You have to be very careful, though, because he has written some good things, too ...

Yep, he's a real Janus. His stuff on changing societies is loaded with insight that had a major effect on how people began to think about transformation. The flip-side of his cultural obsession on the foreign policy front is that he really takes culture seriously on the political and economic development front.

For all the embracing of Huntington by the anti-POMO crowd, he's in congenial company intellectually with many of the serious "social construction" scholars. He recently teamed up with Peter Berger to edit "Culture Matters" -- on my book pile since Berger's one of my heros and Huntington is always thought provoking.

It's a great illustration of how serious scholarship can be hijacked by others for political agendas. (Not that Huntington hasn't helped the process along, mind you.)

That's all true ... I was also thinking about his book on civil/military relations, which I haven't read but understand based on reviews to be quite thoughtful and important.

I guess I'm not too familiar with the bulk of Huntington's work outside his civilizations stuff, which I know mostly in the sense that I think it's a pretty stupid idea, not in any I've-actually-read-his-argument sense. Perhaps it's better in the specifics than the broad summary, but yeah, I really don't like the idea of "civilizations" as an axis of conflict. Given the size of his body of work, writing a comprehensive biography on his ideas and influence and keeping it all under 3000 words could prove fairly challenging, so he remains a tenative subject only right now. The Haqqani paper will probably be recieving the bulk of my effort this semester, so I may decide to tackle Huntington another day.

May the copyright gods forgive me.

Funny thing about Huntington is that he opposed the Iraq War because he thought it would strengthen his civilizational paradigm. Now, his new book, "Who Are We?" reads altogether to similarly to the work of some of these guys, IMHO.

"I guess I'm not too familiar with the bulk of Huntington's work outside his civilizations stuff, which I know mostly in the sense that I think it's a pretty stupid idea, not in any I've-actually-read-his-argument sense."

Ouch! You should read it. I know we are all taught in university that Sam is a Bad Man, but take a look and you'll see that he has a WIDE spectrum of ideas. When I read Clash, I agreed with about 70-80%. But there were some things in it I thought were pretty extreme. And you have to remember I come from a pretty anti-culturalist background.

I have a tendency to read a lot more than I actually write on, at least till I've gathered up a large enough body that I can sit down and synthesize it in one big go (which makes me a pretty bad blogger, I guess),

Sounds like that'd make you a good blogger. I'm sick of bloggers who write about stuff they don't really grasp just for the sake of putting up lotsa posts. That just decreases the signal to noise ratio of that darn intarweb.

I agree — but that need to post regularly, to maintain a vocal presence in the sphere or risk dwindling away to unread obscurity, is pretty powerful in blogging. Competition for eyeballs is nearly unlimited (anybody with an internet connection and an opinion, essentially) and on the internet, if you're not posting, no-one knows you're still there. One thing that I like about a group blogging experience like CN is that it reduces the need by spreading posting out among several authors, making it more of a shared community sort of experience -- our del.icio.us feeds of interesting articles or things we've read being an example of that. There seems to be some notions floating around these days reassessing some of what blogging has been over the past year or so -- for example Ezra here, Ed Kilgore here, and Dave Pollard here -- that I think probably has a lot to do with the end of the presidential election cycle, but I couldn't say where if anywhere it might lead.

I guess I've always been trying for the Steven Den Beste model instead of the Glenn Reynolds model. I've always known that I'm too much of a perfectionist and too annoyed by other people talking about things they don't know anything about, that I couldn't post every day. I just figured I'd write the best pieces I could, and eventually people would read them. It's certainly a slower way to go than posting often, but whatever. A lot of my traffic comes from Google, and I figure they're more likely to come back if they found what they were looking for. I also like to think that this helps my PageRank, but I really have no idea.

I also figure a good portion of my readers are on my RSS feed (or will be more likely to subscribe if they are impressed with something), and the game of keeping an RSS subscriber is rather different from attracting traffic to the site. Most won't notice if you haven't posted for a while. And as Chris Anderson notes, infrequent but well-researched and well-thought out posts are a great way to keep RSS readers. Much moreso than frequent but less insightful posts. Avoiding the useless time-wasting post becomes more important.

I get Kilgore's point about how readers will flock to a frequently updated blog after a big event, but that only goes for popular frequently updated blogs. Won't matter as much for the rest of us. And his overall point was that different blogs fill different niches.

You're right about the group blog helping. I've long thought about trying to join one, but I'm just so much of a weirdo that I don't see myself being a good fit for anyone else. That, plus I have a hard enough time posting semi-regularly on just the one blog. But go ahead and take advantage of your group and try not to feel the pressure of posting frequently.

What do you think of our new system (del.icio.us fresh produce on the right, or the sidebar on the other blog)?

Aha, that's the drawback of reading from RSS feeds is that you forget to look at sidebars. :) Damn, you guys been busy!

I like! Been thinking about adding a "public" tag so I can display some of mine in my sidebar myself, but my stupid MT design looks stupid if the sidebar extends past the main column, so I'm holding off till I switch to a 3-column dealy. Is feedroll the same type of thing as RSS-to-JavaScript.com? I seem to get flaky performance from them. And is the the intent for anybody to use that @chez tag, or just you three?

The @chez tag is supposed to be our group clipping blog. But you've given me an idea -- maybe in some future iteration we'll have a "friends of chez Nadezhda" clipping blog!

You've identified one of the problems with del.icio.us -- it's a totally public set of info, so we could have our feed polluted because we can't control access. BTW, the first del.icio.us spam showed up a day ago.

You can defeat the pollution risk by using something like a reblog and then loading the links to del.icio.us. But for me, that defeats the beauty of having one place/one process of clipping for all my various purposes. It's the merger of personomies and folksonomies -- toward the sort of personal info cloud that Thomas VanderWal has been talking about.

If you're interested in del.icio.us as personomies -- I've some more stuff over at my new infonapsterizer blog (see sidebar). BTW -- that blog has received some nice traffic, undoubtedly generated by a couple of people tagging two of my posts and those links being hit by people interested in the whole tagging & folksonomies discussions at Many2Many etc. So del.icio.us is a whole new way to connect with conversations going on -- you don't necessarily have to get on a blogroll or be linked in somebody's post. So watch for tag whoring!

For del.icio.us to support both the big social tagging folksonomy and personal/small group functions, I think they'll need to think of themselves as a public utility that doesn't provide all the services itself but provides the basic data collection, managment, storage and retrieval functions that other services can add on to.

My thoughts on del.icio.us as a piece of market infrastructure are also over at the infonapsterizer blog. I'd be interested in your thoughts -- or whether you can understand what I'm talking about. I'm going to expand upon the notions -- hopefully sooner rather than later -- to clarify some questions prak has already raised.

Right now, here at chez and LaT we're piggybacking on del.icio.us simple capablities. We use prefixes to create tags that can be used for various purposes: personal action lists, communicating within the blog group, and creating display "clipping blogs." The tags we use for those purposes are sufficiently "unique" that no one else would be likely to use them. That being said, once someone comes across our "system" then they can screw it up by tagging their own stuff with our unique-to-us tags. One advantage of del.icio.us is that, if that happens, it's a simple matter to rename all of those tags that are being polluted with their tag editing function. But still, a pain that will undoubtedly arise in the not so distant future.

I'm hoping that eventually del.icio.us will have a bit more ability to wall off some tags/feeds, so it can really function as a personomy as well as a folksonomy.

For example, I'd like multiple inboxes so I could have several sets of aggregated feeds by topic.

I think the del.icio.us guys are going to get to these types of features quickly. Their mail discussion list is very active -- I get at least a couple of packages of discussions in my mailbox a day, with lots of interesting usage tips & hacks as well.

Check it out if you haven't yet.

Separate point for you -- I've got a Q re RSS-javascript -- it looks like they're a bit more flexible in css display than Feedroll. It would be good to know what you've found that's flaky about RSS-javascript before I shift things over to that service.

Oh, I saw the personomy and all the other stuff. I just haven't been able to digest and process it all, let alone keep up! (and it's been over a week since my last post, longer if you don't count that mix CD one).

On the "del.icio.us spam", it seems that the thing to do for now would be to not display the tag itself in your sidebar. Not sure how to do that, but I figure there's gotta be a way. Of course, once del.icio.us supports unions, you can use that to aggregate the links from just you three.

On RSS-javascript, I've noticed that when I load my page, it takes several seconds to respond. And sometimes it returns nothing. Could be a problem with the del.icio.us RSS feed instead of RSS-javascript. Dunno. But I don't see that same response issue with this blog, anyway.

Yeah, I've used the myComments tag for other users to find conversations to jump into. Dunno what you mean by tag whoring. I see getting linked in del.icio.us as merely between getting bookmarked and getting link-blogged. I just wish there was some sort of trackback notification.

you could use that fresco thing.

I've seen it recognize being delicioused.

Fresco thing?

This:

http://www.truefresco.org/referrers.htm

Well, how do you read your del.icio.us inbox? You could make multiple accounts with different sets of aggregated tag subscriptions, and then just subscribe in your blogreader (bloglines or whatever) to each of your inbox's individual RSS feeds.

Yeah, I'm just trying to practice good data hygiene and avoid the proliferation of accounts. As you may have noticed with the multiple blogs, I tend to use structures a lot. And they're great, but they can get out of hand if I don't watch myself.

I love having a single interface and not having to go jumping around! But I'm probably going to succumb to several accounts, each representing an inbox. But keep all my own tags at the main account.