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I think I want a Whomping Willow in my front yard…

I’ve been tweaking the CSS on my blog, as well as the photoblog. I’m getting really quite happy with how they’re set up. Of course, I’ve said that about a dozen times before, followed shortly by some radical change to the theme because I got bored…

Currently, it’s Helvetica all the way, with clean and simple traditional blog layout here, and similar concepts behind the photoblog as well. I’ve decided to fork the themes I’m using, so I can hack them a bit more than I can if I’m worried about integrating updates from the original theme developers. Don’t know how far I’ll take it, but I may play if I get time. Yeah. Right…

can I still post here? posting is busted over at mindfulseeing.com. Is it a WP 2.8.5 thing? Something borky on the server? Keep getting Page Not Found errors. Sigh.

Great, great article by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone Magazine.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

and

If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

and the tie-in to the next bubble – “green” carbon credits:

And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an “environmental plan,” called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

holy. shit.

The greed inherent in unchecked capitalism is obvious. The rich get richer by sucking the less-rich into “investing” their money. They also provide “guidance” in the form of screaming “investment analysts” on cable news channels, ensuring the masses keep funnelling their retirement savings to prop up the pyramids so the rich can get their money out before it crumbles.

Why are there no mobs roving the streets with torches and pitchforks, demanding the heads of Goldman Sachs (and other leaders of this shitstorm)? Why are people taking the economic meltdown laying down?

Also, why are the best, most accurate, least adulterated sources of news and editorial critique coming from Rolling Stone Magazine and The Comedy Network? How fucked up do we have to get before we hold some feet to the coals? Does Mad Magazine need to scoop CNN on something big?

1:06:20 PM: If this works, all of my tweets will be gathered into a single updating blog post, until I send the liveblog stop code.

1:14:35 PM: now, if this works, it’d be even cooler if I could have it pull all tweets based on a hashtag – either my one, or everyone’s.

1:17:46 PM: hmm… Could it be passing over tweets that start with @jimgroom – that could be a killer feature. wish I’d thought of that…

1:19:31 PM: yeah. the twitter –> blog liveblogging plugin seems to skip tweets that start with @ but includes all others. #hashtags?

1:23:00 PM: OK. This Twitter Liveblog thing is pretty fracking slick. I think I’m going to try this for the next event I’m at. Very cool.

1:32:20 PM: that’s interesting – my tweets getting pulled into a single updating blog post, with comments happening on the blog post as well.

1:34:24 PM: http://twitpic.com/jinnt – How does it handle links? Twitpics?

1:45:33 PM: New post: Trying WP to Twitter (http://cli.gs/G1LhR)

1:55:14 PM: this liveblogging thing looks really promising. I’ll definitely keep it handy…

I posted this on a course blog, but it’s not public so I’m reposting it here.

I just ran a silly experiment to see what dollar value people somehow attach to social capital. Technorati offers a utility to generate a dollar value to see what “your blog is worth” – again, a silly number, but perhaps an interesting way to view the abstracted concepts that compose “social capital”.

I think I’m almost ready to retire. Technorati says my blog is worth over $125,000 US.

Of course, it’s a completely silly and relatively arbitrary dollar value. There’s no way anyone would pay me anything for my blog. That’s just plain ridiculous. BUT, the calculation is based on the value of the website WeblogsInc.com when it was purchased by AOL back in 2005. Loosely, what it’s doing is calculating the “value” of a Technorati rating (which includes the number of websites linking to a site, and their value, etc… in a similar way to Google’s PageRank algorithm) and then calculating the value of a given website (usually a blog) based on that base value. The description from the blog post that Technorati used to create the algorithm:

In acquiring Weblogs Inc., AOL has now provided us with some numbers traditional media are willing to pay for a blog. Looking at the numbers above, one can try to guess at the value of a link from an external site. a single link on the weblogsinc network represents 0.002258559942180087 percent of the overall network.

At the different rumored price points from AOL, it looks as follows:

Link	$25 million value	30 million value	40 million value
1	$564.64	$677.57	$903.42

I don’t know if those values are based on any real rationale but it’s nice to dream up the value of one’s blog based on this.
Should we now assume that traditional media companies are willing to pay between $500 and $1000 per site that links into a blog?
Not quite. The incremental value is in the size of the network and the underlying tools. Jason and Brian have been working on developing a blog authoring technology, called BlogSmith, that sits at the core of their network and one has to believe that AOL saw some value in the software too. However, one can easily say that blog valuations are going to be easier to make after this deal since it provides the first yardstick in that space.

So, it’s a calculation of what “traditional media” outlets would pay for a website based on the number of links tracked through Technorati. Not a real world representation of “social capital” but maybe a simple, concrete way to think about the abstract concepts (even though the dollar values are insanely inflated).

Hey! Look at me! I’m a big time blogger now!

I’ve finally gotten sick of smacking down spamroaches. WP-Spam-Free is still doing a decent job, but it’s letting enough crap through that it’s overly annoying – for me, in despamming the site, and for people who have subscribed to comments by email or RSS because they get spammed. I’ve just re-enabled Akismet, and will be running it alongside WP-Spam-Free for awhile to see if they can double up and plug the holes…

Being a writer in a world that features Wallace would be like playing basketball in a world that has Michael Jordan, only none of us even know how to play basketball and we’re all injured toddlers with broken lacrosse equipment.

and

I know that if we as a society approached depression and mental health with the same dedication and persistence with which we approached drunk driving or smoking or, hell, littering in the past, we’d bury a lot fewer of our brothers and daughters and heroes.

genius. fucking genius.

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