Fri - May 7, 2004
You're ignoring me!
What can I say? Life is unfair! If there had been
photographs, this would be the place for the 90% that weren't as good as the
ones I saw fit to post on the other blog. Ah! The pain of it! The unloved blog!
The blog that gets only the dregs, and you with such a high standard of what
gets to be a dreg!
Posted at 08:17 PM Read More
Tue - May 4, 2004
The sad story of deleting a whole category
As
described on my other blog, I deleted my entire "Life in Madison"
category here in a struggle with a blog poll. I'll try to put some stuff back if
I can. I had Turkish festival day open in my browser, so that was easy to copy,
except now it's in the wrong day. What else did I have? The snow pictures, which
will now be on the wrong day, though they were posted originally during the
freak May snowstorm. There was that cookie... Hmmm..... I'll look through my
recent photos and see if I can figure it out.... Sorry for any dead links I
caused.
Posted at 05:51 AM Read More
Sat - May 1, 2004
I thought you weren't going to put up a Sitemeter?
It's just too enticing. Truthfully, I didn't do it
earlier because I couldn't figure out how to do it with iBlog and was too busy
with end-of-semester tasks to go through the steps. But one of my reasons for
having this blog is to get to use iBlog, so I'm going to pay some attention over
the summer to dealing with some of these technical things, and I started there.
I have to say that checking Sitemeter is a guilty pleasure. On my other blog,
I'm glad to see it approaching 30,000 this week. Here, right now, Sitemeter is
at 0, which I find amusing. You can set it higher, like the way when you open a
new bank account they issue checks that don't start at 1, but I'm not vain about
the Sitemeter number over here. Not
yet.
Speaking of iBlog, I'm going to fool around with the color combination from time to time. It might be like a mood ring. A mood blog. Ooh, look at this Sitemeter graph:
Speaking of iBlog, I'm going to fool around with the color combination from time to time. It might be like a mood ring. A mood blog. Ooh, look at this Sitemeter graph:
Posted at 12:52 PM Read More
Fri - April 30, 2004
"Possible trend" set
So, House of Althouse has been linked by Prof. Yin
who's calling second-blogging if not a trend, a "possible trend." Maybe there is
a lot of second-blogging, but it is just anonymous, like the one Tonya wanted to
do/is doing. Of course, there is a lot of second-blogging in the form of
participating in a group blog, while having an individual blog. But there must
be a lot of double blogging where one is work and one is play, where you don't
want to taint the professionalism of blog 1. But my blog 1 was tainted from day
1. So the trend over here is perhaps inexplicable second blogging. Or the
overflow blogging of Someone Who Blogs Too Much.
Years ago, at UW Law School, I started a faculty email list to chat about various Law School things, back when it seemed really cool to have chatty, conversational threads in an email list. It was called Factalk. We still have it, though I don't manage it personally anymore, but it's mostly a place to dump announcements. In the early days some people liked chattiness and some didn't, so I set up a second list for the chatty people. I asked for suggestions for names, and picked Tower, which refers to the part of the law school building where the faculty offices are. (Here in Madison, six stories got labeled a "Tower" but that was, I'll say in defense of Madison, many decades ago.) When I announced the name as Tower, somebody accused me of naming the list after myself, on the theory that "Althouse" means "tall house," which just goes to show how uncharitable academics are capable of being--and how unfamiliar with foreign languages. (My name isn't Altacasa, so it's not a Spanish "Alt/alta." "House" is clearly from "haus," so it's the German "Alt." The name means "old house." But I'd rather have people think of me as tall than as old, so what the hell! But I am more old than tall, especially compared to an ant. (That's a conundrum. Don't bug me about it!))
So that's all to say that I'm an overblogger and I've been an overemailer. I have an overflow blog, and I once had an overflow email list. Ah, but the Tower list withered away. And Factalk is not an very interesting place to write either. I've started other email lists: Civpro (now Civilprocedure) and Fedcourts, which aren't very active anymore. I believe the email lists are dying out because people are weary of spam. Or maybe because the people who kept them going would rather blog (for a lot of good reasons!). Fedcourts was the first law faculty email list, I believe. Email me if you think there's an older one. Factalk was started long ago too, back when you had to beg people to activate their email, and often met with blank stares or deep anxiety about it. When I first proposed Factalk, I had to put a paper memo in every faculty member's mailbox, explaining what it would be and even what email was and how to activate it. Another lawprof wrote me a memo begging me not to do it, saying what a terrible and inappropriate thing it was, because it would exclude the people who don't want to use email. But it hadn't been that long before that I couldn't believe that memos would be sent out and that if you didn't check something on your computer you'd never know that someone had sent you a memo.
Years ago, at UW Law School, I started a faculty email list to chat about various Law School things, back when it seemed really cool to have chatty, conversational threads in an email list. It was called Factalk. We still have it, though I don't manage it personally anymore, but it's mostly a place to dump announcements. In the early days some people liked chattiness and some didn't, so I set up a second list for the chatty people. I asked for suggestions for names, and picked Tower, which refers to the part of the law school building where the faculty offices are. (Here in Madison, six stories got labeled a "Tower" but that was, I'll say in defense of Madison, many decades ago.) When I announced the name as Tower, somebody accused me of naming the list after myself, on the theory that "Althouse" means "tall house," which just goes to show how uncharitable academics are capable of being--and how unfamiliar with foreign languages. (My name isn't Altacasa, so it's not a Spanish "Alt/alta." "House" is clearly from "haus," so it's the German "Alt." The name means "old house." But I'd rather have people think of me as tall than as old, so what the hell! But I am more old than tall, especially compared to an ant. (That's a conundrum. Don't bug me about it!))
So that's all to say that I'm an overblogger and I've been an overemailer. I have an overflow blog, and I once had an overflow email list. Ah, but the Tower list withered away. And Factalk is not an very interesting place to write either. I've started other email lists: Civpro (now Civilprocedure) and Fedcourts, which aren't very active anymore. I believe the email lists are dying out because people are weary of spam. Or maybe because the people who kept them going would rather blog (for a lot of good reasons!). Fedcourts was the first law faculty email list, I believe. Email me if you think there's an older one. Factalk was started long ago too, back when you had to beg people to activate their email, and often met with blank stares or deep anxiety about it. When I first proposed Factalk, I had to put a paper memo in every faculty member's mailbox, explaining what it would be and even what email was and how to activate it. Another lawprof wrote me a memo begging me not to do it, saying what a terrible and inappropriate thing it was, because it would exclude the people who don't want to use email. But it hadn't been that long before that I couldn't believe that memos would be sent out and that if you didn't check something on your computer you'd never know that someone had sent you a memo.
Posted at 07:48 AM Read More
Tue - April 27, 2004
The Vile Lawprof Conspiracy
Conversation 2 below
was with Tonya and she's
blogging about it too. A key reason she wants an anonymous blog is so
she can curse. She misses cursing. Ah, she reminds me that I suggested calling
the anonymous blog The Id Blog. It occurs to me now that my original blog is my
Superego blog, that this is my Ego blog, and ... yeah I need a third blog! Oh
and Tonya speculates about a joint anonymous faculty website that would be the
equivalent of the anonymous evaluations students do of their lawprofs: the
lawprofs would name names and let loose with criticisms in the style of student
evaluations. See that's why she needs an anonymous blog. You'd go anonymous as
the cranky old retro lawprof and say anything (but without naming names, even
the name of your law school). You could name your blog Professor Kingsfield's
Blog or Cranky Old Retro Lawprof or The Socratic Bastard or some such thing.
Don't worry, I'm not doing it. But I sure want to read it, if anyone else
decides to go ahead and write it. Tonya suggests a group blog of this type.
Let's just call it The Vile Lawprof Conspiracy.
Posted at 06:55 PM Read More
Blogging is like high school/Blogging anonymously
I haven't added Sitemeter to this blog and I'm
thinking of avoiding it. Ah, but no sooner did I write that then I felt a pull
to enter the address of this blog in Technorati. And don't you want to know what
level of evolution you've reached on the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem? I was a
Flappy Bird (over there on my other blog), then I got to be an Adorable Rodent,
then somehow I had fewer links and I was a Flappy Bird again. These are like
cliques in a high school--it was like I was one of the Theater Kids again. This
was all (or most of it) said in a conversation today with a colleague who used
to be an Adorable Rodent like me but is now a Marauding Marsupial. We discussed
the feeling we get when the Popular Kid says hi to us: Instapundit linked to him
today. Oh, and I've be linked by Instapundit five times, but it's like: the
Popular Kid never calls me any more. And so I'm checking Sitemeter referrals and
Technorati like a teenager in love checking to see if the phone has a
dialtone.
Imagine if when you were in high school you had services like BlogShares and Sitemeter and Technorati to check to see where you ranked against the other kids! And then would you try to figure out how to improve your standing and do those things. But here we are, adults with blogs, checking our statistics. Now Jeremy doesn't use any traffic metering device on his weblog, but he's still a character in Blog High School. He's just one of those kids who go around saying popularity doesn't matter and he doesn't even want to be popular. But I admire Jeremy's blog! And I may never add Sitemeter and thus affect the form of self-esteem that is the Pride of the Nerd.
Then I had another conversation with someone who saw that I'd started a second blog and she wanted a second blog too. We discussed the many motives for having a second blog and came up with a lot of good ideas. One would be to have a secret blog, an anonymous blog, where you could say all the things you don't want attributed to your name. Nothing criminal and nothing against a person, just sort of your alter ego. Your main blog would be your Jerry Seinfeld, and the anonymous blog would be George Constanza--all the meaner things you hold your tongue about. For the blogger who coulda been a novelist, the alter ego blog would be the villainous or socially inappropriate character in your story, where you can dump all the mean or daring or shameful things that you think but don't say. I got the idea--really the most outrageously narcissistic idea--of having a second blog that would be anonymous, but that would have as its theme taking issue with everything I say on my main blog--denouncing and vilifying myself, which struck me as a very amusing thing to do. Thinking back to that earlier conversation (the Blog High School conversation), I realized that would be a way to get more links. Especially if unwitting others came forward to defend me.
In the Saul Cornell talk today about the Second Amendment, which I mentioned over on my "Jerry blog" (man, that shouldn't count as a link--that's like sending yourself flowers to try to appear popular!), he explained how the recent body of Second Amendment scholarship was created around the Sanford Levinson article "The Embarrassing Second Amendment," how once that was published and a citation existed, people could write other articles and law review editors would accept those articles, because now there was an authority to footnote. He compared the phenomenon to a coral reef or an algae bloom. He said it was like check kiting (except not necessarily bad). Anyway, couldn't you similarly play the website popularity tracker sites by creating multiple anonymous blogs and linking to them? It would then seem like an important little group of bloggers had gotten going and that might attract others to linking to you and so forth. But why would you be doing that? Because blogging is like high school!
Imagine if when you were in high school you had services like BlogShares and Sitemeter and Technorati to check to see where you ranked against the other kids! And then would you try to figure out how to improve your standing and do those things. But here we are, adults with blogs, checking our statistics. Now Jeremy doesn't use any traffic metering device on his weblog, but he's still a character in Blog High School. He's just one of those kids who go around saying popularity doesn't matter and he doesn't even want to be popular. But I admire Jeremy's blog! And I may never add Sitemeter and thus affect the form of self-esteem that is the Pride of the Nerd.
Then I had another conversation with someone who saw that I'd started a second blog and she wanted a second blog too. We discussed the many motives for having a second blog and came up with a lot of good ideas. One would be to have a secret blog, an anonymous blog, where you could say all the things you don't want attributed to your name. Nothing criminal and nothing against a person, just sort of your alter ego. Your main blog would be your Jerry Seinfeld, and the anonymous blog would be George Constanza--all the meaner things you hold your tongue about. For the blogger who coulda been a novelist, the alter ego blog would be the villainous or socially inappropriate character in your story, where you can dump all the mean or daring or shameful things that you think but don't say. I got the idea--really the most outrageously narcissistic idea--of having a second blog that would be anonymous, but that would have as its theme taking issue with everything I say on my main blog--denouncing and vilifying myself, which struck me as a very amusing thing to do. Thinking back to that earlier conversation (the Blog High School conversation), I realized that would be a way to get more links. Especially if unwitting others came forward to defend me.
In the Saul Cornell talk today about the Second Amendment, which I mentioned over on my "Jerry blog" (man, that shouldn't count as a link--that's like sending yourself flowers to try to appear popular!), he explained how the recent body of Second Amendment scholarship was created around the Sanford Levinson article "The Embarrassing Second Amendment," how once that was published and a citation existed, people could write other articles and law review editors would accept those articles, because now there was an authority to footnote. He compared the phenomenon to a coral reef or an algae bloom. He said it was like check kiting (except not necessarily bad). Anyway, couldn't you similarly play the website popularity tracker sites by creating multiple anonymous blogs and linking to them? It would then seem like an important little group of bloggers had gotten going and that might attract others to linking to you and so forth. But why would you be doing that? Because blogging is like high school!
Posted at 05:55 PM Read More
Mon - April 26, 2004
Why an auxiliary blog?
It's quite easy, really. I want to see what iBlog is
like. So this will be an experimental side blog where I will put anything that I
happen to just not feel like putting on my main blog. Anything serious about law
and politics, I will keep on the main blog. I'll switch to this blog perhaps
when I want to do something with a lot of photos, like this
or when I want to be more self-indulgent, which might mean getting less
self-indulgent on my main blog. I like the main blog being a mixed bag, though,
but I'm careful about the structure of the whole thing and often find myself
worrying about the mix of serious to whimsical. So this will be a bit of a
whimsicality side track, especially when it comes to visuals.
I will put some more artistic things on this site, including scans of drawings and photographs of paintings, both of mine and of one or both of my sons. I can then link to here from the other blog. I might do some streaming audio blogging too. We'll just have to see. I know already that iBlog makes blogging with photos really easy, and I have a feeling that it will be possible to do some audio things easily too. Maybe even some movies at some point.
I will put some more artistic things on this site, including scans of drawings and photographs of paintings, both of mine and of one or both of my sons. I can then link to here from the other blog. I might do some streaming audio blogging too. We'll just have to see. I know already that iBlog makes blogging with photos really easy, and I have a feeling that it will be possible to do some audio things easily too. Maybe even some movies at some point.
Posted at 09:49 PM Read More
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Published On: May 08, 2004 04:31 PM
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Published On: May 08, 2004 04:31 PM