For the taking
censorship
everyone's a winner!
SXSW baybee
socnet repaired!
social network updates
July 2003
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August 2001
I fixed a bug in the crawler that was adding trailing slashes to incoming links. Originally I was doing this to avoid duplicate entries (e.g. http://blogdex.media.mit.edu and http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/), but I've avoided the problem just by using the first version that is encountered.
A while back I made a social network button, which is free for the taking:
I should have up a front page for the social network stuff soon, just doing the finishing touches now. There will be facilities to locate and link to any weblog in the index.
One of the topics that arose during our discussion in the P2P Journalism Panel at SXSW was related to an action I took recently. Last week I got an email from a blogdex user that pointed out a weblog currently being indexed in the system. The site, called The Vanguard News Network advocates a reactionary racist and masogonistic ideology, and nothing else. Based on the user's observation that this hateful speech was available in the blogdex interface, which infringed on her ability to use the system, I decided to remove the Vangard News Network from the list of weblogs. This decision was based largely on the fact that the VNN had been crawled since blogdex began, which implied that the author never asked to be part of the index, but was part of the initial list I used to jumpstart the system.
This raises an ethical consideration, made very clear by the audience of the panel. Obviously if I am going to censor websites from the blogdex index, I need to be explicit about the policy I use, in order to avoid hypocrisy. MIT has very strict rules about racism and general harassment, which I am sure cover the rights of distribution extended by blogdex and the Media Lab, unless some serious consideration is applied to the matter.
I'm looking for the opinion of the blogdex community: should a policy be instituted to censor racist or otherwise hateful speech, so far as it infringes upon the users, or should a disclaimer be made about the democratic nature of the content? I made a rash decision before putting it to the community, and I think the topic deserves some attention.
It appears someone else has decided to censor the VNN, since the website is down. You can still access it through the waybackmachine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020125091259/http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/
If you weren't watching the SXSW awards show, or missed Doc's real-time results, blogdex was not a winner. Or, perhaps better put, blogdex was not a weblog. As I mentioned on overstated, blogdex was well represented (and well documented) in Meg's panel. Thanks to all that came out. More on that to come.
So I'm off for my first SXSW extravaganza. If you didn't know, blogdex is up for an award in the weblog category, which I have been noted is sort of like comparing apples to an apple farmer. We'll see what happens, I'm crossing my fingers.
For anyone currently on their way, if you're interested in memes, social networks, or anything related to blogdex, look me up. I'm speaking on a Meg's panel, Peer-to-Peer Journalism: Weblogs and Collaborative Media, and I'll be around. Hope to see you there!
i debugged the social network today, and it should be sufficiently more recent than it was a couple of days ago. when i get back from SXSW, i'll be finishing up the explorer, and adding a path-generating interface (so we'll all finally know our degree of kottke, as well as those on the path to him).
if your social network appears to be wrong, please let me know and i'll fix it. the 'automatic social network links page finder' is occasionally wrong, which might leave you without any friends, or with the wrong ones.
i've started updating the social network, and for some reason the first update seems to be a bit slim (about half as many connections as previously). i'm looking into it, so don't worry if it looks like you're without friends for a couple of days. i'll fix things (even if it means giving you some friends)