brainwagon

Gordon Smith became my first contact on Google Talk, and mentioned that it was below freezing where was, which happens to be in rural Australia, where he photoblogs from. He also is a bit of an astrophotographer (at least as much of one as I am): check out his full moon picture. I think I […]

Yahoo is carrying the following Reuters’ article: Blogs seen as powerful new tool in U.S. court fight which talks about the role that blogs could play in the upcoming Supreme Court nominations. Pretty standard stuff, but I thought the following paragraph was interesting: Not all blogs are created equal. Many will become “ideological echo chambers” […]

Blogging lately feels pointless. Which of course it is, but it used to not feel so pointless. Grump.

Where your host sings Happy Birthday to his wife and then goes on to discuss the recent Supreme Court decision regarding Grokster, and his feelings on the cult of personality that seems to be forming around blogging, as is exemplified by Gnomedex. Links from the show: The best blog on the doings of the Supreme […]

I keep scanning the news being blogged on Technorati about Gnomedex 2005, and frankly, I’m still mystified. There seems to be a whole bunch of people who are united in their desire to promote RSS. Did I miss something? Don’t get me wrong, I use RSS everyday. I’m a big fan of bloglines to monitor […]

Take a look at their announcement, especially concentrating on the What is Gnomedex… section. Someone, please, explain it to me. Why is Gnomedex significant? Useful link: Technorati: gnomedex2005 Addendum: Just what here requires a license at all, much less a Creative Commons License? We don’t need licenses for other data formats like HTML.

Every once in a while, you read something that makes you just shake your head. Dave Slusher mentioned David Coursey’s anti-podcasting article. I’m not so opposed to his opinions on the grounds that he’s a knee-jerk-off (although he does seem to fit the description) but rather from the simple fact he’s hopelessly off target in […]

However…

I’m not color saavy savvy enough to actually design a good color scheme for websites. What I did years ago was come up with a particular blue (#336699) and just chose to use it as the predominant color for my website. I keep thinking that it would be nice to add some different colors, but […]

Yesterday I did some thinking bout how to prevent more of the spam that floods (or at least leaks into) my sight, and decided to give a whirl to SecureImage, a plugin that implements a CAPCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) . You’ve seen these before: type in the […]

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had 1300 or so comment spam messages enter my queue. I thought I’d make a graph to see what they look like. I don’t believe this includes spams which are automatically blacklisted: there are messages that I had to mark as spam by hand.

Dan Gilmor had a short .mp3 response to the news that Microsoft was cooperating with the Chinese government to censor weblogs on MSN. I ranted about this a couple of days ago, it seems that Dan is of like mind. A Minute with Dan: Don’t Mention Democracy | Bayosphere “It’s easy enough to understand why […]

Something no blogger should be without: the EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers. I’ve only skimmed it, but there seems to be a lot of good information there.

No, it’s not brainwagon, but it looked like this guy had to really work to take the crown away from me. Courtesy of Alan at Amy’s blog.

or, at least not a bad idea. Amy Gahran over at Contentious wrote a nice article entitled Why Daily Blogging Usually Is a Bad Idea which raised some very good points. But, in true contrarian fashion, I find that my reasons for blogging are somewhat different than hers, and therefore I come to somewhat different […]