Sumit’s Seattle Scribblings

After much hand-wringing, I’ve decided to move my blog.  I’ve thought about hosting it myself, but that will take time I don’t want to spend right now, so for the moment, I’m going to keep it over at MSN spaces, which is impressively full-featured given its freeness.  The new address will be http://spaces.msn.com/members/sbasu .  I’ll probably still post here occasionally to poke my friendsters about the fact that I have new entries, but not every time I post :)   The reasons why I’m moving the blog:

1.  Archiving.  Friendster only shows the last 10 posts, which is pretty annoying.  msn spaces archives all your entry, for free.   It also has trackbacks, which blogger (the other main free service) doesn’t have.
2.  No update emails.  Friendster sends a friendster message to all my friends telling them I’ve updated my blog, even when all I’ve done is fix a spelling error.  With msn spaces, those with an RSS feed will have the latest; others can surf by once in a while, and I’ll post digests on friendster occasionally so the non-RSS’ers can know things have been updated.
3.  Easy updating.  Updating the friendster blog is a huge pain - first logging onto friendster, then going to the blog gateway, both of which are incredibly slow.  For msn spaces, I can blog directly from the toolbar or from their website (which is pretty zippy).
4.  Media.  I can (and have) embed a media player into my space, so I can feature my latest song for people to listen to right within the browser (sorry mac and linux friends, this only works on windows).  I’ll still link to the song so everyone can listen, but being able to hit play in the browser is just convenient.
5.  Search engine indexing.  Msn spaces blogs are indexed by the major search engines, while friendster spaces are not. 

Now, the downsides, as there are always downsides:

1.  msn spaces don’t look great — yet.  I’m hoping they will soon allow for greater customizability in terms of appearance, especially in terms of custom images and the like.
2.  censorship.   Blog titles can’t contain the 7 FCC "bad words."  Originally, this was a bigger deal to me, as I thought it covered the entries, but it’s just the title, and since my dream of calling my blog "ass poop butt monkey"  has died for other reasons, I suppose this doesn’t bother me that much.   It’s still lame though.

For now, the balance seems to be in the favor of msn spaces, until I have the time and energy to host my own blog (don’t hold your breath :).  See you over there!

-Sumit

The Pew Internet and American Life Project is a research group that looks at how the internet affects and is affected by culture in America.   This particular report just came out and talks about how the current generation of teenagers are very much into "remixing content" from the internet, be it words, images, music, etc., mostly in the form of blogs.  The most exciting part to me, though, was the fact that the leader in the blogosphere among teens are teenage girls age 15-17:

Older girls ages 15-17 are the most likely to blog; 25% of online girls in this age group keep a blog, compared with 15% of older boys who are online. About 18% of younger teens of both sexes blog.

First off, it’s impressive that so many teens are blogging, but I think it’s spectacular that girls are taking the lead here.   My take is that for a long time, the entry point into the computer world has really been gaming, which is for the most part designed for boys (now, I know at least one amazing woman who is very much the exception here, but she knows who she is and she’s always the exception :).   Blogs, on the other hand, provide a very different outlet - now people can create a presence on the internet and become known and respected for it for reasons other than how many Dweebons they blew up on level Zogotreeb. 

You can download the full text of the study here: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/166/report_display.asp

My friend Candace is a Naturopathic Doctor (ND) and runs a nice practice here in Seattle called Crescent Natural Health.  I didn’t know much about naturopathic medicine before moving to Seattle, but have recently learned a good deal more, both because I met a few people who worked in the area and also because my parents began using some naturopathic treatments.    For those of you who are skeptical, I would say that drugs are drugs, whether they are made by Glaxo-Smith-Kline-AOL-TimeWarner or appear naturally in some plant or other.  The real question is whether there have been solid studies that confirm the efficacy of the drugs.   Candace can definitely help in this regard -  in addition to be a very level-headed and caring person, she is quite scientifically-minded, and will present you with hard evidence wherever possible.

You can find out more at http://www.crescentnaturalhealth.com/

Tomorrow night (tuesday) on Frontline will be a documentary on the erosion of Roe vs. Wade over the last thirty years and the current threats to abortion rights; the episode is called "The Last Abortion Clinic," and more information is available here:  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/clinic/ .  It’s a critical time for this critical issue - while early anti-abortionists were mostly radicals/fanatics and thus widely ignored for many years, they’ve quietly gained a lot of political ground in the last decade, especially in the politically powerful (though often overlooked) deep south. 

For those of us who want to preserve abortion rights, it’s very important to know how serious this battle is, who the players are.   Most of us are already aware that the real risk is not a sudden reversal of Roe vs. Wade, which is highly unlikely, but a slow erosion of rights through many small decisions.  Consider, for instance, the legislation from a couple of years ago which made the murder of a pregnant woman a double homicide - one for the woman, one for the unborn child.  Most congresspeople (including Democrats) sided with this law, since who wants to be seen as being against murdering pregnant women?  The insiduous aspect, though, is that it paves the way to give legal rights to the fetus - if killing a pregnant woman is two murders, killing the fetus alone must be one murder, right?  Well, not yet, but it’s definitely something to worry about.   

For those of you in the Seattle area, the documentary will air on KCTS (channel 9) at 10pm on tuesday (11/8) and 3am on friday night/saturday morning (11/12).  I plan to watch it at home (and probably record it); if you’re in the area and want to come over let me know.

In the last few weeks, I’ve received two kinds of feedback about my blog and the fact that friendster sends email notifications every time I make a post.   The majority of people have said it’s a nice reminder to go look at the blog and know that there will be something new to read.  On the other hand, a small but passionate minority has been greatly irritated by the excess of email that this generates.   Before I get started on the details though, I want to thank each and every one of you that has taken the time to read what I’ve been writing - you’re my friends, I love you, and it means a lot to me that you care about what I have to say.   That said, let’s get into the nitty and the gritty:

First of all, if you want to opt out, it’s easy - you can turn off the receiving of "friend updates" (more about them here: http://friendster.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/friendster.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=191) in your "Account Settings."  You’ll still get friendster message alerts, you just won’t get things like birthdays, blog updates, etc. 

Next, I must say it’s been interesting having a blog on friendster - in the last few weeks, many friends I’ve talked to at gatherings and parties have mentioned they’ve been reading my blog, presumably because they got the updates via email.   This is great - it makes me feel like it’s worth posting about interesting things, since people - in fact, people I care about - will actually come and read about it occasionally.   Also, I think the typical user out there is not (yet) using an RSS reader, so she/he has no other way to know when things have changed.

Regardless, I’m in the process of finding a longer-term hosting solution, though since I’ll probably going to be self-hosting, this may take a while.  Friendster is at best an "amateur" blog and has a variety of annoying characteristics, like only being able to show the last ten entries, only allowing comments from friendster members, etc.  However, they use typepad, which is a really nice interface, and it’s pretty darn easy to use.   And those email notifications - while annoying - do seem to be effective :)  Even once I find a more permanent hosting solution, I’ll probably post occasional "digest" entries on my friendster blog, just to broadcast out to all you friendsters that there’s new stuff to read!

I’d love to get your feedback on this; please leave me comments here or just send me an email/message.