Resuming Normalcy As Once We Knew It

It seems apparent that the firestorm over the temporarily lost blogs has calmed to the point of only being a partially smoldering reminder of its former self.

Some of us moved to other blogging clients, other hosting services. Some of us just waited it out and resumed blogging at the newly created facility which seems to be the heir to weblogs.com, that being buzzword.com, a site run by Rogers Cadenhead.

Some had already abandoned their blogs, and this either awakened them and prompted a rennaissance, or clarified and reiterated their status as deadblogs.

Then there are those of us who created a fauxblog in a personally hosted space, and who are still waiting to see what else shakes out (hello, weblogger.com, et al!!).

My take: continue to use the fauxblog, simultaneously post the same items on the buzzword.com blog, and see what the near future may bring.

One more important note: the backup facility, to get one's entire weblogs.com history up to and until the pages went dark, is working. Like a charm, I might add.

And to his credit, Rogers is reactive to the discussion group, and responds to user questions. He and Dave have been using deanland.weblogs.com in somewhat of a beta capacity, and that's fine with me. I am glad to see the blog have other uses, productive ones, at that. I'd posted some questions in the Discussion Area and in e-mails; some were how-to questions, some were what-if questions, and others were general queries. Almost all have been addressed, and some of them seem to require some analysis or development time before an answer can be offered.

This is a welcome and appreciated method, with open communication and a sense of there being goals and all parties involved having some input. Even the tech-challenged, such as yours truly.

The period of days during the firestorm, at some points reaching peaks of rage and hostility, seems to have revived the spirits of some of the bloggers. I addressed this in my open letter di scussing the return of DeanLand via the fauxblog my son and his pal created for me. I was fortunate in having my tech-savvy son there, ready to put together a band-aid solution for me. After 4+ years of creating what one friend properly characterized as "my brand," my most pressing concern was to get back on the blogosphere, maintain the ability to post, and have a forum in which to do so.

Not every blogger using weblogs.com had that luxury.

It was a discomfiting time, but things seem to be mellowing out, returning to something that approximates Normalcy As We Once Knew It. If, indeed, ever we did know such a thing.

Unveiling the Islamic train

The amazingly polylingual Iggy at Blogalization offers a work in progress translation of an Al Jazeera text which, says Iggy, "reads something like an Islamic Cluetrain Manifesto."

The original text, entitled The Islamic Internet: Where are its flaws?, by Khatib al-Mu'tazz, can be found here with Iggy's translation.

A few snips:

Different standards apply in this virtual world than in its real counterpart, which was once ruled by intimate ties of human consanguinity. This virtual mathematical realm puts each individual into contact with the entire world, granting him access to the ideas of every philosophical and religious tendency. It is this that dissolves established social and educational roles, detracts from the exercise of moral guardianship, and undermines thought founded upon one authoritative source.

Indeed there is a fundamental social symptom that we can attribute directly to the Internet: the tendency toward "uncovering and unveiling." On the Internet, the naked face of every person is on open display, together with their similarities and their subtle differences.

...although the Internet is considered a product of modernity and of the Western intellectual tradition, we discover that Islamist (and especially Salafi) discourse continues to view the present from the point of view of an imminent end of the world in its evaluation of the world, so that the Internet becomes equivalent in their eyes to what they call the mere "wisdom of the moment," a mere "gathering at the marketplaces", an "ephemeral coming together," the "circulation of trade," the "dissemination of immorality," the "rise of usury" and the "cornucopeia of lies."

If the world has indeed contracted into the tiny, intimate "global village" which modern thought regards as one of the great accomplishments of globalization, then that change itself is viewed by the Salafi as "a clear sign that we are living at the end of time,"...

The piece goes on to explore other views, in which, instead of shrinking the world (which has "monstrous" implications for the cultural view described by al-Mu'tazz), the Internet is described as a new world that has opened new territories. From this perspective, al-Mu'tazz offers a memorable description of "the old school," which, he memorably says, "tends to approach the Internet like a man screaming in a canyon."

The piece moves toward sketching a vision of a more complex view of the Net and how Islam can approach it. It's a good read.

OK already

Been gone so long, I know - but I have a valid excuse. Really.

Found this site about two months ago...been incapable of coherent thought since.

New template full of minty freshness. I like it.

Now back to the pickles.

P.S...

That's POSSE, not PU....

children!

Gonzo Enraged

Listen, gonzo engaged participants, what is, is. Stop jumping up and down. Now, another new template is in place. Sorry the other one was so sucky, but I'm in the middle of 25 other things over here, and I gave it a shot.

If you wish to continue posting to Gonzo, please update your blogger profiles within the next week. Otherwise I'll assume you don't want to post to the blog anymore and will delete your ass completely. Reason being, it's kinda nice the way blogger has set up the "Contributors" section of the template to pull your blogger profile info, which shows ALL the blogs you post to, as well as things you probably don't want readers of gonzo engaged to know, like your email address and town of residence.

Ah well, another day...

Stay out of the template for now. Or consult your local posse before entering.

...

Paraphrased from myself some time ago -

I'm not sure when things will pick up significantly here. Reaching for roots. Questing about for that gritty realism that makes the words feel valuable rather than mundane. As I read here, I find we've become so mundane that even I'd delete us from my blogroll.

I've got an excuse. Yeah I know changing career paths and moving across the country is a feeble fucking excuse, but it's an excuse. Where the hell are the rest of you motherfuckers? Did you all drink the fucking koolaid and slip into a stupor? I'll be alive again (and enraged, outraged, engaged), but some of you all seem to have gone into stasis. Maybe it's time to start yanking plugs out.

Our collective writing of late has been de-fucking-plorable.

Read Scoble from a year or two ago and read Scoble today. Is this what we've all become. Shoot my ass.

I've hosted you for free for all these years and this is what I get?

FIRST of all, epeus, you came along and whacked the sidebar. Well fuck. That sucks. I went and found everyone's blog and made the blogroll and now it's gone.

AS for the typeface and template, well you are correct. It does suck. Bad. Especially now that the SIDEBAR is gone.

Look, I don't want to write an entire essay on this, because my feeling is, people really don't read essays.

So just hold on and I'll try to fix the problem myself, because I doubt a posse of men will come along and do it for me.

People just love to jump up and down.

I miss the old template

I fixed the author thingy, but this one really is very ugly, and you blew away our technorati claims too.
I'm all for moving with the times, but how about picking one of he templates that looks less like it forgot what we learned about onscreen typefaces in the last 15 years?

I went and did this because I could.

Some things look different here. That is a good thing. They also looked different previously. Now, they look more different than before. BUT then.

Did I ask you? No, I just did it.
Did I mess you up? No, you hardly ever write here, and you still can!
Did I brighten your day? Absofuckinglutely.

I have a problem though. All is not working well. We have a missing doodadder. The little doodadder that might tell our generous readers which blogger has posted which post is missing from the footer of each post. I think there is some kind of profile container tag-like thing, which would include the poster's name-and-link-to-blogger-profile, that must be inserted into the template, if I could figure out how to do it.

It might have been there once. It might be gone now. I have no clue.

I am going to go ask on my blog for someone to tell me where into the template to insert what HTML doodadder that will indicate, in the footer of each post, who the poster is. Or whom. I'm too tired to think it through. Not the template. The who or whom thing.

ALSO, my dear and esteemed colleagues, I have not a damn clue who writes over here anymore besides the folks on the right. If you're not listed and you plan to post before the year 2010, email me and I'll add you. If you're not on the team and would like to be, email me and if I don't think your email is spam, I might possibly read it and add you in, say, within one day to one week, depending.

I would say sometime after July 1st, but someone beat me too that this week.

Oh, love to all.

--jeneane