This is nuts.

Go to “personalize” your Google homepage. A left-hand pane opens. Selecct “Create a Section” and type in “politics.” It lists some feeds you might want: Slate, CNN, Joho, NYT Magazine…

Yes, you read that right. Joho occasionally fulminates about politics, but it’s not primarily about politics. And its traffic is orders of magnitude smaller than real political sites and blogs. Likewise for links in. (I don’t ever ever check these stats, btw; it’s bad for the soul. But just compare the number of comments I get…)

So, clearly Google is broken. I mean, I’m glad that it’s broken in my favor, but listing Joho in that company is a desperate cry for help. [Tags: google bugs politics rss]

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Here’s a new measure of a presidency: How many TV shows about fictitious presidents do we need to get the taste of the current one out of our mouths for at least a few minutes?

George W. Bush is, of course, the current record holder with an FPI of 2.5 (West Wing, Commander in Chief, 24).

For what it’s worth (and let me do the math for you: Nothing), I was disappointed in Commander in Chief. West Wing aspires to some level of complexity in its narrative, while CiC’s first episode promised a conflict between a good gal and a bad guy. Plus, although I usually like Gina Geena Davis’ work, I thought she was wooden in CiC. She even failed to inspire me in her set-piece speech to Congress, which she delivered with all the enthusiasm of a kid giving a book report; I was surprised it didn’t end with “This book can be found in the library.”

I mean, I’d still vote for her character or for Geena Davis the actress over Bush. But W makes me yearn for the willfully over-simplifistic, fiscally irresponsible, cold-hearted, enviro-trashing, cynically manipulative, and remarkably corrupt Reagan administration. Ah, the good old days when it was morning in America! [Tags: GeorgeBush WestWing CommanderInChief tv politics]

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I spoent the morning at the Museum of TV & Radio which put together a symposium of about 25 people (all white, 3 women) about how bloggers and mainstream media can work together. The bloggers were the usual suspects who write about the issue of blogging, journalism and the media. The MSM folks were high-level execs at the usual suspect TV and print mainstream news organizations.

I typed up a bunch of notes at the time, but instead here’s a brief overview.

The MSM were not univocal in their reaction to the Web and blogs. That’s appropriate and it’s progress. There are still some who think they “get” blogs because they’re using blogs as stringers. But others are genuinely uncertain about the future of mainstream news, which is (imo) also appropriate. They’re facing the possiblity of genuine discontinuity.

There’s a lot of experimentation on all sides here. Appropriate.

No one knows what the business model(s) will be. Appropriate.

The bloggers didn’t have to spend half the morning explaining that most bloggers aren’t journalists, that bloggers are in conversation, etc. Progress.

There were still elements of hostility and misunderstanding, especially around the question of accuracy. But there is definitely progress…

PS: I was surprised at the extent of the MSM’s concern about Yahoo’s moves as it starts to position itself as a media company. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. [Tags: blogging media journalism]

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Scott Bradner writes about the good and bad news in the upcoming telecom act.

Bob Frankston writes about connectivity as a utility. [Tags: BobFrankston ScottBradner telecommunications]

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…if the being of ideas and the meaning of ideas are disconnected from one another, there will be no knowledge of the former, and the latter will not be.

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Zeta 1031b4

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Can you spot the problem
with this knee?
(Click to see full size image.)

Our 14-year-old son has come through his arthroscopic knee surgery well. The surgeon was very pleased. (She’s also amazingly kind.) Our son’s problem was bilateral osteochondral media femoral condyles, or at least that’s what I copied out of his case file. Possible that was the solution, not the problem. Possibly it’s the new type of martini sweeping the medical bars. In any case, they drilled holes in his bone to stimulate the flow of blood in order to take care of the bilateral osteochondral lesions (or, in lay terms, “chilled with a twist of lemon”).

He’ll be on crutches for six weeks, and then six weeks after that he goes in to have the other knee done. If it works, he’ll be able to dance again in 6 months; the doctors had forced him to stop doing almost all athletics — he was taking 5 dance classes a week — for the past year.

By the way, if you click on the photo, you’ll see a more detailed view. See if you can spot what his problem was!

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The Wall Street Journal has an article by Geoffrey A. Fowler and Mei Fong on China’s new restrictions on Internet use, especially blogging. It’s grim.

In the second to last paragraph they have a sentence that I think perfectly defines a divide in thought present not just in China:

The government says it hopes the new rules will make online news more reliable by phasing out small and unauthorized cyber-news publishers.

My first reaction was to laugh. Then I realized the “Blogs are reporters without editors [sotto voce] and without responsibility, good hygiene or their own apartments” crowd believes that blogs overall decrease the accuracy and utility of available information. The big difference is, of course, that when people here say that, they’re generally tut-tutting, not suggesting the blogosphere be censored. And while our government may be monitoring the content of Internet traffic, it at least has the courtesy to do so behind our backs.

(By the way, this must be a first: An article on Chinese Internet censorship that doesn’t mention the Berkman study on the topic and that doesn’t quote Rebecca!) [Tags: china blogs censorship]

Here’s Rebecca’s take…

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Chipster has pointed out in a comment on my post about the brokenness of the Dept. of Homeland Security’s hurricane page that this other page is filled with broken links. The page lists four agencies ( working to reduce chemical and biological threats. The links to the State Department and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency are broken.

Ok, sure, pages go down and links break and usually it’s not worth a mention. My site is full of dead links. But I’m not charged with keeping the country safe in an emergency. No one depends on my site to find urgent information that could save their lives, unless it involves the incredibly rapid folding of shirts. I’d like our Department of Homeland Security to do better than a Humanities-major blogger like me. [Tags: HomelandSecurity security terrorism]

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Chris Locke has a fascinating sketch of what he’s thinking about how the West turned Zen into a New Age religion. (I’m not being condescending by calling it a sketch; Chris warns us that he hasn’t stitched the pieces together yet.)

For me and a gazillion other half-baked students in the ’60s, D.T. Suzuki was the guy to read for the thrill of radical otherness that Zen promised. But, says Chris:

D.T. Suzuki and his Japanese masters conceived just such a questionable need to make Buddhism look and feel and act like Christianity. As a result, what was presented to the West as “Zen” is an animal that never existed. And this bait-and-switch routine has had consequences that still reverberate in our current cultural assumptions, not only about who and what those others are, but about who and what we are — ultimately, about who and what human beings are. And are not.

Because this is just a sketch and some notes, Chris doesn’t say more. We’ll just have to wait for the fullness of time. As if time were real.

Chris does also quote Robert Sharf, however, which gives a hint of where he’s going with this:

Philosophers and scholars of religion were attracted to Zen for the same reason that they were attracted to the mysticism of James, Otto and Underhill: it offered a solution to the seemingly intractable problem of relativism engendered in the confrontation with cultural difference…

My mother was something of a pan-religionist. She was eager to embrace every culture’s religious ideas, in part out of an admirable respect for the diversity of our world. But to embrace all religions, you have to drop the particularities of practice and belief. You end up reducing religion to a mere spiritualism — Yes, I am aware that “reduce” and “mere” are evaluative terms — that attempts to get you past the despair of relativism (just as Chris says) by finding a common core to all religion.

Spirituality may seem to be what all religions have in common, but that doesn’t mean it’s their core. Religions differ over the importance of belief, faith, action, practice and ritual; it only seems obvious to some religions that spirituality is the core of religion.

Personally, I think a whole lot of the problems vanish if we just accept the idea of local revelation, and reject any religion’s claim to universality. This enables us to preserve the notion of difference — which is a way of respecting the local — without falling into the depression of relativism.

(There you have it: A solution to the world’s problems in just two sentences! Now onto curing cancer…)

Anyway, see Chris’ Mystic Bourgeoisie blog for more on how Zen became NewAge++. [Tags: RageBoy ChrisLocke MysticBourgeoisie zen religion spirituality NewAge]

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Susan Crawford has put together one of the most delightful five minutes I’ve spent on line in a while. [Later: The brilliant Flash work was done by Nicholas Kaye at MentalDefective.com.] [Tags: SusanCrawford multimedia]

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Following W. David Stephenson’s advice, I wandered over to the Department of Homeland Security’s web site to see how they’re failing to update their page during this emergency. It’s worse than I thought:

Click to see full page

Makes you feel all secure in your homeland, doesn’t it? [Tags: homelandSecurity WDavidStephenson HurricaneKatrina]

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Brian Oberkirch lambasts Tim Russert for doing gotcha journalism on Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish in Lousiana. Russert replayed a tape of Broussard’s appearance on Russert’s show on three weeks ago and interrogated him about the precise dates on which a friend called his mother’s nursing home and whether the 92-year-old woman drowned on August 29 or Sept 2. Part of Broussard’s response:

Listen, sir, somebody wants to nitpick a man’s tragic loss of a mother because she was abandoned in a nursing home? Are you kidding? What kind of sick mind, what kind of black-hearted people want to nitpick a man’s mother’s death? They just buried Eva last week. I was there at the wake. Are you kidding me? That wasn’t a box of Cheerios they buried last week. That was a man’s mother whose story, if it is entirely broadcast, will be the epitome of abandonment.

Here’s some of what Brian says:

Here’s a new way to think about blogging and all forms of consumer generated media: forget fact checking [your] ass. That’s a parlor game for grad students and professional cynics. Yes, you caught some high-profile folks screwing up. Good on you. We’re frying bigger fish now, and you can’t play with us if you haven’t got the emotional heft. I’ve seen do-it-yourself media help us reconnect as human beings. Help one another as individuals in need. Answer a calling to the better parts of ourselves. That’s where I’m putting my energy. My hope is that whenever someone like Aaron Broussard utters a lamentation that has to be heard, that we’ll broadcast it to the four corners and find someone who can help, right away.

In this case, it was worse than a parlor game. It was an ambush. It was an attempt to discredit the story’s teller in order to deny the story’s meaning. It was contemptible. And, Brian points out, it didn’t help that Russert consistently mispronounced the drowned woman’s name. [Tags: media katrina HurricaneKatrina TimRussert AaronBroussard]

September 28: The story is more complex than I knew, and Broussard was less likely telling the truth than I thought.

It’s still embarrassing that Russert is still as close as mainstream TV news gets to a reporter who asks “hard questions.”

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Tom Evslin has begun serializing his murder mystery at Hackoff.com setting during The Bubble. You can read it for free. You can get it as a feed. You can comment on it. You can visit the faux company web site. Beginning next year you can buy a hard copy version. You can even win prizes.

Is this what Dickens would have done? Well, only if he got paid ahead of time. Per word. Tom’s more generous than that. [Tags: TomEvslin books mysteries blogs]

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Timothy Spalding has put together this really interesting site, called LibraryThing, that lets you list your books, tag them, and share the list with others. You can search by bibliographic info, user or tags. And Tim does some useful listing of the top 25 books by author, tags, etc.

One of the cool things: You enter a book into your list by typing in sloppy information. For example, if you want to enter The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking, you can type in “social construction hacking” and LibraryThing will search the Library of Congress and Amazon. Sure enough, it finds the right one. Click and all the bibliographic info, plus the cover graphic, are added to your list.

It’s basically free, although to add more than 200 books to your list, Tim asks for a one-time fee of $10, which seems pretty reasonable to me…especially once Tim adds RSS feeds so we can subscribe to a tag, reader, etc., and discover the new books the wise crowd is reading. [Tags: LibraryThing taxonomy delicious tagging tags]

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For Everything is Miscellaneous, I’m looking for examples of dumb labels. For example, fire starter logs warn us that the contents are flammable.

Any others?

Thanks in advance… [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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When it’s not too dorky or disruptive, I like to use the phrase “our Internet” instead of “the Internet,” because I think it makes the right political point. Unfortunately, it’s almost always dorky and disruptive.

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Jeff Jarvis has been flogging an excellent idea for a couple of weeks: Recovery 2.0. Lots of people did lots of great things on the Net to help victims of Katrina. In fact, so many sites went up, particularly ones to help people find lost relatives, that there were too many places to look, which spurred a round of consolidation efforts. This is stuff the Web should be proud of. But Jeff’s point is that the distributed nature of the Web, so crucial to its strength, can also be a weakness. Recovery 2.0 — which is more a call to action than a plan of action — is his name for the need to better coordinate ahead of time.

How you think that coordination should happen says a lot about your view of the Web.

A Semantic Web approach would create an ontology of victims, relatives, disasters, relief efforts, locations, threats, supplies, routes, relief agencies, medical records, doctor appointment books, local bus schedules, and stock market data.

A Web 2.0 approach would create APIs among recovery services offered on the Web and wait for hackers to build something useful. Whatever the hackers create would include plotting something on Google Maps, a requirement for all Web 2.0 apps.

A microformats approach would spend a weekend coming up with a quick-and-dirty set of useful metadata, preferably modeled on Amazon.

The regulatory approach would ask the pharmaceutical, transportation and recording industries to come up with a set of guidelines for the distribution of relief supplies with the primary objective of making sure that they do not fall into the hands of terrorists.

(I kid but I think Recovery 2.0 is a terrific idea.) [Tags: recovery JeffJarvis semanticweb microformats]

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I’m in St. Louis for the annual PRPD meeting. Jeff Jarvis, Jennifer Ferro (KCRW) and I are on a panel in 45 minutes on “Technology, Culture and Public Radio.” For me, the interesting question is: Given that the Net is disaggregating radio stations and networks — the content chunks are being ripped out of their play schedules, the listeners are now producers — how should public radio stations respond? They won’t and shouldn’t just fold up shop. What will the transition period look like?

I think I also want to talk about trust, which public radio stations take as their main asset. Maybe trust is going to move from something listeners give to stations to what grows among connections among listeners. It seems to be a lesson of the Net that you build trust with your users/readers/listeners by getting out of their way. I only wish I knew what I was talking about.

Anyway, this morning I got to hang out with Jake Shapiro of PRX and then had a three-hour conversation with Jeff Jarvis (which at Jarvis speeds equates to 4.5 hours with anyone else) in which we settled all issues, solved all problems, bought a house, raised a family, and then split up because we couldn’t agree on how to respond to terrorism.

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I’m in St. Louis for a Public Radio conference. The hotel charges$10 to connect to the Net, even though it’s free to jump into the much more expensive-to-maintain pool. So, I got to my room and checked out the available hotspots. Here are a couple of the un-WEPed SSID’s:

Suck my left nut
Get your own damn router
My other ride is yo mama Even so, I’m blogging to you now courtesy of My other ride is yo mama. [Tags: wifi]

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Logan Airport has forced the American Airlines lounge to turn off its over-priced T-Mobile wirelessness so the Airport can sell its own overpriced wirelessness without competition.

Sucks big time.

And while I’m on the topic of Logan sucking: The re-done Terminal A opened a few months ago. It cost tons of money and it shows. Yet travelers still have to hunt out the rare power outlets. Didn’t Logan ask a single traveler what we want in a terminal? We would not have said overpriced, single-sourced wifi and no power outlets. Jeez!

And while I’m on the topic of T-Mobile sucking: AA has a nice promotion to give one day of free ethernet-cabled connectivity from T-M. Thank you. But to take advantage of this, you have to proceed through screen after screen, filling in your personal details, creating an account, creating both a password and an access code, specifying a security question… Note to T-Mobile: If Logan would get out of the way, then we could maybe get some competitive wifi in here that understands that we just want to turn on our computeres and connect, not fill out mortgage applications. Jeez!

Aaarrrrggghhh.

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[Note: This post is part of the Be Dumb in Public program, of which I am a lifetime member.]

There’s lots of good info on the Web about how to create a robots.txt file that will keep the major search engines from spidering your site. But I haven’t found instructions aimed at my precise level of ineptitutde. So, here goes…

Let’s say my “hideme.com”directory exists at root level. That is, my host won’t let me go any further down than that. I see hideme.com plus all the other directories I own. Let’s say I want to put in a robots.txt file to protect the contents of hideme.com, but I want to leave the rest of my directories open to search engines.

1. Is this the right robots.txt content:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /hideme.com/

I’m especially concerned about getting the slashes right.

2. Where exactly do I put the robots.txt file? At the same level as the hideme.com directory, where I can see all my directories? Or inside the hideme.com file? Or elsewhere? Thanks in advance. And have pity: I was a Humanities major.

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“The popular myth is that the Internet was bult to withstand a nuclear attack, but it may not withstand the depredations of the telcos and cablecos.”

Her idea: A year from today, we have an Earth Day for the Internet. No particular political agenda. Big tent. “A first step towards recognizing the fragility of this resource.” She says, “The key pain humans feel is alienation.” She wants One Web Day to help counter this with connection.

Her mother said, “But on Earth Day, you can plant a tree!” So, what can we do on OWD? It has to be participatory. E.g., connecting villages. More hotspots. “One Day on the Web.”

David Isenberg suggests giving Netizens a few seconds each on a big screen in Times Square. Mary Rundle suggests MTV might be a good partner here.

Susan wants it to be sponsored by many private and public organizations. But how neutral is it going to be? The group discusses. Susan says that just as Earth Day expresses some concern about the Earth, OWD should express some concern about the Net. The positive about the Internet is its ability to connect people and give them voice. What threatens those values threatens the Internet. Should Verizon have pause before joining? Maybe, but they should jump on board if only for digital divide reasons. (”It’s tree planting,” says Erica George.)

Derek Bambauer comes up with the idea of using the Google globe — the one that shows much of the Earth lit up with connectivity [Ack! I can't find it.] — as a logo. [I like this idea a lot, in part because there's an implicit message in the fact that so much more of the north is connected: Light up the world.]

We discuss many other ideas. Susan says someone had the idea of state paintings: Everyone in a state gets to add a few pixels to a painting. [Emergent painting!]. Erica suggests an oral history project. Any page that wants to support OWD can put up the logo and link it to some contribution to make the Net better. Derek suggests that OWD also remind people of the repression occurring. He mentions having an “adopt a blogger” program for bloggers in rights-challenged countries.

The first One Web Day is scheduled for September 22. [Tags: OneWorldDay SusanCrawford]

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I’ve posted the write-up Ars Electronica required of its presenters. It’s called (overly-dramatically) The New Is. It’s a slightly different take on what’s becoming my same-old topic: The effect of the change in principles of organization currently underway. This piece focuses on the dismantling and re-mantling of knowledge. Here’s a snippet from near the beginning:

From Aristotle’s way of thinking came a history of thought and politics that made certain assumptions: Because knowledge and being are fused, just as there is only one reality, there is only one structure of knowledge. The best people to put this structure together are experts. Because of the economics of parchment and paper, experts filter what we need to know. They become gatekeepers, priests of knowledge.

The digital age undoes all of these assumptions, changing the nature of knowledge and even of meaning itself. We are entering the age where to understand something is to see how it isn’t what it is.

(The note of paradox is there because paradox was the theme of Ars Electronica. (VOICE IN HEAD: And if the theme of Ars Electronica were jumping off bridges, I suppose you’d do that too…)) [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous taxonomy]

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[The following is from the latest issue of my (free) newsletter, JOHO:]

Bogus Contest: Internet MadLibs

At the Emmy’s, Jon Stewart apparently dubbed in network-acceptable words to passages they have found too hot (= interesting, real) to allow on air. This suggests a type of Internet MadLibs. Can you improve on the following famous Internet quotes?

Information just wants to _____ – John Perry Barlow

The network ___ the computer – Scott McNealy

The future is already here. It’s just not ______ – William Gibson

…I took _____ in creating the Internet – Al Gore (See here for the actual quote in context.)

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and ________.” John Gilmore

On the Internet no one ____ you’re a ____ – Peter Steiner

As always, all entries will be routed around as if they were damage…unless we can ascertain that they came from a genuine dog.

(Feel free to post responses in the comments section.) [Tags: contest]

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Rebecca MacKinnon at Global Voices gets the scoop on Reporters without Borders‘ Handbook For Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents being released today:

The Reporters Without Borders Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents is not for any of those purposes. It is the first truly useful book I’ve seen aimed at the kinds of bloggers featured here at Global Voices every day: People who have views and information that they want to share with the world beyond their own national borders. They are often people whose perspectives are not well represented in their own country’s media, and certainly not well reported by the international media. Sometimes they are political dissidents, but usually not. Mainly, they are just ordinary citizens with a passion to communicate with the world – and no easier way to do so than by writing, podcasting, and posting pictures on their own blogs.

The Handbook for Bloggers is for people who want to be serious participants in the emergent online global conversation: How to set up a quality, credible blog. How to get it noticed. And.. if you’re in a country where there government might not like what you’re saying, how to avoid getting in trouble when you by-pass the information gatekeepers and talk directly to the world.

She then asks a series of trenchant questions… [Tags: GlobalVoices RebeccaMackinnon blogs blogging ReportersWithoutBorders]

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In Finland, you can design your own postage stamps. Just don’t tell the Boobs4BourbonSt guy. In fact, don’t tell me.(Thanks to Juha Jokinen for the link.)

[Tags: philately]

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TopSpotOrNot lets you rate the satellite images of various spots, combining HotOrNot, Google Maps, Wikipedia and Google images. All it needs is Flickr and del.icio.us to be 100% Cool Site Compliant! (Thanks to wanagi for the link.)

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NPR’s “All Things Considered” last night ran a three minute commentary of mine on tagging. You can hear it here, thanks to Michael Shook. [Later: Here's NPR's own version.]

Here’s a near-transcript:

Google is smart, but here’s a tough problem for it. Let’s say you type in “africa,” “agriculture” and “grains” because that’s what you’re researching. You’ll get lots of results, but you may miss pages about “couscous” because Google is searching for the word “grain” and doesn’t know that that’s what couscous is made of. Google knows the words on the pages, but doesn’t know what the pages are about. That’s much harder for computers because what something is about really depends on what you’re looking for. That same page on couscous that to you is about economics could be about healthy eating to me or about words that repeat syllables to someone else. And that’s the problem with all attempts by experts and authorities to come up with neat organizations of knowledge: What something is about depends on whose looking.

Now a new tool is emerging on the Internet that helps us find things based on what we think they’re about. It’s called tagging, and without intending to, it’s shaking up our ideas about how knowledge is organized.

For example, take a look at the site that kicked off the new wave of tagging, It’s called Delicious and its web address is http://del.icio.us. Let’s say you come across the Moroccan couscous web page and you want to remember it. So you upload its Web address to your free page at delicious that lists all the pages you’ve saved. Then delicious asks you to enter a word or two as tags so you can find the Moroccan page later. You might tag it with Morocco, recipe, couscous, and main course, and then later you can see all the pages you’ve tagged with any of those words.

That’s a handy way to organize a large list of pages, but tagging at delicious really took off because it’s a social activity: Everyone can see all the pages anyone has tagged with say, Morocco or main course or agriculture. This is a great research tool because just by checking the tag “agriculture” now and then, you’ll see every page everyone else at delicious has tagged that way. Some of those pages will be irrelevant to you, of course, but many won’t be. It’s like having the world of people who care about a topic tell you everything they’ve found of interest.And unlike at Google, you’ll find the pages that other humans have decided are ABOUT your topic.

That’s the real change in about-ness. Consider another tagging site, Flickr — that’s f-l-i-c-k-r without the e — where you can upload photos you want to share with friends or the world. You might tag the snapshot you took of the guards at Buckingham Palace as “London” and “Buckingham.” But I might come across it and tag it as “Big Funny Hats” because I’m working on a paper about fashion mistakes. You and I don’t have to agree on what your photo is about. This takes classification and about-ness out of the hands of authors and experts. Now it’s up to us readers to decide what something is about.

Not only does this let us organize stuff in ways that make more sense to us, but we no longer have to act as if there’s only one right way of understanding everything, or that authors and other authorities are the best judges of what things are about. And that’s a big lesson. [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous taxonomy tags delicious flickr]

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But we knew that already :)

Keep getting weller sooner, Halley. [Tags: HalleySuitt]

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Irina Slutsky interviews Justin Ross, the person behind Boobs4BourbonSt, a site where men and women can donate topless photos of themselves and visitors can only see the girls/guys going wild if they forward proof that they’ve donated at least $5 to the Katrina relief effort. So far the site has raised over $13,000. Snippet:

Irina: …What kind of job you want after graduation?

Justin: I’m leaning toward something in government. Not necessarily a congressman or senator, but I think I’d really enjoy being an aide or assistant to one. Maybe work my way up to working in the president’s cabinet. Most of those positions aren’t really places for idealists, though.

Justin notes that “each boob picture has raised, on average, $213.” [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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As so many predicted, my summer fling with a goatee and moustache has, with the changing of the leaves, ended. We have, rather fashionably, annulled the relationship.

It was just too high maintenance, requiring near-constant tugging and twisting, especially the delicious little bits on the border with the shaved areas. You know who you are. Um, were. I couldn’t maintain my beard and write my blog. It really came down to that.

And while I was in having my goatee and moustache removed, I had them further weaken my chin and, what the heck, add some more moles.

BTW, I expect to get over the pathetic habit of stroking my chin where my goatee used to be by the time the spring rains come.

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BradSucks, the webbiest musician on the Web, has a whole bunch o’ news, including that he’s gearing up to perform live. Also, he’s remixed his most excellent CD, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing. And you can get the source of that album. All for free, although you can also pay him, which, if you like his music (as I do), I hope you will. [Tags: BradSucks music]

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0: eight
1: eighteen
2: eighty
3: eighty-eight
4: eighty-five
5: eighty-four
6: eighty-nine
7: eighty-one
8: eighty-seven
9: eighty-six
10: eighty-three
11: eighty-two
12: eleven
13: fifteen
14: fifty
15: fifty-eight
16: fifty-five
17: fifty-four
18: fifty-nine
19: fifty-one
20: fifty-seven
21: fifty-six
22: fifty-three
23: fifty-two
24: five
25: forty
26: forty-eight
27: forty-five
28: forty-four
29: forty-nine
30: forty-one
31: forty-seven
32: forty-six
33: forty-three
34: forty-two
35: four
36: fourteen
37: nine
38: nineteen
39: ninety
40: ninety-eight
41: ninety-five
42: ninety-four
43: ninety-nine
44: ninety-one
45: ninety-seven
46: ninety-six
47: ninety-three
48: ninety-two
49: one
50: one hundred
51: seven
52: seventeen
53: seventy
54: seventy-eight
55: seventy-five
56: seventy-four
57: seventy-nine
58: seventy-one
59: seventy-seven
60: seventy-six
61: seventy-three
62: seventy-two
63: six
64: sixteen
65: sixty
66: sixty-eight
67: sixty-five
68: sixty-four
69: sixty-nine
70: sixty-one
71: sixty-seven
72: sixty-six
73: sixty-three
74: sixty-two
75: ten
76: thirteen
77: thirty
78: thirty-eight
79: thirty-five
80: thirty-four
81: thirty-nine
82: thirty-one
83: thirty-seven
84: thirty-six
85: thirty-three
86: thirty-two
87: three
88: twelve
89: twenty
90: twenty-eight
91: twenty-five
92: twenty-four
93: twenty-nine
94: twenty-one
95: twenty-seven
96: twenty-six
97: twenty-three
98: twenty-two
99: two
100: zero

No, I don’t know why I did this either. (And if there are errors, it’s because I’m a bad programmer, not a bad alphabetizer. Although I’m also a bad alphabetizer, now that you mention it.) [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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EthanZ reports on the not-so-amusing piracy that steals 850 tons of rice intended for tsunami victims. Talk like a pirate? Sure. Steal food like a pirate? Not so funny. [Tags: TalkLikeAPirate EthanZuckerman tsunami]

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Jeneane has an excellent article explaining why CEOs should blogs. She’s talked with a whole lot of CEOs and their moral equivalents… [Tags: blogs JeneaneSessum]

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Joi blogs a BBC report on a study that shows that a substantial number of US teens think that freedom of speech goes too far.

I’m less alarmed than the BBC article apparently thinks I should be. All my life I’ve been reading polls that show that Americans think the Bill of Rights goes too far. I assume that this is in part a trick of the way the questions are phrased and in part scarily true. So, the new study doesn’t surprise me. The question is: What’s the trend? [Tags: politics JoiIto bbc]

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Pedro De Miguel Asensio from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid is talking about the European Union’s rules on consumer protection and how they differ from the US’s.

When it comes to jurisdiction, the general rule seems to be that if a consumer sues a vendor, the suit occurs in the customer’s country of domicile if the vendor’s site is directed at that country. Otherwise, it happens in the vendor’s country. E.g., if it’s a Danish site, written in Danish with only Danish phone numbers, and someone in Spain buys a product from it and then sues, the suit will be heard in Denmark, not Spain. Consumer groups push for suing in the consumer’s country. Businesses don’t like that — imagine opening up a site to sell your music and you get hauled into court in West Elsewhere by a consumer who thinks you’ve defamed her religion.

Pedro says that currently, although the scope of protection differs, the EU and the US are in substantial agreement.

Terry Fisher says that the first generation of Internet lawyers thought sovereign states would stay out of the Internet. It’s just too messy. The new generation, he says, which includes Tim Wu, thinks sovereign states are definitely in and we should be encouraging divergencies (e.g., the French can’t buy Nazi paraphernalia, but Yankees can). Terry says that Pedro diverges from this, recommending coming together on standards.

Bill McGeveran points out that once you’ve decided the forum (e.g., California), you can also choose which law applies: A California court can apply Danish law. And then there’s the question of enforceability.

John Palfrey asks if the Internet is different enough that there should be special procedures and forms of arbitration for it. Pedro says it’s a point worth considering.

When googling “Rome Convention” during Pedro’s talk, I came across a page that uses the phrase “aural fixation.” It doesn’t mean anything like I first thought. (By the way, the Rome Convention to which Pedro referred is not that one. It’s this one.)

[Tags: berkman law internet ecommerce eu]

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The following way of explaining what I mean by the power of the miscellaneous emerged from a phone conversation with Lou Rosenfeld:

It’s like the blind men and the elephant, except you don’t have to choose your favorite blind man any more.

Does that work for you? [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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I’ve just published a new issue of my newsletter, JOHO. This is the first one since I began blogging that doesn’t have some previously blogged material in it. Plus, I put in some very short excerpts from the book I’m working on.

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Taketh:

Verso Technologies has announced a “carrier-grade applications filter” designed to block Skype but capable of blocking P2P messaging, streaming media and IM, according to an article by Doug Mohney in TheInquirer.net. ISPs don’t like Skype because it increases traffic and gets in the way of them “monetizing” VOIP. I.e., it’s free and people like it, hence it must die.

IP Media Monitor (free reg required) writes that Google is planning to build its own optical network:

Internet giant Google is reviewing bids received from multiple technology vendors for the development of a national DWDM fiber network, an optical switching fabric that would cover the entire continental U.S., and ultimately the globe. The construction of an advanced optical fiber network would give Google unprecedented flexibility to push massive amounts of voice, video and data content very close to end users.

The move by Google comes on the heels of the company’s widely reported purchase of dark fiber and hiring of an optical fiber expert to head up initiatives by the company to construct fiber-based networks. Some reports have suggested Google’s aim in buying dark fiber is to cost-effectively manage by the company’s rising traffic loads by constructing their own long-haul networks. But according to vendors who responded to Google’s request for proposals for the optical DWDM network, Google’s architectural demands suggest the company is looking to become a major competitive communications network provider.

As a general principle, it’s important to keep the companies that provide the transport of bits from also providing services using those bits because the temptation is just too great to hamstring the services of others. (See the Skype tidbit above.) But, if Google were to keep the two divisions separate, and if they were to pledge to keep their network open to anyone with two bits, so to speak, this could give us a way to route around the greed- and fear-based architectures coming our way from the incumbents.

Plus, do you know just how cool fiber is? Omigod.

Alternatively, maybe Google is just building itself an amazing intranet.

[Tags: google skype]

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