Epistemographer

So, I just got a G-mail account: epistemographer@gmail.com. How, you ask, did I manage such a thing? Well-connected friends? Winning a contest?

Nope. I went to Gmailswap.com and offered to mail someone a fresh NYC bagel for a Gmail invite. Literally within two minutes, I’d recieved a response, and tomorrow morning, a plain (and an onion, just because she seems really nice) bagel will be winging its way to a young woman in Portland, OR.

For some reason, this whole thing really appeals to my sense of the absurd, and I wouldn’t have wanted to get a Gmail invite any other way.

So, I’m apparently a bit behind the curve here (or maybe I just ought to stop reading political blogs compulsively and add some more techie ones to my daily circuit)…seems that the eagerly-anticipated Movable Type 3.0 is out, at least in a Developer version. Meanwhile, all hell has broken loose over the licensing structure (just check out the Trackbacks to Mena Trott’s announcement).

I’ve been using Movable Type for the past year, and have been quite the little MT evangelist, even convincing Cornell’s Academic Technology Center to install it on one of their servers for a course I taught this semester. Looking ahead to the work I’ll be doing at George Mason, I’ve been thinking about ways to stretch/adopt blogs into the work of the Center for History and New Media, and Movable Type has been my default CMS, simply because it’s what I know best.

For myself, there are a few problems with the new MT licensing scheme, and like most of the people raising a stink, they center on the number of authors/number of blogs permitted by each license. I totally understand the rationale for limiting the number of blogs and/or authors covered by a personal, non-commercial license – they’re trying to bring individuals into the Typepad service, and don’t want one person with technical skills setting up blogs for dozens of his or her friends when they otherwise might subscribe to Typepad. That’s totally cool, and while I myself have been known to set up a blog or two for a friend, I can respect that.

However, here’s my concern, about which I’ve seen precious little discussion – educational/academic uses (Weblogg-ed, for example, has nothing, and the best posts I’ve been able to find are by Shane Nackerud, who’s running the UThink initiative at the University of Minnesota). For example, I’ve been planning to launch a couple of group blogs on the model of Terra Nova to focus on a few of the research topics in which I’m particularly interested. Figuring up to a dozen authors, this rapidly becomes unaffordable, especially considering that I wouldn’t necessarily have any official funding for such a project. Moreover, there’s the question of CHNM – if, say, we wanted to add a blog-like function to the tools available for historians, it now seems substantially less likely that Movable Type is a viable option.

Now, while concerning, these issues don’t seem to be such a big deal in the immediate, practical sense: as best as I can tell from rooting around through various discussions, the licensing is on the honor system and these limits aren’t hard-coded into the software. If anything, though, this is a wake-up call for me, a reminder that while the code is visible, Movable Type is by no means open source software. Six Apart has every right to do what they like with the code, and charge whatever the market will bear. They can stop passing out the free beer whenever they like, and nobody really has a leg to stand on to complain.

This all comes as I’ve been sketching out a redesign for my own site (I finally figured out an answer to the question that Jay Rosen asked me a few months ago when I met him at NYU – “Oh, you’ve got a blog? What are you trying to do there?”), and have been finding Movable Type somewhat limiting – I can kludge together lists of links/photos/ideas/etc. as separate blogs under MT, for example, but that’s kind of a pain. I was toying with the idea of migrating anyways, and now with this reminder that I’d be investing time and building expertise in a system that won’t necessarily be available (or at least not affordable) for future projects I’m wondering whether now might well be the time to jump ship. Textpattern seems the next logical choice, but again, it’s not a purely open source program, and thus subject to the same problems down the road (though its creator insists it’ll remain free for noncommercial use, I’m wary until I see the Creative Commons license in print) – plus, it’s not clear that the same development community will form around Textpattern, and plugins like mt-amazon or mt-blacklist are as vital to my use of Movable Type as the CMS itself. Meanwhile, there’s WordPress, which gets a thumbs-up for being open source but which is also still kind of clunky (particularly the fact that you can only run one blog off of a given installation).

In short, there doesn’t seem to be an ideal alternative, so I’ll probably stick with my current install of Movable Type for the moment (not like I’ve really got time to seriously go mucking around with porting to a new system anyways). I have no doubt that Mena, Ben and the rest of the people at Six Apart are good people, but it seems like my non-profit, academic interests might be diverging from theirs, which leaves me looking for another CMS to which to hitch my wagon.

filed under “Things on which to follow up once I’ve finished my dissertation”:

Dangermouse, the Jay-Z Construction Set and the Videogame Content Creation Model

I would hope that, in the near future, artists and publishers will see the value of releasing not only polished works, but the bits and parts used to create a work, including those parts that were rejected.

This is good not only for fanboy obsessives, but could serve to train people’s musical ears, helping them hear the difference between different mixes of music. It would obviously be a boon to unexperienced musicians who could learn much from the choices other musicians and producers make. DJs would certainly have more opportunity to creatively add to the originals with this sort of access. And, likely, such efforts would help identify new talent.

Combine this with a system that permits “recipe” mixes as I’ve written about before (A History Palette for Music and The Grey Album – No Copying Necessary) and there is no danger of the artists and producers losing money. Indeed, such a model has already been quite successful in another media – videogames…

[via Anne Galloway]

Just downloaded a new RSS reader (FeedDemon) as well as a Movable Type publishing tool (Zempt). We’ll see if these tools are an actual improvement over my old everything-through-the-browser routine…

So, I’m checking out the keyword searches that have brought people to this fine website (as an aside, I’m not sure why five people have googled “Oprah AND Tivo”)…anyhow, I’m looking at my server stats and find that a good 35 people found my site by googling “Joe Trippi.”

(FYI, Joe Trippi is Howard Dean‘s campaign manager.)

So, I think, “Huh…that’s odd. I can’t imagine that my site is that high in the rankings for a ‘Joe Trippi’ search. Funny that so many people would be wading down through the Google search results.”

Then, just for the heck of it, I punch “Joe Trippi” into my handy Google Toolbar.

The result? Of 21400 pages that reference Joe Trippi, a post of mine from a few weeks ago is #9. Number frickin’ nine!!!.

Meg was right, even if she was just kidding..

Alex’s post on Amazon wish-lists as performance art reminded me of a project I did a few years ago for a seminar taught by Cornell’s Geri Gay on Computer Mediated Communication. I’d been meaning to put this online for a while, so here it is…

The project was an analysis of the ways that people were using the public space of Amazon product reviews as a performance space, riffing off of books and each other (in particular on pages selling Bil Keane’s Family Circus collections). If nothing else, the sheer volume of the reviews is impressive, and some of them are quite funny…

There seems to have been an ARG (alternate reality game) unfolding across the Internet for about 6 weeks now, centered around the release of Matrix:Revolutions. As best as I can tell from a cursory look around, the game seems to revolve around a company that creates immersive gaming software and their latest product, which may be the program that evolved into the Matrix of the three movies.

These kinds of games are just fascinating to me, with Majestic the granddaddy of them all. An odd thing about this one, though, is that unlike the game that built up to the release of Kubrick’s A.I., this has been happening completely under the radar…no media attention that I’ve seen, and no mention on any of the big movie fan sites (AICN was all over the A.I. one). Some seem to believe that this isn’t a marketing ploy at all, but a fan-produced ARG not unlike a piece of fan fiction, which would be even more astonishing, considering the depth of the material involved…

As if switching up to Movable Type wasn’t enough, Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall now has a modest proposal up on his site:

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to going to New Hampshire in January to cover the primary – probably for the last ten days or so before the actual vote on January 27th…

Now, the normal way to do this would be for me to go to one of the publications I write for, get them to pick up the tab (hotel room, transportation, etc.), and write it up for them.

But that would mean saving most of the reporting for some magazine or website or newspaper and not doing much or any of it for TPM. And, frankly, I think blog coverage is much better suited to covering something like the New Hampshire primary than magazines or newspapers…

I want to dedicate this trip entirely to blog coverage so I want to fund it with reader support, reader subscriptions.

Marshall is one of the top blogging journalists out there, and I’ve been wondering if he was going to take an Andrew Sullivan-like leap into funding his work through his readers, rather than subsidizing himself with more traditional print-media gigs. I kicked in a few bucks (sadly, all my grad student budget will allow), and I’m curious to see where this experiment will go.

UPDATE: Within 24 hours, Marhall’s already got more than enough cash. To be precise, he raised $4864 within less than 24 hours. You can count this as another example of the power of distributed small-scale fundraising…

I guess I’ve hit the big times, now – just got hit with my first five pieces of comment spam. Within minutes I had Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist plugin up and running, so that should take care of that. Anyone dealing with the same should check it out…

Heh. Over at Neal Pollack’s blog, guest blogger Christopher Monks is performing a David Blaine-like feat, enduring a full day of Glenn Reynolds’ posts. The really scary thing? This is Instapunditathon II, which means he did this once before…