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A few days off, Open Source Radio, and a note on comments

Free Range Librarian is celebrating the season with a few days off the blogging grid to take a deep breath and bid a proper adieu to 2007.

When I return, it will be in just enough time to ask for ideas about trends, in preparation for my stint on the Top Technology Trends panel at ALA. I’d start soliciting now but I’m going to stay offline as much as possible this week and won’t be able to publish or reply to your comments.

Meanwhile, I keep forgetting to share the good news that after a rocky funding period last summer, Open Source Radio has returned to the air. Christopher Lydon recently sent email that said, “Call this the Open Source version of a Christmas card — a quartet of recent conversations touching on poetry (Helen Vendler on Yeats), wisdom (Transcendentalism), music (Alex Ross on the 20th Century, Osvaldo Golijov on the 21st) and war politics (Juan Cole on Napoleon and Bush-Cheney).” May your ears be merry and bright!

I have moderation set up on this blog so that if you’ve previously published a comment here you should be able to post comments without my intervention, provided your comments have fewer than three links. The Akismet spam filter is configured to stop messages with lots of links regardless of who posts them, which I don’t quite understand; if I trust you, I trust you. Then again, maybe that’s in case someone’s using your email address to post spam.

Akismet spam filter does a good job  — it caught over 12,000 spam comments in the last 15 days alone — but it’s not perfect. Sometimes good messages go into the spam bucket, and with 800 junk comments every day, there’s no way I can catch those unless you, dear reader, alert me. Meanwhile approximately ten to twenty bad messages go into my moderation queue every day, and trust me, you don’t want to see these; most are truly disgusting.

This week I’ll also be thinking about personal goals  — which include doing my part to replace that bozo in the White House with a competent leader. See all-y’all round the digital campfire!

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