An interview with a link spammer

From the Blog Herald a must read in The Register an Interview with a link spammer.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:39 PM | TrackBack

January Advisory Committee Report

I'm making up for being so late last month. *S* Here you go.

Posted by prolurkr at 05:31 PM | TrackBack

Some news is too good to keep to yourself

From the BBC News: Judge backs Guantanamo challenge

A US judge has ruled that special military tribunals being used to try hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are illegal.

Judge Joyce Hens Green said the tribunals denied the detainees their basic rights under the US constitution.

I think Judge Green says it best.

The war on terror "cannot negate the existence of the most basic fundamental rights for which the people of this country have fought and died for well over 200 years," she wrote.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:42 PM | TrackBack

Ahhhh Yes, well said

From KevMoTown - Grad School Vortex's post Grad School Vortex.

As you may have guessed by the sudden drop in posting at this hyar blog, I have been sucked into the grad school vortex. Assigned reading leads to recommended reading leads to background reading leads to further development of selected reading to flesh out concepts found in previous readings all leading to a few pages of hypertextual analysis that despite all the reading make you feel that you haven't read enough.

Does the feeling ever stop? Me thinks not. *sigh* Do I know this feeling well, I'm sure many of you do as well. I think it's become lodged in my medulla and has become as natural to me as breathing. Scary ain't it.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:58 AM | TrackBack

An absolute must have for any self-respecting blog researcher

You simply have to have one of these don't you? Yes yes yes you do. Check here for products with this image on them.

Posted by prolurkr at 08:48 PM | TrackBack

Missing girls body found

On Thursday an Amber Alert was issued for Katlyn "Katie" Collman age 10 of Crothersville Indiana. This particular alert caught my ears for two reasons: 1) Crothersville is where my husband's company is located, so it's a town we know fairly well, and 2) because this appeared to be a stranger abduction rather then the usual non-custodial parent "abduction" that hits our airwaves in Indiana. Now while the non-custodial parent issues can be dangerous for the kids, usually they are more of a legal issue then a health and safety of the child issue. But Katie's disappearance is the kind of thing that gravely worries those of us with children in our lives.

They found Katie today, her body was located in a stream bed outside Seymour Indiana. An autopsy will be performed in Louisville tomorrow. News story is here.

There is no doubt that I will be watching every well-maintained older white Ford F-150 pickup truck, driven by a young skinny white guy, that I see in southern Indiana looking for someone that looks like the drawing. We will need to get this person in custody quickly for the safely of the children.

Posted by prolurkr at 06:19 PM | TrackBack

Interesting new study on adolescent sexual networks

I ran across this article in Eyebeam reBlog. The network diagrams are very interesting, click here to see. Ohio States News Release is available here. I will have to pull the article when I'm on campus next.

Bearman, Peter S., Moody, James, & Stovel, Katherine (2004). Chains of Affection: The Structure of Adolescent Romantic and Sexual Networks. American Journal of Sociology, 110(1), 44-90. Available: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJS/journal/issues/v110n1/070259/070259.html.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:32 AM | TrackBack

Thinking while I read blogs for coding

I am spending this evening and tomorrow, no doubt, helping my research team at BROG code data for our upcoming presentation at SunBelt. Coding blogs is always an interesting undertaking; I usually find blogs I want to follow for a while, blogs that scare the cotton out of me, and blogs that make me think. This particular blog's entry made me think so much I felt I had to share it here. Check out EuroPundits post HELP! by Nelson Ascher.

Ascher makes some excellent points about the apparent homogeneity of American culture that is illustrated every four years when we vote for president. He reminds me of comments I have oft repeated to my friends in Australia when they tell me their impressions of America and Americans, things like we all carry guns and believe in the death-penalty. I consistently say to them that "This is a big country and we all don't do anything the same consistently."

Posted by prolurkr at 10:39 PM | TrackBack

Adolescents and Teens Online Bibliography

I've added a new bibliography to the sidebar. The Adolescents and Teens Online Bibliography is available for your use. As with the weblog and blog bib there is no promise of all inclusiveness and this is the format there is. *S* Enjoy.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:26 PM | TrackBack

Breaking in new working spaces

This morning finds me breaking in a new work space at the IUPUI Library. It's somewhat odd that when I was working on my first masters, through SPEA, I parked just about exactly where I am sitting now only 4 floors down on ground level. I can look out of the window on my right and see my old office on the third floor of the Business/SPEA Building. When I would look out those windows I had an uninterrupted view of the Indianapolis skyline. Now this side of campus has a much more claustrophobic feel then it did back then.

I think I have found a carrel that is large enough and comfortable enough to allow me to work in this space. After I settled in and getting the wireless connected, I spent the morning combing through my blog citation database and the IU systems to make sure I have copies of all of the articles I need. Now I'm going to spend the afternoon reading. I need to finish reading and taking notes on - Serfaty, Viviane (2004). The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Then I get to start on - Blood, Rebecca (2002). The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. Cambridge MA: Perseus Publishing. While reading this book I need to put together a general outline of topics for this section of my quals paper. I expect Blood, and a few other prescriptive writers about blogs will help form the backbone for this section of the paper.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:12 PM | TrackBack

Pictures from the trip to Hawai'i

I am posting my travel pictures from the trip to Hawai'i. I post them under the actual date the pictures were taken, so the first entry A trip to the top of Mauna Kae and is posted under January 7, 2005. You can get to the post by clicking the link above, or by going to either the archive for January 2005 or the category "Travel...on the road again".

Posted by prolurkr at 03:17 PM | TrackBack

Indiana University Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects, Student Representative

For the last 18 months I have served as the Sudent Representative to the Indiana University (Bloomington Campus) Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects. It has been a wonderful learning experience. I am privileged each month to sit in a room and listen to a group of very experienced researchers share their ideas on the proper use of human subjects in research, question development, and research design. It has been an invaluable learning experience on many levels.

Over the holidays I began to think about requesting an extension on my two-year appointment for a second term. As things stand, I will be eligible to serve for the entire two-year period as I will not have completed my dissertation process before that time. Primarily I have really just begun feeling as though I have the knowledge required to fully participate in the process at the monthly review meetings. So after the last meeting I discussed the possibility of extending the appointment and I was encourage to make a formal request. Which I did on Monday.

I am pleased to say that my request was approved by the Director of the Committee, having been previously approved verbally by the Committee Chair. I'm not sure if that is the final word administratively, but it is good enough for me to announce it here.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:21 AM | TrackBack

A distributed blogging book?

SplaTT's Blog points to the beginnings of a distributed book on blogging, 100bloggers.

I looked over the initial list of bloggers involved in the project. None of the names jump out at me as being academics. To bad we do have things to add to the conversation. I sincerely hope that someone from the academic weblogging community is invited to participate.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:52 AM | TrackBack

Moving in the right direction

I've start down the path of making improvements to this site that should make it easier for all of us to use. I have undertaken a search for a project based webmaster to work with me to optimize the site and I hope to be working on that project as soon as possible. I will be documenting changes in posts so the rational will be available. In the mean time, I received an email from Andrew Stevens suggesting some changes that I can do with my somewhat limited technological capabilities.

First, I am changing the number of posts that appear on the main page from 30 days to 15. When I set up the blog I set a goal of two posts per week. At that rate the 30 days on the page option made sense. As I am posting far more often then projected I have been thinking that the page is to long, Andrew's email underlined that for me. The decision to set the limit at 15 days is fairly unscientificly, though thoughtfully, arrive upon. When I am traveling, and out of Internet reach, there have been up to 10 day gaps in posting. I don't want to have a blank page so the 15 day limit should prevent that from happening.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:35 AM | TrackBack

Productivity

It's that time again...when all the deadlines have actual dates attached and they seem to be looming at me from the calendar, project planning, and time management softwares.

So I have gone back to a technique I've used previously and should use continuously. I have a multifunction kitchen timer on my desk, in fact it sticks magnetically to one end of a metal shrouded powerbar. I set the timer to countdown 1 hour. When the alarm rings I get up from my desk and go do something from my household to-do list and drink a glass of water. Then I come back to the computer and reset the timer for another hour. It's amazing how much work you can get done this way and how much better you feel with a steady water intake, plus you get up periodically and walk around changing position and stretching as you go. All very good things.

Posted by prolurkr at 06:54 PM | TrackBack

Updated Weblog and Blog Bibliography

I have posted an updated version of the Weblog and Blog Bibliography, the sidebar has been updated to reflect this change. If your work is listed without an abstract please send me one and I will add it to my database. If you have weblog, blog, or we blog articles and presentations that are not listed, please send the the citation - with an abstract, if possible - and I will add that information as well. Contact me at lscheidt at indiana.edu.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:08 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Special Issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

Epistolarity in the Twenty-First Century For a Special Issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

(Published biannually by the Autobiography Society, supported by the Dept of Languages and Literatures, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater) Issue Editor: Margaretta Jolly

Deadline for abstracts: 1 August 2005

James Hewitt puts his love letters from Princess Diana up for auction; J.D. Salinger sues Ian Hamilton for quoting his archived letters in a literary biography; a circular e-mail petition about the oppression of Afghani women crashes its originator's university computer system; anthrax on envelopes adds to fears of terrorism; a woman accused of setting Colorado's biggest wildfire says she was burning a letter from her estranged husband; the testimonial letters of Korean "comfort women" help to get women's rights included in human rights charters; rockstar Alanis Morrisette riffs on unsent letters to former lovers; Ruth Picardie's e-mails, with her magazine column about dying of cancer, are published posthumously by her husband. Most people still write letters-though common opinion is that the art is dead and they are now rarely published as literature. Letters persist as celebrity or literary artefacts, faxes, e-mail, fantasized archival and genealogical heritages, testimony, visual communications, personal ads, and fan mail, as well as in more traditional forms of literary devices, historical resources, journalistic petitions, correspondence courses, and everyday communications. Arguably, letters like autobiography and biography have been energised by the age of information and global communication, confession and celebrity, testimony and trauma. Essays are accordingly invited that illuminate the practice and art of letter-writing in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or that consider letters-or their study-from previous eras in the light of contemporary concerns. Examples of topics that essays may engage:

Truth, confession, witnessing, and the contemporary letter

Persuasion in letters; postmodernity and rhetoric

Letters, loss, and trauma

Letters and the biography industry

E-mail, faxes, mobile phones, and the death/regeneration of letter writing

Letters, historiography, and the return of (grand) narrative

Publishing, archiving, and epistolary ethics

Letter-writing, migration and diasporic identities

Visual letters; the letter in art and media

(Virtual) genders, sexualities, epistolarities

Literacy and letter-writing outside the academy

Letter-writing, globalisation, petitioning

The history of epistolary theory, letter-metaphors in critical theory

Fragmentation, individuality, community, and the letter

Please send abstracts of 300-400 words to the Margaretta Jolly at m.jolly@exeter.ac.uk, School of English, University of Exeter, Queen's Building, Exeter, EX4 6DD

Posted by prolurkr at 05:19 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Speech Acts/Oral Traditions

A Panel Discussion at the Eighth International Literature and Humanities Conference,INSCRIPTIONS '05: an arts and culture conference and festival at Eastern Mediterranean Universityin Famagusta, on the island of Cyprus May 12th - 13th, 2005

Submissions are invited for a Panel Discussion exploring the forms and modes in which literature, broadly defined, is transmitted orally; and how the production, transmission, and reception of "texts" in oral traditions may be addressed in terms of speech act theory or theories of communicative action.

.oral traditions.

For our purposes, forms of orally transmitted literature may include (but are not limited to) traditional narratives such as the epic and the ballad, and ritualized performances (lullabies, incantations, laments, paeans, etc.); and also oral histories, folktales, myths, legends (urban and other), fables, fairytales, ghost stories, proverbs, riddles, jokes and shaggy dog stories, improvised theater, "street talk" or argot, rap or popular song, gossip, rumor, hype, and buzz.

Such language forms may contribute to preserving existing cultural traditions and systems, or to creating new ones. They interact in complex ways with the methods and technologies used to record, print, archive, and investigate them, which codify and transform them through processes of editing, translation, and annotation; by extending their duration, and by recontextualizing their existence in time and place. These codifying processes are framed by, and at the same time generate, the shibboleths and creolized discourses of schools of theory and academic disciplines.

The global reach of electronic media and communication technologies-radio, television, the internet in particular-used to broadcast them has further complicated the study of oral texts not only by modifying their method of transmission, but by dislocating and decentering their cultural/historical provenance, their space of existence, and their audience.

.and speech acts.

In this global context, where the local conventions and assumptions of a culture are constantly being questioned or reconfigured in interaction with other cultures, the literary forms and modes of oral communication and their reception in academic and other disciplinary contexts provide an ideal field of inquiry for the various dimensions of speech act theory articulated by theorists such as Austin, Grice, Wittgenstein, Searle, Derrida, Iser, and Pratt, and the theory of communicative action developed by Habermas.

The relation between speech act theories and social theories of communicative rationality pivots on the operation and validity claims of "illocutionary" speech acts-that is, performative utterances with some inherent degree of agency-which depend on the complex system of socio-cultural assumptions, rules, and attitudes in which they occur.

Since the meaning of illocutionary acts-the "perlocutionary effects" they produce-depends on these conventions of their performance, the forms and modes of transmission and reception of oral literature would seem to constitute critical sites for investigating the illocutionary force of literary/fictional speech acts, and for developing models and paradigms for social action in real-world speech situations.

Prospective panelists are invited to send 250-word abstracts/proposals for 15-20 minute presentations on any aspect of these areas to rodney.sharkey@emu.edu.tr by 11th February, 2005. I look forward to learning about your research, and to a provocative discussion.

For more information about INSCRIPTIONS '05, please visit our website at http://www.emu.edu.tr/elh/inscriptions Please also check out our links to "Individual Research Presentations" and "Creative/Performance Work."

Posted by prolurkr at 05:08 PM | TrackBack

December Advisory Committee Report

Between HICSS and the blog being down, I am behind in posting my December 2004 Advisory Committee Report.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:20 PM | TrackBack

Abstract writing

I play on the boundaries of a variety of academic disciplines, which makes me a master of pretty much nothing. Or at least that is often how it feels when I sit down to write something new.

I have spent time this previous week reading and rereading sections of texts on semiotics preparing for an article that has been fomenting in my brain for some time. Semiotics is not necessarily a new field for me, but neither is it one in which I feel like an expert. Does one ever feel like an expert in semiotics? I think that goal could be a moving target.

Today I began my abstract preparatory work by rereading the first couple of chapters of:

Schechner, Richard (2002). Performance Studies: An Introduction. London & New York: Routledge.

I find that taking the time to reorient my thinking helps me to sidestep some of biases that seem to build up in my thinking as I wonder through my daily life. The process of discrimination, as a part of selection from the infinite whole, needs to be unblocked to allow the eyes to see something in a new and potentially different way.

So here I sit, surrounded by semiotics, linguistics, and performance texts as I work through the 250 words I am penning on the performative aspects of adolescent blog naming.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:49 PM | TrackBack

A week of blog thought - in retrospect

It's been an interesting week of thinking about blogs and blogging. On Tuesday, January 18 Google announced the creation of "nofollow," one tool in the fight against spam - SearchEngineWatch news story is here. I installed the MT plugin as soon as it was available, though I have not - as of yet - set comments back on by default.

On Wednesday January 19, 2005 Lilia Efimova of Mathemagenic spent some time with the BROG group. Pete Welsch blogged her presentation and some of the subsequent discussion.

Thursday, January 20, I spend most of the day crawling through the IU online resources looking for blog related articles and grabbing copies of those I don't have for my personal archive. I will be updating the Blog Bibliography shortly to reflect new entries.

Then on Friday I got my blog back and spent the day reinserting posts. Not tough work but it definitely meant some serious mutli-tasking was going on for most of the afternoon.

So here it is, Saturday. I get to pen an abstract for NCA today. Plus I'm sure I will be thinking more on the "close a door, open a window" concept as it relates to spammer. See this morning I found I have four new trackbacks to my post about the death of J. I. Miller: Two are to a prom dress site and two are to porn sites. So we closed, we attempted to partially close, the door on comment spam but left the window open for trackback spam. *sigh* This is very sad since much of the blog conversation that does happen, actually takes place through formal and informal trackback processes.

Cool I just found out that the MT plugin also blocks trackback spam. Excellent. It's amazing what you learn when you read the documentation. LOL I should do it more often.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:17 AM | TrackBack

Permanent link for Adolescent Diary Weblogs and the Unseen Audience

Adolescent Diary Weblogs and the Unseen Audience now has a permanent home on the SLIS Working Papers site. Sidebar links have been changed to reflect this and the temporary site of the paper will be removed from that server.

Posted by prolurkr at 03:36 PM | TrackBack

Professional-Lurker is BACK!

After an absence of almost two weeks Professional-Lurker is back. Thanks to the folks at 2xtreme Media for their assistance in repairing my damage. And I promise never to do that again.

I'm working to reenter all the posts that were not in the backup, so give me a day or so before you expect to see new posts.

Posted by prolurkr at 02:04 PM | TrackBack

AoIR Conference 2006

In case you don't read the Executive Committee notes for the Association of Internet Researchers let me be the first to tell you this. *leans in to whipser* The 2006 conference will be held in Brisbane Australia. So save your dollars cause it's an expensive trip from the US. But count me in for the whole thing. Oh and for you folks in Europe or Anya in Sydney, save your pennies for the airfare and so you can take a poor starving American to dinner. Personally I can't wait.

The following comment was added to the orignial post on January 13, 2005 11:50 PM and has been readded here:

My response was also posted as a comment January 14, 2005 08:33 AM:

Posted by prolurkr at 08:10 PM | TrackBack

Blog on hold

My ISP is restoring the full blog from a December 23, 2004 backup.  This should give me most of my comments back.  *sigh*  So the blog will be dead until the restore is complete.  Cross your fingers.

Posted by prolurkr at 06:05 PM | TrackBack

The merger of blogs and diaries - SixApart purchases LiveJournal

The rumors are true. Check out the facts here.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:21 PM | TrackBack

Home but not happy at the moment

I got home a few hours ago and just sat down to check email, etc. One of my routines is to pull the latests MT-Blacklist data from Jay Allen's site and add it to my own list. Sadly I did this and "co" was added to the kill list. Which means that when I ran the delete function all of the comments, save 2, on the blog were deleted. I am not happy, not happy at all. I don't know if I can recreate them from the .tar backup. I will have to find someone with much more experience with servers then I personally possess. For those of you that have commented I apologize.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:48 PM | TrackBack

South Kohala and Hilo

We awoke this morning to the pounding of the surf against the retaining wall outside the condo. It was a fairly heavy rain with lots of wind.
I had decided to head for Hilo after taking Dan to the airport so he could pickup a rental car. He headed south to Volcanoes National Park. I had visited Hilo on my whirl-wind Big Island trip roughly 10 years ago. I liked the town then and wanted a chance to see it now. Another one day trip, I'll have to remedy that in the near future and stay for awhile in the Hilo area.
My first stop was to make the drive through Waimea to the Waipio Valley Lookout. Waipio is on the other side of the Pololu Valley, roughly six valleys away actually. There are no roads connecting the two.
I snapped this picture as I wound my way on highway 240 from the junction with highway 19, toward the lookout.
This picture was taken from the Lookout parking lot before I hiked down to the shelter house.
Waipio is a fairly inaccessible location. The valley is 900 ft below the lookout. There are signs everywhere advising against driving down into the valley unless you are in a 4x4. The state highway department has a website detailing why only a fool would drive this road in anything else, click here for the specifics. The road has a 25% grade over all that ranges up to 45% in spots...not something I am likely to drive myself down anytime soon.
It is a lovely setting though. I do want to get down to the valley floor sometime soon and to some walking around.
After visiting the Lookout I started back toward Hilo stopping to snap this picture just so you can see how rolling the landscape is from the highway down to the ocean.
As I drove first down to the Lookout and then toward Hilo, a trio of ships were often visible below me. I caught this picture the seventh or eighth time I saw them.
Looking down into Hilo.
I had a nice time walking in downtown Hilo. It was fairly wet so I didn't cover the ground I would have had the afternoon been brighter. Of course Hilo gets a significant rainfall so this is pretty much the usual weather, though I am told that it often rains the morning and it bright in the afternoon. Many of the stores and buildings were closed as it was Sunday. I was able to grab an excellent lunch at Café Pesto very good food and great Sunday Jazz. I then decided I would drive out the University of Hawaii at Hilo Campus. I had tried to find the campus when I was here 10 years ago but had not driven out far enough west when I went south of town. I didn't find it this time either, seems like a theme. I got caught up in the incredible amount of growth that has taken place. I remember the turn back to the airport quite vividly as happening in open grass lands edged with forest. Now it is all strip malls. Probably a good thing economically but sad for the beauty of the place. . I remember the turn off so vividly because across from me at the turn was an elderly women in a bright medium blue early 1950's car, with white roof and trim. I really caught my eye. Then a couple of years later I was watching a documentary on the volcanoes and there she was again in the same car. Turns out she and her husband were important Hilo citizen. Wish I remembered their names but I don't. I will post more about my first trip to Hilo later, much of it is very funny or at least pretty ironic..
Well after tooling around Hilo for awhile I decided I would start back to Kona. Dan and I had left it that we might have dinner before my plane left the island and me being me I wanted to be in range should he call. On the way back I took the scenic drive along Onomea Bay. The drive goes past the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden sadly they were closing as I drove past so I will have to save a visit for a future trip. Reading the website I linked here makes me wish I had known to go there and possibly skipped Hilo, but hind-sight is always 20/20 isn't it. I did get some great shots of the bay though, and the countryside around it. Here is an overview.
At the end of the drive is a community building or a church I'm not sure which.
Behind the buildings is a lawn and field that roll down to the bluff overlooking the bay.
On the road there is a nice section of retaining wall that was overgrown with moss. I have a thing for moss, the way it looks like velvet and often feels like thistle. *shrug* It's cool stuff.
There are lots of bridges over beautiful streams that roll down from the mountains to the bay. This is just one of them.
And then there is the bay itself. Check here for history of both the Botanical Garden and the Onomea Bay.
This mission building caught my eye because of the name "Hongwanji Mission" in the title. Which is the same as the cemetery I had photographed the day before on the other side of the island. Now that I can access the net and do some searching I find that Hongwanji are Buddhist missions to the islands, some of which operate schools.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:22 PM | TrackBack