Happy New Year from a small green keyboard in the sun!

I've returned to my oldest existing blog space to test the OLPC XO laptop and its browser (called "Browse") as tools for blog posting and editing. If you're reading this, the combination of XO and online editing works... and may inspire me to use this blog (or this one) more than my "main" one called Other Journalism, which depends on software that I've stuck with for years, but that isn't available for the XO.

The experience: I started writing this while sitting on my sunny back porch with the XO screen in "reflective" mode, which seemed appropriate for a New Year essay inspired by this New York Times article. The sun felt good and the screen was perfectly readable, but windchill affected my typing fingers enough to drive me indoors.

Even with cold fingers, I seem to be getting used to typing on the little green chicklet keyyboard. While it's too small for 10-finger touch typing, I've found a modified six-finger approach works. My breakthough was deciding to leave my thumbs out of it and assign my right index finger to the space bar. The six-finger "home" position that works for me is adf lkn (instead of asdf ;lkj). My typing teacher back at Post Junior College would be horrified.

Back to the business of blogging, which generally involves linking and quoting as well as typing one's own thoughts and observations:

• The XO can open more than one Browse activity at a time and can switch between them with a press of the alt-tab keys.
• Copy and paste work between those pages, so I was able to insert the Times link above and a block of quoted text from the New Year story that inspired this whole exercise.

The ideal New Year’s Eve party would come with a psychological voucher, redeemable the next day for a post-mortem session with friends. A chance to relish the night’s humiliations, take bets on who went home with whom, and nominate the guest most in need of therapy, present company included.

An opportunity, that is, to forestall the traditional morning-after descent into self-examination, that lonely echo chamber of what should and could be.

For me, this XO blog examination was sufficiently therapeutic... lonely echochamber or not... Now, off into the new year...

(Note: I was able to add text attributes like italic, the bullet list and color using Blogger's "Compose" view of the page, but did most of the writing and editing in "Edit HTML" mode, because the rich-text "Compose" view renders the XO browser's I-beam cursor invisible, just as it does in in Gmail's rich-text view. I suspect the XO Browse team has that on its bug list. I came back later and added the XO image, as well as deleting some stray space around the indented paragraphs.)

One Laptop Per Child blogging

I just remembered that the template I was using for this blog is similar to the color of my new One Laptop Per Child xo computer... Maybe that's a sign that I should do some blogging with and about it here...

For now, I've mostly been posting in olpc forums and bookmarking pages, including some good YouTube videos, at http://del.icio.us/bstepno/olpc

I also tried using the xo browser with WordPress at my other server-based blog, Red Liner

Thanks to a new blogger on my bookmark list, I poked into my own old Blogger account today for the first time in a year... I'd missed the whole "new Blogger" transition that merged the login for Blogger and the one for gmail e-mail accounts. Google is certainly trying to take over my life... So far I've given in to these:

• gmail
• iGoogle
• Google Reader
• Orkut
  
• Blogger

The last three have slipped off my radar, replaced by other RSS aggregators, social networking applications and blogging software... Actually, I think I started using Userland's Radio for my blog before trying Blogger. I liked the security of Radio, which runs on my computer and automatically stores a full copy of everything I post at my main space: Bob's Other Journalism Weblog.

Back when I first tried Blogger, I wasn't sure I could trust it to be around for long. Maybe it's safe to use now. :-)

Speaking of safety, I see a word balloon below this window that says "Now Blogger saves your drafts automatically!" -- which is something I wish all Web-based writing programs did. I wonder whether that's available as a module in WordPress, Drupal, Manila or Django, the other publishing engines I have used for "demo" blogs?

I suspect Blogger also has a "backup the full contents of your blog" feature somewhere. If so, I'd have no reservations left about using it as my "most frequent" blog, since I could post from any of the seven computers I use. I'll think about it...

bstepno's bookmarks on del.icio.us
... are where I've been keeping a lot of the "for possible reference later" posts that I used to put in this Blogger blog after starting my Other Journalism Weblog.

(Also known as Couranteer.com)

Blogger Buzz: The New Version of Blogger
For now I'm just testing whether this new version works with my old "Blog This" button on Firefox's menu bar. Seems to...
But no. Now that I've poked around a bit, I see that Blogger is phasing in the new version, and it appears I'm not in the first phase. (The giveaway is that my "Dashboard" page doesn't have a section inviting me to try the new system.)
Oh well.

Blog defamation case at my Other Journalism Weblog

Our discussion of digital news archiving projects and the pitfalls of footnoting online publications didn't even try to approach the issues of archiving video or controversies surrounding Google's book-scanning project. This post by Jeff Ubois at Berkeley links to a larger ongoing discussion of both those topics.

Television Archiving? Blog Archive? Google “Showtimes” the UC Library System: "Digitizing the world’s books, films, video, sound recordings, maps, and other cultural artifacts could, to quote Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, provide “universal access to all human knowledge, within our lifetime.” So it’s troubling to see public institutions transfer cultural assets, accumulated with public funds, into private hands without disclosing the terms of the transaction.

The American Library Association, Library & Information Technology Association, and the Open Content Alliance are among the groups he mentions as being on the case.

Elsewhere on the archival.tv site, I saw this quote from Lawrence Lessig, echoing things he said about "read-only culture" at the AEJMC convention:

“Why is it that the part of our culture that is recorded in the newspapers remains perpetually accessible, while the part that is recorded on videotape is not? How is it that we have created a world where researchers trying to understand the effect of media on nineteenth-century America will have an easier time than researchers trying to understand the effect of media on twentieth-century America?” - Larry Lessig, Free Culture

(As is true of many things, a Scripting News item led me into this series of links. Thanks, Dave.)