The most successful small online publications are not only well written, but also well planned. And no matter how blog-savvy the publisher, all good plans require revision from time to time. I recently visited Ronni Bennett’s “Time Goes By” to steal some ideas, and I discovered that she’s doing a major re-design in order to better serve people with mobile devices. When she started blogging twelve years ago not too many of her visitors arrived via smart phone. Now… well, time goes by. Things change.

I asked Facebook friends what I could write here that they would find interesting. There was general agreement that Taco Tuesday is out. Tuba Tuesday, however, received a couple of up-votes–so fine… we have Tuesdays covered. What about the rest of the week? Basically, I get that alliteration is key. For example, how many readers would be lured by a promise of Postmodern Literary Deconstruction Wednesdays? Not too many is the answer, and I think it’s clear why: NOT ALLITERATIVE! So here’s what’s on the Listics Review menu for the near future:

• Mellow Mondays–who needs to start the week all ranty? Not us!
• Tuba Tuesdays–big, bold, brassy!
• Woeful Wednesdays–want something to accentuate those mid-week blues? Check in here on Woeful Wednesdays to find out what everyone is whining about.
• Thoughtful Thursdays–so many people, so much knowledge, so many opinions and beliefs. You can see why we would wait until Thursday to get all the truthiness sorted out.
• Foody Fridays–not just corn dogs, I promise!
• Wonderful Weekends–here in Southern California each weekend is as wild, wacky, and wonderful as the last. Don’t you just love it?

Today I’m musing about links and personal web presence. I’m not going to talk much about Facebook, Google+, twitter, or any of the other social networks that provide people with opportunities to share their thoughts and their work on the web. Maria is an interesting person, and an interesting study in public web presence. She had a blog called “Alembic.” I think I asked her one time if she’s related to the Alembic electronics family that emerged in Marin in the late sixties and she said she was not, but I appreciated the synchronicity none-the-less. And of course everybody’s only a few degrees of separation from everybody else. Consider Kevin Bacon….

Tidying up links on this blog, I saw that my link to Maria’s blog (Ashladle.org) had rotted. Rather than delete her from the list here, I looked for another public web address where she is active and found her blog (small change blog), and I found her on twitter. Also, I found a project she started last winter, a photographic journal called “A Year of Mount Tamalpais.” I lifted this picture from that location…

Photo by Maria Benet

The project I lifted the above picture from is over. Maria still blogs at small change blog where she migrated after her ashladle.org domain name expired, and she’s working on a WordPress site called Marin Bytes. She tweets as @Alembic, and her friends can find her in the walled garden that is Facebook. Amazing the number of ramifications a web-head’s personality requires in the new age of social networking….

Time goes by and our virtual back fences get more and more convoluted, sort of cyber-Christo projects that require the participants’ engagement on a different level than we have known before. How many people actually click on the links they find in a tweet or a posting? The author put them there for a reason, but whether pressured by time or only superficially engaged, most readers fly right by the links and miss some of the allusive content that lends value to what they are reading. In the good old days, missing links were something else entirely, an evolutionary thing. “Missing lynx” of course refers to a lost bobcat, but that’s neither here nor there. In the old days, one could listen in on the party line (ask your grandma what a party line was) or a couple of neighbors could gossip over the back fence. People wrote letters and sometimes got replies. People read newspapers and magazines. Kids at camp and vacationers wrote postcards, usually with pictures on them, and no reply was really expected. All of those mediated conversations were well bounded. The same can not be said for conversations on the web.

I sent off a message to Maria letting her know that I was writing a post about her and asking for her permission to use the above photo. She got back to me faster than a letter in a bottle, faster than teh pony express, faster than airmail, faster–in fact–than the US Post Office could possibly manage. She got back to me so quickly you’d have thought we were connected by a series of tubes or something! I like the Internet for that and for the fact that so many talented people can make their work accessible. Thanks Maria, you’re a poet and , well… the conclusion is self evident.

The University will seek not merely to turn out men as engineers, scientists, doctors, merchants, theologians but also as men of high character, probity and honour, whose conduct through life will show they bear the hall-mark of a great University. A teaching university would but half perform its function if it does not seek to develop the heart-power of its scholars with the same solicitude with which it develops their brain-power. Hence it is that the proposed university has placed formation of character in youth as one of its principal objects.

Malaviya ji was a partner in the life of noted theosophist Annie Besant. I am reminded of this because every time I am just gaining some headway untangling the spaghetti that is this blog’s code, Mr. Paynter will wander in and ask me some awkward question about Jiddu Krishnamurti or Paramahansa Yogananda or Theosophy, etc. I do my best to respectfully respond to these extraneous and irrelevant queries and then I find it takes me precious minutes to regain my concentration and focus on matters involving microformats and HTML5. At the end of a day at work, I am used to feeling tired but fulfilled. Since I came to this place the enjoyment of work has gone out of me, replaced by some nameless dread.

Just this afternoon Mr. Paynter asked me my opinion on the twitter exchange between Paul Ford and Anil Dash vis-à-vis scripts and APIs. I didn’t know how to answer him. Clearly he is ignorant of any browser vendor commitments relating to W3C standards. I was in the middle of crafting a style sheet that would add some font beauty and goodness to this execrable hell-hole Mr. Paynter calls his blog, and he interrupts me regarding some social media teapot tempest that has no meaning for him or for me. Then, rather than excuse himself gracefully, he had the temerity to ask if he could bring me some dinner from Swami’s Cafe. I don’t know whether he was joking, pulling my chain as it were, or simply offering to do me a favor. I’m on contract here, my services provided through a contracting firm. I don’t know how to share my disquiet with my agent. I am concerned that any complaint I might make would be bad for my reputation. Perhaps I will discuss it directly with Mr. Paynter when he returns from Encinitas.

It hasn’t been easy making sense of the hodge-podge of hosting services, blogging software, formatting tools and plain old garbage that Mr. Paynter surrounded himself with back in the days when he was actively blogging. This workstation he’s provided for me is absurdly over-configured. One needs no more than an internet connection, an FTP client, a browser and a simple editor (vi would suffice). I think the Mona Lisa was painted with less. I’m sitting in front of two monitors–one a wide screen–wired into a so-called “Personal Computer” with more processing power and data storage than was available to the entire NASA enterprise when they put those guys on the moon. A browser? There are four different flavors of browser on this machine. Thankfully none of them is Safari. The FTP client points at two different hosting services and a half dozen domains on those services. Sadly, this blog’s domain is hosted by GoDaddy. I’ve spoken with Mr. Paynter about how politically incorrect that is, not to mention confusing; but years ago he bought into the GoDaddy thing before he realized the implications of doing business with Bob Parsons, a sexist and an elephant killer of the first water. I may not be able to influence him to change web hosts at this late date.

Many years ago, when I had just matriculated at what was then called Banaras Hindu University (now IIT, Varanasi), the bloggers were climbing aboard the WordPress bandwagon. Mr. Paynter, whose blogs seem to have been contrived on every piece of software ever written, of course hopped on this bandwagon, and after a year or two he adopted a theme called “Cutline” by Chris Pearson. Cutline was clean and simple and it actually worked. Somewhere along the way, Mr. Paynter seems to have written Mr. Pearson a check for a new theme called Thesis. It was about this time that Mr. Paynter’s writing ended and his time began to be taken up by a futile attempt to understand the ins and outs of Mr. Pearson’s newer software.

Now I have graduated from IIT, I have my green card, and I am working for Mr. Paynter. Perhaps some day soon this blog will begin to look more respectable and less like a hog wallow.

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.
Hunter S. Thompson

The Columbia Journalism Review has cranked up The News Frontier Database, “…a searchable, living, and ongoing documentation of digital news outlets across the country.” They launched with a list of about fifty digital news sites, the beginning of an ambitious effort to catalog sites that meet the following criteria:

1. Digital news sites included in the NFDB should be primarily devoted to original reporting and content production.
2. With rare exceptions, the outlet should have at least one full-time employee.
3. The digital news site should be something other than the web arm of a legacy media entity. (There’s no doubt that some of the most important online journalism is being produced by the websites of newspapers and other legacy media, but this database is devoted to a new kind of publication.)
4. The digital news site should be making a serious effort to sustain its work financially, whether that be through advertising, grants, or other revenue sources.

That third criterion helps the database administrators focus, but it does little to advance the cause of gathering information about online news. Surely “legacy” online publishers that shift from print to pixels deserve recognition. And those who augment their dead tree efforts with electronic publications are among the most informative, best positioned news outlets online. (Click here for the list of outlets in the CJR database.)

Five years ago “The Media Consortium” was organized. Participants in the consortium must have

• A journalism-driven mission
• Staff and organizational capacity to participate in projects that benefit the organization and the Consortium
• The commitment of senior leadership to personally participate in Media Consortium activities, projects, and meetings
• A mission that promotes progressive ideals

When I heard about the CJR database, I thought it would be interesting to see how many of the Media Consortium members were listed. The CJR list includes a lot of familiar sites, some of them liberal. For example CJR lists Slate, Salon, The Huffington Post, TPM, and Politico. But the only Media Consortium member they list is Grist. Several of the consortium members are disqualified by the CJR criterion number 3 (“…something other than the web arm of a legacy media entity”). Among these, I suppose, would be The American Prospect, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Progressive. But, while the CJR database is in its early days exclusion of the entire consortium membership except for Grist betrays a blind spot when it comes to progressive media. There are dozens of high-profile local, regional, and global news sites that meet the CJR criteria that aren’t listed yet. Among the Media Consortium sites that could qualify as web journalism pioneers and important to include in any catalog “new media,” or digital journalism efforts are: Afro-Netizen, Alternet, Campus Progress, Chelsea Green, Democracy Now, Feministing, Reproductive Health Reality Check, Truthout, and Workers Independent News.

These two sources, Columbia Journalism’s News Frontier Database and the Media Consortium, have each listed 50 emerging media news sources. It’s amazing that the only site they have in common is Grist.

…reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio —Howl

Looking for some online clues about Newt’s intention to announce for the Presidency in March–spurred on by secret knowledge of gubernatorial catalyzed strikes, work stoppage, labor betrayal–angry, yet bemused by Republican attitudes about the law and how it need not apply to them, I stumbled into wood s lot and looked no Further than this link which today tops the column of Mark’s ever changing content: The Allen Ginsberg Project.

The Ginsberg blog–its sidebar replete with streaming audio, streaming video, links to critical essays, interviews, articles, photographs, research, memorials, tributes and a robust collection of the poetic works of Ginsberg and his friends–featured this week a post about the Gibney film at Sundance…

Being behind a camera, in front of the camera, is my own little deconstructionist niche.

— Joshua Leonard

The first issue of Popular Linguistics, an online magazine, is now available for people who enjoy that sort of thing. For me, an unbridled malefactor in the realm of lay-lie-lay, an unapologetic apostrophe punter, and some would say a comatose abuser of commas, the welcome mat may not be out. But I expect Beth, with her memories of Edinburgh and Austin and her adoration of most things Language Log will spend some time enjoyably immersed in the pixels presented by editor and publisher Douglas S. Bigham. Bigham says he hopes to serve a general, educated, scientifically-inclined audience, the same type of readers who, for example, enjoy Scientific American or Discover. (Popular linguist and wearer of the Safire crown, Ben Zimmer welcomed the new linguistic populist at Language Log yesterday).

The pseudonymous “Language Hat” on his eponymous blog also welcomed the new arrival yesterday. Many of those who commented on that post share my discomfort with the white on black typography. Bigham promises a shift to something easier on the eyes in the February issue.

Intention is the core of all conscious life. It is our intentions that create karma, our intentions that help others, our intentions that lead us away from the delusions of individuality toward the immutable verities of enlightened awareness. Conscious intention colors and moves everything.
— Hsing Yun

From 2024 until her death in the spring of 2024, Michelle Goodrich used her blog to teach some of us about design. Recently a visitor came here to Listics from the web archive, where Mandarin Meg’s blog lives on.

Michelle enjoyed serendipity. She was amused by coincidence. She liked it when we shared things we found bubbling up around the web, things that seemed somehow synchronous, or things that tickled our sense of deja vu. Here are a few of those things that happen to be stuck in my browser right now, today.

* * *

Meg Pokrass, a new Facebook friend and a flash fiction writer made this…

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Elsewhere, Ashleigh Burrows, a Tucson “elder blogger,” was seriously wounded in the Arizona massacre this weekend. Here is her daughter’s update.
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I’ve been a fan of Paul Ford since the nineties. Paul’s a techie and a fine writer and editor. He’s metro-textual. His most recent piece, “Why Wasn’t I Consulted,” tickles me eight ways from Sunday. It’s worth reading just to get context for his neologism, “the Gutenbourgeois.” Read it here. Learn and laugh!

Somehow related to Paul Ford’s understanding of the web and the persistence of Mandarin Meg’s work, is this New York Times article about a so-called “digital library race.” Oddly, the information is presented in the Business section. Fortunately, not everyone subscribes to the bizarre American ritualistic competitive model. Though the Times laments a “digital library divide,” most of us can simply be grateful for the work that’s being done, take advantage of the collections at Google books or theeuropeanlibrary.org, browse the Library of Congress 16 million item “American Memory” collection, and bear in mind that while old business models for electronic publishing (see JSTOR) hold us back from full participation in this amazing global sharing of the fruits of our cultures, ever more work is available via open access.

Walt Whitman's Cardboard Butterfly from the Library of Congress

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Meanwhile, back in the kitchen… it remains my good intention to mix up my very first batch of English muffins or crumpets today. There’s a first time for everything, but sometimes inertia is hard to overcome and I find myself reading the cookbook instead of cooking. For example, here are some of interesting food bloggers that I’ve been following (instead of baking): Mango and Tomato, One Bite at a Time, Florida Girl in DC.
* * *
And really, there is a lot of other cool stuff on the Interwebz… take for example:

• How Paul Krugman found Politics (The New Yorker)
• The quantified self (a narcissist’s dream come true!)
• ZOMG Science (I’ll never stop linking unless they stop thinking!)
• Quashie (The approachable negro is in!)
• Everything is falling apart (Confirming your worst nightmares)
• Documents that reference Blackwater from Wikileaks current release (no wonder everyone’s in a tizzie)
• …and more, oh so much more…

But for now, play her off keyboard cat!

To: David Larson, Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Cc: Brian Binney, Asst. General Counsel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

July 30, 2024

Dear Deputy Director Larson,

First, thank you for taking my call Thursday, and congratulations on your imminent retirement after so many years of service. It’s unfortunate that on such an otherwise happy occasion I must inform you that the Bureau’s reading of 18 U.S.C. 701 is both idiosyncratic (made especially so by your strategic redaction of important language) and, more importantly, incorrect.

I’m writing you, of course, regarding your recent letter reiterating the Bureau’s invocation of 18 U.S.C. 701 and your demand for removal of the image of the FBI Seal on Wikipedia (images of which are widely available elsewhere, including on the Encyclopedia Britannica website, last I checked). You may recall that in my initial email response to your estimable Assistant General Counsel, Mr. Binney, I pointed to cases construing Section 701 and that, in a subsequent email, I broadly hinted that ejusdem generis, a standard accepted canon of statutory construction, demonstrates that this statute is inapposite to the use of an image of the seal on an encyclopedia.

It’s clear that you and Mr. Binney took the hint, although perhaps not in the way I would have preferred. Entertainingly, in support for your argument, you included a version of 701 in which you removed the very phrases that subject the statute to ejusdem generis analysis. While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version of Section 701 that you forwarded to us.

In your letter, you assert that an image of an FBI seal included in a Wikipedia article is “problematic” because “it facilitates both deliberate and unwitting violations” of 18 U.S.C. 701. I hope you will agree that the adjective “problematic,” even if it were truly applicable here, is not semantically identical to “unlawful.” Even if it could be proved that someone, somewhere, found a way to use a Wikipedia article illustration to facilitate a fraudulent representation, that would not render the illustration itself unlawful under the statute. As the leading case interpreting Section 701 points out, “The enactment of § 701 was intended to protect the public against the use of a recognizable assertion of authority with intent to deceive.” United States v. Goeltz, 513 F.2d 193 (1975). Our inclusion of an image of the FBI Seal is in no way evidence of any “intent to deceive,” nor is it an “assertion of authority,” recognizable or otherwise. If you read the cases construing Section 701, you find they center on situations in which defendants represented themselves as federal authorities. I think you will be compelled to agree that the Wikimedia Foundation has never done this.

May we talk a little bit further about ejusdem generis and your creative editing of the statute? I have reproduced the full statute below. (It is helpfully titled “§ 701. Official badges, identification cards, other insignia” – I note that your idealized version of the statute omitted the section title.)

Certain words that you redacted, which are central to the interpretation, are bolded and underlined for your convenience:

Whoever manufactures, sells, or possesses any badge,
identification card, or other insignia, of the design prescribed by
the head of any department or agency of the United States for use
by any officer or employee thereof, or any colorable imitation
thereof, or photographs, prints, or in any other manner makes or
executes any engraving, photograph, print, or impression in the
likeness of any such badge, identification card, or other insignia,
or any colorable imitation thereof, except as authorized under
regulations made pursuant to law, shall be fined under this title or
imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

The underlined words are conclusive proof that the canon of statutory construction ejusdem generis applies. Under that principle, “where general words follow specific words in a statutory enumeration, the general words are construed to embrace only objects similar in nature to those objects enumerated by the preceding specific words.” Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams, 532 U.S. 105, 114-15 (2001). Courts use ejusdem generis in conjunction with common sense and legislative history to discern the legislature’s intent in writing a statute.

You will note that the phrase “or other” precedes the word “insignia”, both of which follow the enumerated items “badges” and “identification cards.” This constrains the definition of insignia to those objects which are similar in nature to badges and identification cards. This definition comports with case law interpreting 701. As I have noted above (I’m requoting this passage because I truly love it), “the enactment of section 701 was intended to protect the public against the use of a recognizable assertion of authority with intent to deceive.” United States v. Goeltz, 513 F.2d 193, 197 (10th Cir. 1975) (contrasting political use of insignia with defendants’ conduct, which “was of the dirty-trick variety and was for the purpose of enraging its victims”). Badges and identification cards are physical manifestations that may be used by a possessor to invoke the authority of the federal government. An encyclopedia article is not. The use of the image on Wikipedia is not for the purpose of deception or falsely to represent anyone as an agent of the federal government. Using both ejusdem generis and common sense, we can see that 701 does not apply to the use of an image on an online encyclopedia.

Finally, while I sympathize with your footnoted desire to claim that “the plain meaning” of the statute supports your broad view of Section 701’s scope, we note that you specifically removed the language that communicates the plain meaning of “other insignia.” In context, this seems an ironic stroke.

In short, then, we are compelled as a matter of law and principle to deny your demand for removal of the FBI Seal from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. We are in contact with outside counsel in this matter, and we are prepared to argue our view in court.

With all appropriate respect,

Mike Godwin
General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation