2007
by Jon Garfunkel
As the occasional Civilities readers are no doubt aware, this publication is weighed down by a couple of realities: The editor tends to think big, and and the editor is not paid to do this. The editor is only person on staff, and that is me. I've also gotten in the consuming habit of tracking down obscure sources. As I can't compete on pace, so I try to compete on depth. I generally mine early Internet tracts and the occasional buried text. The general format I've settled into these days is a multi-part series of essays, usually around a thousand words each. So these are the various series I've been working on this spring: 2006
by Jon Garfunkel
An ex-girlfriend of mine once mentioned that her father had an idea to create a magazine that featured only letters-to-the-editor (it would be sold next to the coffee-table book about coffee tables, naturally). I’ve stopped trying to impress her now that she’s gotten married (not to mention some years passing) but I can still try to impress her father. Or get revenge by capitalizing on his idea. 2005
by Jon Garfunkel
Comments are back– after I had suspended them several weeks back when I upgraded to Drupal 4.6. And this after a half-year of promising them to various people. After a year ago at the Berkman Center conference where I promised that they’d be done "just in time for Christmas." After almost two years since I wrote the original prototyope for ViewPoints in Drupal. And after over four years when I first came up with the idea for ViewPoints. I’m still amazed that no one else has taken the idea and run with it. Anyways, you get the idea. Coding takes solid concentration, and I have to manufacture some time over the last several weeks to get this done. Perhaps a dozen articles have been on hold in the ensuing time. But we’ve got comments once again. For some reason it’s no longer preserving line breaks. But I have made several key improvements over the 2004:
by Jon Garfunkel
Categories: Drupal
by Jon Garfunkel
If you’ve been reading Civilities through an RSS reader, as 79 Bloglines subscribers presumably are, you may be missing some of the design changes I’ve introduced today. I really wanted to make the front page more pleasing to read on its own, and also get ready (or rather, procrastinate) for the long-overdue Drupal upgrade.
The logo is sharper. The old Civilities logo was a
by Jon Garfunkel
Last spring, I spent several weeks, and many hours at a time, putting together an essay which ultimately comprised eight parts and 14,000 words, titled The New Gatekeepers. One of the main themes was analyzing the architecture of the blogosphere, which I observed had stressed “immediacy over thoroughness.” I developed the argument that if we wanted a system to promote different values– favoring throughness over immediacy– we would have develop a different technology to do that. I had hoped to start that here on
Civilities. Unfortunately, my argument has been undermined by my having rushed the writing and editing of some of the series. There are five glaring problems which I wish to address.
by Jon Garfunkel
 I'm a software architect in Boston, Massachusetts. My day job is working for a Cambridge company that makes business process management software. A hobby of mine is doing research into media structures, the output of which you see here. What is "media structures"? In short, it's more than just "interactive" or "new" media– it's about the structures which underly such media, and how they affect how people communicate. I use my programming skills in PHP, Java, XML to build software, and all of it goes into Civilities.
by Jon Garfunkel
Dear Readers, I had dropped some hints last month that I’d be slowing my output considerably (as like last summer). I wanted my sleep back… But I’ll be, gettting up again at this ridiculous hour in one week when I catch a 6am flight to Portland by way of Dallas/Fort Worth (!), to get to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention for a reasonable fare. I’ll be helping out the Drupal booth and otherwise getting to know some of other folks who help develop this fine software. Unfortunately I won’t be making the BlogHer conference, but I’m still appreciative that my early contributions to it have been recognized by the conference organizers.
by Jon Garfunkel
I’m looking for a team to help me continue to keep Civilities relevant and moving forward. It’s been exhausting for a year-plus doing this all myself, and I need some assistance so I can concentrate more on the software parts. I’m especially looking for people who aren’t bloggers, that is, with have no prejudice about what online personal publishing should be. Here’s what the work here involves:
by Jon Garfunkel
It’s now my 200th post. My hundredth post was a year ago. It took me five months to get to that first hundred. I don’t expect to keep up that pace in the next year. But I have a hunch that many of you– my regular readers, which includes 54 bloglines subscribers— would like me to. I really want to get back to the coding that I put off a year ago. I’m looking to people
to help contribute editorial content. I’ll explain in the next part what I’m looking for, but I just want to expend a few words sharing with you how Civilities has evolved. Plus links to thirty-one pieces, some of which you may have missed.
2004
by Jon Garfunkel
Updated August 29, 2007. Going forward, the content on this website is now provided under the terms of U.S. Copyright law. All text and photographics are property of the author, and you may not copy the text as a whole without expressly gaining the permission of the author. Visual graphics that are screen captures of web pages or graphs are not claimed under the ownership of this site (you may use them without asking).
by Jon Garfunkel
This is my 100th post/essay, so I thought I’d have fun and reflect back. When I started thinking about putting together this website, we were enjoying fifty-degree weather in December. Now we have fifty-degree weather in May. In between were a lot of cold and rainy weekends and weeknights, which in small part kept me inside writing. Five months ago, I had just been clued in to the online Dean campaign, just as it was fading. I jumped into the online forums, but finding them ill-moderated, I withdrew and decided to develop my own site for “constructing informative viewpoints”.
by Jon Garfunkel
Here’s where I generally get my news. I thought I’d provide this as a bit of background to explain not just what I pay attention to, but what I don’t. It’s very likely that I’ve missed something because it was published somewhere else.
Periodicals:
Magazines I used to subscribe to, and may yet again:
- Economist (too thick)
- Harper’s Monthly (too polemic, too esoteric)
- Scientific American (not sure why I let the subscription run out)
Radio/TV:
Notes
I meet Jewish people who won’t listen to NPR or read the Times because they are “anti-Israel”. This is absurd. Such people are missing out on excellent journalism. It may be a defensible position to not donate or not buy a subscription; I don’t agree with it.
by Jon Garfunkel
Having written about forty articles so far, I thought it necessary to disclose some of the ethical and style considerations that I’ve been making while writing this site.
Categories: Internet | Language/Structure
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