I got me a LiveJournal

Well, it’s official, I have now joined the army of Swarthmore students who has a LiveJournal. I don’t really intend to post anything on my livejournal, however, because I prefer to keep control over my own blog. This may seem a bit paranoid, but who ever thought those lamers at mp3.com would go and delete all of the mp3s on their website? If livejournal.com suddenly vanished without a trace, I’d be shafted along with all their other users. On the other hand, with my SCCS webpage, if SCCS suddenly upchucks and dies, I can go wail on the sysadmins, or bribe them to fix it, or become one myself and get the job done.

So yeah, if you have a livejournal, you can add me to your friends, or leave me messages on the page, or anything else that livejournal users tend to do 🙂 I got curious about livejournals for many reasons, one being the apparently huge number of Swatties who have them. I stumbled across one group of people who lived in Mertz with me last year who all had blogs, and were engaging in intense blogcest. I also wanted to try out the Mozilla extension for making entries in livejournals, Deepest Sender, which actually works very well indeed! I even got it to detect my currently playing music in XMMS, as documented on their help page.

All of this livejournal happiness can get a bit creepy though, so maybe I should get a DeadJournal instead. But then again, how cool is it to be dark and depressing anyhow? And annoyingly you have to be invited by someone with an existing account or shell out money. The thing is, they’re trying to limit growth, presumably because of server costs, and this is a good strategy for that… it can’t jump to unconnected communities of people. So much for DeadJournals. They’re dead. Ha, ha! I crack myself up.

First post (and last?)

Hey folks, this is my LiveJournal, but I prefer to retain control over my own blog, so I’m not actually going to post anything here, I’m going to maintain my weblog on my website.  Although I might use the “post only for your friends” option here, since I don’t really have a good way to control access to my weblog… You might also want to keep track of the activities of the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, because that occupies most of my life 🙂

the cluetrain manifesto

The Cluetrain Manifesto is one of the coolest pieces of literature I’ve stumbled across in a long time. It’s a website, and it’s a book. You can read the full text online, but I think I might actually buy this one, because I want it on my bookshelf.

The basic idea of this document is that corporations are really good at dehumanizing business, which is going to be BAD for their business in the networked market of the internet. People want real communication with real people, and the artificial sales pitch just isn’t going to cut it, because when “consumers” can communicate amongst themselves, they become smarter than the corporations, and they can see right through the BS.

And that’s what the SCDC is about, people communicating person to person without a middleman, without an intermediary, because with the internet and modern networking technology, a middleman is no longer necessary. It is more possible than ever before to just be human with one another, because communication has become so much easier. If we can make business human, if workers can blog and speak their mind, if they can honestly try to help customers instead of toeing the company line, then maybe capitalism isn’t such a bad idea after all.

But don’t rely on my crappy summary, read it yourself! And if your employer is against blogging, if your boss wants the company to present a “professional” face, then buy him a copy of this book, and he’ll understand why that is a bad business decision.