So, a few months back, i learned that Righteous Babe was using my lyrics site to print lyrics for deaf patrons of Ani concerts. Today, a fan pointed me to this article in The Mercury News. Apparently, RBR is using lyrics sites to generate liner notes for Ani’s albums. Oh dear me.

They do note that there are tons of errors in whatever fan site they are using. I have to say that if it’s mine, i certainly know it. I also know that way too many other fan sites copy my lyrics for their sites, replicating the errors.

So, if you’re from RBR and you’re reading this, would you mind sending me the fixes that you do for liner notes? I’d love to fix up my version… it’s only screwy because it’s the version that i got from transcriptions of Ani’s recordings.

On Many-to-Many, i was surprised to find an article discussing Eric Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman’s Familiar Stranger work in relation to my own contemplations. Anyone who knows me knows that i adore Milgram’s work and have always had a deep appreciation for his four page piece on The Familiar Stranger. I think that the familiar stranger is such a strong concept that is rarely discussed, and yet so relevant.

That said, i should tease out my use of Milgram’s ideas from what Intel is doing. Intel is truly looking at the physical space, how we relate to familiar strangers offline. A large part of what i’m curious about is how we use the digital space as a secondary context for relating to strangers. Do we become more curious to know who they are when we see them online and recognize them as an offline familiar stranger? What role do these people play in our social network? How do we negotiate their physical presence once we have observed them online?

That said, if you’re a researcher, you must read Milgram’s work on The Familiar Stranger (it’s all of four pages, one of which is a large picture).

Blogrolls are a very interesting and key part of blogs. They create the connections between people, allow for an articulated presentation of one’s social networks. They allow for people to navigate from blog to blog to find one another. They allow other sites that track the “value” of a given blog to see who connects to who. Really, they are great for anyone interested in fashion and blogs.

But they also cause other problems. First, i had a hard time creating a blogroll. I read a lot of blogs, many of which are private or Live Journals, Diary Lands or otherwise. I also read a lot of professional blogs or the personal blogs of my professional connections. My readership is quite odd – friends, colleagues, Ani DiFranco fans, people that i don’t even know.

When i was creating my blogroll, i didn’t want to list my friends’ blogs out of respect – they aren’t asking the world to read them. Those who did participate in listing culture were public, professional. Thus, my blogroll quickly became odd – it was a collection of the professional blogs that i read and those that i felt as though i should be reading more often. Plus, there were people who asked to be on my blogroll and then there were those who were upset because they weren’t listed (even though i read their blog daily). It became weird, outdated and nowhere near representative of me.

Seeing as this is the most personal of my public blogs, i decided that there is no need to list off some strange aspect of my identity in order to feel socially appropriate. I appreciate my readers; i really do. But i’ll also be honest that i’ve been quite weirded out by how many more people read this than i imagined would. But it is public, and i have met some amazing new folks through the blog world. So very strange….