Silly Marxists…Google Is For Capitalists!

Note this exchange on Geert Lovink’s blog. If this is the state of marxist thinking today, well, I am pretty sure the chains are the least of the proletarians problems.

Heh.

(Better Than) Comments Without The Blog

When people ask about Twitter, I always say that it’s like the comments section of an open thread in a blog, just without the blog.

But today, I realized that, in some ways, it’s actually better than that. Because with Twitter, to borrow a phrase from Howard Rheingold, you can “tune your followers.” Which means, unlike a comments thread on a blog, where anyone and everyone — including trolls — can post, on Twitter *you* chose who you want to listen to, and everyone else, you can ignore. And while this might set off some concerns about Twitter encouraging an “echo chamber,” I suspect many people actually follow people with contrary opinions (a point noted in this post from Dave Parry…). I certainly do.

Anyway, today was the RNC’s chairperson race, and all afternoon, enthusiastic Republicans tweeted away, following the vote-by-vote action. Posts were marked with a hash tag (#rncchair), and, using Twitter’s search site, you could follow along in real time.

Or, you know, not.

One of Twitter’s strengths is you can choose whether or not to dip in to this, or any other, data stream. Twitter is broad enough to enable Republicans to carve out their own space, without bothering me. Unless I wanted to take a look, which, of course, I did.

It’s a kind of visibility and connectedness that’s very hard to achieve within a blog community, as so much time there is spent dealing with trolls, and meta-discussions around what is and is not acceptable behavior. On Twitter, it’s much easier to tune into whomever you think is interesting, and ignore (or just listen to once in a while) everyone else.

I’m not suggesting, of course, this is “better” than what happens on a blog; just different. Both forms of media have strengths and weaknesses, and appeal to different sorts of people. But this is one thing I do like about Twitter.

Blago’s Closer

Here’s Blagojevich’s closing argument, in a tag cloud:

Make if it what you will…

A Fountain of Idiocy

Photo of the day, from Rachel Maddow:

Blagojevich is really the gift that keeps on giving.

[edit - That's not the photo from the other day...searching for it...]

Portable Apps and TrueCrypt

An update on my previous post, about Portableapps.

I’ve been using this for a few weeks now, and have updated my setup, with TrueCrypt. Basically, I’ve set a USB flash drive with an encrypted TrueCrypt partition, and within that, I’ve installed portableapps.

So, with this setup, anything I want to bring with me gets encrypted — my browser settings, bookmarks, documents, etc. It’s secure, in case I lose the drive. I have a browser with me all the time, as well as a PDF viewer, and an IM client (Pidgin).

I have two drives, actually. One is 256MB, the other 8GB. Because of FAT limitations, the Truecrypt partition is limited to 2GB, but that’s more than enough space. The only difference between the two drives is the smaller one does not have room to install OpenOffice, but the larger one has that, too.

A very nice, secure, opensource, portable setup.

A Political Blogger’s Reading List

A professor asked me to put together a reading list related to blogs and politics, for his upcoming course at the New School. I’ve divided up the list into sections, and have added some comments on why I think each post/reference is important. As you’ll see, the main focus is on Daily Kos, as it’s scope, size, and influence (both online and off), at least for me, really make that site the center of what’s happening in the political blogosphere today.

Portable Apps

I’m using PortableApps on a USB drive — very nifty stuff.

Since my drive is only 256MB, I installed the “light” suite, which gives you Firefox, a secure password store, a PDF reader, a Word-like program…pretty much everything except for OpenOffice.

I have Firefox configured to clear all the private data each time I exit, so it won’t retain any sessions, in case I lose the drive. It’s a fairly secure setup. I also ordered an 8GB drive, on which I’ll install the full portableapps suite, as well as Truecrypt. That should provide a fully secure, mobile solution for browsing, a doc store, and OpenOffice.

As far as I can tell, this setup leaves no digital footprints on the host machine, aside from some things lingering in the “recent docs” menu. But no cookies, or anything like that.

Good stuff.

Sevilla Skyline

One of my favorite photos from the trip.

Holiday In Spain

Click for link to flickr set...

Just returned from a week in Spain, mostly spent eating.

Photos here, with more to come. Handy RSS feed, too.

Enjoy.