Last December, Six Apart founder Mena Trott gave an infamous speech about online civility where she called out one of her critics in the event's IRC backchannel, an audience member using the pseudonym dotBen: Who is dotBen? All day yesterday you've been an asshole to the people who've been in this town and I want to know why don't you, why, what the fuck? DotBen turned out to be Ben Metcalfe, at the time a technologist at the BBC, who stood up and said that candor is more important than civility. Yesterday on ... read more

After I banned several members of the Drudge Retort earlier this month, they launched their own blog, PoliticalWarZone, with an announcement that they were being repressed: This Blog was started by five guys (RZ, JA, DKIA, STP & H) who simply got tired of all the BS of the supposed wonderland of Open Expression on the 'Net. The Leftists claim they adore & stand for Free Speech & then use it to hammer anyone who doesn't agree with them right before they take it away. They'd rather tell you how immoral you are ... read more

Cyndi Greening blogs about a programming job I did for her this month -- moving her filmmaking weblog from Radio UserLand to Movable Type: I have been complaining, whining and kvetching for over two years about how much I dislike using Radio UserLand as a blogging tool. When I started blogging in 2003, Radio was inexpensive and seemed easy to use. It had an automatic picture uploading tool. It had RSS features I liked. But then ... I started traveling more and wanted to blog from film festivals like Sundance ... read more

I'm exporting a Radio UserLand weblog to Movable Type for a client, turning Radio's XML archive of weblog entries into a Movable Type import file. I wrote a Java application that employs the XOM XML library to read Radio's weblog data. Some numeric character entities in Radio's XML data threw me for a loop: â (’), À (¿), Ž (é), ‡ (á) and — (ó). They were transformed -- either by XOM or the Xerces XML parser that it uses -- into garbage ... read more

Craig Jensen's long-running BookNotes weblog has fallen on hard times since the move from Weblogs.Com to Buzzword.Com in 2004. His site lost its Google pagerank and he's had trouble rebuilding his audience. As the first step in retiring free Manila hosting on Buzzword.Com, I'm helping him transfer the weblog to Movable Type, because I have a five-user commercial license that's going to waste on Workbench and I'd like to encourage a fellow liberal and bibliophile to keep blogging. Jason Levine's Frontier script ... read more

In a keynote address at the Les Blogs conference yesterday, Six Apart founder Mena Trott cut short her call for blogger civility to put an asshole in his place: Who is dotBen? All day yesterday you've been an asshole to the people who've been in this town and I want to know why don't you, why, what the fuck? It's hard to fairly judge the situation without seeing the events that led up to it, but that's never stopped me before. Trott showed courage giving a speech at the Six Apart-organized conference in ... read more

Jim Minatel, an acquisitions editor at Wiley for one of my books, believes that Google's plan to turn web-crawling googlebots loose on print libraries is a clear violation of copyright. I'm not so sure. If I had a copy of the world's most useful computer book (let's call it Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition), and I made a practice of sending one page of the book to people who asked a question answered by that page, would I be violating Wiley's copyright? Selective quotation of a book is fair use. Is repeated ... read more