Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2008

Cory Doctorow on blogging, some tips

Write headlines explanatively: so that people know if they want to read it. Being honest with your reader means they will come back, if you are disrespect the reader (take them on a hunt for the post to rack up hits, treating them like sticky eyeballs, eyes for their ads) they won't come back. Post informative and densely factual posts: not in your own personal shorthand, but something someone can understand immediately. First sentence must describe whole article: readers will be grateful, attention-conservation notices. Link to extensive info: Give the short bit and link to more. Attention economy: treat your readers like their attention is valuable. Data Valdezes: personal data hemorrhaging from 'secure' databases. Try anything: because the cost of collaboration, creating info, experimenting is so low, people are more creative and progress is easy, e.g. blogging - try it, don't like it, leave it. Write what you find interesting: Boing Boing doesn't w

Homosexuals - no other minority is so openly denied a human right like marriage

Flashback Friday, a column on feminist notions... No other minority's human rights are voted on except gay people's human rights. No other minority's human rights, their actual day-to-day lives, are subject to so much pejoration - throw-away pejoration. Unthinking pejoration. Are gay people not human too? Are gay people less human than black people, less human than Christians, less human than any group you can mention? Every other human being on this planet, no matter their country, their skin color, their religious denomination, their language - no matter anything - they are allowed to marry. Like, the cheek, allowed ! Marriage doesn't belong to anyone, and no one can say, You may, or, You may not. Jeez! Religion doesn't own marriage, there are atheists marrying daily. There are rapists marrying daily. There are murderers marrying daily. There are animal abusers marrying daily. But gay people can't marry? Huh? ... Cinnamon Gurl sparked this off. Thanks.

The PH Effect (Paris Hilton is rolemodel for the homogenisation of women)

Flashback Friday, a column on feminist notions ... The friendship pool was meager then. We kinda hadta get on with our neighbors - they were either far from us if we lived in the country, or were living 15 to a double dozen in the same room as we were and wondering where to throw their swill. Thank God we had all those institutions in the olden days that homogenised us. Church on Sunday was only one of the ways we were in a straight jacket then. Education was bare and unsophisticated for the wider population. Politics was Nationalism. Philosophy was a bore. And it worked for us. People lived too far away from each other, or too close, to not have a dozen mechanisms propping up their friendships. A dozen mechanisms brainwashing them into being too alike to be challenging. Communities relied on each other then, to fight the Plagues, to fight the Wars, to fight the Poverty. The more the same you are, the less conflict. So it was a good thing that we all salivated when we could unanimous