"The Ravine" is the name I've attached to the space associated with this account on mine on Diigo, and associated pages elsewhere. Think of it as a site that spills over several servers.

This link takes you to the main page for that distributed site.

If you'd like to be notified of updates to my bloglike (blogish?) homegroup on Diigo, and you have a Yahoo account, you should join this community.

Just sign into Mybloglog with your Yahoo account, if you haven't set up a Mybloglog account already, and you should be ready to run in about a minute. Just remember to click on "my home" and look at your own page before trying to set your nickname in IE, because of a small bug in the system.

I just edited an old post on a group, and noticed that Diigo has jumped onto the bandwagon and started adding rel=nofollow to all outbound links in its groups. Guys, please stop doing that.

The standard argument for using nofollow is that its use deters spammers, even if the rate of spammage would seem to have increased since the introduction of nofollow. This belief can easily be seen to be nonsense by anybody who has ever waited for one of his sites to appear in the search engines listings. Why? Because that process can take months, sometimes even years, and spam sites don't tend to live that long. Within weeks of a site being so promoted, sometimes even within days, complaints about the spam will have gone in to the service hosting the site and to the site's registrar by the truckload, and the site will be gone. Only to be replaced by a brand new site at a brand new location, selling the same old stuff, as anybody who, out of perverse curiosity, has ever clicked on a link on a semi-old spam message (and then checked his newer e-mail) almost certainly has seen for himself.

Spammers work by getting large numbers of visitors to go to throwaway sites that won't live long enough to rise in the search engine ratings, so pagerank won't matter to them. Logically, it shouldn't, and if we take a look at spammer behavior following the introduction of nofollow, we find no evidence whatsoever that it does. It can, however, matter immensely to those who are trying to establish a web presence for themselves honestly, by doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing, that which the search engines are supposed to be encouraging them to do - by creating and posting content that people want to read and link to. Let's say that one of us posts content to a "black hole", a site that (like Diigo) has rel-nofollowed all outbound links, including the homepage links on our profiles. (Check it out - Diigo has done this). Let us say that somebody looks at the content, likes the content, and links to it. Diigo gets a search engine boost, but the person who took the time and did the work to create that content doesn't. Meaning that his other sites would have done better in the search engines if he had posted that content elsewhere, where nofollow wasn't being used.

In effect, he is being penalised for having chosen Diigo (or some other black hole) as the place where he would post his content. Nofollow hurts the legitimate poster, while having absolutely no direct impact on the spammer. But it can have an indirect impact, as one can see by looking at services like Simpy, where the spam has taken over.

Think of the difference between being the one guy who's speeding while everybody else is staying below the limit, and being that same guy when everybody else is doing 85, too. You're still breaking the rules, and you still know that (theoretically) you can be slapped down for that, but there's a great feeling of safety in numbers. As the ratio of spam to legitimate content goes up, the spammers get bolder and more aggressive, as anybody who has ever been away from a forum he moderated for a little too long knows - spam tends to snowball, and probably for the same reason that the number of speeders will start to soar after a point; because one's chances of being one of the people grabbed and sanctioned are dropping. The life expectancy of one's spam is rising, and the profitability of it is doing likewise in the process, a thought that will lure more spammers in to take advantage of this opportunity.

There's the indirect impact on the spammers - by undercutting the incentive given to one's legitimate contributors, one helps create a friendlier environment for those spammers, which perhaps is why the rate of spammage has gone up since the introduction of nofollow. The law of unintended consequences has kicked in with a vengeance, and why wouldn't it? If somebody, in "real life" (offline) decides to treat all of his visitors as if they were scofflaws, hardly anybody is surprised when he eventually finds himself surrounded by nothing but scofflaws; honest men expect to be treated with respect. Why should life work any differently online? Because treating us all like we're spammers, even after we've proved that we're not through months or years of honest posting, isn't even remotely respectful. Even if it is fashionable.

Yes, I know that dealing with spammers can be exhausting, and I'm sure that one will be greatly tempted to believe that a shortcut can be found to doing that tedious, emotionally unrewarding task, much the same way as some of us would like to believe that we can find a fun way of getting around the need to do cleanup in the lab, or that's there's some diet that allows one to lose weight and reduce one's cholesterol while eating all of the steak, bacon and chocolate one wants, maybe by nibbling a few acai berries or something like that. But reality is what it is, and it either gets dealt with on its own terms, or it gets worse. Sometimes, a lot worse.

One doesn't win popularity points by reminding people of this, but it is the truth.

Returning to one of the rings to which my group on Diigo, named "The Ravine", belongs.

Link made necessary because the Diigo staff did not have the foresight to provide us with a homepage link option for our groups, and Webring insists that all pages on one's site be within two clicks of a ring, with an easy path back to the ring. Therefore, I must create this link, put it into the pool for that group, and then never have another link entered there, ever again, or at least very few, because otherwise the link back to Webring will get buried, and their support staff will not be pleased.

Sigh. What can one do? Staff at Diigo - when you have time, please consider the possibility of a little added functionality in this area.

Proper credit - where I found a few of the photo pages I've submitted to Ma.gnolia in the past, and now am about to mirror on Simpy and Diigo, as I wonder whether Ma.gnolia will ever come back. (I'm writing this on Feb.4, 2009; Ma.gnolia went down on Jan.30). When you see me refer to "Anatoly", this is the Stumbleupon blog of the Anatoly of whom I speak.

Chicago Photography is a group that I started and now run at Flickr, that is already a daily source of delight for me. What follows is a sampling of some of the images that have been submitted to the pool, along with credits and links back to the profiles of the photographers, where you can see more of their work. These are reductions of photos that, over on Flickr, were set to allow for the blogging of images, which is what you see me doing here. Click on them, and you'll get to the larger and more interesting fulll sized photos in their original locations. This is, I think, as it should be - the point of a page like this is to get you interested enough in some of these artists to go visit their pages, not to give you the feeling that you had already done so.

Quickly looking through the group's pool, I don't see any photos from her after that, but I hope she'll be back. She is still a member of the group, so perhaps she will be.

(More to come about the other members, but I'm getting a little light headed. A little dinner and I'll pick this up tomorrow)

Videos I've found on Youtube and other video hosting services follow below.

This is said to be radio noise picked up by Voyager as it approached Jupiter. I'll admit to a little initial skepticism about that - it sounds a little too smooth to be noise and the publisher is listed as "BRAIN/MIND Research", not NASA.

But at the very least, it is interesting background noise.

Going to a page on the NASA site called Sounds of Jupiter, we hear something that sounds more natural and less polished.

"Audio of Voyager 1 Crossing Jupiter's Bow Shock" (ie. where the solar wind is stopped by Jupiter's magnetic field) : here "Audio of Voyager 2 Passing Through Jupiter's Outer Magnetosphere": here "Audio of Jupiter's Lightning Taken By Voyager": here

There is still a lot of beauty to be found, but it's the rough beauty of the seashore, not the polished beauty of the art gallery. What raised my suspicions with the Youtube piece was the lack of anything that registered as static. If the sound in the video was based on something from Voyager, as advertised - at this point, I'm not saying that it was or it wasn't - at the very least, it was cleaned up considerably.



Fake or not, it still works as ambient music.

These are images others have made, which I've found on Flickr, DeviantArt and other places where photos and other artwork are hosted. I'll be blogging these with links back to the original locations, where you can see the full sized images, and a minimum of commentary, other than the credit being to the creators of the images.

How many different ways are there to say "I liked this piece and would like to thank the artist for having posted it"?

Somewhere my friends and contacts can gather on Diigo to talk about whatever they feel like talking about, as long as it is good taste and they stay reasonably civil.

Link to the complete page of my bookmarks, created so that I could link my homegroup to that page, for the sake of easier navigability, the two being tied together, as I've explained elsewhere, the homegroup being used for elaboration on subjects and points raised on my bookmark page.

I have difficulty taking this one seriously, which might not be an utter surprise, given the fact that we're talking about a post about an alleged research project posted to a science fiction site. An unnamed "researcher" (identified elsewhere as Mark Holley of Northwestern Michigan College) claims to have found a Stonehenge like arrangement of boulders at the bottom of Lake Michigan. Looking at the picture included in the article, the only thing circular in it seems to be the field of view.

A thumbnail of what is said to be a sonar image of this supposed find can be seen below. How would you describe the distribution of the rocks you see in this image - as being a circular arrangement, or as something more linear, with a little random scattering - as one would expect to see if the river of ice that carved out the canyon that became Lake Michigan had melted, and dropped the rocks?

















How would a stone circle - were one present - end up at the bottom of a Lake that every child growing up near its shores knows was carved by glaciers? The article states "These submerged stones could have been raised by local populations at a time when part of the lake bed was dry, in the late Ice Age." Except that the Lake, again as we all grow up knowing, was initially filled with the water from the glacial melt, so there was no such time - the Lake has been retreating, not advancing, over the millenia.

Another user (lprnal) tries to make the blog writer's suggestion sound more reasonable than it is, saying "lake michigan has been shifting and evolving for quite a while now, and sometimes it's not slow at all. For example in the door peninsula, there are bluffs which are quite high you can stand on, that used to be right on the edge of the water.", but again, this is not due to the ground around the lake moving, but to the level of the lake dropping.

So I found this all quite strange.

Note: Those who wish to read the article itself, which I've bookmarked, should follow this link:

http://io9.com/5130669/another-stonehenge-discovered-under-lake-michigan


and continue from there. Ma.gnolia, where the Ravine was original set up a few days before the fun of January 30, 2009 (ahem! cough!) doesn't (didn't?) allow us to edit links in discussion group posts after the fact, so I'll be making lavish use of offsite redirect pages over there to allow me to update links as needed. Maybe.

Assuming that Ma.gnolia ever manages to get back online. As for here, I'm still learning how the Diigo system works, so I don't know what's needed on this site. That I can embed photos in the text, instead of referring the visitor to images elsewhere as one must at Ma.gnolia, and use some html, comes as a pleasant surprise.

This is a group, but this is not a discussion group. This is more an extension of my profile.

Right now, the name of this group is "The Ravine". It is a possible replacement for a group at Ma.gnolia by that name, which I had just created when Ma.gnolia went away on January 30. This event came as a great surprise to all of us, the owner included, who seems like a decent enough fellow. While I'm inclined to give Ma.gnolia and Mr.Halff another chance, at this point none of us know when or even if that site will ever return. I hope it does, but one has to make contingency plans.

This group and my membership on Diggo, together, are my contingency plan. Regardless of what happens with Ma.gnolia, both will be put to good use. All that will change, should Ma.gnolia come back, is what that good use will be.

What is the purpose of having such a group? We could think of my profile at Diigo as being a kind of blog. I am not that excited by the thought of giving you and endless series of bookmarks, just standing alone as bookmarks. I want to talk about what I saw on the sites I bookmarked, and maybe go on a few tangents which I find interesting. Some of those tangents might be ones that you find interesting, but maybe they won't all be so. The problem with the straight blog format is that it presents the reader with a strictly linear format - section one follows section two follows section three for everybody, whether everybody wants to read section two or not. This, I always found strange, because blogs were invented after the advent of HTML, so why take what was one of the worst limitations of the fora during the all text era, when the limitation was inescapable, and impose it on a more technologically advanced modern medium like a blog?

What I attempt to do is couple what is the strength of the blog format - the reverse chronological order of the postings always taking visitors to what is the freshest material present, without making them wade through old material to find it - with the strengths of webpages and other less linear sorts of pages, one of which is that of offering the reader a chance to be more selective about which points he will read about at length. The way I plan to do this is so simple, that I'm surprised more people don't do it - I'm going to create a series of little "consumable" sites or pages that expand on this point or subject or that, linking to them from the blog, having them link back so that when the reader is done, he finds himself back on the blog. With more standard HTML pages, the way to do this is to organize the little sites into sub-articles, in the form of strings small html pages that loop back and drop the reader off an a central homepage for the site - which is how most sites tend to work.

More about this, when I get up. It is now 3:25 am, my time, and I need to get to bed. For now, I'll just say that this group is going to be part of that nonlinear component of the blog, of which I've been speaking.

If you entered this group, or any of my other groups or sites from a webring, one of the links below should help you get back to it.