The Road to WordPress

Some of you have noticed that our blog header changes daily. Neat, huh?

It’s been a lot of fun — and a big pain to do all of this. At the moment, the fiddling is done, the header looks right, and all of our old posts are here. Whew. Home Sweet Blog

Our move to WordPress from Blogger was inspired by the fact that WordPress is just a much more flexible software package, particularly if you go with a “non-hosted” version of WordPress. This means that there are all sorts of custom things that we can do with our blogging software – like having certain posts not go out to the entire world (more on that later). It also means that we can keep control of our content: it lives on our ISP, back in California, in Santa Rosa. We have a great relationship with them – they’ve been our ISP for 10 years or so – and we trust them. Do we trust Google? Well, no, not so much. And Google IS Blogger. So, our content is in the hands of a company we trust, and we can manage it better and more easily.

It took me awhile to make up my mind about this move, though, not least of which is because WordPress is almost too flexible. Not that I don’t appreciate the complexity – I am, after all, an experienced computer programmer – but that it allows for something which I find a little bit … ethically challenging: it allows for the editing of comments by the owner of the blog. This is not possible on Blogger blogs, which only allow for the deletion of comments, not for their editing. [But see 1, below.]

To me, when someone comments, they own that comment. As the owner of the blog, I have the right to remove comments for whatever reason, but I generally do not, in particular because I believe that you, as participants in this community, have a right to be heard, and not to have me attempt to make you sound other than you actually are. WordPress blurs this line – the line of ownership of the comment vs. ownership of the site upon which the comment is posted – in that WordPress allows the blog owner to change the comment. This is troublesome to me, in part because of an incident I had with a blogger editing my comment, and changing what I had actually intended to say. (I have never returned to their blog.) It’s troublesome, also, because of what it says about the concept of ownership, in the world of the Internet, which isn’t something I’d like to really get into here and now, because it’s an enormous issue. (Actually, I’d love to, as, because of my PhD, this is a fascinating topic for me, but I don’t want to spend the next hour typing about that subject, just to scratch the surface. Rather, see Remix, by Lawrence Lessig – it’s free, downloadable, and written in accessible language, and he’s one of the guys behind Creative Commons.)

You’ll note, though, that I referred to “you,” above. This is one of the troublesome aspects of the online world. We’re inclined to react and interact with participants as if they are human beings, even when they’re “anonymous.” This is problematic, because as it is, we’re only ever interacting with pseudonymous constructions: someone’s idea of what they wish to present to the world and what they want to share about who they are, with what they want to hide never even being an issue, because they are free to project whatever they would like onto this space, and we accept them as they are. That’s part of the hope of the internet, really. But it’s not a real-world thing, in particular as it allows for this feeling of being anonymous.

In the analog world, you could send anonymous letters. If they were threatening, you could go to great lengths to avoid discovery. It’s a terribly flawed assumption to think that “anonymous” means “untraceable” in the digital world. It’s even easier, in the online world, to track down the anonymous than it is in the real world, where you would need to contact some official, who could examine postmarks, or fingerprints, or what have you. Here, all anyone need do is to consult the record left behind when someone visits a particular site, to be able to say,

Hello to the “anonymous” reader from Concord, California, who, having read through 15 pages of our blog, felt that they could say that we hadn’t had any offensive comments from anonymous commenters. You should know that your ISP provides us with your IP address, and tells us your address to within about 5 square blocks [but see 2].
Hello, also, to the “anonymous” person in Belfast! We hope that you’ve enjoyed visiting the San Fran Belfast blog (where you found the link to our site), and Flippin Yank (which, on a different day, you visited and clicked through to us).
Welcome also to Pablo y Anna, who came here from Chris’s blog after leaving her a comment. We hope that you’ll stay, and comment here some day.

Most people just do not have someone – a secretary, perhaps, or a letter carrier – to mediate between them and the world of receiving letters. In the anolog world, if someone writes you a nasty note, you’ve read it, and there’s nothing much that you can do about it. But that’s not what we’re talking about here, precisely: in the analog world, if someone wrote you a nasty letter, it wouldn’t be posted up in the living-room, for all to see – and to serve to intimidate conversation, to put a damper on honest dialog.

(You might also read Code 2.0, also by Lawrence Lessig and also free, for a deeper understanding of regulation via the use of code, and about anonymity in the ineternet world.)

Many people talk about the internet as if it were “the public square,” where everyone has a voice. This blog, however, is not “the public square,” but something more like, “our front porch.” Even so, if you were on my front porch, I’d be able to engage with a human – a single individual, even – no matter how much they attempted to disguise their identity.

There is one last reason for our moving our blog here, and that has to do with my PhD studies. I had been keeping a handy blog for my academic notes, but grew uncomfortable with having that amount of exposure to the public world. Who was reading it? Who was copying it? More than that, though, what constitutes “publication,” in this strange world where anybody can throw a blog out there and “publish?” Because, you see, part of a PhD is the writing of this massive paper – 100,000 words – which is supposed to constitute “an original work.” If it’s been “published,” it isn’t “original.” You see where this is going: if I keep on refining my ideas, in a public space, then I run the real risk of having someone accuse me of having already published that work elsewhere. It’s not a real fear, for my department … but there is no official, University-wide policy. The History department asserts that blogging is publishing. So, those of you in that department should be very wary of putting anything out publicly!

As of now, my academic stuff is in the “restricted” category – and it is incredibly boring to most everybody out there anyway, I’m sure. It’s on “our front porch,” for you who have registered to read, should you so choose, but don’t feel obliged. Pull up a chair and sit for awhile; the Hobbits are home.

[1] Comment changing on Blogger is possible, but it’s a bit of an exercise: you can copy the URL linking to the person’s profile, copy their comment text, delete the original comment, and then go in and post a comment from that user’s username and profile URL. It doesn’t show up as a Blogger icon, so it’s visible, but … not to the unaware.

[2] Anonymizing software might provide you with an alternate point of origination, beyond which you would be untraceable. It is possible that the “anonymous” commenter was not in Concord, but merely utilized a service with an origination point in Concord. It is unlikely, however, because such services ordinarily provide IP addresses from known ranks of IP addresses, and besides I don’t believe that one such thing exists from Concord.