Comments on Small Pieces, Big Thoughts

christina — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:32 GMT

sadly it’s true: spammers are trolling blogs and MT is particularly susceptible. I’ve just deleted the one above. We’ll be looking into solutions, for now we use MT-blacklist.
http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/
But even then it’s hard to keep up—i worry about the future of blog-comments.

frank_piper — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:32 GMT

Shame on you Mr. Spammer. And just before Christmas… this wasn’t very nice from you. Here at B[and]A the whole site and the people are both so cool… I never understood what’s the use of abusing others with such junk.

:-(...

Merry Christmas to the fellow readers anyway!

Andrei Herasimchuk — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:32 GMT

Please say it isn’t true… that spammers are now trolling blogs and auto-adding comments and posting to blogs…

The end of the world is nigh.

Andrew Hinton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:32 GMT

Sorry for the belated response… my computer has been wandering the land of the dead for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve resuscitated it just long enough to squeeze a few breaths out of its zombielike carcass.

Anyway, I’m not sure if TB-L said that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I imagine it was one of his presuppositions upon hacking together the www. Being able to link to other people’s research & publication without having to go through a stifling hierarchy was definitely on his mind.

I think Weinberger takes this a little further, connecting it to bigger existential questions of what it means to be human and a social creature. But the sentiments on permission are very similar.

Thanks for the post!

John Paul Fullerton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:32 GMT

Andrew, thank you for the excellent review.

Commenting about the theme of permission—I thought Tim Berners-Lee said that permission-free participation in the WWW simplified its building.

Andrew Hinton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:32 GMT

Thanks. And sorry for taking forever to comment back!
It is indeed a terrific book. And deceptively friendly, because its ideas are extremely challenging.

As a reminder, I wanted to mention again that a bunch of stuff I was thinking about on this book didn’t make it into the review, but I posted it at my own blog here:http://www.memekitchen.com/mtarchive/000016.html.

I think, excepting my message here, that this review has generated a record low of comments on any article at Boxes and Arrows. Do I get a prize?

mantruc — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:32 GMT

Thanks Andrew for the review. I’m running to buy the book.

I’ve always been fascinated by this same subject (did my thesis studying how the Internet changed the lives of their users), and I agree on most of the ideas you’ve described: I really belive this web will help us change the way we relate, and I’m also a strong beliver thet the real power ot this web is communicating people.