We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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noun. The totality of blogs; blogs as a community; blogs as a social network.
(coined by William Quick)
Usage: “The blogosphere has been abuzz with the Trent Lott story for the last few days and many of the blogs are baying for blood!”
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The key to understanding blogs is understanding the blogosphere. Blogs themselves are just a web format, whereas the blogosphere is a social phenomenon. It is hard to overstate the importance of this.
What really differentiates blogs from webpages or forums or chatrooms is that blogs (at least properly implemented ones) are designed from the outset to be part of that shifting internet-wide social network. There have been many attempts to design ‘social software’ but thus far the only effective example is the blogosphere, which was not ‘designed’ by anyone but is an emergent phenomenon.
verb. To deconstruct an article on a point by point basis in a highly critical manner. Derived from the name of journalist Robert Fisk, a frequent target of such critical articles in the blogosphere (qv).
Usage: “Orrin Judd did a severe fisking of an idiotic article in the New York Times today…”
1. noun. A contraction of weblog, a form of on-line writing characterised in format by a single column of text in reverse chronological order (i.e. most recent content at the top) with the ability to link to individual articles. There is usually with a sidebar displaying links, and the content is frequently updated.
(probably coined by Peter Merholz)
Usage: “Glenn has writen an interesting article about the folly of gun control on his blog”
also see: Warblog, Journal blog, Pundit blog, Tech blog, Group blog
2. verb. To write an article on a blog.
Usage: “Steven Green has just blogged about the joys of Vodka today”
or
“After reading that crap in the New York Times about globalization, I feel a serious need to blog about real world economics”
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The majority of blogs are non-professional (update July 2004: commercial blogs of various sorts are now appearing in increasing numbers) and are run by a single writer. However whether or not a blog has a single author or is a group effort, a key differentiating factor between a blog and other on-line formats (such as forums, wikis etc) is that the main articles (as opposed to just comments) are written by the blog’s owners/members and not by the general public.
Although there are several competing definitions regarding what makes a blog a blog, it can be convincingly argued that, circa 2004, for something published on the web to be a true blog, it must be configured to be readily accessible by the blogosphere. That means although reverse chronological order is a defining feature of a blog, that alone is not enough. If the individual articles cannot be linked to separately via a permalink (rather then just linking to the whole site), then the site in question is not a blog.
This means some ostensible blogs are debatably not really blogs at all (they are merely ‘blog like’ in appearance) by what the developing understanding of what a blog really it.
For example the Guardian, a British broadsheet newspaper, has two blogs and prides itself that it ‘gets’ blogging. However whereas the Guardian Online Blog, which deals with technology, is indeed a blog (and quite a good one), the Guardian main blog, called simply The Weblog1, is nothing of the sort as you cannot link to individual articles and hence it is not actually part of the blogosphere. Not surprisingly as a result ‘The Weblog’ is largely ignored by other blogs and hardly ever linked to according to the various monitoring services such as Technorati or Blogstreet).
1 = as of late 2004, ‘The Weblog’ was superceded by Newsblog, which is a proper full featured blog
Liberty… If You Dare
CYBERSPACE – September 13, 2002: LibertyForum (http://www.libertyforum.org), a web-based political discussion forum, has emerged from an intensive 1 year beta-testing phase and has opened its electronic doors to the general public. During its testing period, a group of approximately 400 dedicated users logged over 200,000 individual posts to test LibertyForumís PHP based forum software, which reviewers consider one of the best implementations of web-based discussion on the Internet.
LibertyForum is organized around the discussion of news-items and political topics, and places the libertarian principles of its creators firmly ahead of site popularity or narrowly ideology. Membership is not restricted to any particular political camp, a fact that has resulted in the wide spectrum of political opinion and ideas presented by forum members.
A key aspect of LibertyForum’s commitment to libertarian principles is its environment of open-debate. Rather than rely on moderators, post deletions, poster banishment, or other types of forum censorship, LibertyForum allows its members to decide for themselves what it is they want to read. Comments are rated by the forum’s membership through the use of a Post Rating System based on Slashdot.org’s (http://Slashdot.org) “Karma” moderation system. This fosters a system of meritocracy, where posts are rated according to their content, and where members are free to set their reading preferences at whatever threshold they prefer.
LibertyForum’s growing expertise in the delivery of web-discussion services has led it to seek and establish strategic partnerships with a variety other Liberty oriented organizations. These organizations are able to utilize LibertyForum’s infrastructure to provide discussion services for their members; this at no cost to the organization or its members. True to its focus on the individual, LibertyForum also actively promotes an international atmosphere that welcomes the participation of posters throughout the world.
With a current, and growing, user base of over 600 members, and daily posting activity that often exceeds 1,500 individual posts, LibertyForum is poised to become the premier Liberty oriented discussion forum on the web. To find out more about LibertyForum, or to become a member, please visit http://www.libertyforum.org.
Contact: John Deere
forums@libertyforum.org
http://www.libertyforum.org
It is always a pleasure to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being one day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be the quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.
– Sherlock Holmes, as reported by Dr. Watson (from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Noble Bachelor)
Tonight I’m speaking at the Putney Debates in London on the topic September 11th 2001, one year on.
A few thoughts I shall be raising are:
1) The terrorists failed the Machiavelli test of initiating a surprise attack: either kill your enemy or win him over. Al-Qaeda, it can be safely assumed, failed badly with regards to the global capitalist system, and hasn’t won over anyone who didn’t support them or hate capitalism already.
2) The ‘war on terrorism’ fails the test on the same grounds: it frightens people who aren’t enemies, is likely to miss the most dangerous targets, and creates the vehicle for new resentments, desire for revenge etc.
3) I think Bush’s speech was terrible: it would make a great recruitment spiel for any anti-Western gang of killers. Was I the only person who spotted Condoleeza Rice grimacing at a couple of passages? As for UNESCO, the less said…
4) The ‘war on terrorism’ is basically a just cause. That is precisely why it is so dangerous. It contains in its name all the inanity of the ‘war on drugs’ or ‘war against poverty’. It is also perfect for exploitation by government. ‘Ingsoc’ could justify anything in Orwell’s 1984 under the banner ‘the war against terror’. Do we suddenly trust Mr Blair and the man who sprung steel tariffs on the world earlier this year? I notice that on “fairness” grounds we’re all being sized up for a national DNA database in the UK. (It’s unfair on criminals that they get fingerprinted and not the rest of us!!!)
5) President Bush has to leave office by 2008 at the latest. Imagine that Al Gore succeeds him and the ‘war on terrorism’ is still going strong: does the Vietnam war sound familiar?
6) I should make it clear that I would happily fire a missile at Saddam Hussein, regardless of his involvement in last year’s attack, or whether he is building weapons of mass destruction.
Looks like some yellow-bellied, tenderfoot back East is kinda gettin’ his shorts in a knot:
“Mars could resemble the lawless Wild West if privately funded adventurers seeking to exploit the planet get there before government-backed expeditions, a leading British astronomer said on Wednesday.”
Well, let’s saddle up our hosses and ride the trail, pard’nurrs
Contrary to its popular cartoon image as a quaint, bucolic idyll, Britain is, and has been for some time, the most urbanised country in the world. The corollary of this is that British country folk are a minority without the political clout and voting power of the majority city-dwellers.
British governments are elected by those city-dwellers and that means that the country people are, shall we say, surplus to requirements. In most cases, this would be a blessing in disguise but, since emerging from 18 years of electoral wilderness, the re-invigorated Labour Party had dragons to slay.
The country folk are roundly loathed by most of the Labour Party who have always characterised them as ‘robber baron’ landowners, natural conservatives (in every sense of the word) and just too embarrassingly ‘British’ at a time when everyone was expected to have discarded such prehistoric notions.
Maybe Tony Blair shares those views, maybe not but what he has done is to serve up Britain’s rural communities as fresh red meat to quieten the marxist dogs in his own party. From the BSE fiasco, to the appalling incompetence and cruelty shown during the ‘Foot & Mouth’ outbreak (and which may yet prove to have been an act of sabotage), the banning of guns, the manipulation of planning laws so as to favour factory-farms (which have squeezed out the small, independent farmer) and now the proposed ban on hunting with dogs.
Five years of systematic bullying and persecution have so traduced Britain’s rural communities that some are simply no longer viable. They have paid a heavy price for being a detested minority. By degrees, their entire way of life is being abolished.
It is always difficult for a minority to fight back against a majority, especially when that majority has its hands of the levers of state power. But a promising way to begin is by (a) getting angry and (b) getting organised. Britain’s rural folk are now both and on September 22nd tens of thousands of them will take to the streets of the Capital to tell the government that they’re as mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.
This is no block of rampaging rednecks. As with most things, the lefty metropolitan bigots are quite wrong about the rural people for they are as multifaceted and diverse as any others but they have actively choosen to unite under a slogan that proclaims ‘Liberty & Livelihood’ and that should tell you everything you need to know.
I canot read that slogan without being reminded of a famous song lyric: ‘Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose’. Well, if that’s true, then ‘nothing left to lose’ is also another word for ‘freedom’.
Yesterday I wrote a short article called The real England speaks in which I described a spontaneous expression of transatlantic solidarity. Much to my surprise, I clearly touched a raw nerve and the response was thunderous (see the comments section of the article to see what I mean).
As anyone who has read this blog for more than a few weeks will have surmised, samizdata.net is not just an overtly libertarian group of writers, but represents what can only be described as libertarianism’s ‘hawk’ wing… a sort of anti-anti-war.com. But I was not writing to encourage hawkish memes (well, not that time). In truth, when I wrote my article yesterday, I was not so much extending the sympathy of Britain to our confreres in the United States, at least not as the main thrust of the article, but rather highlighting the existence of a trans-national Anglosphere civil society of sorts that transcends the confines of states and governments.
That does not mean I think the remarkable outpouring of responses was ‘wrong’, far from it… just that it was not my objective and certainly not what I was expecting. Yet the response goes quite some way to confirm the contention of my article that there is indeed an ‘Anglosphere’ civil society and not just the distinct English speaking civil societies around the world, connected by sentiments far deeper than mere politics or state.
You may be aware that there are blogs for every corner of the human mind. Well, almost every corner, since the thought of blogs for some of the corners of the human mind makes me shudder. It is also axiomatic that people who came up with the weblog technology will have their own corner (or basement) of the blogosphere where their blog about blogging, that is, meta-blog to their heart’s content.
Although I am not a techie by any stretch of imagination (thank you, you may stop now!), I am very interested in technology and so the following post of a techie blogger, Jon Udell of John Udell’s Radio Blog caught my eye:
Every web user engages daily in this process of information refinement. Many share their results – that is, URLs with annotations – in the form of FYI (“For Your Information”) emails. Some also share their results on personal “links” pages. And a few employ a new tactic called weblogging. A weblog is really just another kind of annotated links page, typically in the form of a daily Web diary that filters and reacts to Web information flow according to personal and/or professional interests.
The current weblog craze is, in all likelihood, a passing fad. If you visit Blogger, a portal site that aggregates over 1000 weblogs, you may conclude that this form of communication has already suffered the same fate that befell the Usenet. One “blogger” (short for “weblogger”) recently complained that although there was once a hope that the weblog could become a powerful tool for reaching out and connecting with the world, it has become a powerful tool for self-gratification and self-absorption.
Two years later, he makes a similar argument:
Despite massive uptake of blogging in certain circles, I don’t see evidence that it has made much of a dent in scientific communities. The same is true, I think, in many other professions. Blogging seems huge to those of us engaged in it, and in important ways it is. Culturally, it represents a style of communication that is genuinely new. Technically, it may be the most popular application of XML. But blogging is still a drop in the ocean of email. It’s far from ubiquitous, and at the ETech conference, both Sam Ruby and I were surprised to see how little-understood RSS feeds were even among experienced bloggers.
Whether Jon Udell is right about the overall impact of blogging is not central to my point here, which is simple – understanding the technical side of information generation and dissemination opens more opportunities to generate and disseminate them as well as maximises the use of existing channels.
Underlying the weblogging movement are two technological trends – RSS headline syndication>1 and pushbutton Web publishing. I have recently come across the squabble over RSS formats that from a fifty-thousand-foot perspective looks like a tempest in a teapot. Neither the simplicity of RSS .9x nor the extensibility of RSS 1.0 matters to someone who has yet to experience the ‘virtuous cycle’ that is only recently being discovered by so many – for example, Don Box:
While spending my evening with RSS, I had two epiphanies:
1. The connection between blogging and RSS is deep.
2. WS-IL>2 is the closest we have to RSS in the web service space.
With respect to the first observation, the cycle looks something like this:
while (true) {
ScanRSSFeeds();
RantAboutStuffYouSawFromRSSFeeds();
ExposeYourRantsViaRSS();
}
What an amazingly virtuous cycle!
Before you start thinking of how sad spending one’s evening with RSS is and of any stupid puns on epiphanies or of any of the usual responses that the non-techies fall upon to compensate for their lack of understanding of squiggles, a much more important perspective springs to mind.
The above is worth noting, as technology is making difference to those who find themselves opposing the mainstream or standing aside from it. Communication via the internet, email, weblogs and other channels to come has transformed and will continue to transform the private and public discourse. Many bloggers have discovered the joy of sharing with the world ideas whose expression had, until recently, been confined to conversations over a pint of beer or a cup of latte. Not that there is a cause for rejoicing every time such idea is liberated and this freedom has its price (for a more precise total scroll down the left hand bar here for Havens of Fluorescent Idiocy). I do believe that we have merely scratched the surface of what blogging could do in terms of generating information and, more importantly, in terms of its aggregation.
On a more immediate note, RSS has to do with information filtering and as such is relevant to the blogoshpere. Various blog digests have been set up and disappeared, trying to find an intelligent way of sorting out the data and passing on information that is of interest. Preferences akin to mail filters would allow the user to filter only the data in which they are interested onto the page, from the entire pool of data. For example, a user interested in articles about “Football” would be able to set up a personalised channel that simply consisted of a filter for Football, or even for a particular team or player. Or for all references to Slashdot.org, or whatever. This would give him the largest selection of content, with the greatest degree of personalization available. Tools would be made available to simplify the process of creating these files, and to validate them, and life would be good.
I have risked boring you to tears with techie acronyms in order to get my message across – I see technology as the main tool (and a weapon, if necessary) of education, development, protection and dismantling of the modern state. If we fancy ourselves as making any impact with our arguments, campaigns, thoughts and outpourings via blogging, let’s at least explore it’s potential to the full.
Disclaimer: Those who blog purely for personal gratification and self-absorption, please ignore my rallying call. No need to spend evenings with RSS and various assorted technologies. 
Note1: RSS – a dialect of XML, a vocabulary for representing annotated links. What exactly RSS stands for is itself a subject of controversy – Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication, or John Udell’s favorite, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Note2: WS-IL – Web Services Inspection Language (WS-Inspection) 1.0
In yet another travesty of British justice, Barry-Lee Hastings has been convicted of manslaughter for defending not just his property but his family from a career serial burglar.
Naturally the state sees things differently.
Det Chief Insp Matthew Horne said the case sent a clear message that people in such circumstances should call the police “and let us do our job. If you take the law into your own hands there is always a danger”
Yet in the last year we have had story after story of the Police responding to pleas for assistance by turning up hours if not days later. The fact is, the job which Detective Chief Inspector Matthew Horne is speaking about is not your protection but rather the protection of the State’s monopoly on the means of violence.
Institutionally speaking, the safety of you, your family and your property is purely incidental: if it were otherwise, a person could legally own a weapon for their personal defence in Britain… yet regardless of the fact you may manifestly be at risk from violence in a high crime area or live in a home which has been robbed again and again and again, you may not even use a kitchen knife, let alone a gun, to protect yourself. Ask Barry-Lee Hastings.
The state is not your friend.
What happens when a “we-didn’t-go-to-the-moon” moron calls an astronaut a liar? Yep. You got it in one. He gets decked… and that is exactly what happened when Bart Sibrel, an ignoramus, shoved a camera in Buzz Aldrin’s face.
One should remember Buzz is in his 70’s at the very least. So we have here a demonstration of what a lifetime of physical fitness can do. Mr Sibrel should consider himself lucky… had he done this twenty years or more ago, he would now be doing a richly deserved pretzel impression in an emergency room.
Congratulations to Buzz for giving Mr Sibrel his just deserts… and he’s definitely got my vote the next time he runs for the NSS board!
Buzz Aldrin chatting with members of National Space Society
at their 1992 conference in Washington, DC (photo: D.Amon)
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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