And, now that my traffic has spiked to previously-unseen levels... Sarah and I are off to Baltimore! I'll try to check in and update if needed. Expect some photos from Mosaic and Ian and Brooke's wedding. I'll be DJing before, between, and after Calf Mountain Jam in addition to handling to music during the service. Should be an interesting set... I have a ton of afrobeat, dub, jazz, hip hop, and house to throw down. :)

In other news, the fifth season of The Sopranos arrived today.

They have a bear in their back yard.

Finally, the Citeseer dataset that I was working on ran in to a snag... it seems that all the data that we presumed was in the format used by Berkeley DB is, in fact, in some other kind of data file that far more experienced people than I are totally befuddled by. The Citeseer system uses a mix of C, Perl, and Berkeley DB and requires a fairly complicated install process, so I'm wondering whether the install package has the data stored in some format that needs to be "unpacked" when the system is actually installed and started up. Regardless, while my superiors contact The People Who Know I'm going to play with some XSLT on a different part of the project. Haven't done that in a while, so it should be a nice refresher and definitely an opportunity to expand my skills. That's what it's all about, really... well, that and beer/sushi/paneer money.

Either way... I'm out, buddy.

(Yo, what happened to "peace?")

PEACE!

For my study (200kb PDF) I looked at the comments thread associated with Kos' January 17th post on blog ethics. Male participants dominated the discussion, being both more numerous and more frequently responded to than their female counterparts; of the 119 participants, 27 (21%) were identified as female, 80 (67%) were male, and 12 (10%) were of unknown or indeterminate gender. Though 51% of the comments made by male participants (79 out of 154 comments) were responded to, only 28% of the comments by women elicited a response (16 out of 56). What was most interesting was that there was no apparent cause for this disparity in the comments themselves.

Males and females made humorous or provocative comments at roughly the same rate, for example, and when they were responded to the "quality" of those responses was similar (i.e. a flame from a woman is as likely to receive a flame in response as a flame from a male)... but they weren't responded to at the same rate. The literature related to this kind of analysis shows that men tend to adopt a combative conversational approach in forums like DailyKos and that female participants in male-dominated forums often adopt male norms, so what we see here is that, on DailyKos, playing by the same rules doesn't necessarily mean that you'll get the same response... or any response at all.

Now, I should note a couple of things. First, this was a preliminary study. I only looked at one thread and, ultimately, I'll be looking at threads on many sites from across the political spectrum to get an idea of the medium rather than make an assessment of the gender dynamics on DailyKos, specifically. Second, there certainly weren't any examples of overt sexism in the thread and I am not suggesting that there's some super secret cabal of misogynist assholes pulling the strings at DailyKos. A third, related point is that I have been a DailyKos reader for a long while, starting some time before the Iraq war. I check it more times a day than I care to admit and I think it does a lot of good... but what does the apparently inexplicable marginalization of female participants say about the degree to which the site is reaching its potential to build the netroots?

We hear an awful lot about how blogs are different, an inherently democratizing medium that will break down all these boundaries, steal fire from heaven, heal the poor, feed the sick, and generally make things better. The problem is that we've heard that about every electronic medium to come down the pike, from email to Usenet, BBS to AIM, and in every instance we've seen that the same divisions that have an impact on our offline lives have a way of making themselves known online as well. This is not to say that blogs aren't a wonderful innovation, but we need to keep their potential pitfalls and limitations in mind when we use them.

The effective application of the medium for political organizing, an application that reaches as broad an audience as possible and engages them as activists rather than readers, hinges on spanning the boundaries that exist within the Democratic Party. There's certainly something to be said for tuning content to a given audience; it's what blogs do best. But for one of, if not the most popular and influential progressive blogs to sideline a core constituency, both actively and passively, can only be described as dereliction of duty. It's all well and good to say, "I'm not going to be everything to everyone," but being at the top means additional scrutiny and, dare I say it, the responsibility to be a good steward and bring the disparate threads of the progressive blogosphere together.

I need to watch Dune again sometime soon. So much sample fodder. Ooooo... maybe for the next Improv Mix?

Anyway, as you can see below, I sat in on Howard's intellectual freedom seminar this morning. It was a good class, good discussion. I was consistently unable to fit it in to my schedule for one reason or another the entire time I was here... frustrating. But today's class was good; after the notes ended, I talked a bit about Creative Commons and a few other things. A nice way to spend the morning. Shouts to Howard for having me in.

Much of the afternoon was spent digging around in Berkeley DB documentation (Hmmmm that's different from the version I was looking at... gotta compare the two) and otherwise digging through this dump of Citeseer data that we're working on for Katy.

Now, Unix homework. :)