a lot of people made hay on this issue. Serious amounts of hay. Enough to feed all the livestock for a very long winter. But, and here's where the observation comes in, very few seem to be chiming in now that the autopsy report is in. Perhaps this is because the actual science of the report goes against what they were proclaiming to be the truth to her condition back when she was alive.
I know whom I'm looking for to chime in on this one, and they haven't. They've been silent all day long about it. I'm not going to name them, because they're very middle of the road bloggers. Not freepers. Not moonbats. They don't deserve the ignominy of being called out for this one. I felt that perhaps they were a wee bit overwrought about the entire deal. Say whatever you will about the entire situation, but you cannot deny that Terri brought out people's passion. And it brought it out in both beautiful and incredibly ugly ways. It was personal for these bloggers and that passion, perhaps, sometimes, I thought, got the better of their usually calm, reasoned rhetoric.
A friend of mine likes to remind me that this is a very new medium and that we'll never really replace the mainstream media, or even really make all that big of a dent in it, because bloggers, as a whole, aren't really held accountable. A reporter is held accountable to an editor, who is held accountable to the publisher, who is held accountable by the paying public. We're just spouting off here and are accountable, in only a very limited sense, to our readers and our blogging compadres. But since we can delete our blogs with the click of the mouse, and we'll never really face any real-life consequences if we've spouted off about this, that or the other, unless we're blogging at work and have been fired for it. That's about it. In other words, we really don't have an obligation to say "we were wrong" if we should be proven to be wrong. Audiences, as anyone who's been doing this for a while can tell you, come and go. You may be someone's favorite one week, and they might lose interest the next. Publish something your reader disagrees with and the beauty of the blogosphere dictates that there's probably someone out there who's said exactly what they want to hear, and has done it even better than the blogger they just abandoned. That's fine. As far as I'm concerned, readers are allowed to do that. What I do wonder about is this, though: there are plenty of blogs, this being one of them, who proclaimed the information revolution was well on its way when Dan Rather resigned because of the ball that started rolling in the blogosphere. Some of these very same blogs made some specious claims about Terri Schiavo. And today they've been proven wrong. Will they feel the obligation to say they were wrong?
And if they don't, what happens to the information revolution?
Posted by: Kathy at
12:19 AM
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June 14, 2005
Except...
When someone tries to use me. Then I have to draw the damn line, because homey just don't play that. For those of you who are wondering what I'm going on about this time, well, it's this: I am getting exceedingly tired of bloggers who perhaps don't have a huge audience---and would like to gain one---tracking back to a post I've written on a similar subject WITHOUT LINKING ME. They're doing this to gain hits. To gain notoriety. I know that's the reason they're doing it, but it's---and I'm going to shout this so they get it the first fucking time---TACKY IN THE EXTREME. Your trackback will get deleted. Trust me on this one. Get your own damn audience, or at least get some balls and send me a promo email. If you want me to get angry, like I just did, try and sneak around me, assuming I won't care. Because, let me tell you kids, that's a surefire way to bring the heavens down upon you. But, really, if you want me to promote one of your posts, send me an email that goes something like this:
Hi Kathy,I'm a fan of the Cake Eater Chronicles and I just wrote a post that dovetails nicely with one you wrote about such and such subject. Here's the link if you're interested in reading it.
Thanks for your time,
So and so blogger
Now, that wasn't so hard, was it? I may link you. I may not. You'll never know unless you try.
And just a super sekrit message to the dude who inspired this post: if you'd sent me an email, I would have linked to you. It was a good post. But now I won't because you tried to horn in on my blog and my traffic without giving me anything in return. It's pretty fucking simple. Blogging is, at best, a quid pro quo excursion. If you're not going to give, neither am I. Take your parasitic behavior and go elsewhere.
Posted by: Kathy at
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Trackback is a pretty simple thing once you get the hang of it. It works on the same principle as a submarine ping: remember that scene in Hunt for Red October where Ramius is asking for a ping to verify the distance to target? Well, trackback is pretty much the same thing, hence the usage of the word "ping," when referring to track back, as in "I pinged your blog." It's a tool that allows bloggers to know who's linked a particular post they've written. If you click on the trackback link up at the bottom of this post, you'll see all the people who have "tracked back," meaning they've linked this post on their own blogs. There are other ways of tracking who's linking to your blog, but they're time consuming and late. Trackback is quick and efficient and you usually know about it within a few minutes of being pinged. And all of this is made possible by an html link that's assigned to each and every post.
Now, some blogging software, like Movable Type (the one in use on this here blog) automatically tracks back to other MT blogs. When you link to them, it automatically pings their blog. You don't have to worry about it. Other blogging software, like Blogger, doesn't have automatic trackback, so if you want to trackback, you have to manually ping someone using a software add-on. Haloscan is the primary manual trackback software out there. Now, it's no big deal when someone links to a post you've written and then has manually tracked back, to let me know about it. This is considered to be the polite thing to do in terms of blogosphere etiquette. It lets me know who's linking me and I rather like knowing that. That's not what I'm talking about here. The problem comes in when someone doesn't link me, but tracks back to my post anyway, because it's on the same subject. There are any number of reasons why people would do this, but the main one is that they're looking for links. It's like putting an ad on my blog without my consent, without me getting anything in return. It's very rude.
I hope that explains it. 51 queries taking 0.0485 seconds, 135 records returned.
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