Blogging

“Ezra Klein:”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=03&year=2009&base_name=how_should_bloggers_take_their

The number of comments a post gets is not, in any way, analogous to the importance attached to the post by commenters. As example, a post I wrote yesterday on the DMV — in which I unwisely made a glib joke about Kafka — amassed 50 comments. A post I wrote summarizing an interview with the Swedish Finance Minister who ran his country’s nationalization effort got exactly zero comments. Comments are not a reflection of how much your audience cares about a topic. They are a reflection of how much they have to say on it. As a blogger, I think that actually exerts a subtly pernicious influence on my writing. The posts I write that get the least comments are those with actual reporting in them: Congress did this, or an administration official explained that. The second worst are wonky posts. It’s easy enough to understand why those pieces end with single digit comment sections: There’s less to say about a fact than about an argument. But since I, like many bloggers, use the vibrancy of my comment sections as a way to not feel like a crazy person ranting in cyberspace, too many low comment posts in a row and I itch to write some pieces that generate a bit of discussion and prove that my cyberfriends are still out there. I’m not sure that’s always the best impulse.

I think that the basic argument here that comments sections reflect self-perceived competence to comment rather than interest as such is probably right (although the two are also probably correlated to some degree). Not that this necessarily changes our posting policy too much at CT – several of us have an ‘eat your greens’ philosophy when it comes to inflicting our personal areas of interest/obsession on readers, which I think, by and large, is a good thing. But fwiw, my rough impression of the key causal variables explaining the level of comments at CT are as follows:

(1) Consonance with left/right divide in US politics. Posts which make claims that map easily onto arguments between leftwingers and rightwingers in the US tend to get more comments.

(2) Low culture vs. high culture. Posts on low culture (nb I am using the word in a non-pejorative sense here) which lots of people have accessed or understand get substantially more comments, perhaps unsurprisingly, than posts on high culture.

(3) The Emerson effect. Posts that push John Emerson’s buttons (e.g. on analytic philosophy or economic theory) tend to get more comments than other posts, both because of the volume of comments coming from J.E. himself, and from others responding to him. I’m sure that there are similar effects with other prolific commenters, but this is the most obvious one to me.

(4) Is Israel teh SuXoR. Posts on Israel/Middle East politics get unusually high numbers of comments (although not as nasty as they used to be, thanks to the departure, voluntary and otherwise, of some of the people with strong opinions on this topic from our comments sections, as well as a couple of good commenters I know of who got fed up with being described in unpleasant terms by those who disagreed with them).

(5) Philosophy and otherwise. Even apart from the Emerson effect, there is a sweet spot for posts on philosophy and political theory that can be responded to by those with non-specialist knowledge. The willingness of CT to put up these posts has occasionally been denounced by philosophers with a somewhat more cloistered vision of what philosophical discussion should involve than ours – but like it or not, these posts frequently accumulate hundreds of engaged comments.

(6) The level of snark. Snarky posts, when well done, attract more comments than non-snarky ones.

These seem to me to be the main factors explaining variation in comments numbers at CT; any others?

This sort of puts Mary Rosh in the ha’penny place:

The son of a prominent Dead Sea Scrolls scholar was arrested on Thursday on charges of identity theft, criminal impersonation, and aggravated harassment relating to a complex online campaign designed to smear opponents of his father’s theories. The Manhattan district attorney’s office alleged in a statement released on Thursday that Raphael Haim Golb, 49, son of Norman Golb, a professor of Jewish history and civilization at the University of Chicago, used dozens of Internet aliases to “influence and affect debate on the Dead Sea Scrolls” and “harass Dead Sea Scrolls scholars who disagree with his viewpoint.” …

The office contends that Mr. Golb impersonated and harassed Lawrence H. Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University and a leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, by creating an e-mail account in Mr. Schiffman’s name and using it to send e-mail messages in which the sender admitted to plagiarism. Mr. Golb also allegedly supplemented that campaign to discredit Mr. Schiffman by sending letters to university personnel accusing Mr. Schiffman of plagiarism, and by creating blogs that made similar accusations. Two blogs, each with a single entry, accuse Mr. Schiffman of plagiarizing articles written by Norman Golb in the 1980s. …

Mr. Cargill began tracking the cyberbully—whom he calls the “Puppet Master”—two years ago after he himself was targeted. At the time, he was a doctoral student at UCLA helping to produce a film about Khirbet Qumran—the site in present-day Israel where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered—and its inhabitants for an exhibit on the scrolls at the San Diego Natural History Museum. Mr. Cargill said it was then that the aliases began attacking him and his film, both in e-mail messages to his superiors and on various Web forums, for failing to give credence to Norman Golb’s long-held theory about the origin of the scrolls and how they came to Khirbet Qumran. Some scholars, including Mr. Schiffman and Mr. Cargill, believe that the 2,000-year-old documents were assembled by inhabitants of Qumran. Mr. Golb, however, holds that they originated in Jerusalem and were transported to Qumran later.

Risa Levitt Kohn, a professor of religious studies at San Diego State University who curated the San Diego show and several subsequent Dead Sea Scrolls exhibitions, said she too has been “under regular attack” by Internet aliases since then, both in Web forums and in e-mail messages addressed to her superiors. “Sometimes the criticisms of me are straightforward and overt,” she told The Chronicle via e-mail, “and sometimes the letters appear reasonable but essentially demand that these individuals take note of previous exhibitions’ supposed ‘failings.’ Then they provide helpful suggestions to find solutions, almost always involving Norman Golb in one way or another.”

A number of other Dead Sea Scrolls scholars also said they have been harassed by mysterious Internet personas. Because the messages were written under aliases, they had little choice but to ignore them. “This person has posted horrible stuff about me online,” said Jodi Magness, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “I don’t even look anymore, it makes me too upset.”

According to The NY Times, Golb Sr has commented, too:

Professor Golb said that opposing scholars had tried to quash his views over the years through tactics like barring him from Dead Sea Scrolls exhibitions. He said he saw the criminal charges as another attack on his work. “Don’t you see how there was kind of a setup?” he said. “This was to hit me harder.”

Sounds like this might get both uglier and more entertaining in equal measure.

Some people “are laughing”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/03/03/where-the-rawlsian-rubber-meets-the-randian-road/ at wingnuts who are ‘going Galt’ by signing up for Medicare early. Me, I think it’s wonderful that the right is discovering the joys of solidaristic (well, sort of) strike action. So much so that I’m “asking readers to encourage the leaders of this movement”:http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=71729916270 (Facebook group¹ – I hope but don’t know whether this link will work for everyone) to take the obvious next step.

The ‘Go Galt, Go!’ Manifesto

We proudly salute “Dr. Helen,” Glenn Reynolds, and Michelle Malkin, for identifying the only possible response to Barack Obama’s victory – ‘going Galt.’ By withdrawing their creative and intellectual achievements from the economy and stopping tipping waitstaff, the schmibertarian right can surely bring the parasites and Democrats to their knees. We look forward to these three thought leaders striking the obvious first blow, by refusing to blog for the ungrateful masses and withdrawing to a secret compound until the world capitulates to their demands! Only a universal wingnut blogging strike can bring the moochers to their senses. John Galt lives!

¹ We also have a “Crooked Timber group”:http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2403393389 by the way.

This is a repost from my blog which got a fair bit of attention. The immediate cause was a hoax involving Australian culture warrior/revisionist historian/serial political enthusiast Keith Windschuttle, but the point seems more general.

Looking at various topics that have been covered by both journalists and bloggers, I’ve noted a common theme in which journalist deplore bloggers’ habit of speculating about subjects instead of “just picking up the phone” and asking those directly involved (examples here and here). The implied (and sometimes expressed) view of bloggers is that of lazy amateurs.

It struck me though, that asking questions of total strangers is both a distinctively journalistic activity and one that implies and requires a special kind of professional license. In fact, “Journalists do interviews” comes much closer to a definition of what is distinctive about journalism than formulations like “journalists report news, bloggers do opinion”.

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The Lori Drew case, in which a US woman set up a Myspace account under the name “Josh Evans” to torment a teenage girl who had fallen out with Drew’s daughter, and drove her victim to suicide, has some legal implications of interest to bloggers. Drew was ultimately sentenced to jail, not for her cruel prank and its fatal consequences, but for “unauthorized access to a computer system” by virtue of the false name under which the account was created. On the face of it, the same offence is committed (at least under US law) every time a commenter on a blog or noticeboard uses a sockpuppet to evade bans or blocks, or to post under multiple identities in violation of contractual terms.

UpdateFollowing up on some comments, I was startled to discover that, in some US jurisdictions, obtaining consent to sex through fraud regarding identity (a man pretending to be his brother in the case at hand) is a full defence against a charge of rape, and even more startled to read this post and comments at TalkLeft largely endorsing the court’s finding in this case. This isn’t the case in Australia and, though IANAL, I’m pretty sure it never has been either here of in the UK. (Update ends)

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I missed this bit of DC think-tank inside-baseball yesterday. Matt Yglesias wrote something critical about Third Way:

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit.

Shortly thereafter, GlaDOS Jennifer Palmieri of the Center for American progress appeared from behind the scenes and posted to Matt’s blog:

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects … and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

Whoops. We are throwing a party in honor of your tremendous success. Please place the device on the ground, then lie on your stomach with your arms at your sides. A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party.

Things now seem to have returned to normal, with “weak tea” metaphors substituting for that stuff about “timid incrementalist bullshit.”

I have a Bloggingheads on the Mumbai attacks with Sumit Ganguly, an expert on Indian politics at University of Indiana. Since Sumit, unlike me, knows a whole lot about the background and likely consequences, the format is more like an interview than a dialogue. Click below to see it (or “here”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/16195 for the home site).

I’m on my way to UC Irvine to participate with some very cool folks in a meeting called Public Spheres, Blogospheres hosted by UCI’s HumaniTech. I’m on a panel about Blogging and the Academy.

I suspect the question of whether or how junior faculty should blog will come up. While it’s a topic we’ve gone over numerous times around here and it may make some people yawn at this point, I believe it’s still worthy of discussion with some points that haven’t been considered sufficiently yet. More on that when I get around to organizing my thoughts about it (this conference would be a good opportunity for that, hah). Academics from different fields will be represented at this meeting, which may lead to different takes on the topic. I look forward to the conversations.

UPDATE (11/6/08): Podcasts of the sessions have now been posted, they are available here.

As Kieran notes in comments below, the comments thread to Tyler Cowen’s (perfectly reasonable) “Krugman post”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10/paul-krugman-wi.html is pretty hilarious. But given Krugman’s place of pride in the wingnut demonology, I’m sure that this is only a mere scraping of what’s out there on the Internets today. It furthermore occurs to me that someone (i.e. Me) should do a comments thread to collate and conserve the _very bestest_ blogposts and comments on the Vast Nobel Prize Conspiracy. My “opening bid”:http://volokh.com/posts/1223906449.shtml#459727, from ‘derut’ at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Excellent. He was a pseudo Nobel prize. That he deserves. As his politics is pseudoscientific. Great. Now I can applaude. I am sure many of you have watched him on cable networks. Has anyone else noticed he seems a little off. He speaks like a mouse and his beady eyes have a strange stare. He looks like if someone droped a glass he would scream.

It’s the spellings of ‘applaude’ and ‘droped’ that give it that special something. Anyone able to top that?

Update: “Kathy G.”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/warmest-congrat.html had this idea before I did.

I suppose that I ought to make this clear; I’m not going to be writing anything, on CT or any of my other blogs, about the current global financial markets meltdown. This is basically because of my professional commitments; as you know, I’m a stockbroker by trade, and what with one thing and another, I’m in a more responsible position than I was when I started blogging. Going through my reasons in a numbered list:
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Norm Geras has put up a “profile”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2008/08/the-normblog-profile-254-henry-farrell.html of me – if you’re interested, click over. The bit I’d recommend really has nothing to do with me, except that I was there when it was uttered – my favorite take on a proverb. It came from an Australian friend whom I’ve fallen out of touch with, Mac Darrow. Off the cuff, he glossed _in vino veritas_ as

Many a true word

Is slurred

which I’ve always thought was a translation tinged with genius.

Also, two very good appreciations of writers. First, Julian Barnes has a “lovely piece”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/26/fiction on Penelope Fitzgerald both as a person and as a novelist. I fell in love with _The Blue Flower_, less for the portrait of Novalis than for the quiet tragedy of Karoline Just, and read everything else by her that I could get my hands on. As an aside, while she may seem as far from genre as a writer could be, her pastiche of an M.R. James short story in _The Gate of Angels_ is uncanny and brilliant. Second, Kathy G. has a great discussion of “Tom Geoghegan”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/tom-geoghegan-m.html. His _Which Side Are You On?_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Geoghegan%20Which%20Side%20are%20you%20On&PID=29956, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWhich-Side-Are-You-Revised%2Fdp%2F1565848861%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1217606748%26sr%3D8-1&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ) is a wonderfully written contrary class of a book about the union movement. As Kathy says:

bq. a lot of people just don’t get his charmingly idiosyncratic writing. He writes about politics, and about policy, but God knows his books and essays don’t read like formal scholarly papers or dry think tank reports — they’re far more fluid, inventive, and playful than writing about policy has any right to be. But the problem is, political types often don’t appreciate the literary qualities of his writing, and the literary types don’t get the politics.

I suspect that’s right – his books don’t have arguments so much as they _are_ arguments – going backwards and forwards between different points of view, looking at different aspects of the issue, proposing viewpoints and counter-viewpoints. For those who haven’t read him, he’s really wonderful; one of the best and most original political writers alive.

I’m moderating a discussion at “Firedoglake”:http://www.firedoglake.com on Cory Doctorow’s new book Little Brother, starting about now (with Cory himself as main attraction). If you’re interested, drop by.

Crooked Timber is five years old this month: our inaugural post was on July 8th, 2003. That seems like a long time. Why, I remember when all this were nowt but HTML text fields. Seeing as five years is a long time to go without getting a haircut, we’ve revamped the layout — hopefully for the better. I await reports about how the new look is broken in Internet Explorer.

After reading this piece on self-plagiarism in the Times Higher Ed Supplement, I couldn’t think of any better response than to reprint verbatim this piece from 2005 (now with a new improved 2008 publication date), including a self-link to a piece which is simultaneously self-referential and self-plagiarising.

It’s over the fold:

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