For the first time in J’s Notes long life (I think it’s the second or third longest running blog in Virginia), the site has cracked Blog Net News’s Most Influential List, ranking in at an awesome 19th place:

Probably due to my answering a slew of questions last Wednesday.  Who knew I’d be so influential?

Rachel Leow makes me feel better about my books and boxes of stuff I’ve gathered through the years:

Only Collect; that is to say, collect everything, indiscriminately. You’re five years old. Don’t presume too much to know what’s important and what isn’t. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it’s just one line saying “Never read this again”; collect newspaper clippings and email them to yourself; collect quotes; save your ideas for future papers, future projects, future conferences, even if they seem wildly implausible now. Hoarding must become instinctual, it must be an uncontrollable, primal urge. And the higher, civilizing impulse that kicks in after the fact is organization, or librarianship. You must keep tabs on everything you collect, somehow; a system must be had, and the system must be idiot-proof. That is to say, you should be able to look back on it six months for now and not be completely stymied as to why you’ve organized things that way. (The present versions of ourselves are invariably the biggest idiots, and six months will make that clear).

The organizing party is seriously kicking in as I stare at stacks of papers and books that I have throughout my office (I’m still in shock I have an “office”) and boxes in my basement.  The effort to catalogue is enormous and one I wish I had started a long time ago.  I’m sure I’ll find that the majority of the junk I have is fairly worthless in all senses of the term, but that’s part of growing up and fine-tuing my collection, as Rachel discusses in the article.

Very good advice.

Kottke applies the “broken window theory” to websites:

Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to “own” their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same. Those commenters who are normally respectable participants are emboldened by the uptick in bad behavior and misbehave themselves. More likely, they’re discouraged from helping with the community moderation process of keeping their peers in line with social pressure. Or they stop visiting the site altogether.

Unchecked comment spam signals that the owner/moderator of the forum or blog isn’t paying attention, stimulating further improper conduct. Anonymity provides commenters with immunity from being associated with their speech and actions, making the whole situation worse…how does the community punish or police someone they don’t know?

Bad envionments lead to bad habits which encourage more and more of the same.