Britt Blaser writes:

Starting on September 7, two months before the election, we’ll offer the best site we can to support conversation and political activism surrounding the key congressional races. We’ll provide an even-handed place for each candidate’s supporters to appeal to voters, plus an open forum for each race. In that context, I have no idea which candidates will benefit, but I suspect that it will most help the candidates who are not puppets of big business or big labor or zealots of any stripe. We shall see.

At the moment, he’s looking for some angels with money. Come September, he’ll be looking for participants. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to Britt’s non-profit ORG.net project, and am a friend of his.) [Tags: politics britt_blaser]

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I met Murray Bookchin once. It was around 1970 at a national student political conference in Colorado. He had written a book, Post Scarcity Anarchism, that was important to us. I met him as he was walking into an auditorium to give a talk. It was a dark night. There were pines. He was to me a grownup; I know now that he was about fifty. I said something. I don’t remember what, but it was undoubtedly fanlike and self-serious. He seemed glad that I interrupted him. He looked me in the eye. He listened. He treated me like a person worth talking with.

All in all, maybe twenty seconds. But I never forgot his presumption that a long-haired kid he didn’t know was worthy of his respect. Unearned respect. It’s a lot like love.

Rest in peace, Murray Bookchin. [Tags: murray_bookchin]

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Can’t sneak 19″ monitor into your luggage.

What to have for breakfast, when to go to bed, how often to check email ,and the other habits that hold us together are all thrown recklessly to the wind, hey nonny nonnny.

Traveling kit contains second-tier bathroom paraphernalia.

Staying indoors is suddenly considered abnormal.

Can’t claim antisocial tendencies are actually “just a good work ethic.”

The water tastes different, the pillows smell funny, and I think I just heard a snake.

People insist that you “relax.” What’s that about?

Sight of pasty white-boy torso overwhelms well-tanned forearms and calves.

On the third trip through rustic small town, the cute tourist shop names start to sound evil.

Can’t figure out how to dress worse than normal.

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Working in a nicer spot.

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The Wall Street Journal reports on bloggers in the Mideast who are blogging across the divide. (The Journal has made this piece available without a subscription.) No mention of Global Voices, by the way. [Tags: blogging]

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Look, I know this is only hard for me because I’m a flipping Linux moron, but it took me 45 minutes tonight to find an address of a Linux version of Firefox that I could download using the wget command. The other addresses work fine if you already have a browser, but I couldn’t find one in my MythTV installation other than the minimalist one that comes with it; that one displayed the Firefox binary as a spray of numbers on my screen and the Myth web browser has no apparent “save to file” command. But this address works, at least so far: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/
1.5/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-1.5.tar.gz (Do it as a single line of course.)

There’s probably an easier way to do this using apt-get, a package installer, or even synaptic. (KnoppMyth installs Debian linux.) But it don’t work none for me.

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I’ve now been through the process of publishing a book at Lulu and getting an ISBN from them. The process is necessarily convoluted and their wizards are unncessarily confusing. But it can be done.

Getting an ISBN from Lulu requires paying them $99 for the optional Global Distribution package. You can only do that after you’ve stepped through their publishing process. Only then are you given the ISBN. You then have to assign the ISBN to a new edition. Then you upload the updated materials for the new edition, including a cover and front page with the ISBN number on them.

Here’s a step by step:

Go through the normal publishing process. You’ll upload your content and your cover, specify sizes, specify a price, and be given an opportunity to buy a sample copy for yourself. At the end of it all, go back to your Publish tab. Click on the Global Distribution package link to the right of your book listing.

Go through the steps to pay them $99 Go back to your Publish tab. Note that you now have an ISBN.

Click on the “Accept or Deny” link Click on the “Reassign ISBN” link

On the next page, click on the “Assign ISBN to New Edition” button It will create a new edition for you and start up the Publish wizard again.

Do not continue. Close out of Lulu. Come back when you have your new cover with the ISBN printed on it.

Use a service such as barcode-us.com to turn the ISBN number into a bar code. They charge $10 to email you a high resolution EPS file which you can then stick onto the back cover of your book.

When you have the new cover and content, go back to your Publish tab and click on your project title, which will start up the Publish wizard again.

(I ran these steps past the helpful support person on their live help chat line, and he approved.)

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I’m doing the final keynote at Wikimania, the Wikipedia conference. This has me a tad nervous since in my experience Wikipedians tend to be knowledgeable, forthright, and have a low tolerance for the sort of BS that is my stock in trade.

I’ve posted my in-progress notes about what I plan on saying, although I also expect to modify it based on what’s discussed at the conference itself. I’m open to comments, suggestions, snorts of derision and prognostications of doom… [Tags: wikipedia wikimania everything_is_miscellaneous knowledge]

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I don’t know that anyone needs correcting on this point, but that won’t stop me…

Identity isn’t a continuum with anonymity at one end and documented, certified, authenticated ID on the other. It probably never was and it certainly isn’t online. There’s a third vertex: Pseudonymity. Pseudonyms online are not midway between anonymity and ID. They’re different in kind, but enough on the same plane that any discussion of anonymity and ID that does not include pseudonyms is likely to go wrong.

It’s hard to find an exact analog to this in the real world. Social roles aren’t really the same as pseudonyms. But that means that we have to be extra special careful to include pseudonyms in our thinking so we don’t port inappropriate real world schema into the new virtual world, especially since the porting is being done top down by the traditional fear-based organizations (big corps and governments). [Tags: digitalID id anonymity pseudonymity ]

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Stephen Colbert brilliantly plays the media.

It gets hilarious when he starts showing quick clips of the morning shows.

(Here’s Stewart on Crossfire.) [Tags: stephen_colbert jon_stewart media]

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From Salon:

According to a new Harris Poll, 50 percent of Americans now believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction at the time of the U.S. invasion. That’s a sharp and rather inexplicable increase from February 2005, when just 36 percent of the public held on to that belief. Ready for more? Sixty-four percent of the public still thinks that Saddam Hussein had strong links to al-Qaida.

[Tags: politics]

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I passingly daydreamed this morning about winning a new Hummer in a contest advertised on one of the items in our refrigerator. After paying the tax, what the hell would I do with a Hummer? Selling itwould just pass its demonic demand for fuel on to someone else.

No, the only moral option would be to dismantle it and bury its parts in graveyards scattered across multiple continents. But then, one day in the not so distant future, a call might be issued via SkyNet, and the pieces of all the buried Hummers would claw their way out of their graves and assemble themselves into a robotic army to claim the Earth as their destiny.

Maybe they’d make nice planters instead.

[Tags: hummers environment al_gore]

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While I’m going all Hollywood, I had an idea this morning for the next blockbuster, so I’m blogging this to stake my claim on this Billion Dollar Idea™.

It’s a movie called “No See ‘Ems.” (Yes, I had this idea while out running, trying to breath by only exhaling.) Swarms of teensy bugs mutate. Get bitten by a bunch of them - you never know they’re there - and at first you feel really good, but then you slowly deteriorate into Pennzoil engine gunk. (The product tie-ins alone could finance the movie!) Once the government is persuaded by hunky Drs. Jolie and Pitt that the threat is real, they send in a heavily armed hit squad, led personally by Gov. Ahnuld. He unleashes the heavy personal mounted atop his Hummer, but they’re just wee bugs. And you can’t see ‘em. So, Ahnold gets the Pennzoil treatment. The crisis grows until we figure out their one vulnerability, which is Raid (product placement bonanza!), or fly swatters,or circling the globe with sticky paper, or some damn thing. All I know is that it requires Dr. Jolie to fight in a strategically torn medical outfit and things go blowy-uppy at the end.

“No See ‘Ems - The invisible enemy is inside us!” Coming soon to a theater near you.

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I just published a new issue of my increasingly intermittent newsletter, JOHO:

Why believe Wikipedia?:Wikipedia is credible. Not always. Not in every detail. But nothing passes that bar except perhaps for some stuff scratched into stone tablets. What is the source of Wikipedia’s credibility? Oddly, it has something to do with its willingness to admit fallibility. Simply appearing in the Encyclopedia Britannica confers authority on an article. Simply appearing in Wikipedia does not, because you might hit the 90 second stretch before some loon’s rewriting of history or science is found and fixed. Yet, Wikipedia is in some ways as reliable as the Britannica, and in some ways it is more reliable. Where does it get its authority? There are a few reasons we’ll accept a Wikipedia article as credible… The end of the story (Or: The tyranny of rectangles: Journalism can’t get stories right because the world doesn’t fit into rectangles. If you’ve ever been part of a story covered by a newspaper, it’s a near certainty that you didn’t think the story got it exactly right. Even if there were no outright mistakes, you read it thinking that the emphasis was wrong, that it didn’t quite capture all sides, that there was more to the story, that a turn of phrase was prejudicial. You would have written it slightly differently. At least. This is not because reporters aren’t good at their job. By and large they are, and it is hard job requiring skill, experience and persistence. It also generally doesn’t pay that well. The problem is not with the reporters. Lord bless them and multiply them. The problem is with the notion of "the story." … Book report (Or: My obsession): The first draft of my book is done. Here’s a brief report on Chapter 8. …One odd manifestation of my obsession is that I never get to a point where I’m ready to talk about the book… Walking the Walk: Raytheon tags. And taxonomizes. Cool Tool: Diigo notes socially. What I’m playing: Gun is disappointing. Indigo Prophecy progresses from cool to idiotic. Bogus contest: Metadata for traditional authorities

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Read the round up. Read Lebanese bloggers. We all need to be be made uncomfortable. [Tags: global_voices globalVoices mideast lebanon]

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Brad Sucks, the webbiest musician on the Web, has some new demos out, here and here. Plus, his band, Brad Sucks Live — just about inescapably pornographic in its implication — will be making a genuinely rare appearance at Riverpalooza August 12 in Ottawa. [Tags: bradsucks music mp3]

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Jay has started NewAssignment.net, a response (but not The Answer) to the question “Where’s the money going to come from to support real reporting in this brave new media world we’re building? ” At NewAssignment, story ideas will come from the Web. The idea will be developed initially on line. A budget will be created. Then a reporter will be contracted - for honest-to-goodness money. She’ll work in public, with any of us who care to contribute, in what Jeff Jarvis felicitously calls networked journalism.

Initially, the money is coming from Craig. (Thank you, Craig.) Jay writes:

NewAssignment.Net has no dogma about how the money comes in. It’s a charity and will raise funds for high quality journalism any way it can figure out that’s wise, that works and maintains the site’s independence and reputation.

That’s good. But it means that NewAssignment is not really a response to the money question. The charity model — even Jay’s non-dogmatic charity model — means that NewAssignment is going to be, as Jay says, a “boutique” firm that will cover stories otherwise being ignored. New Assignment instead responds to the question, “How can journalists and citizens work together, in public?” NewAssignment may validate that hybrid, networked journalism gets the job done. But as a charity, it is not — and Jay is clear about this elsewhere in his post — the business model for the future of journalism. [Tags: jay_rosen newassignment journalism media ]

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Mario Sixtus of Handlesblatt has posted a video interview he did in which he asked me about Cluetrain, PR, ID, Web 2.0, etc. [Tags: mario_sixtus cluetrain marketing pr]

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Aha! So, if you have Thunderbird set to compose and send HTML messages, but you want to send a single plain text message, you don’t have to redo your entire configuration. You can just hold down the shift key when you press the Write, Respond or Respond All button. Details here.

And, by the way, if you do want to change the default from HTML to text or vice versa, the switch is in Tools > Account Settings, not in Tools > Options, for reasons that I’m sure make 100% sense to very smart people. On the Composition & Addressing panel, there’s a check box for “Compose messages in HTML format.” [Tags: thunderbird]

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From the press release:

Socialtext, the first Wiki company, releases Socialtext Open at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). Available for immediate download, Socialtext Open is the first open source wiki with a commercial venture as its primary contributor. Over 2,000 businesses run Socialtext Wiki products today as a hosted service or appliance.

Based on the same great product, Socialtext Open is released under a standard open source license, and contains all of Socialtext’s enterprise grade code aside from enterprise management and enterprise integration tools. Socialtext also announced the availability of its Technical Professional Service, a new SOAP API and the Socialtext Open Roadmap for the next three months.

See the Socialtext blog. (Disclosure: Today’s announcement makes me proud to be an advisor to Socialtext. (Note: I had no part in the strategy.))

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Technorati, to whom I’m also an advisor, has launched a big bucket of new features. I particularly like the search refinement tool. And they do a nice job when you look up your own blog. Under the surface, Technorati is making it easier for partners to use its data, which is good all around.

I’m not nearly as enthusiastic about the new design of the home page. The personalization helps, but it’s difficult to tell that it’s a site for searching through 50M blogs. Instead, it looks like it wants to be a media site that shows you “what everyone is blogging about.” The site’s focus on what bloggers with “authority” care about over-emphasizes the “short head” at the expense of the long tail. So, nope, I’m not a fan of that part of the makeover.

Past the home page, some of the the new stuff is both cool and useful…the best sort of tech. [Tags: wikis socialtext open_source technorati]

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We’ve been through two tanks of gas with our new Toyota Yaris, and it’s getting 24 mpg in the city instead of the rated 34. We haven’t done enough highway driving to know if it’s going to get near to the 40 mpg the sticker promised us. Do new cars still have break in periods, or is our disappointment likely to be perpetual? (FWIW, it’s a manual shift.) [Tags: cars yaris]

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Later that day: I just did 120 miles on the highway on 3.1 gallons of gas, so highway efficiency is as rated.

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Britt Blaser just pointed me to the Simile Timeline. It’s 100% Web 2.0 compliant: Open Source, AJAX-based, and compares itself to Google Maps.

The example on the site is a cool timeline of the JFK assassination. The site also points to an example of a Jewish-Christian timeline(s).

You can create your own by building an XML file in the particular, documented format it expects. [Tags: web2 timeline simile]

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Dan Gillmor is organizing — instigating? catalyzing? — an unconference on citizen journalism as an informal extension of Wikimania in Cambridge, MA. Sounds like it could be a terrific event. Details here. [Tags: citizen_journalism wikimedia dan_gillmor]

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The philosophers are right. There is something awe-inspiring about knowledge. Rather than simply accepting whatever comes through our senses or whatever we first think or whatever we’re told, we can step back and consider what is worthy of belief. We can even wonder what constitutes “worthiness” and then we become philosophers and end up driving a cab. Knowing is a break with the world, a recognition that the world isn’t always as it first seems.

But our culture, under the grip of philosophers, came to believe that knowledge is a corrective for fallibility. Having recognized that our unreflective grasp of the world is unreliable, we’ve treated knowledge as a way to gain the certainty that we had previously assumed we possessed. Thus, the story of knowledge begins with mathematics, and it ends — an ending in which we still live — with Descartes’ reduction of the realm of knowledge to a single, self-reflective proposition.

When we think of knowledge as a corrective for fallibility, we are comfortable with a knowledge aristocracy in which there are authorities different from you and I. They are the great encyclopedias, the great newspapers, the great journals. We are mere footloose commoners who look things up in the works the aristocrats have announced.

But there is no corrective for fallibility. We live in the breach between the world and how we take it. We are that breach. It closes only when they shovel the dirt over us. Until then, there are only degrees and modes of fallibility.

That doesn’t mean the authorities have no authority. It does mean that there is nothing with total authority. We’re stuck with always having the argument about what to believe because knowledge is a way to manage fallibility, not to escape it.

[Tags: knowledge wikipedia epistemology philosophy]

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According to a story in the Boston Globe, Gov. Mitt Romney yesterday broke a campaign pledge to index the minimum wage to inflation, rejecting the Massachusetts Legislature’s plan to raise the minimum wage from $6.75/hour to $8 over two years. Instead, Romney proposed increasing it by $0.25 and then have the executive branch study the issue.” Romney called the legislature’s plan an “abrupt and disproportionate” increase. The last increase for the 300,000 workers who make minimum wage was in 2001.

According to InflationData.com, prices increased 13.25% between 1/1/2001 and 1/1/2006. Simply to keep up with inflation, the current minimum wage should be boosted by $0.93, about 3.5 times the Romney proposal.

Someone working full time for the current minimum wage makes $13,500 a year before taxes. Under the Romney Take-a-Quarter plan, this would skyrocket to $14,000. [Tags: politics minimum_wage mitt_romney]

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Knowledge@Wharton has an excellent interview with Tantek Çelik and Rohit Khare, two of the creators of microformats. Microformats are simple, standard ways to express data of particular types (e.g., reviews, events) so that information on the Web becomes more usable and reusable. (I vblogged an interview with them on the same topic.) [Tags: microformats tantek_celik rohit_khare supernova2005]

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The Sunlight Foundation has created a Popup Politicians widget. Mouse over the sun to see the effect:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy

To see how to do this, visit the Sunlight Foundation’s explanatory page…

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It’s Earth Day for the Web…a day when we can all celebrate just how important the Web is to us. Each locality, site or business makes up its own way of celebrating.

Just two months and one day to go until September 22…

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Rebecca has a long and important post on a report on Net freedom in China, along with her thoughts about some attempts to hold the world to higher standards.

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[NOTE: As of Dec. 21, 2006, the site this post recommends is down. Sorry. - DW] If you get the dreaded XP error message telling you that a machine on your network can’t be reached because “You might not have permission to use this network resource,” “Troubleshooting a Peer to Peer Network” is an excellent, step-by-step resource. [Tags: networking xp get_a_mac]

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U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today threatened Dick Wolf, the producer of the top-rated television program, Law and Order, with confinement in the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for “providing terrorists and organized crime with classified information that will make it easier for them to frustrate the efforts of United States officials investigating their deadly actions.” While the Attorney General stopped short of accusing Wolf of treason, he implied that the government might seek penalties associated with that crime.

At issue is an episode of Law and Order that aired in March in which Detective Nina Gafney and Detective Ed Green (played by Milena Govitch and Jesse L. Martin, respectively) discussed using the “Good Cop, Bad Cop” routine to break down a suspect. After some banter, the two decide that Detective Gafney will be the “bad cop.” The ploy meets with limited success.

At a press conference, Attorney General Gonzales expressed outrage that this investigative technique was exposed by the media. “Now terrorists will know that the bad cop’s meanness, the slamming of his fist onto the table, the outright refusal to get the terrorist a Mountain Dew or even a cup of coffee, all that will look like play-acting,” Gonzales said. “And when the good cop comes in, the terrorist will play along, get the soda and the cigarette, but not give up any valuable information in order to bond with the investigator.” Gonzales claimed that this technique now is “null and void” and that Dick Wolf “has brought comfort to our enemies and has made America less safe.” He added, “This is the type of thing that gets people sent to Guantanamo. Or worse.”

Asked about the popular series 24, Gonzales responded with praise. “Now there’s a show that sends a positive message to our enemies,” he said. “We will stay up all night to hunt you down, especially if you kidnap our comely Canadian daughters.” [Tags: politics television humor]

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Trevor Cook and Paull Young have started an anti Astroturfing campaign. As you know, Astroturfing is the creation of a phony grassroots (hence the name) movement by hiring people to pretend to be just plain janes and joes out talkin’ up their favorite product.

Astroturfing corrupts conversations. It is a bad bad practice.

[Tags: pr trevor_cook paull_young astroturfing]

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Pew Internet has a new report on a national survey of bloggers. It’s the usual great stuff from Pew.

Eight percent of internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog. Thirty-nine percent of internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs - a significant increase since the fall of 2005.

37% say their favorite topic is their life and experiences. 55% blog under a pseudonym. 52% blog to express themselves creatively. Only 27% say they blog to influence how other people think. 87% allow comments. Only 18% say they have an RSS feed.

Bloggers are racially and genderly diverse.

34% consider their blog to be a form of journalism. 56% spend time fact checking. (Let’s assume that the 56% includes the 34%, or else much merriment shall ensue.)

Lots and lots in the survey…

[Tags: blogging blogosphere pew]

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Teletruth has sent a letter to the judge considering the Bell0AT&T-MCI merger suggesting that because Bell companies never delivered on their commitments to deploy optical fiber —despite the fact that “customers paid over $200 billion for networks they never received” — perhaps the judge ought to have some concerns about this latest merger. [Tags: telecom teletruth fiber_optic broadband]

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Here’s the Couchsurfing mission statement:

CouchSurfing seeks to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance, and facilitate cultural understanding.

On June 27, they suffered a catastrophic crash and had no adequate backup. (Insert smug “tsk tsk” here.) You can read how the community not only rallied but created Couchsurfing 2.0 in the process… (Thanks to Mike O for the link.) [Tags: couchsurfing]

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My wife and I went to Susur for our anniversary meal after it was recommended by our friends and the hotel concierge. Everyone, including the waiter there when he was greeting us, pointed out that the chef has been on Iron Chef, a show where you compete by making five courses out of a specified set of ingredients such as a yam, an octopus sucker, and the first flatulence of a new-born lamb. Apparently, being on Iron Chef is taken very seriously.

Everyone at Susur gets the tasting menu, which means you get whatever the irony chef cares to give you. We went for the five-course vegetarian meal. When the waiter kindly asked if we had any dietary restrictions, I unleashed the dogs of war: No fish, no mushrooms, nothing sweet, and I don’t much like vegetables. Nevertheless, over the course of 2.5 hours, Chef Susur amazed. Each course, starting with the entree and then working down in size until you get to dessert, was some startling combination of ingredients, carefully narrated by the server in a French accent so thick that when he asked if we wanted more bread we thought he was asking if we wanted more wine. Some of the courses had multiple pieces, so the waiter would take a good seven minutes describing the component parts: “The paler one is a comfit of Brazilian pear puree, run twice through the small fingers of a boy who sings alto, topped by a black olive puree marinated in the juice of two pomegranite seeds blessed by the Dalai Lama, ringed by a wreath of mint leaves plucked from the side of an imaginary mountain.” Absolutely delicious, though, and well worth the $60, if you’re in a splurgey mood.

This morning we went to Ontario Place to walk around, but found out when we got there that it’s $34 each to ambulate. So, we hiked along the lake for free, and then walked up the connecting series of underground malls that have emptied the streets of people. It’s a Big Dig for shoppers, albeit without any fatal ceiling collapses that we know of.

Now I’m in the airport, downloading gazilliondreds of emails, punishment for having a good time with my wife. That’ll teach me.