I’d like to join in the commentary about MSN spaces, but two things keep me from getting past the home page.

First, I’d have to open a Passport account to join. Once Microsoft dropped its attempt to make Passport a worldwide digital ID standard I lost my rational reasons for refusing to participate. Now all I have are my irrational reasons, but they seem to be doing the trick.

Second, I’m uncomfortable with the imagery it uses on its home page.

Pretty girls making kissy-face? Please!

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Would you make someone named RageBoy your Chief Blogging Officer? Look, fellas, you went into this with your eyes open. When the sick bastard turns on you, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.

In short, congratulations! The blog is – rather brilliantly – not about HighBeam, the sponsor. It’s about Chris burrowing into ideas he’s interested in, incorporating information found via HighBeam. So, we get to watch over Chris’ shoulder as he works on his next book, which has nothing to do with his sponsor. HighBeam shines the more brightly by being reflected through Chris’ interests.

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Frank asks. A bunch of us answer. It seems to boil down to: What a cool way to hang out together!

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Fascinating post today by Mitch Ratcliffe on a topic near and dear to me: facts, news and Wikipedia. Here’s a snippet from his concluding paragraphs:

If WikiNews editors acted as a peer-review committee and called out shortcomings in fact-checking or the accuracy of facts, this could be a powerful enhancement to multiple versions of events that helped the reader decide for themselves what actually happened. But reducing a report to a single version, especially based on contributions from people who were not actually there to record the event, is of questionable value.

It’s a long-ish, thoughtful post and I wish I didn’t have meetings all day so I could respond instead of just linking. I haven’t sorted out my thinking very well about these topics, as Urs Gasser pointed out to me yesterday, and Mitch’s post is helpful. (BTW, thank you, Urs.)

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Just a reminder that tonight I’m leading a session at the Harvard Berkman Center on the question “What’s ours on the Web?” It’s about why some sites feel like ours and others don’t, and what this might tell us about what an “us” means. I’m going to try to post more about that this afternoon.

I wrote a bit about it here, and got some excellent comments. Peter Merholz took issue with the premise here.

The session is 6-7:15pm at the Baker House, 1587 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge. Here’s a campus map. All are invited and pizza is served.

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Glenn “Unsolicited Pundit” Fleishman was on public radio today talking about Firefox and security. Here’s the Real Audio.

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Technorati (disclosure) has a beta of a bookmarklet that will show you what the blogs Technorati indexes (all 4.7M of them) are saying about the page you’re on. It’s a painless way to expand your bloguniverse, not to mention the endless, both-hands-on-the-keyboard masturbatory ego surfing! (Dave Sifry of Technorati refers to it as a favlet, which may be different than a bookmarklet, except like a bookmarklet, it sits in your bookmarks and excutes a teensy bit of code whenever you select it.) (Found via Joi.)

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“Bo ke” is a Chinese neologism for “blogger.” New Scientist has a fascinating article by Xiao Qiang about the growth and importance of blogs in the Middle Kingdom. Snippet:

Blogs play an important role in republishing and spreading information as quickly as it is banned from official websites. One example of this played out in September when China’s most influential bulletin board, Yitahutu, was closed down by the net police…

After the closure, all the major university bulletin boards were instructed to delete any discussion of the event. Even the name of the site was censored from Chinese search engines.

But the net police found it much harder to purge discussion of Yitahutu’s closure in the blogosphere. Bloggers are quick to find euphemisms so that they can continue conversation despite keyword filtering…

Lots more great info.

[Thanks to Scott Feldstein for the link.]

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I’m enjoying danah boyd’s articles over at Operating Manual for Social Tools. The new one is on why we bother telling a social networking tool who our friends are. (I’m blogging there, too. See the disclosure statement.)

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According to Luca de Biase, whom I got to hang out with at the Microsoft Search Schmoozefest, L’espresso ran an interview with me. It’s off the home page and I can’t find it, but it’s a pay site anyway. Besides, Luca has run the text of the interview, in Italian. (Apparenty, my Italian is fluent, although since I don’t read Italian, I can’t confirm that fact.)

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