Author Archives: zephoria

the public nature of blogging

I’ve been blogging in some form or another since 1997. Early renditions of my blog were explicitly personal and shut away via .htaccess files for my friends to read. This rendition has been explicitly public and thus the content has a very different tone. For the most part, i only publish that which i think would still be socially acceptable 20 years from now. I rarely publish my opinions or my thoughts beyond the highest meta data. There are many instances when information is presented in a way that those who know me know how to read between the lines and know what actually happened. But even that is rare.

I don’t even mention friends’ names, unless i’m discussing their professional work. One place where this bothers me is in my listing of links. The list of blogs i read is much longer than what is listed on the sidebar. That list is comprised of the blogs that i read which are really meant for the public at large, instead of just for friends. Although many of my friends’ LJs or diaries or blogs are very public, i just don’t feel right linking to them off of my site. It’s a weird negotiation of what’s appropriate.

Of course, what humors me the most is that those growing up blogging and journaling will take this all for granted and think it to be natural, rather than my panicked uncertainty of what’s appropriate. How strange.

FRinBL 7

Anne Galloway [5 May 2003] – After receiving multiple pings from friends, Anne joined Friendster. She reveals her distaste for the competition that people have going concerning how many Friendsters they have. She also references the distinction between a Friendster friend and a real friend. Comments reference the problem that not all of one’s friends are on the Internet.

“Isn’t the purpose of Friendster to turn acquaintances into closer friends?” – Abe

Adam Greenfield [7 May 2003] – Adam hesitatated and then waited for critical mass to join; his hesitation stems to its purpose as a dating site.

“I firmly believe that one of these sites, duly modified, or a scratch-built successor or successors, will catalyze huge changes in the way we socialize, connect, associate and construct our lives. Huge. This is completely uncontroversial to me. What remains to be seen is if anyone can pull it off with flair and an appropriate amount of personality.”

Adam Greenfield [9 May 2003] – Following up on his earlier article, Adam reflects on the implications of these sites in relation to the theory on the topic. He also discusses how and why we compartmentalize our social networks and why we don’t necessarily want all of our friends connected to all of our other friends.

“One thing I keep coming back to is the artificial and unintentionally dishonest partiality of these attempts to graft the possibilities of digital networks onto the patterns of human ones.”

“Something tells me these services won’t reach their maximum potential until they can incorporate our less salutary feelings about association: the latent but powerful distinctions we make, the dislikes and fears we, however subtly, import into our presentation of self. These are precisely the shadows we may have “gone online” to escape in the first place, but they are a part of what we’ve always meant by “social,” they serve a function evolved over a very long span of time, and I believe we ignore them at some disservice to our ambitions.”

V-Day deals with trans issues

When i first got involved in V-Day in 1998, i was determined to make it as trans-friendly as possible. Violence against women hits the trans community so very hard. So many murders, so much violence. Before i was even staff at V-Day, i helped make the organization trans-friendly by clarifying what we meant when we say that all actresses must be women. We explicitly tell organizers that V-Day does not define someone’s gender identity and that they must include anyone who identifies as and lives their lives as women.

Over the years, i’ve watched as more and more transwomen have participated in V-Days in a variety of ways. I watched women come into their own through V-Day, find that female bond and really understand what it means to be a woman. And this year, Eve is going to take the trans issue even more seriously. Not only is she going to write a trans monologue, but V-Day is working directly with Calpernia Addams to create a trans-focused V-Day. Yippee!

LJ & Friendster

Needless to say, there is a lot of commentary about Friendster on Live Journals. For the most part, it is banter about adding one another as friends. Of course, this brings into question whether or not LJ connections are friends. [In LJ, there are explicit references to “Friendster friends”]

Other interesting bits:

xaotica: used Friendster to connect with a desired journalist gig after a blind contact provided no leads. Also, “it’s a site a little similar to livejournal, minus the journal.”

truna: “friendster = high school yearbook and that’s why i love it ;-)”

yummystuff: chronicles her Friendster dates

brokenchinaldol: “you’ll notice every fifth testimonial seems to include something like ‘i don’t know why we don’t hang out more/i wish we saw each other more/we should keep in touch’. i vote someone makes realster.com, where people admit ‘i don’t call her anymore because all she does is complain about her boyfriend’, ‘we used to hang out in high school, until i develop a little thing called a conscience”, “maybe we should start having casual sex again’. this would certainly help singletons weed out the poor dating choices.”

Anyhow, there are pages and pages of Friendster quotes on LJ.

engaging compassionately

The conference is over. Organizers loved it. Participants loved it. Basically, it was an outright success.

While all of this was happening organizationally, the impact on me personally was far beyond what i ever envisioned. I didn’t attend very many talks (surprise) but i met people who totally shook up my world. In particular, i connected with two people who threw me for a loop. Through interacting, i found certain dormant characteristics of my personality reemerging, for better and worse. Their suppression had been a coping mechanism and to see them come out again was a total surprise. Here i was engaging with two people quite intensely and loving it, remembering how much i love connecting and how much i miss compassionate people who engage through their soul. Genuine positive energy.

I fell in love again this weekend. Not with someone else, but with myself… with people in general… and with life. Two good souls shook me up and made me see things from a different vantage point. I needed that rejuvination more than i even realized. Namaste.

Friendster Power Games

Jonathan Van Gieson has a list of Friendster Power Games that is just wonderful:

Top Friendster Power Games:

The Pre-Rejection
You just signed up for Friendster, and you notice that I’ve been using it for a month, and didn’t invite you. Perhaps we’re just not as close as you thought we were.

The Delayed Approval
You can see by my profile that I was active yesterday. You sent me a “new friend request” three days ago. I haven’t approved it. Maybe it’s because I’m waiting to see if anyone worthwhile signs up to be your friend before I commit to having you on my friends list.

The Unreciprocated Testimonial
You wrote me a very nice testimonial three weeks ago, yet your page still displays the pathetic notice: “No testimonials yet. You can add the first!” Gosh, it looks like you’re more interested in me than I am in you, doesn’t it?

The Mexican Standoff
You’re one of John Smith’s friends. I’m one of John Smith’s friends. We know each other, we can clearly see each other in the “John Smith’s Friends” page, and yet neither of us has attempted to add the other as a friend. It’s a battle for status, and the first person to send the new friend request will forever be the loser.

Google cache raises copyright concerns

Google cache raises copyright concerns is an interesting news.com critique of what happens when copyright lawyers realize what Google is doing. [When will we get that our copyright/IP laws need some major revising for the digital age??]

…

As seemingly benign and beneficial as it is, some Web site operators take issue with the feature and digitally prevent Google from recording their pages in full by adding special code to their sites. Among other arguments, they say that cached pages at Google have the potential to detour traffic from their own site, or, at worst, constitute trademark or copyright violations. In the case of an out-of-date news page in Google’s cache, a Web publisher could even face legal troubles because of false data remaining on the Web but corrected at its own site.

For this reason, search experts and copyright lawyers expect the issue to come up in a court of law, joining the leagues of copyright disputes that have surfaced because of technology innovation.

…

friendster in horoscopes

Cultural familiarity with Friendster has reached the point where horoscope writers are using it as commonly understood language. From the Seattle Weekly:

Libra (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)
Whether you sign on to Friendster or just lay it out on a piece of paper, I want you to list all the people you know this week, and the people they know (that you know about). It’s important that you see how you affect the world, without even trying-just by being. Everything you do is rippled out through your friends, to their friends, to their friends, and so on. Get my drift yet, Libra? I’m doing my best to counteract your absolutely false self-denigration. All I’m trying to say, really, is there’s no way you could not matter, no matter how hard you tried. You’ve already irrevocably changed our world-almost entirely for the better. We, the friends of your friends’ friends, thank you. Now thank yourself.