(source page)

What you see is the result of a large-scale scan of web sites favorites icons (“favicons”) using the Nmap security scanner and the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE).

The sites scanned were the one million domain names with the greatest “reach” according to Alexa on January 19, 2010, plus the one million names created by prepending “www.” to the former.

For each of these, an NSE script downloaded the favicon, calculated its MD5 hash, then summed the reach of the sites under each hash. 328,427 unique icons were retrieved; of those, 288,945 were loadable by PerlMagick and the remaining 39,482 were considered non–image files.

The reach was not know exactly for every site. On January 27, 2010, the reach was looked up for a sample of 178 sites, and the reach of the remaining sites was calculated by the formula reach = 66.1682 × rank0.9337. The formula comes from a linear regression of log(reach) versus log(rank) of the sampled sites. This chart shows the closeness of the fit between the estimate and sample: (see chart).

The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons, those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach, are scaled to 8 × 8 pixels at 600 pixels per inch, or about 0.34 mm on a side. The larger icons are scaled proportionally, their size however being constrained to be a multiple of 8 pixels. The largest icon is 5,968 × 5,968 pixels, and the whole diagram is 18,720 × 18,720.

Details of the scan: The script first retrieved the root document and searched for an element of the form

. If such an element was present, the favicon was retrieved from the given URL. If the element did not exist, or if the URL could not be retrieved, the favicon was looked for at /favicon.ico. Up to five redirects were followed for every document retireved. An icon was considered to belong to a domain name even when redirects led away from that domain name, or the icon was on a different domain. After redirects, only response with an HTTP status code of 200 were counted. When multiple icons were present in a file, the image with the greatest size and color depth is shown.

Viewer beware: The chart should not be taken as authoritative of the popularity of the sites presented, because of the inaccuracy of large, over-Internet scans. Sites were only counted if their favicon could be downloaded. Because of the unpredictable network effects, some sites, such as Bing, Baidu, and Amazon, are shown smaller than they should be.

My web home, squareONE, was fetched to reveal the following assessment:

http://www.squareone-learning.com 10000 bytes in 0.00 seconds.

http://www.squareone-learning.com/favicon.ico 2550 bytes in 0.00 seconds.

Online lookup: The icon is at (16.960, 16.200) and is 1056 × 1056 pixels.

Putting it in the top 1 million web sites. Yowza!!!

recently i lamented on the list that the majority of us in the land of oz were not likely to put up much complaint other than complaint itself when government and/or big business threaten to take over our lives or encroach on civil liberties, our so-called ‘rights’ to privacy and so on. i mean in the light of “the threat of terrorism” (now that “communism” does not hold us all in its thrall of scaredydom), the previous govt here put sniffer dogs on the streets. they also prevented people from publicly expressing their disapproval of bush coming to town, spending many of our tax dollars on enormous surveillance cameras in downtown sydney – for our own protection of course. meanwhile, people line up at hospitals to be seen, and the river systems on which we all depend for something we can’t do without are being sucked dry… for me, govt promises of “we will cut taxes” has a hollow ring to it, when they spend the taxes i would willingly give, on items that do not benefit anyone except those who have enough income to avoid paying what they should in the first place… and i say the ability to control and survey the media, and other means of public and private communication does not benefit the public in any way.
to me, there will always be criminals – but it depends on who makes the laws as to who or what acts are deemed as ‘criminal’. i would rather put up with petty criminals and burglars (which btw i may not need to put up with if 1) smack was supplied by govt, 2) poor or unemployed people were given a place to live and a living income, and 3) advertisers were not paid as much by rich companies to entice us to desire and think we need more crap in order to make us feel better about ourselves) than the big corporate criminals and government criminals who sometimes indirectly are allowed to get away with murder, or at least a whole pile of booty earned off the back of their poor gullible workers who dutifully complain when their company cannot employ them anymore since they cannot make enough profit off them to enable their profligate and eminently enviable lifestyles to continue in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed.

but then those with the wherewithal – either in brains, aesthetic skills, or financial backing – are occasionally called upon to show their cards. and right on cue, after me saying we are not about to do anything down here.. well one of us has flown the coop to do his crowing, over to europe and various bunkers (such as iceland) i don’t doubt… julian assange thinks it about time to release a whole pile of documents to the media. just to see what they will make of it. naturally, he didn’t give them to the SMH (sydney morning herald), but the SMH had to get in on some of the act, and have posted a mashed-up video with some editorial comment by the ed. see this video article from today’s SMH for example for the local take on the matter.

but probably better to check out the guardian UK who have a video of assange defending his decision to release the documents.

here is thewikileaks link posted previously on netdynam – but i’m guessing maybe you won’t be able to get a service there for a while…

and now, today, dick smith, notable self-proclained capitalist, entrepreneur and start-up businessman responsible for dick smith electronics stores nationwide…. uses his spare cash for amusing (to me) advertisements in the local murdoch press…

it’s on another matter, content-wise, but it is another approach to the “what’s to be done” lament i often intone…

To this I add a first level of links that allow further exploration of what this technology is about and what it is linked to:

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/24645/page1/

So we have a new way to manipulate data that allows a different insight to emerge from massive amounts of information.

The television series CSI and its geographical offshoots have always pushed technological advances with their fancy computer graphics, image enhancing and hand or voice controlled computer displays. Now we see the next steps. One truism that has prevailed from the early days of computer use is that the greater the capacity of the system the larger and more sophisticated projects than can then be undertaken. There’s a problem in the programming industry with its much larger programs and applications where the coder/developer can no longer hold the whole picture in their mind. These two tools alone have implications for that entire paradigm.

The charge into Cyberspace has been blunted by technology that is not up to the word and idea visions of William Gibson et al nor the movie maker’s spin ala the Matrix.

Technological advancements are accelerating and convergence is a growing force. My smartphone is the end result of this convergence. The former incarnation required a large physical box connected to a wire based network, a camera, a video camera, a library, a typewriter, an entire postal system, a boombox, a tape recorder, a bookstore, a video store plus many, many more separate systems and infrastructures.

A lazy Sunday that has brought some new insights to my daily ruminations. To sum up I wish to drag you a bit sideways into my mind space and I offer as a final tidbit this piece:

http://spiffy.ci.uiuc.edu/~kline/Stuff/internet-rant.html/

the discussion in the article is based on the fact that we have the ability now to keep permanent records of everything everyone has ever posted or written on the internet. the article also deals with the potential of web3.0 to search and find almost anything anyone might wish to track…using new technologies such as face recognition for example….

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html

Live streaming video by Ustream

Greetings from ISFC 37!

I’m writing to let you know that on Thursday afternoon 22nd July, 1.30 – 2.55, Vancouver time, the discussion in the interactive session at the Congress will be audiostreamed through the web. The session will involve the plenary speakers (except for Terrence Deacon, who has to return to Berkeley early after giving a brilliant plenary this morning).

The link to access the streaming is:

http://dlc5.lled.educ.ubc.ca/ISFC_interactive_session/

We have also arranged 5 digital, multilingual chat rooms, in which people at the congress will comment on the interaction for listeners in Brazil (Português), India (English), India (Hindi) and China (Chinese). People participating in the chat rooms will also be able to feed questions into the UBC-based interaction.

and then this one is packed with so much information, you need to have your finger ready on the *pause* button to take it all in adequately.

the thing is, we made the trip over here to adelaide (again) from sydney last week. if you go the shortest route, the drive itself, i.e. actual drive-time, takes 18 hours. usually we drive about 6 hours every day, stopping for lunch and a wander in the middle. and, since we do not like driving at night (nothing to see), we usually take about 3 days and two nights to get here. but, also it is now winter and the days are shorter, and as well we decided to go via broken hill and check out various backwaters along the way, and seeing as this entailed using some unsealed roads and also stopping regularly to take photographs, this time the trip took us about 5 days… lessee, we left on the saturday, and arrived in adelaide on the following friday… OK, 6 days.

so far i have uploaded some of the recent shots to my flickr ‘photostream’, but i have not really had enough time to edit properly, hence it is a little untidy. i tend to take a few shots of the same objects at different angles and distances… oh yeah, now, this has been occasioned as well, by my trialing of the lastest acquisition, a fixed focal length 50mm lens. it takes me back to college days and the 35mm pentax, sigh. now i have a digital SLR camera though, and use a canon EOS body. yes, but normally these days, with the lens that comes with the camera, i can stay in virtually the same place and merely adjust the focal length to get diffferent framing options. now, i have to walk about the place. the benefit is apparently cleaner crisper shots, so i had to test this out. also, there are some shots i’ve uploaded to flickr that are pretty similar in content but i’ve wanted to test-change the aperture. so later on i will delete some of the repetitious ones.

earlier i wrote a very nice succinct blather about what i have done in the interstices of ‘not posting here’, and this post was meant to be a pointer to the fact that i have not been entirely idle. at the same time, into this post, i also wanted to insert a advertorial shot, a teaser, but this ole theme did not like that at all, and not knowing that i would be treated to a blank screen upon attempting to insert, i blithely tried to do the inserting after an easy upload as usual… after which, the blank screen and no recourse assailed me. my photo? or wordpress 3 and this theme combined? nobody knows.

meanwhile, perhaps a link to the photo in the medai gallery will sufiice… also i’d better “save draft” first….

here is the URL from our media library anyway….

Resource map by Sallie Goetsch (src), via WordPress Asylum.

Absolutely painless upgrade to WP3 here on ND2.0. The only chip in the pile was learning that our venerable–by our standards–theme is not compliant with some of WP3′s added functionalities. The only ones I’ve identified are the extra widget areas, and, the menu builder.

WP3′s new features bring some power user capabilities to the masses. Although, in noting this greater power, it is only afforded to those who can grok the basics of how WordPress works under the hood. For example, custom post types provides a way of breaking out content from the either/or of Post/Page, but, it’s most beneficial application involves situating those custom “types” within dedicated Divisions within a layout, using their loop.

Closer to our wheelhouse here is the revamped taxonomy function, that could be deployed to classify tagged texts. WP3 also integrates WordPress Multi-User; although ND2, multi-user as it is, is also minimalist in approach.

The WordPress 3.0 feature set was finalized a long time ago. The one addition I would eventually like to see is easy play list podcasting. The kludgy workarounds which use plug-ins are hit-or-miss–mostly miss.

Feature guide via Sixrevisions

Smashing Magazine’s Highlights of WP3

Taxonomies explained at 1stwebdesigner.

actually i went on a search for mike’s posting of the role and function matrix.

because one of the perspectives for entering the realm of affordances for users, is to look at what type of user (aka wordpress ‘role’) allows and constrains what blog activities, or, in other words, what acts are afforded these users.

it seems mike was a little ahead of us. no matter. i’m still catching up.

anyway, i think that the following post and its comments are certainly grist for this particular mill, and quite eminently quotable in parts. note mike’s disappointment with some of the affordances of the blue…thing…
see
the collaborative environment

having done so, i now face the prospect of at least reviewing the copious literature on the topic and related areas, see for example (one of the speakers) john bateman’s extensive online bibliography, especially the link to the multimodal and computer-related list



so if any one of you is interested in contributing to the project, i’d be happy to collect comments, pointers, and so on to add to the substance of the presentation – and possibly, if i can, publish a paper on the topic. the presentation (if the abstract is accepted that is) will only be able to set out the main areas of interest of some sort of wobbly framework i have in mind, but if there is continuing interest, then a written paper in acknowledged collaboration with you, my colleagues here, might also be possible. with me, though, once the work is done, it is done. archived, and not thrown away, but enhanced and tarted up is sometimes not on the cards. however, in this case, i will need to do the work should the abstract be accepted and given continuing motivation, publishing is also a good *idea*.

here is the abstract for comments anyway:

Mediated personae: Towards a description of blog affordances.

The interweb is now populated by an intense variety of blogs allowing users an interactive facade which in the first instance mediates their communication with others and presents a persona to the wired world. The blog interface allows and constrains the type of interactive events afforded to users, and, depending on what role function each person is accorded, users may adjust the way the blog interface and their projected persona appears to the public.

In this paper I present the basis of a framework for the comparison and description of blog interfaces, and propose a means of categorising these communicative interfaces according to a number of different dimensions. For the purposes of the investigation on which the framework is based, these dimensions mainly refer to the textual and interpersonal/relational functions blogs may afford. The nature of the affordances which blogs provide is seen as a product of ways in which blog structure and management options allow or effect certain interactions for users, but moreover they can be used to channel and project certain identities for their administrators. In this sense blog structure is conceived as a matter of expression, with content the allowed or potential events that users may enact or interpret given the constraints of the medium.

The resultant set of dimensions is conceived of as a potential means for both analysing individual blogs, and providing cross-comparative material for classifying sets of blogs by function. The framework will be illustrated here by reference to a number of themes available in the WordPress blogging interface, analysing the ways in which each of their designs affords user activity.

while P is engaged in more practical and everyday pursuits involved in delivering lectures, attending to university admin matters, fielding student enquiries, dealing with blackboard and its drawbacks, etc, i and the other three indulge in some entertaining back& forth about aspects of the conception of the lexico-grammatical system as we see it.

because we are indulging, and because we know each other to be iconoclasts in some way, we have not made the blog public, i.e. we have not annouced its presence to other systemicists. thus, for example, there are only 2 recognised members who are also authors, plus 2 admins (me and P). there are no subscribers as yet, and comments are restricted to those who are registered and logged in…

the other day, however, someone who is not a user managed to post a comment which was obviously a bit of a joke. calling themselves ‘webmaster’, with a link that lead to nowhere, the comment read something like: “please send me a list of contacts as i have a question for you”. now, with no email address, nor a link leading anywhere, there was obviously no possibility of sending this person anything anyway…

i wondered how this person could have subverted the settings so that s/he could make a comment and have it approved (as it was in the comment log) without being a subscriber or without it needing to be approved by moderation. and without leaving an address – actually there was an email address under the wording, but the address seemed invalid anyway.

i checked out the IP address, even though these days one can easily make out one is neither here nor there. but for interest, and i spose, almost unsurprisingly, it was a russian server:

http://www.ip-whois-lookup.com/lookup.php?ip=188.168.84.224

anyone got any ideas on how this was done?

there is a hole in wordpress somewhere i guess, and some people know how to access it.

Screen capture of part of the interface. Keyword search=privacy. Lexicalist

ABOUT. Lexicalist reads through millions of words of chatter on the internet to analyze how certain demographics talk and what kinds of things they talk about. We currently break this information down into three kinds of demographics: age, gender, and geography.

METHODOLOGY. Lexicalist works by analyzing rich sources of information online, including blog posts, news sources, and social networking sites like Twitter. Each bit of information is subjected to rigorous natural language processing, which includes a likelihood distribution of being authored over all geographic, age and gender demographics.

All of the statistical results displayed here are then normalized against the volume of information coming from each demographic to see what words are most commonly associated with certain populations. The result is a descriptive snapshot of language as it’s used today.

src

Lexicalist is worth investigating. In fact, it potentially is a time sink/waster for the lexically minded. I wish I knew how a descriptive snapshot relates to language usage. This seems to me to be more a question of the relations between a particular form for methodical description and some particular frame for usage. Presumably there is a relation born by natural language processing.

Okay, over at Wikipedia, the treatment of NLP includes:

Tasks and limitations

In theory, natural-language processing is a very attractive method of human-computer interaction. Early systems, such as SHRDLU, working in restricted “blocks worlds” with restricted vocabularies, worked extremely well, leading researchers to excessive optimism, which was soon lost when the systems were extended to more realistic situations with real-world ambiguity and complexity.

Natural-language understanding is sometimes referred to as an AI-complete problem, because natural-language recognition seems to require extensive knowledge about the outside world and the ability to manipulate it. The definition of “understanding” is one of the major problems in natural-language processing. src

‘Context is to understanding, . . ‘

(I added Lexicalist to our links.)

(Pwn (below: Various pronunciations) is a leetspeak slang term derived from the verb “own”, as meaning to appropriate or to conquer to gain ownership. The term implies domination or humiliation of a rival, used primarily in the Internet-based video game culture to taunt an opponent who has just been soundly defeated (e.g., “You just got pwned!”). It was popular among Counter-Strike gamers before spreading through the more general Internet world. The past tense and past participle, pwned, may also be spelled pwnd, pwn’d, pwn3d, pwnt, poned, pawned, or powned. Source: Wikipedia )

Enterprising parodists on May 19 created a Twitter account and feed to mock BP, BPGlobalPR.

Chris Matyszczyk reports (5/26) from CNET,

CNN did contact BP and asked the company whether it might feel its image was being polluted by this rogue global PR force. BP reportedly said it had seen it, but was sure that people would realize it’s not really the company’s work.

Perhaps this underestimates people’s notions of what is and isn’t possible in today’s often ugly, cynical world.

Still, I know there will be sticklers among you who will attempt to invoke Twitter’s fake pages policy. It reads that impersonators “should not be the exact name of the subject of the parody, commentary, or fandom; to make it clearer, you should distinguish the account with a qualifier such as ‘not,’ ‘fake’ or ‘fan.’”

It’s unlikely Twitter will get too picky about this, given that it gets some nice PR (happy to help, as always, chaps) out of it all, and given that BP seems unlikely to complain. BP has made its first wise PR move in allowing this site to gush black humor while the nation’s beaches are threatened by a far more painful darkness.

90,000+ followers, and counting.

Sometime in the next few days, BPGlobalPR’s following will surpass in number BP’s number of employees worldwide.

BP America’s Twitter following? 8,000 or so.

Although the official feed doesn’t offer any black humor, it’s funny in a different way.

click to enlarge

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

This video from Kate Ray quickly made the rounds.

What a long way the net has come. I suppose it necessary but gratuitous to add: ‘for better and for worse.’

There’s a moment in this interesting mash-up where the speaker implies the following: could we re-render human brain to think more like a machine? This follows from the difficulty of making a machine think like a human.

I had to look up the use of the term ontologies because I know little about information science, and, the its use in the video seemed to depart from the philosophical term. Here’s the treatment about ontologies at wikipedia.

There is nothing about the problems faced by the varieties of user. I’m a user and I know of the problems I encounter in searching for information, both on the internet, in libraries, and, on my own computer, in my own archive of documents.

I’ll mention three challenges. I’ll frame this by stating that I wish my computer-based archives and library archives were indexed by google.

(1) usually, (my) searches for information on google are satisfied. However, because the results are matched with the real-time indexing my cognition provides for, the end of a search on a given topic–usually in the social sciences–is arbitrarily terminated. In other words, I have conclusive idea that a given result is the optimum result. I’d also characterize my search methods using partly ad hoc heuristics.

(2) searches in my computer-based archive are brute force and leverage Spotlite’s ability to look into the text of every file, BUT, involve scanning through very long result lists, most of which are not positive. As a user, the labor intensive task of organizing files on my end is, ‘too much.’ And, fit to this is the ease with which information can be archived versus the labor involved in organizing it. Somewhat: the intuitive’s curse…

(3) The most difficult search of the web and internet resources are those that are very particular and very local. A good example would be somebody’s address. Searches oriented to topics do not fall into this category.

One other note–I would guess my own search capability falls into the highly capable slice of any Bell Curve. This guess is based in my understanding of how to use the specific editing features of google search. And, it’s based on observing how most other people use search. One of the challenges for the semantic web, given,

The Semantic Web is an evolving development of the World Wide Web in which the meaning (semantics) of information on the web is defined, making it possible for machines to process it.

is any useful, more powerful interface and facilitation, has to meet the different modes of differentiated users.

For example, I wouldn’t be skeptical of a machine’s ability to qualify results so that I could be confident I’ve reached the optimum set of results, but I’d like to know beforehand why I needn’t be skeptical. And, this would have to be presented to me at my level.

Following from my previous post about methods for learning more about people encountered on the internet, The New York Times today features an article The Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Off-line (Laura M. Holson; NYT 5-8:2010).

While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry.

They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves. In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves. “Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you,” said Mary Madden, a senior research specialist who oversaw the study by Pew, which examines online behavior. “Now you are responsible for everything.”

One interesting question raised by the article–but not addressed–concerns how investigations into online ‘reputation,’ are framed by investigators.

In this article from Septmeber 2009, How HR Professionals Analyze Your Facebook Profile, author Damian Davila Rojas mentions a key finding from a Harris Interactive poll of HR professionals,

The findings were more likely to get candidates rejected than hired: 35% of HR professionals said social networking content had caused them to eliminate a candidate, while only 18% reported deciding to employ someone based on a profile.

There’s a graphic presented to represent the negative reasons for rejecting a job candidate based in their online data.

Of more interest to me is the positive graphic because it begs the question of how positive data is framed.

Here are the top three categories:

50% Got a good feel for the candidate’s personality, could see a good fit within the company culture

39% Job candidate’s background information supported their professional qualifications for the job

39% Job candidate’s site conveyed a professional image

Item #2 is the only element subject to neutral verification. Whereas item #1 begs the question about framing and instrumental approach, and, item #3 does the same while pointing in the direction of normative practices. Also, item #3, with respect to Facebook, can only mean a professional image within the limitations set by Facebook. This includes all the data from friends which flows into the person’s Facebook home page.

Hiring practices vary greatly. They can be very subjective and are subject to hidden cognitive biases. For example, the hunch is more a problem to be eliminated than a valuable instinct in this area.

Social media presents data about a person’s social network. This is not off limits to the hiring professional. Yet, this realm of data raises interesting questions.

When I meet a new participant, I immediately become interested in who they are; what they do; what are their interests; what are their publications; where are their internet tracks; what are their affiliations.

Often the forensics involved in uncovering this data is easy to accomplish. Given an email or wide use of a particular handle, a real name falls into place, and the traces and locations are quickly unfolded.

On the other hand, when neither email or handle lead to a real name, then the forensics often become formidable. There are give-aways, because the next step is use distinctive phrases and the brute text search capability of google.

This always works when the internet tracks are text-based and prolix. This doesn’t work when people don’t leave “text” tracks.

***

I prefer people do not compartmentalize their various aspects, when they’re willing to speak of the data but not say where it resides. Especially this is so when I find it “hidden” in plain sight.

This subject has come up at various times on the ND email list, in the back-channel, and even about this blog. This concern for how their own data is to be distributed, for me, is always in the context of my experience with rare people who are masters of concealment and most people who don’t understand what this mastery actually entails.

Google Inc., owner of the most-used Internet search engine, was sued over allegations its Buzz social-networking service violated the privacy rights of users of the company’s Gmail service.

Buzz, introduced by Mountain View, California-based Google in February, automatically displayed to other users the customer’s contacts pulled from Google Gmail accounts. Google has said it modified the e-mail service after customers complained.

The complaint, filed April 5 in federal court in San Jose, California, follows a letter sent to federal antitrust authorities last month by 10 members of Congress. The lawmakers urged an investigation into whether Buzz compromised users’ privacy.

“Google has publicly admitted that its Buzz program presents privacy concerns, and Google has made several waves of modifications to the program,” according to the lawsuit. The changes “do not go far enough,” and the error “already caused damage because the Buzz program disclosed private user information the moment Google launched the service.” Google Sued Over Claims Buzz Violated Privacy Rights

2. Their is NO VALUE with Google Buzz as I mentioned earlier. Who wants something that has already been done before? As I said, it’s FriendFeed, but worse to every degree! I feel when using the platform that it offers a very messy experience. I don’t enjoy it. There’s so much going on that I don’t want to even bother checking it. Social Tech Zone: Google Buzz At This Point Is Google Bust

It is not simple to both protect privacy and promote the development of a healthy network. Facebook was the first to prove that privacy controls can foster the growth of social networks, but as the Beacon episode and Facebook’s recent privacy changes both demonstrated, even the most experienced social media companies can go sideways when it comes to privacy. When rolling out any kind of new social media platform or application, companies should always engage in extensive, privacy-centered user testing before releasing any social networking products to the public. Leslie Harris-Buzz or Bust?

Today, QC-L, my blog, lost its fold.

Some of you know how the blog got its fold. It had to do with my getting kicked out of Brainstorms. I divided my blog in two and sent half of it to the boards at Ladies of the Heart and kept half for myself. Over a time, I just kept the fold. Well, today the fold is gone.

This time nobody kicked me out. Blogger will no longer publish via FTP come May 1, and I don’t want to switch to Blogspot. I do not have the kind of a subdomain to which Blogger can publish. This is what happens when you depend on free services. So it goes.

I rent space so it is back to having an easily updateable web site rather than a blog. I used to calll this a pseudoblog. In the age of flash drives and easy FTP, this is not as technologically backward as it seems. I’ve all ready added my first post. I’ll blog more, and more often, now that I have plentyof space. I even have a fiction section and yes, the avatarot both from Second Life and the open web will get their say.

QC-L is dead, but QC-L lives….FOREVER!

Hi Nick, Due to our licensing agreement with the ABC, all HUNGRY BEAST video content on the website is Geo-Blocked. This means videos can only be viewed within Australia. Cheers, HB