Wednesday, September 18, 2002

[Blogroots] QUOTE Libel law applies to blogs, too -- and many bloggers may not realize it.  Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh (both law professors) have relevant responses (the latter created an early seminar on cyberspace law with Lawrence Lessig, which is available at EFF). One of the better resource pages is FindLaw's Cyberspace Defamation and Libel. Individuals remain vulnerable -- and the public figure exemptions may not always apply. posted by dhartung to culture - comments UNQUOTE [Blogroots] 11:40:17 PM

[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE RIP, Biggle. Science fiction giant Lloyd Biggle, Jr. has died. Biggle combined an interest in music with his work, which began with the short story "Gypped" in 1956. His notable short works included "Monument" (1961), a Hugo nominee later expanded into a novel, and "The Tunesmith" (1957), recently selected by Orson Scott Card for the anthology Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century, Locus reported. Biggle's novels, which began with The Angry Espers in 1961, were mostly space operas on social and ecological themes and included the Jan Darzek sequence, beginning with All the Colors of Darkness in 1963, and novels about the Cultural Survey, including The World Menders (1971) and The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets (1968). In recent years Biggle wrote mystery stories and novels. He was founding secretary treasurer of the Science Fiction Writers of America and edited Nebula Award Stories Seven in 1972, Locus reported. Link Discuss UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog] I loved Monument, All the Colors of Darkness, and The Still Small Voice of Trumpets.  Biggle had a way of looking at things that was unique, making for great plot twists.  SFWA was founded in 1965. The organization's website is www.sfwa.org Other SF websites worth noting. www.scifi.com focuses more on Hollywood and TV than the written SF. www.sfcrowsnest.com has a great search engine to access other SF sites. www.sfsite.com covers the world of SF and Fantasy literature. www.wsfs.org World Science Fiction Society www.simegen.com/fandom/n3f National SF & Fantasy Fandom Federation (I am a member) http://radio.weblogs.com/0105852/categories/scienceFiction/ 11:08:39 PM

Aug 17 I posted my notes from reading a great article on improving our web writing skills from [A List Apart], whose subsequent discussion often shows up on my referers.  I was intrigued by a post on the middle of the second page of comments from anonymous.  QUOTE I got this tidbit from drop.org : How Do You Establish Credibility For Your Web Site? http://www.webcredibility.org/guidelines/index.html Stanford have compiled 10 guidelines for building the credibility of a web site. These guidelines are based on three years of research that included over 4,500 people. (contributed by David Sim at ecademy.com August 19, 2002) UNQUOTE Studying Stanford's Advice and self-grading myself on how I doing so far. Make it easy for people to check my sources. I give myself an A for links, citations, giving credit where due, etc. But this is so easy to do with Radio, that we all ought to be doing a good job here. Show that we are a legitimate organization. Well this does not really apply to personal weblogs. But users ought to know who we are in case they want to contact us. I give myself a D here ... I have not yet got a round TUIT on making a who I am statement let alone putting it on my weblog where Y"all can easily find it. I basically started out exploring what could be done with Radio Weblogging, and have had a large number of ideas where I would like to go with this, and a small number of them actually implemented. Highlight your organizations's expertise in whatever content and services you provide. This does not yet apply to me, because I am not offering any of my expertise through this medium.  Other than sharing interesting content on hot topics. They also say not to link to outside sites that are not credible, that a site's credibility is by association. This sounds to me to be quite different than trying to show up high in search engines, where weblogger linking is to interesting sites, where we know many are not credible, but interesting is more important. Show that honest and trustworthy people are behind the site and the organization. Well I agree with the general principle, but given recent scandals in politics, charities, and on Wall Street, I can't go along with their presentation of how you measure integrity. I think it is much more important what we DO than what we SAY, that we avoid entanglements with scandals or the appearance of impropriety. I'll give myself a C for my success rate so far. Make it easy to contact you. I give myself a D here - this is one of the aspects of my weblog I need to improve some time. The website should look professional, and appropriate for your purpose. I think weblogging makes it very easy to look far superior to the competition, what some of us lack is the ability to stand out against the crowd of other weblogs.  I score a lot of non-weblogs as D-F and on that scale I give myself a C (bottom of weblog scale). Make the site easy to use - and useful. Well I need to add a search engine on this site, and break it up into more categories.  Again, with Radio Weblog Themes, you have to work at making the site eye-hostile, and a few people have succeeded at that, but many have used the resources to make a great looking site.  I give myself a C because I got a ways to go here. Update your site's content often. I update it too often.  B from their perspective. More important, I should spend less time adding stuff and more time fixing the place up. Use restraint with any promotion. They primarily referring to hostile ads, but also use clear direct and sincere writing style.  I think my ego gets in my way too often, and I do some of this well and some not so well.  Grade myself a B here. Avoid errors of all types. I definitely need a spell checker plugged into my writing here, and perhaps also a grammar checker. I think I normally write well, although too wordy, but have my share of spelling and other errors - give myself a C for this. So, overall I have given myself a C average on the Stanford test.  Passing Ok but with lots of room for improvement, and I know what I need to be doing better. 9:40:05 PM

[Ernie the Attorney]  QUOTE Read this CNN article.  I'm glad that the government is not going to collect money to use for enhancing security (that would just increase the likelihood of preciptious action), nor restrict the use of wireless networks (which apparently was a brainstorm of the Bush administration's main computer guru).  UNQUOTE [Ernie the Attorney] The article identifies government plans based on some government officials not knowing all the facts about what is possible with computer security.  It sure sounds like the current administration decided not to get any kind of briefing from prior administration efforts with computer security, so they would make a whole set of new mistakes, without learning from the mistakes or discoveries of the folks who went before.    Homeland Cyber Security is too important to be left to a panel of special interests.  I sure hope there is more going on than the media is sharing. 2:02:51 PM

Today I attended a meeting of my local 400 user group with a meeting presentation on using Ethical Hacking to test a company's computer networks.  Here's my write-up on what I got out of that meeting. 1:42:55 PM

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.