I’m about to get on a red-eye to Linz, Austria, for the Ars Electronica conference (art, technology society). I come back on Sunday.

I’ll blog from the conference…

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I spent a few minutes on the phone today with Ofer Ben-Schachar of RawSugar. You can think of RawSugar as a searchable del.icio.us with automagic, hierarchical clustering. (Users can also manually create hierarchical tag sets.) So, instead of seeing a long list of links on the left and a long list of tags on the right, at RawSugar you see a list of links on the bottom and your top-level tag categories on the top. The higher level tags are automatically propagated to the lower level ones. So far there is no way for users to publish their tag sets so others can use them.

Ofer wouldn’t tell me much about the magical clustering (not enough time on his side, not enough brain cells on mine), beyond that RawSugar infers relationships among mulitple tags an individual gives to a single object and among multiple tags multiple people give to the same object.

Ofer pointed to using RawSugar to create annotated link lists such as this one.

The site is new and only has a few thousand users and about 15,000 links. It looks very usable. Now we’ll just have to see if it reaches the critical masses… [Tags: tags folksonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous RawSugar]

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Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly writes about Creative Labs inane patent suit against iPod. The Creative patent covers browsing a menu of music by narrowing your focus, with each branch being a new screen.

Wow. The US Patent Office is stupid. [Tags: ipod patents DigitalRights]

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It’s BlogDay, so here are five blogs from around the world that I just came across. I’ve only read them a little so far, but they seem interesting…

Rajeev’s Random Musings — “Rajeev on books, science, India, world…”

China Snippets – Shanghai Views — Here’s the tagcloud: “china chinese coffee english favorite great local money seems shanghai start street yangshuo”

Madame Chiang — “Madame Chiang is presently based in Manila but her heart remains in Hong Kong, she has lived in many dark and interesting corners of the globe. Many things interest her including (but not limited to) World Affairs, Literature, Art, Life’s Idiosyncracies and Travel.”

It’s Peru, Baby — “Although I’ve always been interested in International Affairs, I never expected I’d move to Peru to be with a man who doesn’t speak English. Nor did I anticipate I’d fall in love with a Spanish speaker whilst I was living in Japan.”

Jakartass — ” The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.”

[Tags: blogday GlobalVoices]

The Bobs are back, awarding Best o’ Blog ribbons to blogs in nine languages and thireen categories. Vote here.

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Scott Bradner has a very interesting column on the meaning of the World Trade Organization’s ruling that the US cannot prevent US citizens from gambling online at a casinos based in Antigua and Barbuda. As Scott says:

This ruling establishes that the U.S. cannot unilaterally control what people can use the Internet for, even U.S. residents using the Internet from within this country. This is certainly not going to go over well with those people in Congress or other parts of government who think the U.S. should own the Internet because “we built it.”

Of course, the people who actually built the Internet — people like Scott — are the ones who understand best that the Internet is un-owned. At least so far. Pretty much. We hope.

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I’ve long been amused by words that mean their opposite. E.g., “cleave” can mean to cling to or to cut apart. And “dust” can mean to remove dust or, as when dusting for fingerprints, to deposit dust.

Yesterday, an odd almost-example of one occurred to me.

Imagine a mob intent on no good has formed. It’s going to loot and pillage. But a preacher gets their attention. They stop mobbing and start listening. The preacher delivers the greatest anti-violence sermon ever. Afterwards, the crowd reformed.

Yeah, it’s too contextual to make it onto the list of auto-contradictory words (AKA autoantonyms). But I thought I’d mention it. [Tags: autoantonyms wordplay]

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Now’s not the time to start pointing the political finger for what wasn’t done that could have ameliorated the devastating effects of Katrina. So read this article next week. Right now, check with Wikipedia for news and for links to places, like the Red Cross, looking for help… (PS: David W. Stephenson has started a category of his blog for Smart Mobs relief for Katrina and other natural disasters.) [Tags: katrina hurricane]

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From a scary Salon story by Michael Scherer on the FCC perhaps planning on outlawing what it considers to be indecent material from cable:

In 2003, he [Kevin Martin, head of the FCC] shared his concerns over indecency in a letter to the Parents Television Council, a group that has called for a boycott of shows like the WB’s “Everwood” because it features adults who encourage teenage characters to use birth control and, in one case, have an abortion. “Certainly broadcasters and cable operators have significant First Amendment rights, but these rights are not without boundaries,” Martin wrote to the group. “They are limited by law. They also should be limited by good taste.”

That is exactly what they should not be limited by in a democracy. [Tags: fcc tv]

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From an email going around:

Q: What’s the difference between Iraq and Vietnam?

A: Bush knew how to get out of Vietnam.

[Technorati tags: Bush humor iraq]

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Alex Steffen of WorldChanging posts an interview with Ethan Zuckerman of GlobalVoices and the Berkman Center, who has now become president of the Board of Directors of the non-profit behind Worldchanging. (The interview seems to be a year old. Still hugely relevant, though.)

Here’s Ethan’s basic challenge:

…issues which fall outside of the immediate experience and concern of the people blogging in some ways actually seem to be harder to talk about in the blogosphere than in mainstream media.

and

You’ve actually just identified the essential problem of free market journalism. In free market journalism you’re allowed to print whatever stories your audience wants to read. And because you know your audience is more interested in Michael Jackson than Jesse Jackson, you’re going to run fewer stories on policy and more on the abuse of boys on Neverland Ranch. Unless you get some extremely strong current of countervailing opinion, your coverage tends to fall towards the lowest common denominator. That’s why the international news hole in domestic television coverage has shrunk to almost nothing in recent years. The assumption is that no one’s interested.

That’s why a blogging community that pays attention to the rest of the world is so important. If bloggers talk about what’s happening in Africa, say, that not only means that more people have access to information about what’s going on there, it also means that there’s a countervailing force which shows the editors at the New York Times that people are interested enough in these issues to read about them.

For the “What can I do about it part?,” plus much much more, read the rest of the interview.

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Yes, it’s a 3D alphabet. Or, perhaps it’s what our alphabet would look like if we lived in a 4D world.

It’s also available as a font. (Thanks to Mark Dionne for the link.) [Technorati tags: fonts alphabet]

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When I was young, I used to be able to make up for a week’s newspaper avoidance by reading the NY Times Week in Review on Sunday. There I would find, well, the week in review.

Now what’s in it?

Page 1:

Two thirds of the page are devoted to an article on statistics vs. intuition in baseball. The other article is an interesting one on our worries about distributing better weapons to the Iraqis.

Page 2:

Occupying the the top third is a piece on the Pat Robertson embarrassment, presented comic-strip style. The middle is an article with accompanying infographic that tries to make clear how much data is going over the wires. About 7 column inches are devoted to virginity, keying off the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin. There are also three editorial cartoons.

Page 3:

Two thirds of the page are spent on Timothy Treadwell, subject of the just-released Herzog movie, Grizzly Man, who was eaten by bears in 2003.

There’s also a selection of answers to moral and normative questions, centering women-men relations, on Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s web site.

Page 4:

The major article is on the safety of lighter cars. Interesting, but not exactly news. But that’s ok, because page 4 is the “Ideas & Trends” page, as opposed to pages 1-3 which are the “Infographics & Movie Plugs” pages.

There’s also an article on the political leanings of law professors at the top law schools. Answer: They’re Democrats.

Page 5:

The page contains a single article. It’s on Sudoku, a sort of numeric crossword. The article is by Puzzles Editor Will Shortz who has been publishing books of Sudokus. At least the author blurb at the bottom notes the conflict of interest.

That’s it for The Week in Review. The rest consists of editorials, letters and op-eds.

Read it end to end and you won’t know what went on this week. You will, however, be better prepared to watch baseball and go to the movies. [Tags: nytimes media]

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Mortimer Adler was the person behind the Great Books, the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Propaedia, and other attempts to synthesize all knowledge. In 1986, he wrote A Guidebook to Learning about how to organize knowledge. After surveying a couple of thousand years of attempts to organize knowledge, he ends Section Three with these words:

If any light can be thrown on the problem of how to organize knowledge in the twentieth century—how to order and relate its parts of branches—it must come from philosophy; and it must do so in a manner that accords to some extent with the cultural pluralism and intellectual heterodoxy of the present age. (p. 104)

The easy slam is right, but too easy: We don’t need old white men to tell us how knowledge is organized. We can find whatever we need by searching and folksonomies. Yeah yeah, it’s true. But there still is value in having thoughtful people point out the inner relationships of knowledge. Some of the most important questions are exactly about this — is religion really a branch of psychology? is science really a branch of faith? is psychology a branch of chemistry? — and it’s important to have learned people in the discussion.

But why think of this as a question about how knowledge is organized? Adler thinks of the organization of knowledge as a map, but does that metaphor hold any more? Why think knowledge has to fit together? Why think it’s a thing or a landscape? Why think it has to have an overview?

Now that we we don’t have to organize the physical containers of knowledge, putting books on bookshelves, the term “organization” doesn’t really apply. Findability counts. So do arguments about how to understand our world — e.g., is thought really just neuroscience? But neither of these require the organization of knowledge.

And if times we do need a map of knowledge, either to help us understand our world or to help us find information, we should assume that it’s a map without a geography to which it refers. [Technorati tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous MortimerAdler taxonomy]

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Bush today:

“What is important is that Iraqis are now addressing these issues through debate and discussion, not at the barrel of a gun.”

Reueters today:

QAIM – Two Sunni Arab tribes, one loyal to al Qaeda and the other to the government, clashed near Qaim in western Iraq on Friday and Saturday, killing at least 20 people and wounding dozens, local clerics and hospital officials said.

KIRKUK – An Iraqi army officer was assassinated by gunmen near his home in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, police said.

MOSUL – U.S forces killed two insurgents in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Thursday including Abu Khallad, a Saudi national, who was believed to be a major facilitator of foreign fighters and suicide bombers to Iraq, the U.S military said.

KIRKUK – A roadside bomb targeting an Iraqi army patrol near Kirkuk’s University wounded six soldiers, five of them seriously, police captain Salam Zangana said.

[Tags: bush iraq]

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I ended up spending a fair amount of time with Josh Kinberg at foo camp. His FireANT — at the attractive URL http://www.AntiSnotTV.net/— aggregates and plays video feeds quite nicely. It looks highly useful, even in beta.

Glenn Fleishman has started using LookLeap instead of TinyUrl (one of my favorites) because he finds it “a little more transparent” because LookLeap lets you look up the shortened urls to see where they take you. In fact, simply adding “/look” to LookLeap’s short url takes you to a page that tells you where you’re going. Plus, the domains are human-readable.

For example, here are some versions of the Wikipedia page on “Abbreviation”

Original: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation

TinyUrl: http://tinyurl.com/c3eq3

LookLeap: http://lookleap.com/en.wikipedia.org/a2

LookLeap info page about the LookLeap Url: http://lookleap.com/en.wikipedia.org/a2/look

Note: With either LookLeap or TinyUrl, the links you create will only work so long as the LookLeap and TinyUrl sites remain up and working. [Tags: fireant lookleap tinyurl GlennFleishman utilities aggregators video]

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In a move that David Isenberg characterizes as turning the other cheek, Hugo Chavez has responded to Pat “Crazy Ass” Robertson’s call for his assassination by offering to sell gasoline and heating fuel at bargain prices to poor communities in the U.S.

Oddly (?), this story is not being widely picked up. There are only eight hits on Google News for chavez robertson “poor communities”, although two of them are Bloomberg and Fox. [Technorati tags: venezuela PatRobertson]

The Chris Lydon radio show, Open Source, did a show on hyper-localism that featured Ed Remsen, mayor of Montclaire NJ, who isn’t above commenting on posts on Baristaville. As Brendan Greeley points out, Remsen isn’t a born-on-the-Net hip guy. But he sure seems to get that the Net is an unowned conversation…and it’s his constituents who are talking. [Technorati tags: baristaville politics hyperlocal ChristopherLydon ChrisLydon]

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A rainbow planted one foot on land
and another on top of the ocean.
I know how they work:
Water particles split light into its tendencies.
But I don’t know why the colors band,
why they twice touch the bottom of the sky,
or why they paint a half circle
so perfect that it confounds Plato. So I lost my explanation for a moment.
The rainbow became a gift
so orderly that it must be a sign. I was watching as someone else.
Believe me, I know
there is no giver of the gift
and no sense in the sign, just the modern embarrassment
of looking at a rainbow.

(Please remember Blogging Rule #3: We must forgive one another’s poetry.) [Technorati tags: poetry]

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I just posted a handful of photos from Foo Camp onto Flickr. (Or search on the tag “foo05″.) [Technorati tags: foo05 photos]

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Beloit College has released its annual list of things freshmen have never been without. E.g., “Starbucks, souped-up car stereos, telephone voicemail systems, and Bill Gates have always been a part of their lives.” Etc.

That’s nothing. To me you’re a whippersnapper if:

You’ve never had a cavity drilled by a machine powered by an arrangement of pulleys

You think “Watergate” was about water and had the “gate” appended to it to signal it was a scandal

You have only seen impressions of John Wayne

You’re ok with coed bathrooms

You think wearing your baseball cap backwards isn’t just plain stupid

You consider feminism old fashioned

You can’t understand how Michael Jackson ever became a star

You can’t understande why anyone cares about Woody Allen movies

There’s not a single black-and-white movie you like

You can’t remember the first time you saw a female news anchor or heard a female DJ

The last Saturday Night Live death you remember was Phil Hartman’s

Vietnam was at least two wars ago

Man, I’m feeling cranky! [Technorati tags: beloit humor]

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Jeneane Sessum
CoreStreet Software’s president and blogger Phil Libin:

Blogging is my golf game

It’s where he hangs out and converses with his peers and other interested parties. Exactly. Especially for those of us who tend toward the George Carlin side of the golf spectrum.

BTW, the quote is from a story Jeneane’s writing on CEOs and blogging for next month’s Global PR Blog Week 2.0, an online conference about the effect of the Web on PR. Jeneane’s and other articles will hit the site September 19-23. Here’s a list of authors. [Tags: pr JeneaneSessum]

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Andrew Dupont developed a Mac OSX widget that helps people who use the Azureus client to download content via Bittorrent. Although it has become popular, Apple won’t list it on its widget page. Andrew asked politely and got a polite reply from Apple [Note: in the comments, Dave Rogers points out that this quote comes from DashboardWidgest.com, although Apple apparently agrees with the sentiment. Thanks, Dave.]:

We decided early on that we did not want to promote piracy in any way, choosing to exclude widgets related to P2P, BitTorrent, etc. …[T]he main use (though usually unpublished) for BitTorrent is illegal downloading.

Talk about your chilling effects! This is how the Net is bifurcating: Chickenshit companies like Apple (and many many more) play it safe even when it comes to hugely valuable tech like Bittorrent, so the “mainstream” Internet has one set of protocols while another set is driven underground. We end up with a cultural and economic divide, with the lawyer-safe Internet on one side and the transformative Internet on the other. To use the transformative Net, you need tech skills, knowledge that it’s there, and a respite from the brainwashing that’s going on.