Meetings, Usual Life Stuff, News

[tcpip]

Tomorrow evening I am speaking at the Melbourne Existentialist Society on "Autonomy and the Phenomenology of Nature and Property", which relates to an interest some fifteen years old in my persective; developing a political and economic outlook to existentialism. Next week (same location, same time) is the Melbourne Atheist Society, with Russell Blackford speaking on "Religious Vilification and Freedom of Speech", on which I've already stated my point-of-view in various forums (simply put: many racial and religious practises and beliefs and the people who espouse them are deserving of ridicule, contempt and even hatred; I encourage and incite others to express the same).

Work has mainly consisted of more server hardware builds and Xen installs along with transferring sites and mail to a new server. Jon Oxer is back onboard giving presentations and tutorials at OsCon. Social life has struggled a bit with caseopaya not being the most well critter this week. Played Ars Magica Festival of the Damned courtesy of Michael and ran Stormbringer Rogue Mistress.

Well-paid stupidity: Kevin Zuccato, head of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre in Canberra, says terrorists can gain training in games such as World of Warcraft in a simulated environment, using weapons that are identical to real-world armaments (from begedel). Paid users now can't avoid "ads" in livejournal (just call it 'sponsorship'. Welcome our new (armed) robot overlords in Iraq (from mundens). Russia is getting very serious about claiming the North pole (with some justification I may add). Finally, vale, Dr. Ellis, another hero of the human species.

Comments

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

IIRC the livejournal news link has someone pointing out the connection on the first page of comments.

Livejournal is being very daft. A fund should be establish to buy it off Six Apart. They have amazing levels of incompetence.

[angel80.livejournal.com]

Brad Fitz has now departed too.

And springheel_jack linked to a post yesterday on declining numbers. They now have only 200,000 people posting within the last day, a little more than half of the average number when 6A took it over.

As for other services, there are several using the LJ code - insanejournal, greatestjournal, deadjournal - and blurty. But there's hardly anyone on them.

It seems that 6A also owns typepad, which is also rumoured to be in trouble.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

LJs strength is the critical mass they have. Their loss is their managment.

The new places with lj's code will be fighting among themselves for the critical mass; whereas SA, apparently, will continue to alienate the customer base.

It's a rather depressing scenario.