Blogs and Bloggers

Dean Esmay is talking about Cindy Sheehan and how she has been changing her story.

I thought it might be of interest for some to see her columns over at the libertarian site LewRockwell.com. They're full of bitterness, as only a mother who has lost her son can be.

If you're going to talk about a person, at least read what they have to say. Not that you agree, but in the interest of fairness. This even applies to screeds written by the Kossites. It shows their true nature. It's easy to dismiss it, but once you've experienced it first-hand, it becomes tangible.

Yesterday I received a call for papers that was distributed on the Corpus Linguistics email list.

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) will hold a symposium on blogs at Stanford University next spring (March 27-29). The title is "Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs" and will cover everything from symantic processing to political science:

[01] AI methods for ethnographic analysis through blogs.
[02] Blogosphere vs. mediasphere; measuring the influence of blogs on the media.
[03] Centrality/influence of bloggers/blogs; ranking/relevance of blogs; web pages ranking based on blogs.
[04] Crawling/spidering and indexing.
[05] Human Computer Interaction; blogging tools; navigation.
[06] Multimedia; audio/visual blogs processing; aggregating information from different modalities.
[07] Semantic analysis; cross-blog name tracking; named relations and fact extraction; discourse analysis; summarization.
[08] Semantic Web; semantic blogging; unstructured knowledge management.
[09] Sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction.
[10] Social Network Analysis; communities identification; expertise discovery; collaborative filtering.
[11] Text categorization; gender/age identification; spam filtering.
[12] Time Series Forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on blogs.
[13] Trend identification/tracking.

If NZ Bear would like to submit a paper on relationships between blogs and all that, I'm sure he would do very well

I might see about submitting a paper on one of the above topics, though I've not decided if I find time.

Wow! Our friends at Llamabutchers seem to have made it into a comic strip, too. Except this one is widely available. And it's negative.

Rudy Park (April 2, 2005):


Background: Rudy has become a Republican (which is evidenced by his new short hair) and has decided to become a capitalist, to the dismay of his Uncle Mort. In this installment, we see that life as a conservative isn't easy. Why the Llamas have to be colicky, I'm not sure. But it seems to stand to reason, that there is at least a reference to the colicky Llamabutchers. Hope they recover soon.