JasonMorrison.net

Years ago, in an undergrad course, one the of the school’s librarians gave a talk about the big risk of the move to digital publishing - historical preservation.  We know what the ancient Greeks thought in part because their words were carved into stone - would we be so lucky if they had used floppy disks?

I wasn’t completely convinced that the situation was so dire then, and I’m still not really worried.  The production and storage of information continues to grow exponentially, and I think the real problem for future archeologists will be dealing with information overload rather than some hypothetical gap in the written record.  But I have been thinking a lot about my own digital history lately so I spent part of this weekend looking at old papers from college and publishing them on my site.

I don’t think my meager efforts will be much help to future historians (much less reverse the entropy of the universe), but I did find some interesting stuff that I probably should have posted for the world to see a long time ago.

For example:

• Seven years ago I wrote a pretty decent paper about The Internet, the Marketplace of Ideas, and the Public Sphere.  Some of the issues discussed look a little different today, with so many easy options for blogging and other user-created content, but I think the overall point is still valid.
• Five years ago I encountered a Dialog, a library search system, which some of my professors from the library science field thought was the pinnacle of information retrieval.  I thought Dialog was a huge pain and that relational databases were much more powerful than flat-files.
• Ten years ago I did an experiment in a cognitive psychology class on memory and bias.  The paper is a bit thin (hey, I was a freshman) but the experience of researching and running a study made me consider switching my major for a little while.  I still love doing research and hope to start working on a Phd in the next few years.

The more I dig up and paste into my WordPress archives the more I realize a few things.  First, a distinct lack of content between undergrad and grad school - I’m doing a much better job of writing without assignments now than I did then.  Second, a hard drive crash in 2003 resulted in a gap in my saved emails - this hurts more now that I’m looking back through things.  Finally, I need to make a point, for the rest of my life, to just put things out there. It seems like such a shame that I put work into these docs just to have them rot on my hard drive.

I know some of my co-workers, Reid and Wysz, have gone through the process of resurrecting old content to their current website.  Anyone else thinking about doing something similar?  What prompted you to do so?  Or, what prevented you?

Everyone has tag clouds all over the web, but are they really useful?  Altocumulus is an attempt to use tag clouds as a real navigational system in Wordpress blogs.

Install the plugin and it will automatically put a cloud of related tags at the top of all your Category and Tag pages.  Hopefully this will serve two purposes:

1. Users who end up on a general category page can click through to a more specific (or more relevant) tag page, and
2. It should give users a general idea of the topic of the posts on that archive page, increasing the information scent.

Next version I’ll add an options screen where you can change the number of tags, placement, etc.

Please drop me a note if you run into any bugs or are using it on your blog.  Let me know if you have any ideas you’d like to see implemented, too - I am all about implementing and studying folksonomies.  The more folks who are interested, the more likely I am to add features.  Thanks.

Download the Plugin Here

Spam, it’s not just for breakfast and email anymore.  Webspam is a huge problem - if you run a blog or a forum, you’re probably familiar with the gobs and gobs of gibberish being posted all over the web by spammers.

This humble blog, which only gets a few hundred visitors per day, has had over 17,000 spam comments since I moved over to Wordpress last year.  Having your site inundated with comment spam can be just as big a headache as getting hacked.  No one wants to spend hours every day sorting the good posts from the bad.  I’ve already written about how to totally clear out a spammed forum and erase all traces of it’s reputation-marring existence, but the best solution is prevention.

Here are some steps you can take to help prevent spam on your blog or forum.

Keeping Spam off Your Blog

This section assumes you’re hosting your own blog and can add plugins and make configurartion changes, and my examples will be WordPress-heavy because I’m more familiar with WordPress.

Option 1:  Close or restrict comments. Most blogs give you some options to restrict who can comment on articles.  In Wordpress, you can require that users create accounts to comment under Settings -> General.  This might not help too much since I’ve seen hundreds of automated user accounts created right alongside the spam.

You can also require that comments are approved before they appear - in Wordpress look under Settings -> Discussion.  This will stop your blog from being graffitied without your knowledge but also requires manual effort.  You can also disallow trackbacks and pingbacks, which are really cool in theory but a major avenue for automated spam.

You can also shut down comments completely, or disable comments on old posts.  At that point you may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but it’s certainly effective.

Option 2:  Make sure commenters are real people with a captcha. Even if you’re not familiar with the term, you’re familiar with captchas.  They’re the little widgets at the end of a form where you have to decipher some scrambled text from an image.  Many blogs have captcha options built in, but if you’re looking for a captcha plugin be sure to balance usability with security.

I’ve used the Did You Pass Math plugin with some success.  Jeff Atwood has used an extremely simple captcha for years on his high-traffic blog.  Recaptcha is a really cool project that helps fight automatic posting and digitize old books at the same time.

Option 3:  Use an automatic filtering system. If you’re using Wordpress, I have three words for you:  Akismet, Akismet, Akismet! Seriously, Akismet is so good at automatically marking spammy commetns and trackbacks that it’s almost scary.  If you’re not using WordPress, you may still be able to find an Akismet plugin for your blogging platform.  There are other systems worth trying as well such as Spam Karma but I have less experience with those.

Keeping Spam off Your Forum

Again, I’m assuming you are hosting the forum yourself or can otherwise make config changes.  I’ll use phpBB (version 3) as an example because I’ve used it in the past.

Option 1:  Restrict user accounts. This can be a tough call, because when you start a forum you want to make it as easy as possible for people to join in the discussion.  Unfortunately, allowing anyone to register and begin posting without any admin approval also opens the door for spammers.

In phpBB this setting can be found in the Administration Control Panel under Board Configuration -> User Registration Settings.

Option 2:  Again with the captchas. Captchas aren’t 100 percent garanteed to remove spam but they do help.  If your forum software doesn’t have a captcha or a captcha plugin, I would seriously consider upgrading to a version that does or switching forums completely.  I know it’s a huge pain but waking up one morning to find 10,000 spam posts is even worse.

In phpBB3 look under Board Configuration -> User Registration Settings for a setting called “Enable visual confirmation for registrations” and make sure it’s turned on.  You can change the details under Board Configuration -> Visual confirmation settings.

Option 3:  Try to find an automatic filtering system. This is harder than for blogs.  There was an Akismet phpBB mod but it’s apparently not being maintained.  There’s a workaround involving the Spam Words mod that you can read about here.  The Spam Words mod might be worth trying on it’s own too.  Here’s a thread with more options for phpBB2, search around and find what’s available for your forum software.

Even without automated filtering, you can try to slow down the spammers by setting a time limit between posts (most human beings don’t type as quickly as spambots do).  Other options, such as disallowing links and BBCode, are pretty drastic but might make your blog less enticing.

Just for fun:

Spam, spam, bacon, and Spam

I just wrote a post about buying a new camera, and because I want to compare specs on several different cameras and lenses, I’m going to need a spreadsheet.  Luckily there are some great online spreadsheet programs to chose from.  I’m going to use this as an opportunity to explore how to use Google Docs and Spreadsheets in blog posts.

Before you get started I’m assuming you already have a Google Docs spreadsheet ready to go.

1.  You can always just link to the document. By default your docs will be private so you’ll need to make them available to your readers.  To do so you’ll need to either go to the Share tab and check “Anyone can view this document WITHOUT LOGGING IN at:” or go to the Publish tab and publish the doc. Either way you’ll get regular URL to post, like this one:  http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=ppevxmL24UqmeiZSbqIU1DQ&hl=en

Links aren’t very exciting though, so how can you embed into a post instead?

2.  You can embed the content into the post.  If you’re wondering how to do it in Wordpress, one solution I’ve come across is the Inline Google Docs plugin at Broken Watch.  This plugin gets the actual text/html of the spreadsheet and places it inline in your post.  So if you have a wide blog template, or a spreadsheet with relatively few columns, it should blend right in.  On the other hand, there’s no editing or other fun.

Here’s an example of what the output looks like:

3.  You can put the doc directly in the page with an iframe. This works really, really well with Google Presentations but is a bit trickier with a doc and even less optimal with a spreadsheet. You’ll get the best-looking results if you publish the document and use the published URL in the iframe. On the other hand if you use the shared URL collaborators should be able to make changes right in your blog post.

You’ll want to create some code like this:

<iframe src=”http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=ppevxmL24UqmeiZSbqIU1DQ” width=”500″ height=”400″></iframe>

Make sure you put the code in the “HTML” editing mode of Wordpress rather than “Visual” mode.  As a result you can see some of the info I’ve gathered about possible camera / lens combinations in the spreadsheet below.

The main issue here is the relatively small iframe window size. If you use a wider blog template this technique might work really well.

Why bother? Spreadsheets aren’t the most exciting thing in the world for most people, but play around with all the features of Google Docs and Spreadsheets and you’ll see why this can be pretty cool.  You can embed questionnaires and surveys, cool charts and graphs with Gadgets, and anything else you can think of.

My esteemed colleague Beah just started blogging, and opened her blog with a very important question - Why Blog?  I remember people asking a similar question years ago when I registered this domain - why would you want to have a website with your name on it?  Almost the same question has come to my mind recently when playing around with Twitter.

So, why blog?  With all the hundreds of thousands of blogs on the web you might think there’s no need to ask this question.  One of the best things about social science is asking questions about things that everyone takes for granted.  Unfortunately the “science” part of social science is a bit too time-consuming to finish up on a Sunday-evening blog post, so instead we’ll look at a few sites of friends and colleagues and maybe collect some thoughts on what motivates people to blog.

First, why do I blog here?  I try to keep this blog relatively professional, posting mostly on topics that I encounter in my work, in my academic research, and in my side projects (the standard disclaimer, as always, applies).  One of my motivations was sharing some of the research done for classwork - it seemed a shame to write up a report, turn it in to a professor, and then let it gather dust in some corner of my hard drive.  My undergrad degree was in journalism and I do miss writing, so that’s another motive.  Also, having been through some rough patches in my career during the dot-com downturn, I thought blogging might help me establish a bit of a professional brand.  I have my URL on my resume and I would hope that any company looking to hire me would get an idea that I’m knowledgeable and interested in relevant areas.

But I’m not a very random sample, so let’s look at a few other blogs and try to appreciate why they write.  I think I can place them into a few rough categories:

Personal takes on professional / technical interests:

• Wyszdom
• Mike Leotta’s Blog
  

This is largely where my blog falls.  Common post topics will include things like “how to get around an annoying issue with some software/programming language,” “very excited about the new device from Apple,” “report from a conference,” and “very disappointed with the new device from Apple.”

Public journaling to keep in touch with friends and family:

• Because I Am Just That Important
• Being Electrocuted
• d.i.l.a.
• Flashing Lights
• Random Quotable Stuff

I’ve done this in the past as well - blogs taking the place of those old-fashioned mass emails you used to send out freshman year of college.  If you went to college in the ancient days before blogs and Facebook.  This is a place for both epic travelogues and saved IM conversations filled with inside jokes.

Sharing interests and reviews:

• Belly Button Treasures
• Read Reid’s Blog
• i’ve got information man
• wires and stars

This category runs the gamut from folks who just want to show their friends a funny Youtube video to blogging a season of a TV show to reviewers writing prolifically about a very obscure musical genre.

Artistic or literary expression:

• tiffography.com

Self-publishing has opened the doors for artists and writers, both amateur and professional, to share their work with whatever audience they find.  This can run from virtual serial galleries shows to community-driven commentary and learning.

Of course these all overlap, and some blogs cover all the bases.  See KooKoo for KokoPuffs for an example

So do we answer our question with a plethora of distinct motives for blogging?  Not necessarily.  There’s one theme that runs throughout all of the above - these are all social activities.  Ultimately blogging is human interaction.

…

Oh, and that other question - why use Twitter?  No clue.

Got a reason why you use Twitter?  Are you a co-worker angry at me for misconstruing your blog?  Please let me know in the comments below.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

More on blogs this week.  Online journalism seems to be obsessed with blogs anymore, which is annoying, because some really good IA discussions go on here otherwise.  Someone posted a study that provoked a ton of response:  “Perseus estimates there are 4.12 million blogs on eight hosting services.  But the research company estimated that 66% - 2.72 million - haven’t been updated in two months and that 1.09 million haven’t been updated since the first day. The average duration for an abandoned blog was 126 days, according to the survey of 3,634 blogs.”

http://www.mediapost.com/dtls_dsp_news.cfm?newsId=221430

None of this is too surprising, and some argued whether or not any bloggers are important at all.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

One of the topics that comes up a lot here is blogging versus journalism.  Someone brought up an interesting project where a reporter was doing live coverage of a trial with in a blog-like way.  A big part of this is how so many relatively inexpensive portable computers, PDAs, etc. are around.  A number of posters noted that it seems like the bloggers are not the ones starting the debate, and that they seem to be a pretty inclusive group.  Others pointed out that blogging is a buzzword and not yet proven; news on the internet is only about 10 years old so its hardly a mature medium.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

This week did not see a great deal of discussion per se.  One poster asked for useful/innovative tools that CMS (content management systems) have.  The only response so far said that flexibility was the best feature his CMS had, so that his programmers could add/alter modules without paying a bunch of money for consultants.   In his site, they added RSS feeds and added a simple interface for editors to use.

Last week there was a long thread that started when someone asked which blogging software they should use for a student project on a Windows platform. One suggestion was Moveable Type, and there was some back-and forth about how easy it is to make changes to built-in templates with CSS.  Typepad and Pmachine were two alternatives that were also mentioned.  There was some talk about integrating it into a CMS and even using Flash (which one writer pointed out, might be silly if most of the content is just text).  Several people talked about the difficulties they had setting up MT for multiple authors, and gave some suggestions to make it easier on the original poster if they decide to go that route.  RSS was also mentioned, which is something I know little about and should probably look into.