The Fourth Place

UPDATE: No they didn’t, it was an associate of Murray’s trying to keep the site up. See comments for full story.

Holy mother of God, the Fasthost’s censorship debacle worsens:

On my article about Alisher Usmanov which so incensed his lawyers Schillings, let me ask this question. Has anybody seen an argument posted or published from any credible source to argue that what I say about Usmanov is untrue?

I ask the question because one of the edits to this log my webhost made at Schillings’ behest was to say that my claim was “regarded as false by many people”. I have altered that edit, because there is no justification for such a claim. I have yet to see evidence of anybody, not one solitary person, arguing that I am wrong about Usmanov, other than his lawyers. Who are these “Many people”, and why are they peculiarly silent?

I am very sympathetic to my webhost having to change things for Schillings, but not to the extent of altering things to become defamatory of me!!!

Posted by craig on 3:14 PM 14/09/07 under Uzbekistan

Source

Winston Smith is alive and well and living in Gloucester. Utterly irresponsible.

Well I might be back.

Comment moderation was a huge drain on my enthusiasm for blogging in the past but hopefully a move to market leading Word Press will give me access to some kick-ass spam prevention wizardry…. but I have no idea what that might be - yet.

I also doubted the mental healthiness of pouring every frustration out onto the internet regardless of whether anyone was listening and without any regard to whether or not I was making a contribution. I had thought this exercise cathartic, and maybe it is, but perhaps there are better forms of catharsis.

So, what are my goals?

1. Assess Word Press as a platform and get to know it. I first promised to do this for Sonia at Hearts Cafe in Ollantaytambo but that seems a long way away now and she hasn’t been in touch, but I also need to do this for my own commercial purposes.
2. Have an outlet for posing questions and reporting answers in a careful and diplomatic fashion that conforms to my needs, for example, polishing up my contributions to Wikipedia or to Open Source technology projects are things I can put into the public domain that are useful, if only to random users of Google.
3. Have a virtual mental place that is mine, a real fourth place that centralises bookmarks and tools I used regularly and keeps me, my friends and my colleagues updated - without submitting to data rape by Facebook.