One of the early blogs that I very much enjoyed was The Rittenhouse Review, a Philly blog which I discovered shortly after leaving Philadelphia. It had gone quiet a while ago, rather mysteriously — it’s another of those odd things about this medium that there can be so few signs of what’s going on in real life from what we see online — but sadly, we now learn that the author, Jim Capozzola has died after a long illness.

The ScienceBlogs buzz today is on Atheism and Civil Rights, and the opening blurb gets it wrong.

Richard Dawkins and other contemporary atheists have argued recently that America’s faithless are subject to discrimination akin to that faced by women, racial minorities, and homosexuals. But is atheism better understood as a civil rights issue, or a public image problem?

Nisbet has successfully “framed” Richard Dawkins in the old sense of the word. He has not made that claim. I haven’t made that claim, unless you’re taking “akin” in the weakest, most meaningless sense of the word. So ignore the blurb, unless you’re looking for another example of how “framing” skills can distort a debate.

Watch out, because now your ISP will have the power to insert their own ads into the html streaming through their pipes.

Every single web site owner is affected by NebuAD’s technology: whether a site is running ads or not makes no difference, Customers of any ISP evil enough to run NebuAD’s platform are going to see ads on every page on every site; ads that don’t benefit the content creator. It is important to note that these ads are NOT pop-ups, and this is not a free internet service; the ads are served as if they were part of the page, to paying internet customers who are NOT made aware that these ads have been inserted by their ISP.

Bleh. At least Nic has a possible solution — we should all go to encrypted web pages. I suppose another solution is to not give your business to an ISP that implements such an awful solution.

There’s a minor contretemps going on at scienceblogs — a few of our Original Content Providers are a bit peeved at certain abysmally uncreative sites that think they can get rich by collecting rss feeds and putting them on a site with google ads, while adding no original content of their own. I don’t mind the rss parasites trying that at all — if it’s in my syndication, it’s out there and you can jiggle it around however you want — but it’s such a stupid, mindless strategy. Who’s going to regularly read a site that just repackages other people’s work, when the originals are easily and freely available? And if they stumble across something I wrote on another site, as long as it has a link back here, I really don’t care; it just means they’re doing some half-assed, clumsy advertising for me, for free.

So I’m not joining in the complaints. However, I do think this great comment from a Technorati rep at Bora’s is an optimal way to handle it.

Thanks for bringing that to our attention, ny articles won’t be getting indexed by us. We try to index only original sources and to avoid aggregator/planet sites; we definitely don’t want mechanical feedscrape-and-adsense sites.
cheers,
-Ian (from Technorati)

A parasitic clone-dump really represents minor damage, in the form of inefficiency, on the internet — it’s nice to see that it’s also seen that way by at least one of the network aggregating services, and that they are going to detour around it.

Now for the philosophical dilemma: are Technorati and Google also mechanical scrapers of the original content on the web? Should we be irritated that Google keeps copies of our web pages on its servers?

The Panda’s Thumb is back online again, in case you’ve been missing it.

After a long hiatus, the Koufax Awards site is chugging back to work, and is accepting nominations. No voting yet; this is just the time to let them know who you think is most deserving in various categories.