Blog

Andrew Murphie pointed out this Wired article on the fibreculture list - All the News That's Fit to Skewer. Puts a whole new spin on the idea of gatewatching... Andrew also mentions the work of Pierre Levy on collective intelligence - better read up on this, too.

OK, I've grabbed a new version of import.module from the Drupal CVS, which means that the newsfeeds should be fixed now - recently the Kuro5hin.org feed just wouldn't update any more. Let's hope that this didn't break the other feeds.

This also brought home the fact that Drupal is now up to version 4.3.x, while I'm still running on 4.1.

It's taken a while, but finally this site is directly accessible to outside users - so if you're reading this, welcome ! There have been any number of delays, and I would have liked to get this online earlier - but the lack of content for the general information pages meant that I didn't want to launch yet, and the delayed launch meant I didn't blog as regularly as I wanted to. Now I'll try and provide more frequent blog entries as the year progresses.

I've also added plenty of links to my recent articles, as well as my PhD …

Haven't written for a while, but (because) much is going on. I'm currently preparing the 2003 fibreculture conference here in Brisbane, with a host of colleagues, and am also hoping to get in a grant proposal for a project I'm developing with my colleague Liz Ferrier at UQ.

Add to that day-to-day teaching and the plans for a new Journalism portal at QUT, and I'm plenty busy. In the meantime, I've also received a variety of new Prog DVDs (including the PFM in Japan DVD I've mentioned before, and a little miracle of a Van der Graaf Generator live in …

No, this isn't about whether you'd rather be obliterated by the weapons of mass destruction of Dubya's evil empire or Kim's evil minnow. Rather, there's the start of an interesting series of articles about content management systems at the All-American Web Portals site (what a name). They're promising to look at a group of PHP-Nuke-style CMSs to compare their features.

I've mainly worked with PHP-Nuke so far (and now with Drupal, of course), with some good success - both M/C Reviews and EMIT run on PHP-Nuke. In the versions I've used it's very much for PHP programmers only …

Doing more work on my M/C Journal article for the 'fight' issue today. It was accepted for publication with some requests of further changes by the refeerees. One referee wondered about the impact of CD burning and filesharing on CD sales, so I did a bit more research and rediscovered a nice article at The Register which questions the RIAA's claims using its own figures. (That article is in turn based on this one.)

Of course there is always an element of conspiracy theorism in these kinds of reports; of course there is an almost universal dislike of the …

Someone on Slashdot pointed to this article on "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality" by Clay Shirky. Very interesting stuff, and another indication (as if one were needed) of how blogs and similar interactive technologies are coming of age. I'm listing it here for further reference.

Ooh, some very interesting new releases listed in the latest Cuneiform/Wayside announcement. Michael Giles's long-lost Progress is finally available, and there'll be a DVD from Van der Graaf Generator ! Also Robert Wyatt's Solar Flares Burn for You, a new band with Frédéric L'Épée, Happy the Man's new The Muse Awakens and a new CD from Djam Karet.