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Poll: Do you actually use the sidebars on blogs?

May 15, 2007 | 5 comments

I’ve been playing around with the content in my sidebar, and it got me thinking: do people actually click on any of this stuff? I know that I, personally, don’t muck around with sidebars on blogs that much. To see what readers of Sys.13 think, I’ve made a poll, using this nifty poll plugin for WordPress.

Anyway, here’s the poll:

I stopped using the Poll plugin, and so the poll is no more. However, if you’re interested in the results: 11 votes (quite a sample size, eh? ;) ) 64% said they didn’t use the sidebar; 27% said they did; 9% said “What the hell is a sidebar?
Thanks for voting!

Update: Cas made a good point. It would be nice if I knew what folks are clicking on in the sidebar. If you select “yes” for the poll, if you’ve got a minute, drop me a comment and let me know what in the sidebar you click on frequently.

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Threats of violence in the blogosphere

March 27, 2007 | 3 comments

Earlier today as I was going through my feeds, I came across this post by Nils. While it’s certainly not his fault, having read the post has darkened my day quite a bit.

What’s it about, then? It’s about threats of violence in the blogosphere. Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users has, for the past four weeks or so, been getting death threats in the comments on her blog. There have also been some violent images and nasty comments directed towards her on a few different blogs, like meankids.org (no longer in existence), as well as unclebobism.wordpress.com (also no longer in existence, due to breaking the terms of service at wordpress.com). You can read more about what’s been going on here.

When you get down to it, the title of her entry says, in short form, what I want to express here:

Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech”

Blogging has been heralded as a great tool in exercising one’s right to free speech. People across the world have turned to blogging to express themselves, particularly those who aren’t permitted to do so in their local areas.

However, regardless of how great blogging is when it comes to expressing yourself, that doesn’t mean you can go around threatening bloggers you don’t like. Blogosphere or “the real world”, threats of such a nature are still a federal offense here in the United States. As Scoble remarked, a lot of people just take such threats on the internet as part of the territory. The anonymity that the internet supplies makes some people lose sight of the fact (or perhaps, they just stop caring about the fact) that they’re dealing with human beings. The fact of the matter is, bloggers shouldn’t have to deal with such threats. I don’t know what the solution is, but “coping” with such sick shit isn’t the answer. As Kathy remarked in her post, she’s probably never going to be the same, and to be honest, if people were hurling death threats and sexual attacks at me over the internet, I’d probably be feeling pretty screwed up, too.

If you have a blog, it’d be great if you blogged about what’s going on, to get it out there for all to see. The first part of the solution to this issue is to get people to realize that it’s happening in the first place.

As a note, if I sound like a jerk in this post, my apologies. I’m just really upset about this, because it could just as easily be any of us bloggers going through what Kathy is going through. What those people have done to her is total bullshit, and to put it bluntly, it has got me extremely pissed off.

Update: Here’s another good post about this over at apophenia.

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The Language Geek

March 23, 2007 | 2 comments

As if writing one blog isn’t enough, for a few months now, I’ve been writing a second one. It’s called Language Geek, and you can find it here. Language Geek is a couple of things: it’s a journal of my progress (and my inevitable set backs) in learning foreign languages. At the moment, I’m learning German and Russian.

The blog is also just about languages in general: tidbits I find interesting, peculiararities, etc., along with links to language sites and articles. If I were to compare Language Geek to another blog, I’d say it’s most similar to Confessions of a Language Addict (except, in my opinion, that blog is far better than mine – but I digress).

It could be argued that I could have just wrote about languages here (and I had intended to, actually), but ultimately, I decided to make a stand-alone blog for it. Some of the stuff I write about at Language Geek is a bit too language-geeky for many people, I think, and I didn’t want to scare off readers of System 13 by rambling on and on about verb conjugations and prepositional objects.

Anyway! If you’re into foreign languages (or if you just can’t get enough me, heh), check out Language Geek. If nothing else, you’ll get to read about me getting my tongue in knots while trying to pronounce Russian words.

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Blog for freedom of speech

October 28, 2006 | No comments

Lorelle has put up a new blog challenge: blog about those who dare to speak out. From her post:

According to a news story on BBC News, Amnesty International is asking bloggers to show their support for freedom of speech.

Amnesty International is asking bloggers to highlight other bloggers and publicize cases where freedom of speech is under attack. It wants to make the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) lobby the UN to “act as a debating body for national net policies”, helping bloggers and anyone expressing their “freedom of speech” rights do so without persecution.

I think this is an extremely worthy cause. I’m all for freedom of speech, and I’m also pretty darn fond of blogging (obviously). If you have a blog, I’d like to add my request that you take part in this. No one should have to put their life on the line just to express their opinion.

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Why System 13?

October 2, 2006 | 5 comments

It occurred to me recently that I’ve not really explained why my blog is entitled System 13. Here’s the answer:

When I created my first blog at WordPress.com, I used netJosh as the title for a while, but I didn’t care much for it. I wanted my blog to have a title that held at least a bit of interesting-ness to it, so “Josh’s Blog” or “The Life and Times of Josh” just wasn’t going to cut it.

Shortly after I created my blog, I started getting more interested in science fiction, which would explain why, when I wanted to have a more interesting blog title, I turned to science and science fiction. I started digging around on Wikipedia, looking for science / space terms that could be converted to a blog title. Galaxy? Nah. Universe? Too big, and I didn’t like the ring of it. Star system? Now hey, that could be interesting. The definition for a star system, according to the almighty Google ‘define’ command:

A star system or stellar system is a group of stars (and possibly smaller bodies such as planets or asteroids) that orbit one another (systems with planetary bodies orbiting stars, are referred to as solar systems or planetary systems). Although this is similar to the definition of a star cluster, the term is generally used to describe a group of a small number of stars, often two or three, emphasizing the gravitational influence they have upon one another.

I figured I could play that to fit my blog: my thoughts, ideas, and opinions could be likened to a star system, with lots and lots of different things orbiting each other, interacting in interesting ways. Certainly a long shot, and I’m sure the science is shoddy at best, but hey. I liked the idea, so I ran with it.

The next question that might follow then, is, “what’s the meaning behind the 13?” I’d love to have an explanation, but I don’t. I wanted a number after ‘System’ to kind of mimic how stars and planets are initially named, and 13 sounded good. I wanted a simple number, one that would have a decent ring to it. For an example of what I didn’t want, here’s a snippet from a Stargate episode:

Gentlemen, these planets designated P3575 and P3A577 have been submitted by Captain Carter’s team as possible destinations for your next mission.

Hmmm. Check out my blog, it’s called System P3A577… ?
Nah, I’ll stick with System 13. :)

I’m going to be blogging a bit more about this. The next entry in this ’set’ will be about making my theme to match the title of my blog, and second thoughts on doing so.

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