Blogging

“Ralph Luker”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/15702.html has a round-up post of reactions to the second “Ivan Tribble” “missive”:http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/09/2005090201c.htm on blogging and academia. This is something that I’ll be speaking to substantively in the near future in a longer piece; for the moment, I just want to observe that blogging has been helpful in a very practical but unexpected way to my academic career. I moved last year from the University of Toronto to George Washington University (I loved Toronto and the university, but had good personal reasons, unconnected to the Department, to move). I know for a fact that my blogging at Crooked Timber played a minor (but real) role in helping me land my current job – one of the people involved in the job search for a new position was a CT reader, clicked through to my homepage, and saw that my research interests seemed a plausible fit with the Department’s needs. I suspect that the blog only played a marginal role in helping bring me to the attention of my current Department, but when you are one of many people applying for a job, every bit of name recognition helps. I can easily imagine how some kinds of blogging wouldn’t be helpful – but the vast majority of academic blogs that I read don’t fit into the rather peculiar stereotype that Tribble seems keen to perpetuate.

The blogosphere ecosystem just lost a bit of its biodiversity with John Band’s decision to shut down “Shot by Both Sides”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/ . I’ve alternately enjoyed and been infuriated by John’s blog and he’s certainly been a major irritant to the decent smug and self-satisfied former left and the samizdatistas. Both Daniel and I were regular commenters on John’s site and I’ll miss the mix of friendly repartee and ill-tempered invective there. Still, there’s an upside: John says he’ll be writing more at the excellent “Sharpener”:http://thesharpener.net/ . Go to read him there.

CT was a knocked out by today’s “big power outage”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-5274095,00.html in Los Angeles, along with every other site hosted by our provider, and much else besides, like traffic lights. Despite our cosmopolitan nature, our server is in one place only — the wrong place, today. But they seemed to have managed over there without any panic. One of the news reports I saw quoted a vox pop reaction from a woman identified as “Stylist for TV Commercials.” Ah, LA.

I am guest-blogging over at Lifehacker this week while regular editor Gina Trapani takes a breather. Lifehacker is part of Nick Denton‘s Gawker Media empire that has managed to make money out of blogging. (We’re not all in it for the $s as you can tell by the lack of ads on CT, but it’s nice to know that some people who don’t necessarily have other main sources of income are able to pull it off.) CT readers are probably most familiar with Gawker’s Wonkette, but there are about a dozen Gawker sites at this point addressing all sorts of topics.

Lifehacker focuses on ways to make your life more productive. Many of the posts feature downloads (e.g. Firefox, Flickr), shortcuts and pointers to helpful Web sites. There is a whole category of advice pieces as well ranging from how to deal with various situations at work to ideas for getting things done more effectively.

If you have any lifehacking tips, please send them along to me this week by writing to tips@lifehacker.com.

Sean Carroll “reports”:http://cosmicvariance.com/2005/08/24/arxivorg-joins-the-blogosphere/ that the “arxiv”:http://arxiv.org/ pre-print series has started to integrate itself into the blogosphere; this strikes me as a Very Big Deal indeed for academic blogging. Non-physicists may not be familiar with arxiv (I know that I certainly wasn’t before I started getting interested in network topology) – it’s effectively replaced journal publication as the primary means for physicists to communicate with each other. Journal publication is still important – but as an imprimatur, a proof of quality, rather than a way to disseminate findings to a wider audience. arxiv has now introduced trackbacks – people visiting the abstract of a paper on arxiv can see what blogs have commented on the paper, and read what they have had to say. Furthermore, arxiv has “rss feeds”:http://arxiv.org/help/rss of recent papers, classified by subject matter, making it much easier to keep up with new publications in a subfield.

This seems to me to be the nucleus of something like the new approach to academic publishing that John Holbo has advocated, in which blogs and bloglike tools become an integrated part of academia, creating conversation around interesting recent papers, filtering the good ones from the not-so-good ones etc etc. I can see potential problems down the line (trackback spam, attempts to game the system etc) – but the promise that this holds for physicists (and for non-physicists when we get around to creating arxiv equivalents) seems to me to be nothing short of extraordinary.

Update: It appears as though “Jacques Distler”:http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000638.html had a lot to do with this.

A recommendation: John McGowan’s second “post”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/theory_tuesday_nussbaum_v_butler_round_two/ at Michaelberube.com on the Martha Nussbaum-Judith Butler controversy is really worth reading – an example of what academic blogging should be like (the “first”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/nussbaum_v_butler_round_one/ is pretty good too). Lucid, measured and thought-provoking – highly recommended.

I mentioned Alfredo Perez’s “Political Theory Daily Review”:http://www.politicaltheory.info/ a few days ago – it’s a wonderful site. I see today that Perez is looking to get a little publicity, by asking people to nominate his site for Business Week’s “Best of the Web”:http://www.businessweek.com/technology/bestofweb.htm survey. It seems a laudable goal to me (you can also, of course, vote for other websites that you think don’t get as much attention as they deserve; feel free to list these in comments).

Google is about to issue 14 159 265 more shares (the number chosen is derived from the decimal expansion of pi) aiming to raise about $4 billion at an average price of about $250 a share. Given that I argued that Google was overvalued at the initial offer price of around $80, it might be time to take another look, both at Google as an investment and at the issues raised by its position in the Internet. In this post, I’ll stick to the first issue.

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A point of occasional confusion for people linking to, or commenting on CT – “Henry Farrell” is not the same person as “Harry Brighouse” . When a post is by “Henry,” it’s written by me, and when it’s by “Harry,” it’s him. I’m not really complaining about this, as I get much the better end of the deal – while I get to “author books on political theory”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/13/more-brighouse-promotion/#comment-89465 without actually having to write them, he “gets attacked”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006239.php for saying rude things about Robert Conquest that he didn’t in fact say. But still, perhaps better to keep things straight.

Not being an American, I’ve followed the whole Cindy Sheehan thing from afar. I’d been noting, with growing disgust, the whole slime-and-defend operation mounted by O’Reilly, FrontPageMag, Michele Malkin and points rightwards. Now I see that Christopher Hitchens “has joined in”:http://www.slate.com/id/2124500/fr/nl/ and that his invective against Sheehan has been “endorsed by Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/08/ventriloquizing.html . I guess there are two views on this kind of thing. There’s the view that citizens, whatever their background, are fair game for personal attack as soon as they open their mouths and should be treated in the same hardball manner as any machine politican or professional pundit. And there’s the view that grieving mothers should should be shown consideration, kindness and respect. Geras and Hitchens clearly take the first of these views.

Just over a year ago “I posted”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/26/katharina-blum/ about Schlondorff’s film of “The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073858/ and commented:

bq. What is different today, of course, is the way that the blogosphere serves as an Insta-echo-chamber for tabloid coverage of such stories. One imagines the “Heh”s and “Readthewholethings” that would accompany posts linking to a contemporary Die Zeitung’s online coverage of events.

[There’s good coverage of earlier episodes of the anti-Sheehan slime campaign at the Media Matters site: “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508100009 , “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508110002 and “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508120006 . ]

Ralph Luker writes to tell me that 15 other US presidential historians “have joined”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/13998.html Rick Shenkman’s blog, to form a presidential history conglomerate. A nice addition to the academic blogosphere.

Cheers to Eugene Volokh for opening commments on this post. If it weren’t for that decision, I might have simply been appalled by Professor Volokh’s willingness to pass on a vicious smear of war opponents. I would likely have missed how poorly sourced the insinuations about the marital faithfulness of a dead man were. A commenter notes:

Steven Vincent was married for 13 years. His widow posted a touching memorial outside their house, just a few short blocks from me. While I don’t know a thing about their personal lives, the accusation that he was going to divorce her and marry his Iraqi translator is a hell of a thing to say about a dead man, if it turns out to be unfounded.

Jeers for posting it in the first place. Who, may I ask, are all the “Westerners who side with the ‘Iraqi resistance’ against America and its allies”? Generally speaking, the “Iraqi resistance” is killing our troops in the interest of a fundamentalist ideology that liberals find appalling. If our countrymen are actually taking their side as they try to kill coalition troops, that seems like a (conversational, if not legal) accusation of treason. Who are we talking about? Ward Churchill? George Galloway? Michael Moore, for comparing the insurgents to the Minutemen? Some Guy With A Sign Once? Could this vast conspiracy fit into a VW minibus?

Of course, James Taranto carelessly uses this sort of language all the time, and readers know damn matl who he’s talking about. It’s not referring to a handful of psychopaths and extremists who hardly need refuting. It’s aimed at opponents of the war in Iraq, who aren’t anti-war, just on the other side. In the past few years, we’ve seen a constant, sickening effort on the part of supporters of the war in Iraq to conflate opposition the war with support for terrorists.

I’ve come to expect this sort of rhetoric from the mainstream conservative media and blogs. I don’t expect it from Eugene Volokh. He has earned the respect and readership of a wide swath of left-leaning readers for his intelligence, his fair-mindedness, and for his ability to express a right-wing viewpoint without displaying contempt for the other side. There are a million places that war opponents can go to get accused of siding against their country. It appears that there’s now one more.

UPDATE: Daniel Davies writes, in the Volokh comments:

DK above is absolutely correct that this post is ignorant as well as unpleasant. The Shi’ite gangs who killed Steven Vincent are not part of “the resistance”; they are operating to institute Iranian-style sharia law under the eyes of the British troops which control (in the loosest sense of “control”) the city of Basra. Furthermore, this fact was the main theme of Vincent’s journalism and his blog. I have no idea how anyone could possibly not know this, unless of course they had never read a word Vincent wrote and did not care about him at all except as a subject for a blog post that might make a useful smear on anti-war opinion.

UPDATE II: Volokh has updated his post to say:

Some people interpreted the OpinionJournal item, and this one, as criticizing all opponents of the Iraq War. That’s an interpretation that’s in the mind of the interpreters — I see no support for it in the text of the post.

The item is quite clearly a criticism of those Westerners who do endorse the Iraqi “resistance,” or at least explain its actions in ways that lessen or eliminate the killers’ culpability (poverty, supposed desire for “self-determination,” supposedly justifiable anger at various American, Israeli, or other Western sins). That’s the group the item identifies. It’s the group against which the item’s argument makes sense. The item doesn’t criticize any broader group of Iraq War opponents.

Fortunately, the group being criticized is not a vast group. So? They’re still worth condemning.

I’ll believe that Volokh meant to criticize a small group. (Although, if that’s all he meant, I have a hard time seeing the point. As a commentor adds: “I condemn Republicans who drink puppy blood with breakfast. Fortunately, this is not a vast group. So? They’re still worth condemning.” We could play this game all day, and how enlightening that would be.)

But I don’t believe it about Taranto. He’s the guy who called Congressional Democrats “The al Qaeda Cheering Section”. He thought it appropriate to title his criticism of the New York Times editorial page “Root, Root, Root for the Bomb Team”. He churns out lines like “we wish (Naomi) Klein well in her efforts to persuade “progressives” actually to embrace an idea of progress rather than serve as apologists for fascism.” I don’t doubt that some of Taranto’s readers read “Westerners who side with the ‘Iraqi resistance’ against America and its allies” and interpreted it narrowly. I also don’t doubt that some interpreted it rather broadly.

This is unrelated, but it’s a funny example of Taranto’s approach to commentary:

For God’s sake, won’t someone think of the mountain climbers?

I’ve decided to do a pre-announcement review of the candidates for the 2005 Hugo Award for best novel. I’ll post a draft before too long, I hope.

But one vision of the future disturbs me. I was reading Charles Stross’ Iron Sunrise (a strong contender, but I liked his Singularity Sky better), set in the 24th century, and he introduces a character who had inherited the masthead of The Times and announced his profession as “warblogger”.

I don’t really suppose our little virtual community is going to last a thousand years, or even 300, but just in case, can’t we find some way to agree on a better name than “blogger”?

Over the past few hours we’ve had a little trouble with the server — apologies to our readers: it should be fixed now. In the course of trying to diagnose and repair the problem, I was looking through our log files and I noticed some search queries that made me feel a bit queasy. About a year ago, Belle wrote a post called “The La Perla Exception”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/04/02/the-la-perla-exception/, which discussed the legal problems associated with drawing a line between pictures of naked children (e.g., canonical baby-in-the-bath-with-rubber-ducky photos) and child pornography. Just in the past 24 hours or so, we’ve had eleven hits on that page via google. According to “GeoBytes”:http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm, the originating IPs for these searches were in places as various as Bangalore, Chennai (also in India), Rio De Janeiro, Burnaby (in British Columbia), Oscoda (Michigan), Cabot (Arkansas), Bridgeport (Connecticut) and Tampa (Florida). Of these searches, two appeared legitimate — “debate+child+pornography” and “what+constitutes+child+porn.” The rest were queries like “European+Child+nudity+pictures”, “child+models+nude” (several variants of that one), and “small+girls(12-15+years)+sex+pics.” Because the La Perla post is so old, I’ve no reason to think this trickle of sewage isn’t typical. The searches represent just under one percent of referrals to CT from distinct google queries in 24 hours. That’s pretty low, I suppose. But, then again, it’s not as if Crooked Timber has much in the way of content that would attract pedophiles. Imagine what many other sites — never mind Google itself — must be seeing.