Some time over the next few weeks, there may be some alterations to the comment system in order to try to cut down on spam. I’m in the process of wiping out 770 comments that accumulated in the moderation queue since yesterday, and it ain’t my idea of fun. So if I accidentally killed something that wasn’t an ad for discounted pharmaceuticals, my apologies. There may be some kind of verification system added soon, and I’m adding some words to the kill file.
The Public Policy articles from the HTML and phpBB versions of the site have now been brought into the current WordPress edition. For the most part I have not gone through and rechecked all of the links in those pieces, so there are probably some dead links and stuff that’s behind subscription walls right now. But if you want to see what we were talking about from 2000-2004, you can go take a look from the Public Policy link on the sidebar. And if you’re like me, you’ll marvel at how much it seems like the country’s talking about the same things in 2006.
Since the old phpBB forum was being overrun by spambots, I’ve switched it over to a read-only archive. I kind of regret that there’s not a space for folks to initiate conversation topics anymore, but the forum’s been dormant for months anyway so it’s not as though we’re cutting a function that anyone was using.
I also aim to resume the bringing-old-content-into-WordPress project this week. Wish me luck.
I know content has slowed to a trickle lately. Heck, a trickle might be optimistic. I’m in the middle of a number of things that will hopefully provide much fodder for discussion soon enough, not the least of which is the defense of my dissertation coming up in less than two weeks. So we’re not dead. We’re just resting.
Just a little bookkeeping right now. Mark Wagner’s Educational Technology & Life blog has moved to http://edtechlife.com/ – Mark’s set up his own WordPress site to get some added functions beyond Blogger. Go check out the place while he’s still remodeling.
I’ve also added Robin Zebrowski’s Hyper-textual Ontology to the sidebar. Robin’s a philosopher of artificial intelligence, something I thought I would be once upon a time. Anyone curious about how philosophy, science and other disciplines intersect should check out the blog.
I’ve begun pulling essays from the original HTML version of the site and both incarnations of the forums and putting them into WordPress with timestamps that reflect their original dating. When I’m done this should make it far less cumbersome to explore the content we’ve accumulated over the last five years. When I’m done, I’ll remove the link to the HTML archive from the sidebar. I’ll probably keep the link to the phpbb forum active, though, since there is good stuff there that’s not easily translatable to the blog format. (Well, I could just turn each thread into its own post. But that is so low on my priority list that it’s underground.)
Right now I’ve brought the philosophy section up to date. Public policy will be next up.
There should be some actual new posts coming as well tonight or tomorrow.
Welcome to This Is Not News. If this is your first time here, this is a site that tries to help create the kind of democratic community envisioned by American philosopher John Dewey. More on that here.
If you’ve been here in any of the site’s earlier incarnations and are wondering why I’ve gotten on the blog bandwagon, that’s a good question. It’s been five years since I first launched Not News, and it’s had two significant periods of dormancy when I couldn’t muster the time or energy to produce lengthier articles on a regular schedule. But I still have a lot to say about the topics that led me to launch the site, and I think the informality of the blog structure might be more conducive to that. I have also seen sites like Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo use the blog model to help foster a certain kind of electronic community, and I think I’d like to get a little bit more involved in that conversation.
The message board and site archive are still here, and I have no plans to take them down any time soon. In fact there’s a good chance that lengthier blog pieces might work their way into a more permanent form in one of those two areas. I’m still working out how this is all going to work, and trying to tinker a little bit under the hood here, so please bear with me for a while.