Laughing Meme

One of the unfrequently mentioned costs of privacy is that you give up the ability to set your own frame. Or put more plainly, one of the benefits of blogging is taking control of your own story. (assuming you can manage the fairly minor feat of establishing yourself as credible source about you)

We don’t normally think in terms of the cost of privacy (other then as the operational cost imposed by one’s threat model), but it came up today, and I was intrigued. (See also Documentation in the Age of Google)

Hosting a project with Sourceforge is great. They provide bandwidth, CVS with anonymous access (something I never set up on my own boxes), and above all, a certain credibility. But they don’t provide good traffic analysis. There was some recent discussion if people were actually finding Magpie searching for PHP RSS parsing, or if they were simple searching for a picture of a magpie.

So here is a bit of Javascript that will fetch a remote image from your Sourceforge project home page and tack the original referer url to the image.

<script language="javascript">
var img = "http://example.org/bigbrother.gif"
var ref = parent.document.referrer;
document.write("<img src=\""+img+"?"+escape(ref)+"\">");
</script>

I imagine this is what someone like SiteMeter does.

…real soon now! The first 2 artciles touch on same ideas we’re struggling with on online collaboration, and how to build a new credibility model. The last is nominally what I’m getting paid to do these days, and should probably know something about

• Smart Mobs

  Smart mobs use mobile media and computer networks to organize collective actions, from swarms of techo-savvy youth in urban Asia and Scandinavia to citizen revolts on the streets of Seattle, Manila, and Caracas.

• TOOL: The Open Opinion Layer – hopefully something more interesting then collaborative recomendations on how to consume.
• Non-Profits on E: How Non-Profit Organisations are Using the Internet for Communication, Fundraising, and Community Building – Ruckus was supposed to be about this, didn’t do a very good job of answering the questions raised.

Rabble recently said in Indymedia, Credibility, & Covering Palestine:

The NY Times is the bastion of credibility, their stories always reinforce a hegemonic perspective despite adherence to the ‘facts.’ Now many in alternative journalism want to out do the NY times, using the same objectivity but just replacing it with another paradigm for viewing the world.

I don’t think this will work for two reasons. First off they have almost all the money. Secondly we aren’t advocating the kind of world that will fit neatly in to one modernist perspective. Unlike the Marxist-Leninist of old who had THE answer, today we have many answers and even more questions. For a credible media to be created in this new networked, postmodern if you like, world we need to fully reconstruct what we mean by credibility.

MediaGeek is also talking about these ideas, responding to this “surprisingly fair and mostly accurate” article by the Washington Post.

WP:

in the end, crafting content requires selection, shortening, simplification and even a mildly authoritarian editorial brain making decisions

Mainstream news organizations, like the Washington Post, are very concerned with creating an air of authority and maintaining the illusion that their reporting is utterly consistent, complete, fair and authoritative… regardless of how well a story is researched, reported and written, it cannot be singularly authoritative — any such appearance is the just the effect of style that we have been trained to read as “objective” or “true.”

Yeah. Thats what I’ve been trying to say!