No, really, I’m just anticipating the events. Someday, somewhere, a big blog will suddenly crash, and some ‘smart’ dude will say: “this day the blogosphere died”. Though blogs will still continue to exist, whatever one meant for “blogsphere” won’t be there anymore.

But then, what if it had happened already? Three years ago, when I thought “blogosphere” I thought, because it was that way, about a decentralized heavily interlinked community of self-aware individuals —and sorry for the IT slang. Did something change radically either on concept or scale in these last three years?

Yes. Advertising. And blogs as low quality-high spread commercial platforms.

Advertising networks, and therefore the Search Engine Circus competition, has moved the network from the blog-to-blog sphere to the blog-to-ads-network sphere, and replaced the core of the interlinking from the «lets form a super-cool bloggers microsphere» to «lets form a cartel to powergame the Google-slot machine». But the worst part of the link-rush fever, as always, is being paid by the small mimicking guys lured by the big promises. The once natural and balanced ecosystem of blog links is now spammed to death by the massive creation of artificial relations between blogs. You don’t know anymore if something is being referred because it’s worth it, or because the blogger wants to place some keywords, or is being paid for linking —which is not evil by itself—, and pretending that it is his sincere personal tastes —which is blatantly shameless. And we cannot forget, too, that the bulk of the chatty-sociable people has moved away of regular blogs to the meat-market of look-at-me web profiles, so they are not greasing anymore the interstices of the read-what-I-think sphere.

So, is the blogosphere of the old good days dead already? Do we bloggers live in tiny islands in the after global-web-warming apocalypse? Or is that still waiting to happen?

Siempre hay una necesidad imperiosa de espacio en la habitación de un lector.
There’s always an imperious need for space in a reader’s room.

Arthur C. Clarke was probably the last prominent SF author alive from the Golden Age era (the 40’s), not including Ray Bradbury, which was more or less on his own league even then. He was said to be one of The Big Three, the other two being Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein.

Now put into perspective by the force of nature, neither The Big Three nor the Golden Age were nothing too much remarkable from a literary point of view. Clarke himself, who during his life was active in several fields and not a trully “literary animal” never created any canonical work, being his style empty of very remarkable traits, and his stories between a washed out romanticist exotism and a mild pulp romance. 2001: A Space Odyssey was surely «his» best work, though it is a collaboration with the weird genious of Kubrick to which it owes most of its alienating effect. Even though, Clarke deserved the outstanding place he earned within the «science fiction century», as his anticipation skill was a virtue strong enough for any anticipation reader. He managed always to mix credible science, feelings and a somewhat buddhist view of life, in a way that made his stories more a serious reading than those of many of his contemporaries.

Now with that Age almost closed, I cannot help but think it’s becoming the time to start a critic analysis of that literature, see what it really contributed and check if anything or anybody was unjustly forgotten. Many authors of those years became a «common place» beyond their literary work and they received always the biggest share of credit and attention. Maybe we’ll see during this XXI century a critic revision of the speculative literature in the fancy of that the characters of El Quixote did with the popular knighthood romances.

Aliens have a big ego. They like to sculpt faces everywhere.

Context here.

The site for Cassini’s raw images has been rushed by space enthusiasts today, so it isn’t easy to access the full images. As far as I know most or all of them are taken on eclipsed Saturn-shine —the light that gets reflected by the rings and the atmosphere— and also the shine of Rhea and other nearby moons. The raw previews are provided in lossy JPG format, so they aren’t suitable for trying to spot the ice geysers:

News sources often show user comments in reverse order, with newest comments first. That’s useful when comments aren’t usually threaded or there’s a lot of them.

For Wordpress, it needs either a plugin or some hacking. The manual tweak is quite simple. Just replace in comments.php this:

foreach ($comments as $comment) :

for this:

foreach (array_reverse($comments) as $comment) :

There’s more info in the Wordpress support forum.