So, SixApart made some incredibly stupidunfortunate business decisions about Certain Types of content yesterday. Lots of blowback all over the place; I first saw stuff on Warren Ellis’s site (this is his final word as I write this) and then Elf Sternberg posted (and there have been subsequent posts from Elf on the same topic). From what I can see standing on the edge of the community, seems like a lot of people are poised to up and move elsewhere.

Here’s the thing: this is the downside of the “user-generated content” “revolution” — it’s way too easy for somebody else to pull the plug on you with little to no notice. It has its own set of issues, but the next step up the Internet food chain — buying your own domain and getting it hosted somewhere — is a lot more resilient to this particular type of disruption. The problem is that the feature set of LJ isn’t, as far as I know, really available in a form you can use in a “hosted” fashion.

That’s where we come to the idea. It seems to me like, given that OpenID is mature and getting some traction, it should be possible to come up with some reasonably simple CGI that ties together some basic blogging functionality, some RSS pull/display capability, and a bit of access management, and bicketyBAM, instant distributed LiveJournal-ish-like thingy. The key here is that there aren’t any centralized servers where this runs, you’ve just got a whole bunch of people with CGIs on their own hosted domains and all the community interaction happens from the CGIs talking to each other, using OpenID to handle all the authentication/authorization issues. The real beauty is that, since LiveJournal supports OpenID, taking your existing LiveJournal community with you shouldn’t be a big deal — which was a concern for Elf and I bet for a lot of other people. Pair this with a tool that scrapes your old content out of your LiveJournal and dumps it into the new system, and you’ve just made it possible for people to jump off the LJ wagon.

One of you crazy college kids that just got out of school for the summer pick this up and run with it, okay? First version doesn’t have to be all that pretty, just has to be good enough to spread around and demo the idea for people; once that happens I don’t think you’ll have a big problem with contributors.

The Photoboof is another great photo-based art installation that was at Burning Man. (Do I even need to say NSFW? Probably not.)

The best Burning Man photo set I’ve seen so far is “What’s on your mind?” (some mild nudity here and there, so may not be completely SFW…)

I have a hypothesis about online communities, which goes something like this: if you, as the moderator/owner/list-mom of an online community, find yourself in the position of having to say things like “Being an asshole is not acceptable behavior and will result in expulsion from this place” multiple times in multiple ways in some short interval of time, then that online community is already mortally damaged, whether you realize it or not.

I’m currently involved in a test of this hypothesis, unfortunately; something I have neither the time nor inclination for at the moment. I hope I’m wrong.

(Suggestions for dealing with “assholes in the midst” gratefully received.)

I’ve got one of the comp’d Flickr accounts to give away — if you’re interested, drop me a line and justify why I should give it to you…

At this weekend’s SIG-BEER I heard some interesting things about Linked In — anybody else out there using it and finding it valuable? If so, drop me a line and/or an invite…

Dan tagged me earlier today, so…

Total number of books I’ve owned: My OCD must be acting up, because I decided the most accurate way to answer this one was to try to get a current count and extrapolate from there. So, currently, there are at least 1150 books in our house — not counting TheChild’s story/board books (of which there are easily a hundred or more), and not counting the stuff that’s in the garage awaiting donation and/or give-away. Of those, about 250 are in my “to read” queue (a not quite completely disjoint set are in TheWife’s “to read” queue), and about 200 are trade paperback collections of comics — I mention that because I suspect some people wouldn’t count those as “real” books. Since I’ve had several cross-country moves, as well as a period in gradual school where I was heavily into used books to support my fiction habit, I’d estimate my lifetime total somewhere in between 2 and 4 times our current load.

(Trees hate my damn guts.)

Last book I bought: Impulse purchase, this past Friday: ORA’s Javascript and DHTML Cookbook. Interestingly, Buzz Aldrin and Wendell Minor were in that very bookstore signing Reaching For The Moon; I decided the line was too long. If I’d known I was going to be writing this entry, I might have decided differently…

Last book I read: Currently reading several:

• Learning Perl, 3rd edition; one of the texts for the class I now may not be teaching this summer
• Higher Order Perl, to stretch my brain back out after the Llama,
• The Star Fraction, for our book group meeting the weekend after this upcoming one. (This is a half-fib: I’ve already read the book once, and haven’t actually cracked it again — yet. But it’s sitting right here, and I’m going to start once I post this.)

Last book I finished: I finished two on Sunday: Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd. ed. and Randal Schwartz’s Perls of Wisdom. I’d stalled out on both of these, so I took some time Sunday and pushed on through to the end of both.

Five books that mean a lot to me: In no particular order:

• House, Tracy Kidder — This was a text in a class that TheWife and I had together in college, before we even really knew each other. Special because of that connection as well as because of the interesting content.
• Microserfs, Douglas Coupland — I read this in gradual school, right as my dissatisfaction with what I was doing was starting to really peak. In some ways, this was like a John Hughes movie of all the cool stuff it seemed like I was missing out on. Also has the best description of geek motivation — the 1.0 imperative — evah.
• The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein — There’s lots of Heinlein I could have picked, but this is my stone-cold favorite.
• Learning Perl, 2nd edition, Randal Schwarz et al. — The book mostly directly responsible for where I am today, in a professional sense.
• Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson — The modern gonzo comic and essential guide to understanding today’s media culture. I’d pick a favorite volume out of the eleven, but it would just change tomorrow, so what’s the point?

Five people Id like to see to do this as well: I’d have picked Lyn too, but Dan beat me to it, so I’ll spread the joy a bit:

• Eric (Snowdeal.org)
• Rafe (rc3.org)
• JenB (Divinest Sense)
• Glen (Immediacy)
• David Chess