Happy Celibate Passover

From Bob Treitman of SoftPro Books comes a pointer to an article from the Jerusalem Post that tells us that Viagra isn’t kosher for Passover. Looks like the dough won’t be leavened for some of my brethren for the next week or so.

Happy Pesach and here’s wishing liberation to all of G-d’s children.

[I'm in Miami this morning to talk with a Nasdaq marketing council so you won't be hearing more from me today.]

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Sufi and Wifi

Eric Norlin cites a Sufi rendering of imagination.

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Paul English has started a Web site for Boston-area folks interested in providing wifi services to their neighbors — install a wireless network in your house, put an antenna on your roof, and anyone withing elctro-shouting distance can share your broadband for nothing. (Paul is currently installing a Neighborhood Network in his house in Hull which will provide wireless connectivity to all the boats in Boston Harbor.)

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Blog-Crazy PC Forum

People are blogging like crazy from the wifi-enabled PC Forum. I’ve been enjoying Dan Gillmor and Doc Searls especially — Dan is cool and columnistical while I can envision Doc’s fingers tapping at his Mac until they’re red and swollen. You go, boys! This is is important stuff and your coverage is much appreciated.

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Metaphorical verbs

Through email with Vergil Iliescu, I think I’ve realized what my problem is with the never-ending blogthread on new metaphors for the Web — which I, of course, am now extending yet again. While I like the direction the blogthread has been going, focusing on the associative, hyperlinked nature of the Web and comparing it to the imagination, maybe the problem is that we’ve been thinking about nouns instead of verbs and adjectives. If the Web is like a shared imagination, then what verbs follow? After all, the spatial metaphor is baked right into the everyday language we use for talking about our experience of the Web. A new metaphor would have to replace the quotidian “going to” and “leaving” language the spatial metaphor provides.

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Spatiality, Imagination and Links

AKMA advances the blogthread on alternatives to the spatial metaphor of the Web by focusing on hyperlinks as providing an “associative space,” tying nicely into his earlier comment that “imagination” might provide a better metaphor than mind. He also suggests that Jung might have something to say about this.

I find this more useful than the “mind” metaphor because the point of similarity is much clearer. It is also consonant with the spatiality of the Web since that spatiality is due to the Web’s navigability which is in turn due to its hyperlinked geography.

So, the Web as a global imagination in the sense of an association of ideas. Interesting…

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Meta-Oscars

They really did try to keep it short. No dance numbers. They kept Whoopi to a short, unfunny monologue. So why did it drag on for almost five hours? Because of all the damn special tributes. My free advice to Oscar: Next year, do the tributes after the last award is given out. People who really want to stay up until 1am watching Robert Redford thank the sky for shining above him are perfectly free to do so. The rest of us can go home at 11.

Biggest surprise: Jennifer Connelly’s arms. You’re supposed to have to bend over to tie your laces. If she’s joined a bowling league, apparently she’s using a monster ball.”

Biggest relief: Now that Randy Newman, after 16 nominations, has finally won an award, maybe he can write a different song.

Best argument against regaining control: Halle Berry was great until she got a grip on her emotions and started thanking her lawyers for negotiating such good deals.

Best Living Up to Her End of the Bargain: Unlike her previous time hosting, Whoopi Goldberg didn’t once use the word “beaver.”

Julia Roberts unhinging her jaw
moments before mating with Denzel Washington
and then devouring him whole.

Best Money Spent on a Publicist: In the Oscar site’s gallery of fashion-glam shots from the show, Ernest and Tova Borgnine are the second in the series, right after Nicole Kidman.

[BTW, the Oscahs! tabulator I wrote broke before I could even enter the fifth entry. If you were using it, I'm sorry.]

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Small Photos Loosely Joined and in The Globe

Gary Turner sends a picture of him reading my Upcoming Book, joining the photos of Chris Pirillo and Ev.

BTW, there’s a nice piece about Ev by Hiawatha Bray in today’s Boston Globe. And Scott Kirsner has an interesting update on what’s going on at PARC: modular robotics and collaborative sensing. Although they sound like phrases from the Tech Randomizer, they are actually interesting ideas. Also in the Globe is a good piece by D.C. Denison on Instant Messaging that as a sign of desperation actually quotes me.

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New Virtual Appliances

In the wake of the exciting virtual keyboard

new appliances have been announced in the past few days.

Virtual Watch

Virtual Car

Virtual Bono

Virtual Dentures

Also in the works: Virtual Belt, Virtual Umbrella and Virtual Birth Control

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MiscLinks

Frank Paynter points us to an article (in PDF) in which Valdis Krebs applies what he knows about mapping social networks to mapping the terrorist cell responsible for 9/11. The key illustration is on Valdis’ site here.

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I mentioned Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere” when commenting on Akma‘s blogthread-inspiring idea that the Web might be usefully compared to the mind. I heard from Trevor Bechtel, Assistant Dean at the Loyola grad school:

In your deliberations about the web and the brain you should know that Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg wrote an article in WIRED in 1995 on just this subject. The article compares Teilhard de Chardin’s thoughts about the noosphere to the rise of new information technologies.

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Megnut writes:

I’m doing a monthly column now for The O’Reilly Network entitled, aptly enough, Megnut. You can read the first one here on “Attendee-Centered Conference Design” aka My Observations from the SXSW Interactive Festival last week in Austin TX.

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Gary Lawrence Murphy has written a spirited reply to Dave Webb’s article “Blogging a Dead Horse.”

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Ryan Ireland has moved his always enjoyable blog, Becoming. (The new host, Movable Type, can suck in all your previous Blogger entries if you move from here to there.)

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Small Pictures Loosely Joined

Now Ev has posted a picture of himself — well, his hands — holding a copy of my Upcoming Book. So did Chris Pirillo. One more and I’m going to start a gallery of Bloggers with Books. You’ve been warned.

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