The death of blogging has been exaggerated

Particularly the death of William Gibson’s blogging. Great post today about Shadowrun (“the admixture of cyberspace and, spare me, *elves*, has always been more than I could bear to think about”) and about buying his books, in which he makes a nod back to the discussion I had with him in February at the start of his book tour:

When people are downloading your pirated texts for free, it means you’re already pretty widely distributed. I view downloading as a sort of natural, organic tax on reputation.

Buying used copies is ecologically correct and to be encouraged. The list price on a hardcover PATTERN RECOGNITION in Canada is $40. After GST and PST, that would be closer to $50. When people have the courage to shyly tell me they’re waiting for the paperback, I’m all the more amazed and flattered at the number of people who buy me in hardcover. I didn’t start buying new fiction in hardcover until I was in my thirties and owned a house. And most of the paperbacks I bought, up to that point, I bought used.

Interesting absence(s)

Last week, you could buy Radiohead’s OK Computer in the iTunes Music Store. Not this week. No comment, no notice.

Wonder if the leaking of Hail to the Thief to the web soured Thom and the boys on the whole music download thing? If so, I hope it’s a short term anger…

Also now absent: Sigur Ros. They had a headline in the Alternative section last week.

Update 9 May 9:12 am: See the expanded version of this post at Blogcritics.

MoveOn moves on

When you’ve mounted some of the most effective online anti-war protests ever, but still refused to prevent the war or convince the president to pay any more attention to your arguments than he did to his b-school classes, what’s your next act?

Some might give up. Not MoveOn. Currently they’re mounting a petition against the pending FCC ruling to further deregulate media ownership. The first round of this process was radio. Like your local radio station? Odds are you liked it better before Clear Channel bought it and started running it out of a central location hundreds of miles away. How do you like your local newspaper and television station? Want them all controlled by the same corporate interest? Before you say “it couldn’t happen,” think about what’s happened to radio. Yet most congresspeople only hear from the media on this one.

MoveOn is mounting a petition to convince Congress to block the FCC’s move. I think this one is worth signing, or at least looking at.

To South Carolina for pig-pickin

So, what’s the story with South Carolina, Greg asked me last night. Well, I’m not sure how best to describe the setup, but here goes:

  • My uncle and aunt live one hill over from my parents on the family farmland in western North Carolina
  • My uncle retired as an executive in a transportation company; his company has an executive retreat in a forest in South Carolina
  • Said retreat features fishing, hunting, horseback riding, and other outdoor sports facilities (when I was younger (11?) I rode a horse for the first and last time there; it bolted and I got a bloody tuchus)
  • My parents, my aunt and uncle, and another couple or two are sharing a multi-bedroom house at the retreat for a week next week
  • I managed to squeeze in two days off next week to join them
  • I will arrive on Saturday, the day before the pig-pickin’

What’s a pig-pickin’, my Northern readers are now asking. It’s something like a barbecue, if by barbecue you mean “cooking and eating a ridiculous amount of pork cooked on a fire.” But that doesn’t do it justice; neither does this (though it gives a little of the flavor and some of the recipe). All I can say is, after you’ve been cooking a whole pig on an enormous grill for a day, you’ll be hungry enough to eat anything. The fact that even without the anticipation the meat (dressed in a vinegar sauce only, please, no “smoky barbecue” tomato sauce here) is ambrosial is icing on the cake. And of course there are all the side dishes, and beverages, and occasionally (if it’s a pig-pickin’ that my uncle organized) live country music.

Why is it called a pig-pickin’? Well, because after being cooked over a slow fire all day the pork is soft and moist enough to be pulled off the pig and eaten with one’s bare hands, if one is feeling barbaric. And after a taste of the stuff, one could certainly feel that way. It does seem to awaken a deep hunger. In fact, I’m hungry now…

So this has been a dry week for posting, partly because I’ve been crazy busy at the office, but partly in anticipation of the stories to come.

Clinton: the story that refuses to die

Salon is serializing Sidney Blumenthal’s White House memoir, The Clinton Wars. It’s amazing reading. Certainly not objective, but after reading everything that the rabid Clinton-haters have slung for almost a decade at the man, it’s interesting to read a perspective from the opposite side, inside the second administration just before all hell broke loose.

I wonder if it’s coincidence that the depiction of the president in the first installment sounds a lot like President Bartlett on The West Wing.

Weblogs.com – Seeing the curve

When I looked a few minutes ago, Weblogs.com was only 50 updates away from breaking over 2400 weblogs in a three hour span. This would be the first time since the war was declared over that we might set a new high water mark (on April 7).

In related news, John Robb suggests that it may be time for Weblogs.com to do a “three-for-one split” (my words, not his) and start displaying only an hour of data at a time. If this happens, of course I’ll restate the traffic curves that we’ve been seeing—but it will only be an average approximation, since there’s no archive of data to tell us what the actual hourly high water mark is.

The interesting part is why the need to move. Take a look at the curve below (last updated 4/7):

linear plot of weblogs.com high water mark growth, 6 may

See the uptick? It could be caused by one of two things:

  • The war and corporate earnings season together caused an upswing in blog posting traffic that may not be repeated
  • We could be on the cusp of an exponential explosion in weblog activity, driven by the virtuous cycle of blogging: publish – subscribe – read – comment – publish.

The above graphic was a linear plot of the traffic to date. Take a look at this log-normal plot, which maps the high water marks on an exponentially increasing scale:

linear plot of weblogs.com high water mark growth, 6 may

This suggests that the hockey-stick shape of the first graph is no accident; there really are some reinforcing loops driving the growth of the blogosphere. If that’s the case, yeah, it may be time to move to displaying a shorter time increment on Weblogs.com…

Own a piece of the Club

campaign chest

The Colonnade Club, that is. I got a circular in the mail today about an auction at Harlowe-Powell in Charlottesville of many antiques and art objects that have been “deaccessioned” from the Colonnade Club at UVA, the faculty club that sits in Pavilion VII.

This was the first pavilion, or professorial residence and lecture hall, that Jefferson built in his original suite of buildings for the university, but it has long since become the permanent home of the faculty club and is now reopening after a long renovation. Apparently the club has to auction some of the items that it’s accrued in the intervening 180 years to pay for some of the restoration work.

The details of the auction are here. Although I’m a member, I haven’t spent much time inside the club, but I do remember a few of the pieces, in particular this spectacular sideboard.

Must be spring

Adam notes that he was hard at work this weekend too. Sounds harder than the stuff I was doing:

… we attacked our overgrown and uncared for backyard. We cleared out blackberry bushes and weeds as well as a dump pile that included 5 sections of fencing, a christmas tree, and a trampoline. In total, we filled 20+ yard bags of waste. We also discovered that there’s a 10′ x 15′ concrete slab out back which is now the future home of a shed or patio.…

Yikes. Reminds me of a time in college when some friends, in their annual cleaning of a house they had rented for several years running, decided it was finally time to clean out the back yard. After bushwhacking all the ivy and other plants back, they found that there was an entire terrace that had been hidden by all the overgrowth, complete with steps.

Bricks and blockbusters

Ah, late spring/early summer blockbuster time. As for the last few years, it’s the time that you’re not afraid to admit to friends, co-workers, and even your wife that you’re still a comic book geek at heart. X-Men 2 (I can’t quite bring myself to call it X2) was excellent last night. Though afterwards I was sad (not for the first time) that I let my collection (which included, in addition to complete runs of various mini-series and spinoffs, included numbers 94 (in which Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus made their first appearances, and Wolverine joined the team), 95, a handful of issues between, and then numbers 135 through about 225) go shortly after graduating college. —Sorry; geek off. (But there was something so fascinating about picking up the comic for the first time around #171, then going back and learning where all these friends had come from and where they had been. It helped that my first job was in a comic book store.)

So. Bricks. We’re about halfway done with our job, and our full pallet of bricks. There was one scary moment after we did the ramp from the driveway to the section we had already bricked in by the recycling, and started the section from the gate to the side garage door. And then I realized that the bricks were about an inch too high for the gate to close. We had done the new stretch at the same height as the other sections, but it was too high. Swearing, I had to dig out the bricks under the gate path. So now we have a bi-level path. At least until tomorrow. I’ll have to look at it again in daylight and see if I can live with it.

But it’s not all dusty and hard work. We have roses coming into bloom. And irises are starting to come out.

More bricks ahead

It’s been just about long enough since our last brick excursion that we’ve forgotten how painful it was. So we have another order in to finish the job. When we’re done, we’ll have a complete path around from the driveway to the back patio, which is perfect because it includes the major accesses for the garden and the recycling.

Man, I’m boring. How boring? Just put in a composter last night, that’s how boring. But I’ll be a boring guy with the best vegetables on the block. The herbs are growing like wildfire too.

Tonight, though, the X-Men movie.

—Oh, and Esta: impressive stream of consciousness. But I have to disagree with you about one thing: as much fun as it was to mow over the mint, the best part about mowing the lawn each week was always stopping.