I finally installed NeoOffice last night, and I really like it. It's nice to have an open source word processing program that's native to the Mac, but it still takes a loooonngg tiiiimmme to launch. Jonathan said, "You know the reason Microsoft Word loads more quickly is that it puts itself into the memory when you start the computer, right?" (He probably explained it better than that, actually.) No, I did not know that. I replied, "Okay, is there any way to make NeoOffice do it too?" Jonathan said he could make OpenOffice do that on his PC. We poked around in NeoOffice's preferences but didn't find a way to make it happen. Anyone know?

I just uploaded tons of presentations to SlideShare. I hope you'll create an account there and do the same -- or, if you already have an account, add me as a contact.

Early this week, I participated in a few days' long meeting about MediaCommons, and I'm excited about where it's going. If you're going to be at Computers and Writing, I hope you'll check out my presentation about MC. The presentation will be in the format of a user's guide to MC, after the fashion of Collin's presentation at CCCC, which was terrific. Here's my abstract:

Peer-to-Peer Review, Metadata, and Distant Reading: Introducing MediaCommons, a New Scholarly Network

MediaCommons is a project of the Institute for the Future of the Book. A scholarly network-cum-academic press, MediaCommons will take advantage of the affordances of web technology to create what has been termed a peer-to-peer review process. This process will be transparent, onymous, and publicly accessible online. Like the CCC Online archives, MediaCommons will use metadata including traffic, Technorati tracking, and Google Analytics data in order to assess the circulation of scholarly discourse about new media. We encourage scholars to use images, audio, and video in their projects; reviewers may also post their comments in the form of podcasts or videos if they like. This presentation will serve as a user's guide to MediaCommons, a brief review of existing MediaCommons initiatives such as In Media Res, and an opportunity for the audience to ask questions and offer valued feedback about the project.

Now if I can just manage to do something on Sunday, I will actually be presenting every day of the conference. Behold my current C&W schedule:

Thursday, May 17, 1 pm-4 pm

Getting Started With Open Source Software

Bradley Dilger, Matt Barton, David Blakesley, Troy Hicks, Clancy Ratliff, Charles Lowe, Jeremy Tirrell

Friday, May 18, 10:30-11:45

H. Web Sensible Selves: Individual and Institutional Identities in Digital Writing
Spaces
Darren Cambridge: Deep-Web Sensible Selves: Writing the Responsive Learning Organization

Byron Hawk: Identifying Web 2.0: Institutional Identities and the Grounds of Research

Clancy Ratliff: Peer-to-Peer Review, Metadata, and Distant Reading: Introducing MediaCommons, a New Scholarly
Network

Saturday, May 19, 9:00-10:15

I. Roundtable: Digital Writing Research(ers): Institutional Review Boards: Mapping the Issues for Organizational Position Statements

Will Banks, Michelle Eble, Gail Hawisher, Heidi McKee, James Porter, Clancy Ratliff, Cynthia Selfe, Pam Takayoshi, Laura Gurak

But back to MediaCommons for a moment. You may have checked out In Media Res before, but if not, I strongly encourage you to do so, and leave comments. One in particular that I recommend for rhetoricians is Fay Ginsburg's blurb about Amanda Baggs, a brilliant autistic woman whose video "In My Language" is easily one of the most sophisticated and sensitive analyses of language I have seen in a very long time. I subscribe to and watch all the videos on Baggs' channel on YouTube, but "In My Language" is my favorite, followed closely by "Being an Unperson" and the three-part interview with Laura. Here's "In My Language" -- the first half is in Baggs' native language; the second is what she said, translated into English:

Friend Who's Into Politics Makes You Feel Stupid Again, from The Onion.

[. . .] whose impromptu analysis reminded you that you still haven't gotten around to reading the Obama cover story in that issue of Time magazine you purchased five months ago.

Sad, but also provocative of discussion.

How do you pronounce it? (Extra credibility conferred upon you if you're from Belgium and know Dries Buytaert personally.)

I should have posted my presentation earlier, but better late than never; here's my presentation as a PowerPoint file. The first three slides need a bit of context: they both involve instances in which people plagiarized from my blog. The first one contains an excerpt of an email to me in which the guy said he'd stolen some material "just to get started" with his blog. That's where I came up with the "plagiarism as placeholder" idea. I went to his blog, and I didn't see my posts anymore. I surmised that he had deleted my words and replaced them with his own (or some other not-me person, for all I know).

Of course -- and I should have said this in the presentation -- it did cross my mind that it could just be a $p@m ploy to get Google juice, lest the geeks think I'm utterly unclever. It wouldn't be such a bad idea, actually; start a fake blog at the address that is your soon-to-be Viagra/Cialis/Phentermine site, and purposefully plagiarize some text from a few bloggers. Then make sure they find out somehow, either by emailing them or grabbing images remote-hosted from their sites so that they see the traffic in their referrers. Then, if the bloggers take the bait and link to the offending plagiarist in order to call him/her out and do some public shaming, that translates into a higher Google PageRank for the site, if I understand PageRank correctly. Maybe $p@mm3r$ are already doing this.

And the third slide: The second time someone plagiarized me, it was this post about a first-year composition with a public health theme. I found out about the plagiarism when I saw her site in my referrers; she hadn't linked to me to give me credit for my post, but rather had done the remote-hosted image thing I referred to in the last example. I was irritated about the plagiarism, but I didn't say anything about it here because when I looked at her other posts, they were all in a very OMG ROTFLMAO!!!!!111!!! style. I thought then that if it came down to a dispute, no one would believe that she had written the post.

Finally, here are the links to the sites I cite in my presentation:

Humanity Critic: and as I said in my presentation, I can't recommend him highly enough. He deserves all the weblog awards he has gotten these few years running.

Kuro5hin: The Cruelest Cut and the specific segment of the comment thread.

Copyscape, and their About page.

UPDATE: Here's my presentation in Slideshare:

You heard it here first, dude! These are the awards that were presented tonight at the ceremony:

Best Book

tie:
On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment by Norbert Elliot

Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness by Krista Ratcliffe

Berlin Award for Best Dissertation

I didn't quite catch the title, but the first part was Learning to Love the Bomb, and it was about risk communication, nuclear weapons, and the political climate after 9/11 (I think). It's by Julie Staggers, who got her PhD at Purdue. Her dissertation was directed by Patricia Sullivan.

Braddock Award for Best Article

The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued by A. Suresh Canagarajah

Outstanding Dissertation in Technical Communication

Again, I didn't catch the title, but the author is Natasha Artemeva, who got her PhD at McGill. Anthony Paré directed her dissertation.

Writing Program Certificates of Excellence

• Ball State
• Michigan Tech Writing Center
• Purdue's ICAP (Introductory Composition at Purdue)
• Swarthmore's Writing Associates Program
• University of Toronto

Best Article in TETYC

Reading Lolita in Tehran Leads to Reading, Writing, Drawing, Painting, Sewing, and Thinking in Saranac Lake, New York by Shir Filler

Nell Ann Pickett Service Award

Jody Millward (an old site, but it seemed to have the most information about her)