widdershins

I'm back! You're front!

And so with an obscure Eyebeam reference, I return to these here pages for widdershins, v2.0.

Wid1.0 consisted of 166 posts over the course of a year, with 164 comments. Even now, after lying idle for more than 6 months, it still gets more than 30 pageviews a day on average. Not bad, I think.

To all of you reading, I missed you!!

I haven't been completely offline, tho. You may have noticed my Furl links in the sidebar constantly updating all this time. More about that later. Wid2.0 will have a lot more quick links like that, and not necessarily much of an essay or commentary on all the individual posts. I'll also look into rejigging the formatting of these pages at some point to better fit a quick links style.

In the words of the Amazing Bag, "Wimpy No More!"

Huzzah!

Blindfold Blog

A guide dog instructor, as part of her training, spends ten days blindfolded in a dorm with blind students learning to use their new guide dogs.

I'm completely fascinated and dying to read how her ten days go, starting today.

[via MetaFilter]

Watching Justice

George Soros's Open Society Institute has started up the Watching Justice web site to report on the doings of the US Justice Department, drawing on a list of watchdog sources that it openly shares. The degree of commitment to transparency is inspirational and badly needed. And, naturally, the web site uses a blog-style format because it's an excellent format for regularly updating an interested community. Now they need to add RSS and Atom feeds. [via MetaFilter]

And why should transparency in government matter? As Matt Welch wrote recently:

Above all, Bush's attitude toward sensitive information has remained consistent from his pre-9/11 behavior: Transparency is overrated, secrecy is a virtue, and post-Watergate reforms curtailing the government's ability to snoop, prosecute and act freely are a serious obstacle to protecting the country.

These beliefs don't make him venal, just wrong. History has shown that a government that acts without the checks and balances of scrutiny is a government that abuses its power. Secrecy is often just another word for "it would be embarrassing for me if you saw that." And transparent examination and debate, however untidy, unlocks the genius of distributed, free-flowing intelligence—one of America's biggest competitive advantages—and gives citizens their deserved seat at the decision-making table.

del.icio.us/mg

More and more, my quick links are going into del.icio.us/mg, also available via RSS, so point your favorite RSS aggregator that-a-way. I'm also experimenting with the links in the sidebar here, using feedroll, although I'm not happy with the formatting or performance yet.

Thoughts on social networks

Sure, signing up on Orkut is fun, but there's no there there. The only ongoing activity well-supported by the system so far is the competition to have the biggest friend count (which the system foolishly encourages by printing number of friends after one's name and by listing people consistently in descending order of friends). That's certainly not going to continue to engage most people's interest over time. There are communities, but there isn't enough basic functionality to use them for anything other than an expression of one's interests. It will be interesting to see if they can get some useful functionality into this site or whether this YASN (Yet Another Social Network) will just fade into disuse or misuse.

The real value of social networks, generally, has to do with the loose connections: people you have a distant or tenuous connection with, who by way of the social network, become more closely tied to you. Much is said about the alienating tendencies of computer-mediated communication, but this is one of the ways that the net brings people closer together. Sometimes it's by creating a channel of contact that wasn't there before. Sometimes it's by making explicit a connection that was only there implicitly, unobserved. YASNs can do this, as can blogs. Some of the blogs I follow most closely are written by friends of friends, or by friends I only kept up with occasionally before. Through Orkut and LinkdedIn, I've reestablished connections with several wonderful people I thought I had pretty much lost contact with for good. All of this is bringing people closer together.

Bloggies

Nominations for the Bloggies have been made, and voting is open. It was fun to look through all of the nominated sites, most of which I was not already familiar with. I was a bit surprised at the nominations, though; for the most part the final nominations do not include the sites I would have picked. After having looked through all of the nominees, here's what my selections were (and in some cases what my preference would have been had it been nominated):

Best Meme: 100 Things About Me
Best Article or Essay About Weblogs: Weblogs and the Mass Amateurisation of Nearly Everything
Best Weblog Directory or Update Monitor: blo.gs
Best Web Application for Weblogs: TypePad
Best Australian or New Zealand Weblog: ScorpioGirl
Best Asian Weblog: A Sassy Lawyer in Philippine Suburbia (although my pick would have been the Living in China aggregator)
Best African or Middle Eastern Weblog: Baghdad Burning
Best European Weblog: Giornale Nuovo (although I would have picked A Fistful of Euros)
Best British or Irish Weblog: GreenFairyDotCom (my pick would have been Samizdata)
Best Latin American Weblog: I abstained, as I know very little about this category
Best Canadian Weblog: MezzoBlue (my own pick would be Colby Cosh)
Best American Weblog: Boing Boing (my pick would be 2blowhards)
Best Tagline: The Art of Rhysisms: “Stealing traffic cones from the Information Superhighway since 2002”
Best Photography: Satan's Laundromat
Best Non-Weblog Content of a Weblog Site: RatherGood
Best Programming of a Weblog Site: Kottke.org Undesign
Best Music Weblog: ChaChaCha.co.uk
Best Politics Weblog: Talking Points Memo (although my preference would have been Hit & Run or The Volokh Conspiracy)
Best Web Development Weblog: The Daily Report
Best Computers or Technology Weblog: Slashdot
Best Topical Weblog: Belle de Jour (my pick would be Language Log)
Best GLBT Weblog: Just Write (although Pansexual Sodomite should have been on the list)
Best Humorous Weblog: Margaret Cho
Best Group Weblog: Boing Boing (although I would have picked Crooked Timber)
Best Community Weblog: MetaFilter
Best-Designed Weblog: Brookelyn.org
Best-Kept-Secret Weblog: Low Culture (my pick would have been Snarkout)
Best New Weblog: HoneyTom
Lifetime Achievement: Anil Dash
Weblog of the Year: Boing Boing (a fine choice, but my pick would have been MetaFilter)

The final winners of the voting will be announced March 15. Voting is open through Jan. 31.

del.icio.us

del.icio.us is an early-alpha social bookmarks system. It's very simple: you register, then you add bookmarks to the system. There is a bookmarklet and an API to make adding bookmarks easier. Your page shows your bookmarks, and the main page shows the most recently added bookmarks, including the number of people with that bookmark, and also has a link to show the most popular. It's interesting to add something to my del.icio.us links, and then watch it get picked up by other people.

2004 Bloggies nominations

Nominations are now open for the 4th annual weblog awards, the 2004 Bloggies, in 30 categories, including weblog of the year, best new weblog, and best meme. Nominations are accepted at the website until 10pm EST on Monday, January 12.

2003 in review

Rex Sorgatz at Fimoculous has compiled a list of 300+ 2003 year in review websites for news media, technology, books, music, films, etc., which is incredibly helpful, interesting, and mind-numbing. He also has his own list of favorite blogs of the year, which like all such lists is highly idiosyncratic, but I enjoyed following the links to the blogs I wasn't familiar with to check out what is going on in some unfamiliar corners.

For a compilation of 150+ critics' top film picks of the year, see the fascinating chart at Movie City News.

Happy 2004, everyone!

Reserve Currency

I recently came across the topic of reserve currency and I'm tracking some thoughts and exploration of this topic in my new Reserve Currency blog. I expect the topic will be too dry to be of interest to most people, and it might be handy for myself or someone else at some point to have lots of references to the topic in one place, so off in a single-topic blog it goes. See you there.