A Response To A Comment On Web 2.0

I've recently gotten a butt load of comments on my various rambling on Web 2.0, some positive, some negative, in the last few days. Here's one that was interesting enough to me to reproduce (with a couple of minor deletions) and address some of the commenter's points:

"1. I got your narcissist point, the framing of the self issue, and I will definitely use it (and the great "Pornography of the self") in my own papers, with due reference to you; as all academic types, I focused on errors. You made my day, though."

Thanks.

"2. Design. Simple is design. Your blog is canonical design at its purest. Tell those who disagree to choose the font and size and fancy features they love in the settings of their own browser. 'Empowering the user' they call it."

My basic approach has been that I want this site to resemble a page coming out of a typewriter back in the days of manuals and electrics and courier fonts. I plan on sticking with my basic design on this site, plus a few tweaks in the New Year. If anyone knows MT 3.2 semi-well and wants to help me tweak my individual entry archive code so that it more nearly resembles the main page, I'd be much obliged. But all the various trackbacks and internal references in that code intimidate me too much to go tinker without some advice. I'd also like to screw with the fonts setting in my CSS.

"3. Federated-Media is your David against Mountain View Goliath. Check it out."

I just did. Thanks. Looks interesting. The fact that Batelle is involved tells me a lot. In a good way. The loss of The Industry Standard was more significant than people realize.

"4. Copying "FOIA" fifty times. I've found it: Select All; Copy; Paste, paste, paste. . . Select all five copies and Copy those; Paste, paste. . . Done! I had to google that acronym! I'm really sorry bloggers don't have the needed journalists rights in certain semi-dictatorial states, while they need it."

Ha ha, good one. I actually meant 50 different FOIAs of course. The secret with public records requests is that you've got to know where the interesting documents to request are in the first place, then you have to know the law really well to keep the government from not complying. And, any citizen has the right to do public records requests, be they blogger, reporter or neighborhood crank.

"5. Congratulations for leaving your job for ethical issues: I haven't seen many journalists do that here --- and I'm sensitive to those issues."

Thanks. Principles are utterly useless if you don't act upon them.