“Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness.” Nietzsche, Friedrich W., Beyond Good And Evil, 1886

Along with the features stated previously plus a few more power mvblogs.org will go horizontal today. 26th July 2009 marks the 44th anniversary of Maldives officially gaining political Independence from the United Kingdom.

As individuals, the followers of mvblogs.org now have the power to choose some aspects of the website. They can either enable or disable flickr, youtube, blogs and twitter feeds. They can switch layouts between horizontal and vertical. And their browser will remember their last settings. The cascading boxes of previous 5 articles from the last 5 days can be expanded and contracted with a click. The boxes also gives an idea of who the most active bloggers were on that 5 day period. The feed will still remain the same, with improved validation.

Of course there is still no power for the viewers to choose contents. No power to self-censor selective blogs is built on to this. There are plugins for mvblogs to filter its content by users.

And nothing is absolutely independent or free! Enjoy and keep expressing thoughts

We have generated a new visual that depicts radial distribution of bloggers around the sphere.Unlike previous visuals, bloggers are represented by dots instead of their respective anonyms. Color assigned to any originating link from any single blogger is exclusive to that node and are shared by all the other links that may originate from that particular node.This visual is based on 1465 distinct relations between 620 bloggers.Also do have a look at our listing on visualcomplexity.

We have upgraded our blog parser. For the past few months the php xml parser library we used was having problems while parsing feeds from some blogs (specially the blogs with beta rss feed from blogger). We tried a walk-around but it also failed to parse all the blogs all the time. This made some users think that we were arbitrarily censoring certain posts.

Most of the time the reason for some of the posts not being able to parse was due to invalid posts by users. And the php parser library is not as forgiving as it should be to non-tech oriented users.

Either way, the new blog parser uses a python library which is more brutal. So far it parses all the posts and generates the recently updated page every 2 hours. Earlier we updated posts every hour; but since 1 hour is too little exposure for new posts, we decided to expand the time between updates.

We have only upgraded the parser, the rest of it (including page generating), is still done by the same php tools we had before. Another small issue is that we assume dates on the feeds of the blogs are in a standard format (RFC 822, W3CDTF, ISO 8601) which we use to convert to MVT.

We are not sure how long the python parser can be sustained, anyway we are in discussion about a possible next version to which may possibly emphasize the purpose of mvblogs more.

I was going to post this a few days ago, but during those days we were more focused on technical issues to get a functional prototype out, than to deal with legal issues.

Anyway, there is a big debate going on around the world about dealing with privacy issues and copyrights of displaying rss feeds of blogs as we are doing. In general since we have attributed the content, it may not become a big issue.

Also, the internet would not have been as it is if the ‘linking’ of one site from another required permission from the original websites. The same debate goes on even in the world of photography and videography. Some argue that what is visible to our eyes, in the ‘public’ can be photographed, and if the content is not used commercially, it usually does not become an issue.

here’s an interesting article i saw today..

http://www.rss-specifications.com/the-copyright-debate.htm

also, a site containing a similar list and feeds from science blogs around the world.

http://scienceblogs.com/

should we ask permission from the bloggers? and add an activate deactivate field to the DB table and activate if they want to? or should we leave it as it is and remove when people request to be removed, which is quite understandable in this society.

Please express your opinion

At sharp 0000mvt, on 20th January 2006 friday, mvblogosphere v1.0 is launched. http://mvblogs.org/

Currently the time displayed in “recently updated” page is in GMT. Both me and Shahee think it would be more relavent to use MVT instead of GMT as it is more relavent to the community of bloggers that we are tracking/maping/analyzing/etc. However both GMT and MVT would be delusory is some entries because different bloggers have different timezones. Myself and Shahee are under the impression that most of them have set it right and we should go for MVT.

Also about the Coffee v1.0 propose by shahee who, unfortunately, is in Netherlands…
We (Inn, myself and Simon) did compile version 1.0 of the coffee. There weren’t any errors during the compilation and nor did it crash afterwards. Most of the things we disscussed had already been implemented or mentioned here.

As per a beta tester I invited, I have changed the first caption in visual.php from

“Visualization: showing the network of Maldivian bloggers that are linked to from their blogs”
TO
“Visualization: showing the network of Maldivian bloggers that linked to each other’s blogs”

If you think this is not right, please revert :)

It may be a nice idea for the mvblogosphere dev team in male’ to go for a coffee, and talk about everything else except the project. And may be post a summary of the meeting. Specially about the taste of coffee. How about call each other and set a time now?

mvblogosphere is an attempt to track, map and analyze the exponentially growing maldivian blogopsphere, in order to draw a larger portrait of the social, cultural, political and economic structures it represent.

The mvblogosphere project got initiated when Senn (visual artist / network technician) compiled a list of the blogs he was able to visit from one random point and showed it to Shahee (media designer). With a collaborative effort, they were able to come up with techniques to visualize the blogosphere.

The visualizations are generated using a ‘dot’ generator programmed by Senn. Different ‘dot’ renderers and photoshop is used for the final output. Ideas about programming a ‘crawler’ to gather more data is being developed by Simon (programmer).