layout: post title: Online identity pollution is happening today created: 1074787320 categories:

• Social Media

Much as Loïc Le Meur warned, identity theft is already happening:

This blog posting is actually a Web page that I have created to help my good friend Aina Gerner-Mathisen dig out from a major identity-theft problem she recently experienced. It seems that some evil comment-spammer has posted spam comments onto a number of weblogs in her name. Now these comments appear higher in Google search results than legitimate pages about/by Aina.

Read on for more on comment spam, and a link to help Aina.

I don’t think much of his other post where he talks about a comment spam solution that “Google should provide“. He’s right that it is the content providers (i.e. bloggers, online forum providers, software tool makers, etc. etc.) that should try to stop this comment spam. But the natural conclusion doesn’t have to be requiring authentication.

For instance, I have seen very little automated spam on Drupal sites. I have had 3 postings in 2 years that I consider spam — and those were hand-entered. Every person I know (me included) that has had <acronym title="Movable Type">MT</acronym> installed somewhere has had comment spam.

Nova also wants help for non-technical people:

Aina is actually a leading writer and journalist in Norway — yet due to the comment spam problem if you search her name on Google you get links that do not accurately represent her views. This is a real problem for her — and she is not technical enough to solve it herself. Her professional reputation, and personal reputation, could be harmed by this. So for people like Aina, there is a need for a system to “dig out” from under comment spam in their name.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this is attainable. The web, like in any other medium, has many different people in it. There are very few (none?) other “Boris Mann” people out there. And with Aina’s unique name, there are likely few others of her as well. If you want to promote yourself in a medium, you need to have your own views available in that medium. Aina needs to establish at least a small web presence, and ask other people to link to it. What Nova has done (see below) is a start.

What Aina can perhaps do is maintain an online profile. The social networking sites (if they were open to Google) would be good for this, having a very low barrier to entry. The second hit for my name on Google after this website is my Zerendipity profile.*

Nova: some feedback. If you really want that page to come up in search results, make the title (and the URL) contain Aina’s name. Also, suggest to other people that they link to the page with “Aina Gerner-Mathisen” as the link text, like so:

Page about Aina Gerner-Mathisen.

Hope that helps. If you want an invite to Zerendipity, I would be happy to provide that as well.

*Disclaimer: I’m doing some work with Zerendipity right now, so I might be a little biased. Still, it is the only site that I know of that provides a custom URL for your profile that can be linked to directly.

layout: post title: Dave Winer Impressed Me Today created: 1086020319 categories:

• Web Development
• Personal Publishing

And Mark Pilgrim <strike>depressed</strike> disgusted me.

Here’s what Dave Winer wrote in a long flame war on ATOM vs. RSS that broke out over on Scoble’s comments:

Update: Dave is committed to making this work. See his trial balloon.

To summarize: Atom has an advantage over RSS in that a content provider can, if necessary, tell the aggregator specifically how to process the equivalent of RSS’s description element.

If RSS was to match Atom, it would either have to directly adopt Atom’s content model (breaking the roadmap, not good) or recommend the use of a namespaced element (preserving the roadmap) or just use Atom’s content model (the best solution, imho). Then we would recommend to aggregator developers that they support this subset of Atom, where present, when processing RSS 2.0 feeds.

Scoble Comments: Dave Winer

Way to go, Dave. I think I’ll have to start reading you again, rather than just triangulating you from other people’s comments. While I’m a firm believer in Atom as two-way web enabler, infighting amongst the greater community of syndication proponents doesn’t help anybody.

Can’t we just agree that RSS 3.0 == Atom? This doesn’t mean the 1.0 or 2.0 lineages stop developing, and seems to be a nice thing to get behind.

layout: post title: First Apple Store in Canada - Yorkdale in Toronto opened today created: 1116729033 categories:

• Apple
• Apple Store
• Toronto
• Yorkdale
• Canada
• Mac

I just happened to make it to the Yorkdale Apple Store today — the first of its kind in Canada. I was wearing my Daring Fireball member’s t-shirt, but no one was hip enough (Mac geek enough?) to pick up on it. James got a picture of me taking a picture, so hopefully that turned out for proof.

The store (as you can see from the pictures) was crushingly packed. The line up we waited in was because they only let people in as people left — and it was still hot and sticky from all the people inside. A ton of people were buying iPods of various shapes and sizes and I was tempted.

James ended up getting a blue iPod Mini for his wife, along with the iPod car charger he actually needed. The atmosphere was incredible — everyone was so hyped up and there were so many purchases going on, there was a feeling you HAD to buy something. So I ended up with an iSight, which will go on the desktop at home, since it doesn’t have a microphone built in.

In an email discussion, Michael Tan sent along a link to more pictures in an EhMac.ca thread. He also said "this reminds me of when Krispe Kreme first opened up in Mississauga" to which Greg responded "I like that Krispy Kreme analogy. AAPL is not a tech company, it’s a sugar-as-lifestyle marketing agency.".

Am I a slave to marketing? Don’t know, I’m just super comfortable in my Mac ghetto and haven’t felt a push for a very long time to leave it. The iPod definitely is a marketing phenomenon…but it also seems to "just work". Anyway, I’m off to experiment with some webcam software for the new iSight.

layout: post title: Third Tuesday attended yesterday, nPost is today created: 1187799007 categories:

• DemoCamp Vancouver
• Facebook
• Jenn Lowther
• Meetup.com
• nPost
• Rob Lewis
• TechVibes
• TechVibes.com
• Third Tuesday
• Upcoming.org
• Vancouver

A late meeting I had last night ended early and I was at loose ends downtown, so I ended up swinging by the Third Tuesday event, since Rob Lewis’ post at the TechVibes blog reminded me that there were a couple of events going on mid week.

Tonight (Wednesday) is the nPost Entrepreneur Meetup*. I’m not too sure about nPost. I mean, it’s great to have more people highlight and promote tech in Vancouver, but there is such a thing as too many different events and focus at some point… The focus for nPost seems to be startups, and highlighting the people and companies in cities where they have events. Rob and the gang at TechVibes are sponsoring, so I’m sure they’ll do a good job of guiding them into the Vancouver scene. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it, I’ve got the Granville Island Night Photowalk to attend.

Back to discussing the Third Tuesday event…this was a sort of “kick off” event, so there was no speaker or discussion, just mingling at the Soho Cafe in Yaletown. I think there were as many as 30 people through out the course of the evening. I ended up mind melding with Rob Lewis as we talked about the rebirth of TechVibes.com and tech / events in Vancouver in general. Soon the martini-wielding Jenn Lowther** from Invoke Media and Mike***, a Comp Sci / Cognitive Science student from UBC, joined us bad kids by the bar.

One of the things that we discussed is “where to post events?”. Third Tuesday itself is the perfect example for this. Rob posted about it on the TechVibes blog, and linked to the listing he created on TechVibes.com. That, in turn, linked to the Meetup.com page. On the Meetup page, we find that a CollectiveX group has been created. I created an Upcoming entry for Third Tuesday, but I actually originally found out about it through the Facebook group.

Yeah. That *is* ridiculous in case you were wondering. I won’t go through this time and analyze the usefulness of each of those listings, but as two data points, I believe Mike and Jenn both found out about the event through Meetup.com. Oh, and why did I create an Upcoming.org entry? Because there is a widget for Facebook, so posting to Upcoming automatically gets it into Facebook. I just did the same thing for the Granville Island Night Photowalk — the upcoming entry can be a public Internet URL, but it shows up inside the walled garden of Facebook as well.

The ideal event listing platform would allow you to do two things:

1. aggregate event listings from all platforms in a management queue
2. publish those events you want to talk about / promote / etc. with a local permalink, which in turn would all you to cross post to those platforms that don’t yet have a listing

For bonus points, aggregate back all the media that gets created to your permalinked event entry. Merging attendee listings might be fun to try and tackle, but approaching impossible until we get closer to the whole portable social network concept.

In any case, thanks to the organizers of Third Tuesday. I’m looking forward to a more structured 2nd event with a speaker. Just let me know where to look for event announcements :P

Notes:
*to the nPost guys: you don’t even have a permalink for this particular event, just the #vancouver anchor tag: Rob’s TechVibes listing gives you a permalink, but you really need to have direct permalinks / separate pages for all your events
** Jenn, ya gotta get a real site that’s “you” online. I’m tempted to become number one for your name :P
*** sorry, Mike, I forgot your URL. Leave a comment or email me and I’ll update it.

Acknowledging historic injustices is part of building a more equal society today§

Articulated here: The Guardian view on the ‘Colston Four’: taking racism down | Editorial | The…

Because§

Epistemic status§

Type : [[claim]]

Acceptance level : [[Most likely]]

I’m sure it must be, I just don’t have any supporting evidence as of yet.

André Gorz’s Non-Reformist Reforms Show How We Can Transform the World Today§

URL : https://jacobin.com/2021/07/andre-gorz-non-reformist-reforms-revolution-political-theory

Overview of [[André Gorz]]‘s ideas on [[non-reformist reform]]s.

In mapping a path forward for social movements, he disagreed with social democrats who believed that the harms of capitalism could be ameliorated simply through electoral politics and parliamentary dealmaking. Yet he also criticized radicals who perennially predicted a revolution that was nowhere on the horizon.

“It is no longer enough to reason as if socialism were a self-evident necessity,” he argued. “This necessity will no longer be recognized unless the socialist movement specifies what socialism can bring, what problems it alone is capable of solving, and how. Now more than ever it is necessary to present not only an overall alternative but also those ‘intermediate objectives’ (mediations) which lead to it and foreshadow it in the present.”

He recognized that putting together a near-term program could not simply be a matter of coming up with the most radical demands possible.

The great strength of Gorz’s theory is not that it offers easy answers but that it provides a framework through which we can weigh the costs and benefits of pursuing any given demand or accepting any given compromise. It creates an orientation toward action that forces us to balance revolutionary vision with a hardheaded assessment of present

Seems very important to be honest. Green New Deal described as an example of this.

For Gorz, non-reformist reforms seek to undermine the established order. “Structural reforms should not be conceived as measures granted by the bourgeois State at the end of a compromise negotiated with it, measures which leave its power intact. They should rather be considered as cracks created in the system by attacks on its weak points,” he writes.

Have you hugged a concrete pillar today?§

Metadata§

• Author: [[Bill Gates]]
• Full Title: Have you hugged a concrete pillar today?
• Category: #articles
• URL: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Making-the-Modern-World

Highlights§

• other hand—getting back to relative dematerialization—there’s no end in sight to the rising
• humans have an amazing capacity for finding ways around scarcity by using materials more efficiently, recycling them, or finding substitutes. The big concern isn’t so much whether we will run out of anything—it’s the impact that extracting and using these materials is having on the planet.

learn datalog today§

• [[go]] http://www.learndatalogtoday.org/

• [[ybaumy]] https://mk.autonomy.earth/notes/902h2o2388/activity

The French Revolution has historical significance to revolutionary socialism today§

Despite strictly speaking being a [[Bourgeois revolution]] against monarchy and feudalism, the French Revolution has a clear relevance and lineage for the socialist revolutionary left today.

It was a left-wing, radical, egalitarian revolution. It was a revolution from below that mobilised the commoners.

We on the left can claim this as our history and our tradition. It was a precursor to things we care about and identify with.

For example: the revolutionary government of the time in Paris was called the Paris Commune. The latter proletarian uprising named themselves after this earlier revolution. That proletarian revolution saw it as their lineage.

– paraphrasing [[Breht O’Shea]] in [[Revolutionary Left Radio: The French Revolution]]

Epistemic status§

Type : [[claim]]

Agreement level : [[Signs point to yes]]

• [[tanepiper]] https://tane.codes/@tanepiper/109270724301234033 pull