GoogleCircles, the latest beta from Google (so why is it marked version “4.1″?) is a bit like the late lamented Amazon Book Circles: It shows you what people in a geographic area or from a particular domain are searching for. Be sure to check what they’re looking for in WhiteHouse.gov. [Tags: google googlecircles 4.1]

5 Comments »

I loved my KayPro II.

I loved it not only because it was my first computer, although that helped. I loved it because it taught me so much; I learned about computing, and not just about a particular operating environment. I loved it because within a year I could teach myself to write assembler programs for rescuing crashed WordStar documents and manage files. I loved it because I could carefully follow directions to double the clock speed by actually soldering jumpers on the motherboard. I loved it because even I could read its schematic.

I don’t love my current PC. It’s a big honking machine and I like how it works: 3.2mh processor, 0.75T of storage, two screens, etc. But I’d ditch it tomorrow for a bigger, faster machine. My emotional attachment is zero.

As DRM locks down my machine so that it becomes more like a TV, I’m going to feel more alienated from it.

Many Mac owners feel attached to their machines for a variety of reasons: Its elegance, its Unix hackability (in the good sense), its not-Windows-ness. Of course, we’ll see how much Apple’s love of DRM weakens that good feeling over time.

I do not expect to love a computer again. I would be happy to be surprised.

[Tags: windows apple microsoft macintosh kaypro]

7 Comments »

Tim’s got a post with lots of comments discussimg laptop bags. (I get some of the blame for this, having raised the topic with Tim at dinner a few nights ago.)

Not so coincidentally, but before reading Tim’s post, I ordered a Crumpler bag off of eBay because my Swiss Army knapsack is coming apart and I admired someone’s Crumpler a little bit ago.

Yes, the Crumpler web site is so hip that it’s unusable. [Tags: bags tim_bray crumpler]

1 Comment »

That is, photos of the partial eclipse, not partial photos of the eclipse. [Tags: photos partial_eclipse eclipse]

2 Comments »

David Donnelly at News.com is upset that Google is engaging in politics-as-usual lobbying, even if it is to protect the neutrality of the Net. David suggests some webbier ways Google might proceed.

Personally, I’m glad Google is lobbying the old fashioned way. We’re getting creamed by the other side’s ability to work Congress. On the other hand, I’d love to see Google also try out some of what David suggests. (Thanks to Micah Sifry for the link.) [Tags: google net_neutrality politics david_donnelly ]

Be the first to comment »

Hao Wu’s sister has started a blog at MSN Spaces. There’s a translation of the first post here.

You can get a badge for your site here. [Tags: hao_wu]

1 Comment »

Those darn teens

danah’s got a great post about what happens when teenagers actually do engage in a political cause. [Tags: danah_boyd myspace]

2 Comments »

You will not come away from Rebecca’s latest post all eager to sign up with Yahoo. If nothing else, Yahoo’s continuing to host its email service within reach of China’s police is unconscionable. [Tags: china yahoo rebecca_mackinnon ]

2 Comments »

With his reference at the press conference to not wearing Speedo’s on the beach, President Bush came perilously close to acknowledging the one photograph that could bring down his administration overnight. No, not a photo of more torture at Abu Ghraib. Not Dick Cheney tying a young woman to a railway track…

…A photo of Bush without his shirt on.

In the full eight years of his presidency we will never ever be shown such a photo because America would learn how much time he puts in buffing himself.

America isn’t ready for Bush’s six pack. [Tags: bush politics]

Be the first to comment »

The Carpetbagger Report reports that John McCain seems to be moving to the right wrt gay marriage.

Too bad.

[Tags: john mccain]

Be the first to comment »

Bill DeRouchey is trying to find out when and who introduced the use of two vertical bars to mean “pause.”

Now there’s a question I’d never thought of!

If you happen to know, could you leave a comment? Thanks. [Tags: bill+derouchey]

4 Comments »

Amazing closeups of insects. (Found at Reddit.com) [Tags: photos insects]

2 Comments »

Last night I cleared US Immigration in the Montreal airport. I was the only traveler in the hall. The immigration officer was about thirty-five.

IO: What’s that button on your jacket?

Me: It’s for OneWebDay

IO: What’s that?

Me: It’s like Earth Day for the Web. It celebrates the value of the Web.

IO: Like free speech?

Me: (Getting nervous about where this is going) Yes, that’s one important value of the Web.

IO: The Internet is great for free speech.

Me: Absolutely. But now there are threats that might limit it.

IO: Limit free speech on the Net?

Me: Well, track and identify people by what they write, which, especially in other countries, could be used to crack down on dissidents.

IO: (stamping my papers) Ok, you’re all set. Keep the Internet free.

Me: A whole bunch of people are working on it. Thanks.

This was a charming conversation, and it’s great to have a face emerge from a bureaucratic process. But I have to wonder: If my button had said “Out of Iraq!” or “Legalize pot!” or “Impeach Bush!,” would the conversation have felt so innocent? [Tags: OneWebDay]

3 Comments »

I’m belatedly looking into hotels for my trip to Freedom 2 Connect outside of DC and have decided to go for the Hilton’s Romance Package because not only is it the lowest priced room they offer, it comes with breakfast. Besides, don’t I deserve a night of one-person romance, a chance to rekindle my love affair with myself?

I was mildly amused to read the description:

A romance package with two beds?? That’s either a lot less or a lot more intimacy than I think most couples would be comfortable with. [Tags: romance kinkiness]

3 Comments »

KiJiJi is like CraigsList with sites in various cities in the northern hemisphere (+ Australia and New Zealnad), but, conspicuously, none in the US. (”Kijiji means “village” in Swahili. Plus, it has five dotted letters in a row.)

Competition is almost always a good thing. But CraigsList is so good, and so good-hearted, that I’m not filled with joy at the thought of the fragmentation competition brings. My feelings, they are mixed. (One of the threads at the Toronto site asks if anyone has actually made a sale on it yet. Not a lot of yes responses yet. But give it time.)

[Tags: craigslist kijiji]

5 Comments »

Yesyterday as I sat in the audience at a session at the IA Summit, I was unable to connect to the wifi system in order to send an email to a friend about meeting him for dinner. I tried every way I could to connect, but to no avail. I started thrashing through the options for getting him a message. IM? No connectivity. Skype? Nope. Phone call? My cell phone doesn’t work in Canada. Text message? Did I mention my cell phone doesn’t work? So, I slipped out of the session, thinking maybe I’d ask one of the staff if I could borrow a cell phone for a quick local call.

And then, on the way to the staff desk, it hit me. The perfect solution. Simple. Cheap. Fiendishly clever.

Did you know that in many public places there are coin-operated devices that enable you to enter an arbitrarily assigned GUID, creating a VPN optimized for voice signals? One Canadian quarter later, I reached my friend.

D’oh.[Tags: i_am_an_idiot payphones]

3 Comments »

Andrew Hinton asks what we can learn about the future by looking at what the kids are doing. [I came in a few minutes late.]

71% of all teens are playing games online, he says. [I missed the scope — US teens?] . He goes through the impressive financial stats: We’re spending lots of money on these games. Wells Fargo built an island in Second Life.

Designing a game overlaps heavily with designing information spaces, Andrew says, and thus there is much IAs can learn from game design. E.g., game sites assume multitasking and are ok with complex interfaces. Games assume you will learn by doing.

We need to give people not just maps but navigational tools because the environment is constantly changing. He points to Microsoft’s Wallop.

“Kids are going to be kings of all media,” he says. “Broadcasting is dying; it’s not going away but it’ll be a specialized thing…It’s a peer-to-peer world. And, please only give me authentic voices.” And community is important, he says, pointing to Warcraft as an example. Why doesn’t Photoshop’s help system send us to the communities of Photoshop experts, he asks.

MySpace takes all the stuff about high school — how many friends you have, for example — and makes it explicit.

Being able to make multiple selves — e.g., multiple profiles at Yahoo — is relationship diversification.

The virtual environment is spilling out into the real world. He talks about TATUS, a simulated virtual ubiquitous computing environment. “This is freaky. This is Postmodern to the nth degree. we’re studying virtual reality to study reality.” He also refers to the “I love Bees” marketing campaign to launch Halo 2 that engrossed the user community.

Andrew calls “the game layer” the merging of the physical and digital realities. “This is going to make our real lives more like game lives, because we’re going to be immersed in data.”

[Great talk. I haven't done justice to it or its playfulness.] [Tags: iasummit andrew_hinton games]

3 Comments »

Donna Maurer of Maadmob Interaction Design has a session explaining to IA’s why they ought to take seriously George Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, a book basically about Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory. (I’m about to start writing about this in my book.) It’s a difficult book to read, despite its great title.

Categories, she says, have been taken as being existing/natural divisions that can be expressed in clear definitions. But, Lakoff says (says Donna), categories have prototypical examples. We can organize by similarities to the prototypes without having to define the category.

Donna talks about the concept of basic level categories— you generalize up from them and down to the specifics. BLCs are the level you learn first and usually has a short name, e.g., “dog.” It is the “highest level at which a single mental image can reflect the category.” [In English we can't form an image of furniture but we can of chair.] BLCs depend on the culture. E.g., city dwellers will say “a tree” while a country dweller might say “a maple tree.”

Donna looked for a web site that organized information by laying out BLCs, but she couldn’t find one. E.g., the eBay site’s category list mixes BLCs with more specific categories.

Prototype theory is important to IAs because the classical theory of categories is built into much software. She says this is her most important point: “Recognize that categories occur and you’ll be less stressed about categorization that is not neat.” Messiness is ok. No scheme is going to include everything and be perfect. (Someone from the audience points out that Sotheby’s “Other” category has an “Other” sub-category.)

Other implications for IAs. Donna suggests using less prototypical items to describe edge cases. And, she says, you can derive BLC names by doing research to see what they are for your users. “Basic level items are easily recognized and likely to have good scent.” Card sort, she suggests, with basic level items rather than more granular content elements. “Get people to the basic level of the hierarchy as soon as possible.”

She wonders whether tags are often BLCs, accounting for their popularity. (Livia from the audience says that they probably are basic level if the taggers are typical of the group.)

Q: Does Lakoff deal with the cultural differences?
A: Definitely. That’s what the title is about.

Q: Folksonomies can help us get away from us imposing a taxonomy on a system.

Q: The same category may be basic level for one group and high level for another…

Q: (Christian Crumlish) When you focus on basic level categories for navigation, where should they be on the site, typically?
A: On the home page, if possible.

Q: (me) How stable are BLCs and what size group do they vary over?
A: They’re pretty stable over time, and the size of the group depens on the domain.

[Excellent talk. Exciting to me to see IA's taking this stuff up.] [Tags: iasummit donna_urer george_lakoff prototype taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous eleanor_rosch]

4 Comments »

Luke Wroblewski has done an impressive job blogging an outline of my talk at the IA Summit. Thank you, Luke! (Wriggle Room Note: There are a couple of things I’d tweak or quibble with.) [Tags: iasummit everything_is_miscellaneous luke_wroblewski]

Be the first to comment »

I should keep in mind that messiness is a virtue in the miscellaneous world because the value of the miscellaneous comes from its implicit and potential relationships/connections …and the implicit is messy, resonant, echoic, full of sort-of-like’s and in-one-respect’s. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous]

Be the first to comment »

[This is 5 days after the fact because I've been on the road.]

Tom Gerace of Gather.com is giving a Berkman Tuesday lunchtime talk. The company has raised about $9M, including an investment from Minnesota Public Radio. Jake Shapiro, in introducing Tom, says Gather is like “MySpace for grownups.” [Note: As always, I'm paraphrasing and summarizing in real time. As a result, I'll get at least some of what Tom says wrong.]

User driven content is big, says Tom. MySpace has passed the NYTimes, AOL and CNN in reach and page views. “User-driven content is where user-driven retail was in the early days of eBay.” eBay let the community evaluation create credibility.

Now it’s easy to create content, Tom says. But how do you enable people to find the best content on a topic. Gather wants to do this for an audience that doesn’t know technology well. So, at Gather you can publish articles. To enable community-driven organization, you can create tags. You can publish for select groups of people, for organizations within Gather, or to anyone. Anyone can create a group for. Groups can be public or private, moderated or unmoderated. Groups are a content filter, Tom says, making sure you get focused attention on a topic.

Gather is working on being able to bring in content via RSS. And they will allow bookmarking of off-site content. Gather articles have permalinks, but you have to be a Gather member to comment.

There are about 20,000 members of Gather, 150,000 readers per week. They built membership via NPR. There are 36,000 unique tags.

There’s social network: Family, friends and colleagues. You can publish your content to any of those.

Articles are rated anonymously. Political articles tend to get rated by partisanship, not quality. So Gather is moving towards looking at standard deviations.

“We’re looking at letting our community own the community.” E.g., there is an open forum where people can tell Gather what they think, even though that might help Gather’s competitors. (On the back of Tom’s business card is the text of the First Amendment.)

“Community enforcement is an increasing focus” to handle tag-spammers, people not categorizing content as “adult,” and other ways of gaming the system. There’s a flagging system now. Gather needs this because Gather compensates contributors, sharing the ad revenue.

You will be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for a particular author.

Tom says the focus is on finding and making available the best content. “We want to focus the community on the most interesting and best content.” Gather wants to reward the best authors. They’re thinking of assigning a default ranking to an article based on the author’s average ranking in order to keep people from seeing and ranking over and over an article they don’t like. They’re also playing with a “discover” facility to surface articles not yet popular. Also, there’s an editorial team that hand picks articles.

In response to a question, Tom says that Gather is not a “walled garden”: more than 90% of its content is available publicly. Adding RSS will help.

Demographic: 25-55 yrs. 55/45 f/m. They thought it’d be the NPR demographics but they’re skewing a little younger.

A power law distribution is developing: Some articles get lots of reads/comments, and then there’s a long tail.

Q: (me) The development of a power law distribution of readership of articles would be a sign that Gather is succeeding in locating good content, but it probably discourages community because most people won’t be highly read and thus may be discouraged.
Q: (Erica George) You could have lots of little communities, each with its own thought leaders.

A: The audience can comment and authors can react.
Q: But which is your vision of success — surfacing a relative handful of great aricles or enabling lots of small communities to emerge with their local favorites?

A: It’s up to the community. We let the community identify the best of the best. But we do focus visitors on what they’ve chosen.
Q: (Rebecca MacKinnon) But recruiting George Will isn’t bottom up…

A: Sure it is, because the community can decide whether he’s a thought leader.
Q: (Jake) Which way does your business model push you?

A: This is a true marketplace of ideas. The best contributors will rise to the top. No doubt people with brand recognition have an advantage, but because it’s community selected stuff, we hope it will find the highest quality stuff. My gut is that if you take 100,000s of people writing on a topic, one will write an article better than what the professionals are writing on any given day.

Q: (Erica) It’d be good for high-quality comments emerge as well.
A: I completely agree.

Q: How do niche sites do?
A: Initially we had an editorially-defined taxonomy and user tags. We’ve eliminated the taxonomy because everyone thought they had a new topic that they should be top level, but no two people ever proposed the same one. [Everything is miscellaneous :) ] People were using the tagging system five times more often than they were using the taxonomy. The tag system allows people to drill down into the site.

Q: Is there a novel type of discourse coming out of this?
A: Engaged, informed discussions. Not focused particularly on tech.

Our aim, says Tom, is to connect people around shared passions. Connecting people around the very best content on a topic is a great way to build community. [But the site is structured to surface a handful of the best authors. What effect will that have on community?] [Tags: gather tom_gerace everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy]

Be the first to comment »

I’m at the Information Architecture Summit, which I’m greatly looking forward to.

At the opening cocktail party, there were three common topics of discussion, at least from my non-statistically-relevant experience: 1. “Did you see how dramatically attendance is up this year?” 2. “I don’t really call myself an information architect.” 3. “How can I arrange to move to Vancouver for the rest of my life?”

I’m giving the opening keynote, a choice that has me bewildered and terrified. I rewrote it last night and I’m about to change the chunks again. (No, “change the chunks” is not an alimentary euphemism.) As it stands, I’m trying out a couple of ideas that have surfaced late in the course of writing the book I’m working on; as my talk progresses, the ideas get flakier, which is not a good thing.

Well, I’ve got to get back to un- and re-writing my presentation. I will feel better — or possibly much worse — after this morning. [Tags: iasummit06 ia user_experience]

1 Comment »

China has started blocking freehaowu.com, freehaowu.org, freewuhao.org and freewuhao.com. They are not (yet) blocking the page those sites pointed to, which is on Ethan’s site. (At that page you’ll find a request to use the tag freehaowu if you blog about him.)

Ethan also has an important post on disintermediating advocacy. [Tags: china freehaowu hao_wu ethan_zuckerman ]

1 Comment »

John Van Oudernaren, senior advisor to the World Digital Library, talks about the global library initiative. It grows out of the American Memory project in 1994, an effort to being 5M references on line. The Global Gateway grew out of that, an effort to put selected material from international libraries online, working with Russia, Brazil, Spain. the Netherlands and two other countries [which I couldn't see on his slide...sorry]. Projects provide thematic coherence, e.g., life in Alaska and in Siberia. The interpretive text is bilingual; not every individual artifact is translated.

The scanning is being done in three spots in Russia, and in Brazil and Egypt. Almost a million images have been scanned. Images include maps, illustrations, and the full text of books.

He says the project is a success, but it’s still too tied to American history and is difficult to scale. Plus, each project is in only two languages, which is a limitation. The next step is to build the World Digital Library. Dr. Billington proposed this about a year ago. It intends to digitize selected materials to enrich particular themes highlighting various cultures. It is not a mass digitizing of libraries. Scholars would advise on which items to scan in. The project is still in the planning stage, supported by a $3M grant from Google. [Tags: libray_or_congress libraries]

2 Comments »

Bev Godwin, Dir, FirstGov.gov talks about “Government of the Future: 7 Predictions.”(She’s speaking for herself, not FirstGov.) [Note: As always, I'm paraphrasing. I am sure to get some of what she says wrong.]

Her assumptions: By 2015 [the year the conference is about] people will never not be on the Internet, and access will be provided by the government.

In 2000, there were at least 24,000 federal web sites. There are now at least 40M documents. There are way too many sites. Many are out of date. Her mantra to her group: “Let’s manage the content we have.” If you type “mold” into the FirstGov site, you get 127,322 hits. (There are 3,541 active top level.gov domains. 1,476 are federal. 1,811 are state, county or city. 81 are sovereign nations.)

Prediction #1: There will be dramatically fewer government Web sites and pages.

Prediction #2: The design debate will be over. They’ll all be arranged basically the way newspaper front pages are: Title at the top, color image to direct the eye to the lead story, etc.

Prediction #3: US gov’t sites will have a common look and feel. She points to .gov sites that are wildly different in their format. She believes they all should look basically the same, using usability-tested layout. [Usable but boring.] They can vary in details but have the same navigation bar in the same place, the country logo in the same spot, etc.

Prediction #4: No gov’t Web site will be launched without usability testing.

Prediction #5: “The .gov naming convention will actually make sense to the public.” There will be a taxonomy that’s rational.

Prediction #6: “The public will be able to perform the tasks they want on gov’t websites.” Gov’t should think of it as a retailer of services, not a wholesaler.

Prediction #7: Content will be aggregated to serve the public. It will be intelligent about your interests and needs: It’s time to renew your driver’s license, here’s the contact info about your elected officials, here’s your tax refund status, how long until you can collect social security, etc. [Tags: firstgov bev_godwin ]

2 Comments »

Dan Pelino, General Mgr, IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences, talks about the move towards patient-centric healthcare. He paints this as a requirement as the boomers get older, especially since we spend as much in the last five years of our lives as we do in the rest of our lives.

Lee Strickland spent many years in the intelligence community but is now at the U of Maryland. He says we need to restructure the intelligence community, revitalize the discipline of analysis, and rationalize our policies.

In intelligence today the technology supporting the efforts is neither a backwater nor state of the art. The community is moving from stove-piped, proprietary solutions to one in which info is ubiquitous.

“We tend to ignore the uniquely human aspect of intelligence.” Intelligence is, he says, the human mind converting information into knowledge, in light of the entire context, through a rigid process of hypothesis and testing.

He suggests five points to improve security:

1. Rationalize and restructure. Organize around intelligence priorities and then apply intel sources and methods and technologes required for the task. Don’t let the collection machinery drive the train.

2. Institute performance-based measurement.

3. The Cold War culture of secrecy is no longer appropriate. Secrecy inhibits the efficiency of intel analysis because secrecy inhibits access. But lack of secrecy imperils sources.

4. Revitalize the practice of analysis. “Analysis is nothing more or less than the scientific method in action.”

Agencies are adopting federal IT standards. Digital info enables the creaation of ad hoc communities of practice. The digital tech provides a platform, but it’s a platform for human work.

S. Abraham Ravid, an economist at Yale School of Management and Rutgers talks about the declining cost of transmitting entertainment and the legal battles regarding piracy.

He begins with a quote that seems to excoriate music downloading but that turns out to be a case from 1908 in which the owners of sheet music sued the creators of piano rolls. The Supreme Court went against the composers. He says that this type of suit has continued, but the new technologies have actually increased the market.

Abraham thinks that the current struggles will be resolved with a new business model that works out for both the producers and the audience. The new model will “distribute the cost savings among all participants.”

“Intellectual property” [yech - I hate that phrase] will be available everywhere, any time. “We just have to make the contractual environment amenable to this.” He does not think theaters will go away, even though attendance is declining. (The peak in terms of absolute numbers was in 1929, he says…an amazing fact.) People will go to the theater and buy the DVD later, he says.

Content production is being democratized, he says. “Things are moving very quickly and it will take a while before settle into a new model. I’m very optimistic.” [Tags: libraries entertainment copyright health_care intellligence]

1 Comment »

I’m at an event at the Library of Congress put on by the Federal Library and Information Center Committee. The event was opened by Dr. James Billington. I took some notes by hand. Here’s my impression of his comments:

Dr. Billington presented a progressive vision for the future of libraries. The digital revolution is the most profound change in knowledge since the codex was introduced in the 4th Century BCE…more important than even the printing press. “The cascade of digital information calls out for human intermediaries” and for physical places, he said. [Note: As always, quotes are actually paraphrases and are undoubtedly wrong.] We need “knowledge navigators” more than ever.

Nevertheless, he said, the Library’s fundamental mission hasn’t changed: To make accessible the world’s knowledge. There will, of course, be changes. Libaries will collect at the point of creation; libraries will complement traditional categorization and navigation systems with free search; the Library will “continue to work with legislators to balance copyright vs. the need to access information.” [Yay!]

“Libraries are ideologically important to democracy,” Dr. Billington said. They are inherently “islands of freedom,” an antidote to fanaticism, and inherently pluralistic because “books stand next to books that disagree with them.” Libraries unify communities and yet celebrate diversity.

He talked briefly about the World Digital Library being built by the US with six other national libraries. The collections will be full blended digitally. “Globalization has to happen intellectually and perceptually,” he said.

[Jeez, I love librarians.] [Tags: libtraries library_of_congress james_billington everything_is_miscellaneous]

2 Comments »

Richard Sambrook, the forward-looking director of global news at the BBC and blogger, writes about how he sees the rise of citizen journalism. His overall point: It’s here, it’s real, it comes in four flavors. [Tags: richard+sambrook media bbc citizen+journalism ]

3 Comments »

This is one of those ineffably cool sites.

Try searching for words. For example, did you know that “squeamish” is one unit more frequently used than “hypnotist”?

The site was created by Jonathan Harris, who also did these. (Thanks to Pito for the link.) [Tags: cool words jonathan+harris]

2 Comments »

There are 598,000 hits on “matzah” at Google and only 328,000 on “matzoh.” Google doesn’t recognize “matzah” as a word legitimate enough to have a dictionary link in the blue strip at the top, but it does so recognize “matzoh” (”Results 1 – 100 of about 328,000 for matzoh [definition]“).

I wonder how often that happens.

And I wonder if someone can come up with a clever name for when a variant with more Google hits isn’t recognized as a word by Google’s dictionary sources. [Tags: google dictionary matzoh matzah tagging taxonomy everything+is+miscellaneous]

1 Comment »

WGBH, one of Boston’s NPR affiliates (89.7 FM), is broadcasting two interviews in Jennie Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast series this Sunday, 10-11pm. Writes Jennie:

The first half hour is an interview with theHarvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, who authored “The Clash of Civilizations,” and the second is an interveiw with Megan Marshall,on her new biography of the three Peabody Sisters who helped found the Transcendentalist movement in the early to mid-19th century.

Meanwhile, over at PRX you can hear her interview with David Ferry who recently translated Virgil’s Georgics.

Oh, Jennie, when will you stop pandering to the mainstream?

But seriously, isn’t this just the sort of thing we all wanted the Net to do for us? That is, make room for everything from talking dogs to freelance intellectuals? Occasionally at the same time?

[Tags: podcast thoughtcast jennie+attiyeh wgbh ideas virgil]

At Corante, Civic Minded is a new, promising blog devoted to the Internet’s effect on democracy.

1 Comment »

I mean this as an honest question: Take a look at this page from WhiteHouse.gov. I haven’t spent a lot of time at that site over the years. Has it always been this blatantly political? [Tags: politics]

1 Comment »

Five soldiers in Iraq have been carrying video cameras with them throughout the past year. Working continuously with a director via IM, they have produced a 94-minute version of the film set to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 29. It is non-partisan, or perhaps multi-partisan…How could you be a soldier in Iraq and not have points of view?

At TheWarTapes.com you can see the latest clips from these citizen-soldier journalists. And the site is also a blog and a place for others to submit their images, words and stories.

Remarkable. It is a site that shows how everything has changed. [Tags: iraq media citizen+journalism war ]

9 Comments »

An interesting front-page story by Jonathan Saltzman in today’s Boston Globe talks about the fact that an ailing justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has been listening to oral arguments over the Web. The article spends most of its time discussing whether it’s necessary for a judge to hear oral arguments and in only one paragraph wonders if hearing arguments over a webcast might affect the case or the judge’s decision. That is, there’s no discussion of the medium’s effect on the message, yet another sign that the medium is becoming invisible, as all successful media must.

A page 2 story thinks it so unusual that Bush took questions from the audience that it merits a subhead: “Takes questions at an Ohio event.” Our president actually deigned to speak spontaneously, albeit undoubtedly after hours of rehearsal. The article doesn’t mention how many questions he took or how long the Q&A session was.

I’m puzzled, though, by one transition in the article, by Tom Raum of the AP:

The White House made no attempt to screen the audience or the questions, spokesman Scott McClellan said.

However, much of the downtown near the hotel where Bush spoke was barricaded off. About 100 antiwar protestors chanted…

What’s the “However” supposed to tell us? What’s the implied contrast?

My wife, son and I had an amusing five minute conversation in which we talked past each other because we took the following teaser and text radically differently:

[Teaser] There Goes Arroyo: Red Sox send rocking righthander to Reds for slugging outfielder Pena.

[Text] Yesterday, the Red Sox opted to …deal Bronson Arroyo to the Cincinnati Reds for slugging outfielder Wily Mo Pena…

My wife and I couldn’t figure out why they would trade a player as a penalty for hitting another player. Our son understood that “slugging outfielder Pena” means Pena is a slugger, not that he was slugged.

Ah, language! Ah, sports know-nothings! [Tags: boston+globe media george+ bush web]

WRT to the length of the Q&A period, Tim Grieve at Salon has the mot juste:

At the end of his speech in Cleveland today, George W. Bush said he’d be “glad to answer some questions.” But when the questions at the lunchtime event dragged on a little long for his liking, Bush blurted out, “Anybody work here in this town?”

Think Progress beat us to the inevitable punch line: Not as many as used to, sir.

Since Bush became president, the unemployment rate in Cleveland has increased by 29 percent, from 4.5 percent in January 2001 to 5.8 percent in January 2006.

Be the first to comment »

Harvard Law School students have put together a pretty impresive — and funny — web site anticipating the future of documents in Massachusetts if the Commonwealth does or does not adopt the ODF for all its state documents. [Tags: odf standards web2 ]

Be the first to comment »

Hao Wu, a Chinese documentary filmmaker and blogger, who’d lived in the US for 12 years, has been detained for a month by the Chinese government without being charged with a crime. Under the name Tian Yi, he’s been an editor at Global Voices. The site at this point has no recommendations for action… [Tags: china hao+wu globalvoices censorship]

3 Comments »

danah speculates whether production of DMT (a brain chemical) helps explain how cults draw people in. Then, reflecting on it, she asks:

This then puts me into an interesting bind as an ethnographer trying to make sense of these things. If there are changes to the neural processes, are there ways to see practitioners on their own terms? Is it possible to understand the cultures there without experiencing the effects that the rituals are meant to bring on? I have to imagine that anthropologists studying religion and religious practices went through some of this. (Anyone?)

There is, of course, a long tradition of mystics warning that outsiders can only understand the experience by experiencing it. The epistemological question is whether mystical experience is any different from ordinary, non-mystical experience in its ineffability and unknowability. A difference in brain chemistry would suggest that, yes, mystical experience is qualitatively different. [Tags: danah+boyd epistemology anthropolgy]

Be the first to comment »

Yellowikis is a wiki-based, open yellow pages. On the main page of a business, you do the Wikipedia-ish thing of all agreeing on the neutral-point-of-view facts. On the discussion page you can do the ranting and raving you crave.

The pickings are pretty slim at the moment, but founder Paul Youlten hopes that college students (and others) will want to earn some extra cash by making YW pages for local businesses, including making videos for them; the students keep all the money. Paul has some other ideas up his sleeve as well.

It would be great if YW gained critical mass in some localities. Alternatively, maybe one of the yellow page services — e.g., local.yahoo.com (disclosure) — would like to integrate YW. In any case, it’s a project that could be tremendously useful not only as a service but as a Web resource. [Tags: yellowikis yellow+pages directories local+business business paul+youlten ]

2 Comments »

Comedy Central has yanked the South Park episode that makes fun of Scientology. Trey Parker and Matt Stone responded by writing the following statement to Variety:

So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun!

Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!”

—Trey Parker and Matt Stone, servants of the dark lord Xenu.

For what it’s worth, I don’t watch South Park because I don’t find it funny enough. But after SP’s endless ragging on the world’s major religions, there’s something pathetic about Comedy Central pulling an episode making fun of Scientology. [Tags: south_park scientology entertainment tv]

4 Comments »

Continuing what is apparently my new policy of only blogging about Wikipedia, with occasional posts about how Bush sucks: Jay Fienberg recommends that we take a look at the Semantic MediaWiki if we want to see the Semantic Web in action. He says that it even shows that RDF can be easy to use.

He also points out (in an email) that Pandora, a music taste site that’s got lots of people excited, uses a “ginormous faceted taxonomy/ontology.” (Just to make my position clear, if I actually have one: Local ontologies obviously can be highly useful. The question is how hard is it to knit them together reasonably well? And then the question is what counts as reasonably well. But one thing we know for sure: Bush sucks.)

Finally, Jay recommends a post by Steve Krause about Pandora vs. Last.fm. “Pandora’s recommendations are based on the inherent qualities of the music,” says Steve, while Last.fm is a collaborative filter. [Tags: jay_fienberg steve_krause pandora taxonomy ontology everything_is_miscellaneous EverythingIsMiscellaneous semantic_web wiki]

And while talking about taxonomies, VerbDate.com is a new, free dating site that integrates tags, tagclouds, Skype and google maps. If it were any more Web 2.0-ish, you’d only be able to date Tim O’Reilly.

2 Comments »