Back in 2005 I found myself looking through the Dean blog archives and noticed that they'd gone missing for a time (they're back now-- with some comments missing here and there-- I know because I have a 500MB copy of it.) In 2006, I poked around the early DailyKos/MyDD archives, and was frustrated with how difficult they were to navigate (compound by the fact that the early MyDD posts are onl

I've implemented OpenID on this site. My friend Kaliya Hamlin (Identity Woman) has been helping this effort for a number of years, and when she passed along the news that Yahoo had joined the effort, I decided to get with the program.

As promised, I took the server crash of two weeks ago to be an oppurtunity. Previously, I had subconsciously stopped updating my "civ" Drupal extension modules as I was several revs behind. So this site was getting dull to read and navigate.

I have been hosting Civilities.net for close to four years. After tge first couple of months of finding my way through blog-like dribbles of posts, I posted a document Ethical and Stylistic Guidelines. I didn't know very much about the blogger vs.

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:

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:

Civilities.net has been upgraded to the latest version of Drupal, 4.6.3. It's been three long months since I connected with the Drupal and Bryght communities at the Open Source Convention in Portland, and I feel like I'd let the group down. Part of the recent motivation was an exchange with Lisa Williams on UniversalHub about the current state of "community journalism," following my Still Too Static article. Lisa runs a "hyperlocal" community site H2Otown for Watertown, Mass. and felt that the site would greatly benefit from the webzine module.

The logo is sharper. The old Civilities logo was a

I'm a software architect in Boston, Massachusetts. My day job is working for a software company in Cambridge 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"?

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:

It's now my 200^th 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.

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).

Periodicals:

• Slate (every day)
• New York Times (columnists every day, most of the Sunday Times)
• Salon (many days)
• Boston Globe (check Boston.com everyday)
• The New Yorker (subscribe weekly)
• Jewish Advocate -- Boston's Jewish newspaper (weekly)
• Brookline Tab -- weekly, 2-section community newspaper (read some each week)
• Campaign Desk -- Columbia Journalism Review campaign report (occasionally)
• Princeton Alumni Weekly (subscribe biweekly)
• Boston Phoenix (every few weeks I remember to pick up a copy)
• Atlantic Monthly (subscribe monthly)
• Hadassah -- The Women's Zionist Organization of America (monthly)
• Entertainment Weekly (some each week)
• Ha'aretz English Edition (rarely)
• The New Republic (occasionally)
• Metropolis -- design/architecture (I pick it up every now and then)
• no blogs -- only if I'm looking for something specific. None I really feel compelled to read day-to-day.
• tech trades (hardly ever I do read an occasional Tech Review)

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:

• The World with Lisa Mullins -- coproduction of BBC, PRI, WGBH
• NPR's All Things Considered
• MPR's Marketplace with David Brown
• MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann (some weeknights)
• WGBH's Greater Boston with Emily Rooney (some weeknights)
• If it's Sunday, it's NBC's Meet the Press

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.