I am starting a new feature on this blog: automatically posting links to pages I find interesting/relevant/funny/noteworthy enough to bookmark on my del.icio.us account.

Often enough I find interesting material that I would like to blog about, but don’t get around to doing so. This way you can see what sites of note I am browsing even if I don’t get around to commenting on them at length.

Feel free to let me know if this feature is useful or annoying. I can always turn it off.

If you ever notice, dear reader, that several days go by without my adding anything to this site, it is probably because I am behind on meeting some deadline and I have banned myself from posting updates. I am not sure if there is much use to this practice (or the banning of a practice to be more precise), but it’s one way I try to motivate myself to get certain things done. Now I am back, however, and all that is left is to figure out what were the various things that I had meant to post about during my time away.

I’ve been a big fan of Firefox since last Fall and given its wonderful features (better security, all sorts of functionality) I try to do my best to encourage others to use it as well.

In that vein, I have put together a page with a list of my favorite extensions. Firefox extensions are little programs that add features to the browser. Some of my favorites include being able to search for a street address without having to retype the address or pull up a map first, tabbed browsing, better use of browser space, etc. I know some of these features are available in other programs as well, but it’s great to have it all come together so nicely in one program. Feel free to list additional favorites in the comments to this post.

I have also put together a detailed tutorial on how to install the program (on Windows) for those who do not feel comfortable downloading programs. Feel free to pass along these page to your parents, cousins, friends, etc.

This Webuse.Info site contains some additional information so to recap:

• Installing Firefox (on Windows)
• Some basics of efficient Firefox use
• Adding Firefox extensions
• Tips for efficient online searching

Enjoy!

.. as in “new links” and “new feature”. I created an account (free) on BlinkList and am publishing the links I add to my accoun there on the sidebar of this blog. The section is just below the search field, which is below the Flickr photos (or “Flickr badge”) on the right.

BlinkList is a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us. BlinkList’s site has a page devoted to explaining its advantages over del.icio.us. It is certainly a much nicer user interface and the fact that you can publish the links on your own blog so easily is a nice feature. BlinkList also offers the option of putting selected other users’ lists on your own watch list. This is a feature I very much missed in del.icio.us.

Let me know if you start an account so I can add you to the list of people whose list I watch.

If you are a Digg user you’ll also note the similarity regarding the “blink it” feature.

In an off-topic comment* (ahem;-) to this post, Jeremy requested that I make the blog spam guard flexible enough so that you can type in “Eszter” or “eszter” as the key word. Good idea, but Jeremy didn’t say how to implement this in php. Now it may seem like I know php since I pretend to know something about it whenever I’m implementing new things around here, but in reality, I don’t actually know anything about php. Jeremy must have knowns I like a geek challenge though. The request is now implemented.

Enjoy!

* I should say that the comment was only partly off-topic since there was a thread-related note in it as well.

E-BLOG is happy to catch up with blog tag goodness. Thanks to the helpful Jerome’s Keywords Plugin and associated instrudctions, tags are now added to posts and you can even view a tag cloud for tags used on this blog (what’s a tag cloud, you ask?). Thanks also go out to Barb for sending me relevant pointers.

If you are or want to be at the cutting edge of all things tag-related, you may want to attend TagCamp.

UPDATE: Oops, I just realized that this isn’t fully functional yet. Although the links work if you click on them in any one post, the links from the cloud are not functional right now. I won’t be able to tend to this for a few days, but I’ll try to fix it soon.

UPDATE 2: I was able to fix this problem. I just had to change the link specified under all_keywords in the tag cloud plugin file. Instead of linking to

/tag/%keylink%

the code needs to say

/tag/?tag=%keylink%

to work.

Next year Eszter’s Blog will be coming to you from Silicon Valley. I will be a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. I am super excited about this opportunity. The Center got a grant from the Annenberg Foundation last year to add Communications to the fields represented among its fellows and I’m going as part of such a cohort.

There’s something amusing related to all this. Or I thought it was amusing until I shared it with a friend who didn’t think it funny at all. You be the judge. While I was lifehacking away a few weeks ago, Chris pointed me to Google Sets for various associations. I decided to see what Google Sets had to say about my academic affiliations. I typed in the names of my BA and PhD granting institutions plus Northwestern (the place of my current employment) and pressed Large Sets. The fourth school on the list was Stanford. When I did this I already knew that I was headed to the Center next year so I found this amusing. But perhaps you need to have a certain geek factor to get anything out of this exercise.:)

Shadows in the lake,
originally uploaded by eszter.

I have absolutely no recollection from the past two years I have spent in Chicagoland as to whether this is regular weather, but I am delighted to have had the opportunity to enjoy another beautiful weekend. It was still warm enough to go down to the beach although I did not venture in the water past walking knee-deep. I did, however, get a chance to “stand on water“, which was neat.:-)

Blog Workshop Dinner,
originally uploaded by eszter.

I’m spending Friday and Saturday at a meeting about the Power and Political Science of Blogs organized by Dan Drezner and Henry Farrell. The discussions have been great so far – and I suspect will continue to be very insightful and interesting today – and we also had a fun dinner last night at Emilio’s Tapas.

UPDATE (9/18/05): I posted a related note with some relevant links on CT.

I am having some major problems with the blog, thus no updates in a while. I hope to have things resolved in the next few days. My apologies.

I haven’t blogged for over a week. This is partly due to my travels (ICA in NYC and Princeton Reunions) although I’m afraid what really set me back is that I got sick the second day of my trip. It’s never fun to be sick, but it is especially annoying when you are on the road. It is that much harder to recover. Hopefully now that I am back at home I will start feeling better soon.

So I’m afraid I cannot say that overall the visit was fun, but it had its moments. I saw lots of colleagues and friends at the conference and participated in some interesting discussions about research. I also got to catch up with several friends in the city and in Princeton although not nearly as many as I had hoped since I had to cancel half my meetings. I am not sure when I’ll be heading out there again, perhaps I’ll get a chance to stop by in late August.

A year ago I started blogging over at the great group blog Crooked Timber. Since then, I have only blogged at CT simply replicating all of my posts on E-BLOG. Recently I started to realize that the group nature of CT made me more selective in my blogging than I preferred. After thinking about this for a while and also prompted by some of the comments on Dan Drezner’s blog about whether he should move toward a group blog, I decided to come back to E-BLOG and do some writing here in addition to my posts over at Crooked Timber. Of course, it may seem silly to extrapolate from people’s comments about Dan’s blog to possible opinions of my readership given that E-BLOG only ever had a few hundred readers. Nonetheless, some of the comments resonated with me so I decided to return to E-BLOG more actively. I’ve revamped the looks and started using a new blogging software with added features so hopefully that will make things even more user-friendly than before. As always, thanks for reading. And of course I’ll keep blogging at Crooked Timber and very much continue to encourage people to read it given all of the great material that’s posted there by my co-bloggers.

Since WordPress makes the creation of categories very easy, I am now using this blogging feature. I thought I’d take a moment to explain some of the categories.

I blog over at the group blog Crooked Timber and any entry that I first posted there will be filed under CT here. This may be of interest because CT attracts many more visitors and commentators than this blog so follow-up discussions are often more active and thus exciting there.

Links that I featured on my mailing list Eszter’s List will be labeled E-LIST just to give credit to that other undertaking.:)

Snapshots is the category for posts that include images.

Maintenance entries are about E-BLOG technical issues.

I think all the others are self-explanatory. If not, just post a note and I will be happy to clarify.

I have moved institutions and states, and although that doesn’t mean I’d necessarily have to move my online presence, I’m taking this transition as an opportunity to start using a new blogging software. Although Greymatter served me very well and am still happy with it, I have decided to migrate to WordPress. This is my new blog home. Welcome.

I’m in the midst of transferring my Web site and concurrently I’ll likely start up a more active blog presence on my personal blog (as opposed to the great group blog Crooked Timber of which I’m a member). Stay tuned for information about new location and newly opened comments (with the hopes that I figure out a way to fight spam).

This short film by zefrank seemed to make it to some corners of the blogosphere in March, but I don’t think it got the type of exposure it deserves. Go behind-the-scenes to learn about the making of the yellow-orange-red alert system (Tinky Winky reference and all!:). Warning, only visit the rest of the site if you have plenty of time to spare!

The recent discussion of blogs and their democratic characteristics (or lack thereof) prompted by Laura|AMP|#8217;s comments at Apt 11D in response to critiques of her blog study|AMP|#8217;s survey instrument has gotten me thinking about the comments option on blogs yet again. It is a question I have pondered numerous times already, probably ever since I started reading blogs and certainly since I decided to start my own.

For me, the question of whether a site that calls itself a blog has comments option turned on is actually quite directly related to what constitutes a blog in the first place. I realize this is a question that is probably impossible to answer in a way that would satisfy everybody, but it is one still worth asking especially if one is to do research on the topic (as I am doing now) where a definition would be helpful.

One of Laura|AMP|#8217;s concerns is that the blogosphere is not very democratic. That|AMP|#8217;s true (she mentions some reasons and others have discussed this point at length elsewhere as well). However, blogs can have a democratic component: Comments. Why is it that certain bloggers decide to go without comments? And what makes their Web site a blog in that case? (Clearly I am showing my bias here in that I believe comments are an essential part of a blog. That said, I do realize and accept blogs as blogs even when they do not have comments turned on.. but do so mostly because the community has decided to consider them blogs. You know which ones I mean.)

Laura herself does not have comments on her Web site. This makes her blog more undemocratic than many other blogs. The only way someone can comment on an entry posted on a non-commentable blog is by posting an entry on their own blog. This already excludes those numerous readers who do not have blogs of their own, but more importantly, it also leaves the original post untouched by critical response. And that makes blogs less interesting in my view. And certainly less democratic.

Of course, I understand some of the reasons why people may not allow for comments. It can be an extra burden on the blogger. If one doesn|AMP|#8217;t want certain types of material present on a site then one must constantly monitor comments. This can become tedious in the case of blogs that attract a lot of attention and response. But comments can add a very interesting and important component to blogs. Crooked Timber would be quite different without the insightful and witty (although in some cases very frustrating) contributions of our readers. I wouldn|AMP|#8217;t have it any other way (here I only speak for myself and not the entire CT crew, but I suspect many would agree). A reader can always decide to skip reading the comments (which, of course, underscores the fact that commentators do not have the same level of input as the posters), but those who are most engaged with and interested in a post likely do read the responses from other readers. (Perhaps that idea needs to be tested, but I think it|AMP|#8217;s a reasonable assumption.)

I certainly do not mean to glorify comments too much. There are excellent and very valuable blogs that do have comments turned on yet receive little response. That does not mean that they are not being read nor that people do not have reactions to what is said on the blog. It seems to take several thousand readers to produce a few dozen comments so only a few blogs will receive lots of comments. Nonetheless, the issue here is the option to comment.

So bloggers, why no comments? And readers, do you care? (I realize it|AMP|#8217;s a bit problematic to ask that question here, but this is just for discussion, it|AMP|#8217;s obviously not a scientific poll of any sort.)

I was sitting in the St. Louis Amtrak station yesterday (huh, that would be a glorified name for a shack¹) and observing with curiosity people|AMP|#8217;s reaction to a soda machine that was sold out. Given the hot day and my tourist explorations of the morning that left me tired and thirsty, the soda machine was the first thing I looked for upon entry into the waiting room. The two machines I noticed at first were selling snacks and coffee. I couldn|AMP|#8217;t believe that there was no soda machine |AMP|#8211; unfathomable for this type of an establishment in the U.S. |AMP|#8211; so I circled the room. And there it was, of course. The first thing I looked for was to see how much the soda cost. However, instead of a price, I found the words SOLD and OUT flashing. Bummer. But now came the fun part: observing how other people reacted to the sold-out soda machine. At one point I was almost convinced we had a candid camera scenario. It was quite amusing to watch how few people bother to check signs. (This was second in a series that day after having watched just a few minutes earlier a woman in front of me exit |AMP|#8211; or try to do so in any case |AMP|#8211; a building through a door clearly labeled and also taped shut by a sign stating that the door was out of order. After pushing it a few times she noticed the sign at her eye-level letting her know that this was not going to work.)

Most people approached the soda machine with bills or coins in hand and started to feed (or attempted to do so) the money into the machine. The machine seemed to be configured so it would not take bills when empty (good call) and the coins fell through and came out in the coin-return section immediately. These signals did not prompt most people to look for clues about what may be going on. Rather, they continued to attempt feeding the machine with their money. The most interesting case was a young man who walked up to the machine with much confidence and tried to feed a dollar bill into it. Soon enough he noticed the SOLD OUT sign. This did not faze him, however. He decided to try again. You can guess the result: nothing. At that point he walked over to the other two machines with much confidence intent on satisfying his soda needs. His stride made it seem as though by marching with enough confidence those machines would transform themselves into selling sodas. Alas, that|AMP|#8217;s not how it works. Oh, the world is so unfair!

What seems interesting in all this (in addition to the obvious) is that people were ready to buy the soda no matter the price. After all, the SOLD OUT sign was where the price would be displayed. But other than one woman (in addition to me), no one cared to check it before starting to feed their money into the machine. Sure, it may be that all these people go to the St. Louis Amtrak station all the time and are already familiar with the price of a soda, but I doubt that that is the case. People probably have an expectation for how much the soda might cost and are willing to pay in the vicinity of that sum regardless of the specifics. Next up in the candid camera saga is a soda machine that charges $7.50 per bottle. Stay tuned for reactions.

¹ The station is so remote (although downtown) that a woman on her way there stopped her car when seeing me walking toward it to offer to drop me off saying that it was all too dirty and messy for me to have to walk to. Some people are so nice. (No, I did not take her up on it, but did think it was a very kind gesture.)

I’ve put up some new pictures. These are of the Passover festivities this March in Cleveland at the Katz’s. I had a wonderful time, I think the mood comes through pretty nicely in the pictures.

Hello, welcome to Eszter’s Blog. Finally, coming to you live (well, as live as these things get) from Princesstown, NJ.

A blog or Web log is an online forum usually with one main author/contributor who frequently posts his or her thoughts on just about anything – or a in some cases on the specified topic of the blog (this one is general). For a more detailed introduction to blogs, read Scott Rosenberg’s informative piece on it in Salon. Although he wrote it in 1999, it is still a useful piece as are many of his other writings.

Below in the right hand column, you’ll find a few words on what type of material you are likely to see on E-BLOG and what contents I will not be promoting.

As with my E-LIST, feel free to send me thoughts and suggestions. You can also leave a note right here on E-BLOG by entry. You’ll find people’s comments – and on occasion my response to those comments – by clicking on the Comments link right below an entry. Just to clarify, all the main entries were posted by me. Comments by others are on the separate entry pages.