Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’

Post from the iPoderantz

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Thanks to the good people at ibiblio, specifically Ken, I now have the WordPress app for the iPhone set up. Behold, the matzah… or, in this case, my first post from my iTouch. Which, yes, I call the iPoderantz. (It was just too easy a shot… when I had a Palm, I called that Palmerantz. I mean, come on, with a name like Pomerantz, you have to take it where you can get it.)

Breathing new life into the old blog?

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

Now that tenure is a done deal — on March 10 I submitted a signed copy of my tenure letter to the Provost’s office… see my celebratory tweet — I keep telling myself that I’ll put some effort into this blog again. Not that I don’t have about a dozen other things that I should be writing instead. But for reasons passing understanding I am not willing to just completely abandon this blog, so I figure I’d better actually contribute to it.

To this end, a couple of days ago I installed the WordPress for iPhone app, thinking that maybe that will lower the bar for blogging for me. Maybe my blog posts will become more tweety. Who knows. Well, I’m getting an XML-RPC error. I submitted a help ticket to the good folks at ibiblio, so we’ll see how this turns out.

I’m a twit

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Once again again, I come late to the party… Yvonne has shamed me into creating an account with Twitter, by accusing me of being a Luddite. My new tweety username: jpom. I have to admit I don’t really get it… I don’t care if the world knows my status on a minute-by-minute basis, or even an hourly or daily basis. And Paul’s often quite hilarious tweets notwithstanding, I don’t really care to know other people’s status that often either. I suppose these antisocial tendencies disqualify me from truly being Web 2.0-compatible. Well anyway, I’ve discovered that one can tweet from Google Talk, so at least the interface is easy and it’s a tool I’m using anyway. So I’ll give it a whirl. Just don’t expect much.

Done with spring cleaning

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Well, it took me about a month, but I’m done with my blog spring cleaning. I’ve now posted or simply deleted all of the old posts that I wrote ages ago and have been sitting on for years. My Write Post tab is clear, and I feel the warm glow of a tidy desk. For those of you who have ever been in my office, you know that’s not a feeling I get to have very often. I shall now move on to all new material.

Bursty

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

You may have noticed that I’ve been posting like mad here lately, at least compared with the past two months of near radio silence. I genuinely don’t know what makes me lose or gain interest in my blog over time, but I’ve suddenly entered the latter phase. I think part of my recent blog-aversion may be that I have a backlog of posts that I’ve started and never finished, over seriously the past two years. These half-baked posts mock me from the Write Post tab. So I hereby declare a spring cleaning initiative: I’m going to either minimally edit and then post, or delete all of that backlog.

Intellectual debates in public forums

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

In the latest issue of JASIST is an article by Marcia Bates, which is a response to an article by Birger Hjørland, which is a response to an article by Marcia Bates. Bates’ first article was published in 2006; Hjørland’s article was published in 2007; Bates’ second article was published in 2008. First of all, let me say that I love these sorts of exchanges. First, in a schadenfreude kind of way, observing the academic equivalent of fisticuffs. But more importantly, as an example of exactly the sort of thing that academia excels at: airing intellectual debates in a public forum. But my real point is, that’s a solid 2 years in which this particular debate has played out, and I suspect it ain’t over yet. Plus it’s only had three moves.

I witnessed another intellectual debate with three moves recently: Paul Courant to Siva Vaidhyanathan to Paul Courant. Total elapsed time: two days. Two days! The Courant-Vaidhyanathan exchange was literally 365 times faster than the Bates-Hjørland exchange.

Ok, so it’s not a perfect comparison: Bates1 and Hjørland are a little meaty to be blog posts, though Bates2 could possibly have been. And really this is not a novel observation: academic bloggers have been saying forever that blogs have the potential to speed up the pace of intellectual exchange. Still, though, it’s rare to see such a clear-cut example; most of the discussion of the benefits of blogging for academia are hypothetical (academic, one might even say)… what it amuses me to call the “ooh shiny object” argument: Look at this cool new toy! Here are some ideas for how we can use it! Aren’t you as excited about this as I am?

Anyway, I love seeing this actually happen, with bona fine Really Smart People™ having an interesting debate. Not to mention the added value that the blog exchange enables: comments. Other Really Smart People™ pitched in on that discussion: Brewster Kahle, Paul Duguid, John Gilmore, Kristin Antelman, and no doubt other Really Smart People™ whose names I just don’t know. Now that’s airing an intellectual debate in a public forum. That has the potential to really raise the level of the debate.

Upgraded

Monday, July 16th, 2007

I’ve finally gotten off my duff and upgraded my version of Wordpress to the latest version, 2.2.1. (I believe I was previously using version 1.5.2 — very, very old.) Most important: comments are working again, finally. Considerably less important: in my copious spare time I plan to start futzing around with some new plugins.

Oops

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007

A reader (I say that like I have so many) just informed me that comments weren’t working here in PomeRantz. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the “Allow people to post comments on the article” option was unchecked. I have no idea how that happened; I don’t remember doing it, though I suspect I must have. I took a break from blogging (for no reason other than I didn’t feel like doing it) from August to November of 2006. Looking back on old posts, my last post in August had comments enabled, and my first post in November had them disabled. I must have unchecked that box in there somewhere, for reasons that now elude me. So I’ve had comments disabled for 8 months, & I didn’t notice. Oy. And here I just thought my vast readership had abandoned me. Clearly the lesson to be learned here is that I need to keep closer tabs on my blog. Maybe my first step should be to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.

Oh, BTW: comments are re-enabled now.

Update: A happy side effect of my having disabled comments for so long is that it really cut down on comment spam. And now, more than 2 weeks after I enabled comments, my comment spam is still almost nonexistent. And I’m not using authimage or Akismet on this blog (yes, the version of WP I’m using is too old for Akismet).

Survey on Blogger Perception on Digital Preservation

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

Songphan requests that I post this:

Do you blog? If yes, then please consider participating in an online survey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. The study, Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation, is being conducted under the guidance of The Real Paul Jones. The study team is interested in hearing from all bloggers on their perceptions on digital preservation in relation to their own blogging activities, as well as the blogosphere in general. To hear more about this survey, please visit the study’s fact sheet at http://www.ils.unc.edu/~hcarolyn/blogsurvey/. From there, you can link out to the web-based survey. The survey will be available from April 25 through May 23, 2007. We believe blogs are valuable records of the human experience. Help to contribute to continued access to these important records by participating in our study. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Carolyn Hank, the study Principle Investigator, at hcarolyn@email.unc.edu. Thanks!

This conversation was and still is being blogged

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

Earlier today I was on the panel of: THIS CONVERSATION IS BEING BLOGGED: Our lives, online, all the time, in the trend towards lifelogging

And I’m feeling a bit of peer pressure here: Paul and Terrell both wrote about their topics ahead of time, and I didn’t. So I’ll write about it now. Also I’m amused by the recursiveness of blogging about this panel, and the fact that it was videorecorded. I’ll add a link to the video when it’s put online, thus completing the loop.

I won’t bother writing about what I said on the panel, since you can watch the video to find that out. But will you? I wouldn’t; there’s almost nothing more boring than watching a video of a panel or a speaker, even a good one. Something is lost in the medium switch, I think, though I can’t say precisely what it is. These sorts of events are truly experience goods; you really just need to be there. All of which makes one of my points for me. Deborah mentioned not being able to imagine wanting to ever relive an entire year of her life that was captured on some media, but that she could imagine reliving a few choice moments. Which I absolutely agree with. Are you really that interesting? Why would anyone want to relive big chunks of their life, in realtime? Most or at least a lot of what all of us do all day is boring: checking our email, walking to our cars, etc. Of course a panel like this is one of the few choice moments (or at least we panelists hope so). But even that loses something in the translation. I submit that this is why editing was invented: to convert raw footage into something worth watching. I commented on the panel that blogging is inherently exhibitionistic. Umberto Eco points out that pornography is one of the few genres where action is presented in real time. I most definitely do not want to get into a discussion of the merits, or lack thereof, of pornography. But really, why would anyone watch unedited footage of another person’s life? That seems to me about the most boring and gratuitous thing imaginable. Of course, I think I just said that pornography is boring and gratuitous… maybe I need to rethink my metaphors here. Anyway… Can anyone explain to me why anyone would watch justin.tv? Because I seriously don’t get it.