The Fourth Place

The document “Northern Rock Summary” has been removed from Scribd

This content was removed at the request of copyright agent J. Afia of Schillings o/b/o Northern Rock, plc

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I said I didn’t want to use this blog to moan, but having moaned once on the topic of censorship, libel and Schillings the above quote (source) demonstrating the chilling effect of copyright on free speech seems entirely justified.

Guido explains the importance of the document concerned in his post “Northen Rock Nationalised“.

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.